| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | MTPE is a dirty word... but client will not pay the rates for full human translation. Thread poster: BabelOn-line
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Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 19:56
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Samuel Murray wrote:
Most of what I do might seem terribly boring to some of my colleagues, but I don't mind it. 1000 days of MT checking would be all right for me, if the content is interesting and if the money is right.
I agree more or less. To me translation (and even post-edition) is like solving jigsaw puzzles. It's the act of solving that fascinates me, while I hardly care about what exactly I have to translate (as long as we are talking about full sentences. I hate translating series of short sentences or single words).
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
Member (2008)
Italian to English
BabelOn-line wrote:
..... I personally see MTPE as a valuable skillset
MTPE is simply taking the rough first draft of a translation and beginning the long process of perfecting it. It is not a separate skillset.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 19:56
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Tom in London wrote:
MTPE is simply taking the rough first draft of a translation and beginning the long process of perfecting it. It is not a separate skillset.
Not quite. You become (a lot) faster by doing it more. In that sense it's a skillset like any other.
| | | | | Exploration works both ways, and hourly vs. annual earnings | Aug 2, 2022 |
BabelOn-line wrote:
No serious linguist seems to be willing to explore the client's quality expectations.
But why should they have to when clients are perfectly free to explore translators' expectations and can then make a choice according to their budget? You are talking about two different market segments: clients who refuse to "explore" the earning expections of translators at the top end of the market, and translators who choose to work in it. Just as clients are free to decide their budgets, so translators are free to decide what rate they want to earn depending on what makes sense for them. That's how markets work.
Maybe see how we could preserve the translators' hourly earnings while completing jobs quicker?
I've heard this "as long as you're getting a good hourly rate..." argument before, but what's far more important to me than my hourly earnings is my annual earnings. Earning the same rate per hour is no good to me if I only get a couple of hours' work a day instead of a full day's work. Your individual business might be seeing an increase in demand, but I cannot believe that overall global demand for translation is likely to increase with the use of AI expanding and budgets being cut in worsening economic conditions. It's more likely to fall, and even if it somehow remains constant, it makes no sense to supply the same end product for less money as the cost of living goes up. From my point of view, hourly rates are the wrong thing to focus on, I'm no more interested in them than I am in the task of fixing machine output.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 12:37 GMT]
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Not much faster | Aug 2, 2022 |
Lieven Malaise wrote: Tom in London wrote:
MTPE is simply taking the rough first draft of a translation and beginning the long process of perfecting it. It is not a separate skillset. Not quite. You become (a lot) faster by doing it more. In that sense it's a skillset like any other.
But overall, not much faster because 90% of the job still remains to be done, and there's no machine that can do that. It really is naive, or disingenuous, to suggest that MT massively speeds up the translation process. It doesn't - and as a translation agency you should know that.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 12:28 GMT]
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Tom in London wrote:
But overall, not much faster because 90% of the job still remains to be done, and there's no machine that can do that. It really is naive, or disingenuous, to suggest that MT massively speeds up the translation process. It doesn't - and as a translation agency you should know that.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 12:28 GMT]
It will for some texts. Not everything is complex or requires massive polishing. It could more than halve the time taken to do some things.
But not in our part of the market.
| | | | BabelOn-line
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
English to French
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | But in the long term | Aug 2, 2022 |
Peter Shortall wrote:
I've heard this "as long as you're getting a good hourly rate..." argument before, but what's far more important to me than my hourly earnings is my annual earnings. Earning the same rate per hour is no good to me if I only get a couple of hours' work a day instead of a full day's work. Your individual business might be seeing an increase in demand, but I cannot believe that overall global demand for translation is likely to increase with the use of AI expanding and budgets being cut in worsening economic conditions. It's more likely to fall, and even if it somehow remains constant, it makes no sense to supply the same end product for less money as the cost of living goes up. From my point of view, hourly earnings are the wrong thing to focus on.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 12:20 GMT]
You can certainly see that jobs in chunks of 100k words would not be "a couple of hours here and there".
As an agency, if we don't manage to find a way to process these 3 million words in a way that is acceptable to all parties (i.e. pricing, time spent, rates for translators), it is lost for everyone AFAIK. For us, for our freelancers.
Is this a problem?
As you say, we have strong economic headwinds. So it very much looks like it is going to be cutthroat competition for all linguists, no matter how good or experienced they are.
With this in mind, I find the lack of appetite for "giving it a go" – by this I merely mean doing a sanity check, a bit of exploration: give a glance to the MT output, see how it could be handled, if it can be handled at all, see what kind of quality the client may be perfectly happy with – equates to letting these dark times come without a plan B. I really hope there will be enough pie for everyone to have a share. The fact rates and agencies' rates did not budge much in the last 20 years is not exactly a good sign for the industry.
I am perfectly happy (and again, as a linguist myself, I genuinely understand) if linguists tell me, "this is not for me". That's absolutely fine. I am simply sad i did not find the way to engage correctly with the top of the profession to see if we could rejig our methods a bit.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 13:02 GMT]
| | | | BabelOn-line
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
English to French
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Levels of grey | Aug 2, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
But overall, not much faster because 90% of the job still remains to be done, and there's no machine that can do that. It really is naive, or disingenuous, to suggest that MT massively speeds up the translation process. It doesn't - and as a translation agency you should know that.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 12:28 GMT]
If the productivity gains were only in the tune of 10% overall with MT, I would definitely not bother my translators with it, nor offer at a substantial cost a platform that can provide it. I am a translator first and foremost, I use Memsource wich picks the best MT output with an AI, and I can assure you that we are not talking 10% here.
Morevover, I think you see the issue as "to provide a target that is polished to my usual human-made standard, how much time would I save with MT?"
This deviates from my initial question. The question is to tap into this vast market that is currently dealt with using raw MT or non pro translators/reviewers. It is about providing what the TAUS calls "good enough" quality. The response I feel I get is a binary choice between noble human translation and horrible MT. Nothing exists in between. You are either or. Black or white.
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BabelOn-line
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
English to French
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | $200 per hour | Aug 2, 2022 |
Kuochoe Nikoi-Kotei wrote:
That way you'll be able to make a more convincing case, at least in your language pair. "Make $200 an hour!" sounds a lot better than "Spend 1000 days reading machine translations!" right?
If I could offer a job that paid $200 an hour, I'd be happy to. It means I would in turn be able to bill this to the client and scrape a margin on top. Or I would do it myself!
The idea is to lower the cost per word or there is simply no project at all. My gut feeling is this can be done by maintaining the translators' earnings (with the added bonus of ensuring long terms projects, I never had any intention to suggest that a single linguist would send 1,000 days on a MTPE job, this is the total available reserve of work).
I can't tell how much productivity gains can be expected precisely because we would have to do a small dry run to find out.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 19:56
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Much faster in my book. | Aug 2, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
But overall, not much faster because 90% of the job still remains to be done, and there's no machine that can do that.
It depends on what you call much faster. I double (at least) my speed doing MTPE. You talk about the 'long process of perfecting the machine translation', while in my experience it's more like 'the (sometimes very) short process of perfecting it'. Might be language-related and is most certainly topic-related, but it is what it is.
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:56
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Lieven Malaise wrote: Tom in London wrote:
But overall, not much faster because 90% of the job still remains to be done, and there's no machine that can do that. It depends on what you call much faster. I double (at least) my speed doing MTPE. You talk about the 'long process of perfecting the machine translation', while in my experience it's more like 'the (sometimes very) short process of perfecting it'. Might be language-related and is most certainly topic-related, but it is what it is.
As it happens, I was sent an article today to translate, by a good agency that pays what I ask. It's a rather quirky critical review, quite short (715 words), of a work of modern sculpture. It took me 5 minutes to run it through an MT programme (MyMemory) and after that, more than 2 hours thinking, rewriting, thinking again and rewriting again, to get the translation right. The MT was a dog's breakfast. So I don't know what kind of texts you work on. Probably something very mechanical and not interesting.
[Edited at 2022-08-02 14:19 GMT]
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 19:56
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
| Some thoughts. | Aug 2, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
As it happens, I was sent an article today to translate, by a good agency that pays what I ask. It's a rather quirky critical review, quite short (715 words), of a work of modern sculpture. It took me 5 minutes to run it through an MT programme (MyMemory) and after that, more than 2 hours thinking, rewriting, thinking again and rewriting again, to get the translation right.
I think we all agree that the type of text you are talking about here isn't suitable for MTPE.
Tom in London wrote:
So I don't know what kind of texts you work on.
You name it and I probably work on it or have worked on it.
Tom in London wrote:
something very mechanical and not interesting.
The concept of a translation that is 'not interesting' is unknown to me. I adore translation and the search for the correct terminology, I couldn't care less about the subject itself. I have zero interest in, let's say, the operation of a digital thermometer, but translating its manual is pure fun.
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| Depends (part 2) | Aug 2, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
a rather quirky critical review, quite short (715 words), of a work of modern sculpture.
But that is precisely the kind of text that literally nobody claims MT is any good at...
I have some drug documentation coming in later. I imagine MT would do the list of side-effects perfectly adequately in a fraction of the time it will take me.
| | | | | Could you try to decide what you mean? | Aug 2, 2022 |
Lieven Malaise wrote:
I think we all agree that the type of text you are talking about here isn't suitable for MTPE.
That's what many of us have been trying to say.
Then you said:
Lieven Malaise wrote:
I double (at least) my speed doing MTPE.
You seem to be contradicting yourself. Maybe you meant that MT can double your speed for certain types of texts, but that isn't what you said.
I can double my speed with certain formulaic texts too if the source is good and not too complex, but for many other types of text, the speed remains unchanged. T&Cs, privacy policies, etc. are in fact the only types of text where I have achieved any time gain.
| | | | Lieven Malaise
Belgium
Local time: 19:56
Member (2020)
French to Dutch
+ ...
Thomas T. Frost wrote:
You seem to be contradicting yourself. Maybe you meant that MT can double your speed for certain types of texts, but that isn't what you said.
I didn't say specifically 'for certain types of texts' because I thought everyone would know by now that MTPE isn't suitable for everything. It's like the umpteenth time this topic is being disussed.
I will correct myself: 'I (at least) double my speed when doing MTPE almost every single time I use it.' But indeed, there are exceptions (but in that case paid MT is even useful to uplift translation quality).
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