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Do you charge articles (a/the) and prepositions (in/of, etc) while using pay-per-word charge system?
Thread poster: James Frost
James Frost
James Frost
Russian Federation
English to Russian
+ ...
Mar 24, 2021

I want to clarify this unobvious point.
The question is about translating English texts into other languages texts.
Please tell about your pay-per-word charging system.


 
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida  Identity Verified
Portugal
Local time: 09:56
Member (2007)
English to Portuguese
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@James Mar 24, 2021

I don’ know what you mean by pay-per-word charge system. All my translations are invoiced per word (article, noun, adjective, verb, preposition, adverb…): number of words x price per word = final price.

Barbara Carrara
expressisverbis
P.L.F. Persio
Philippe Etienne
Jorge Payan
Michele Fauble
Philip Lees
 
Stepan Konev
Stepan Konev  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 12:56
English to Russian
There are other units to measure translation Mar 24, 2021

Teresa Borges wrote:
I don’ know what you mean by pay-per-word charge system.
In some countries, they count in characters (1800 chars in Russia, 1500 chars in Italy, etc.).

James Frost wrote:
Do you charge articles (a/the) and prepositions (in/of, etc)...
I've never thought or seen it could be different. Articles and prepositions are obviously words too. If your client suggests that you should skip articles/prepositions/numbers/etc., just skip that client.

[Edited at 2021-03-24 17:47 GMT]


P.L.F. Persio
Philippe Etienne
Jorge Payan
Christel Zipfel
expressisverbis
Michele Fauble
Philip Lees
 
Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 09:56
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
You charge for all words or all characters or all lines... Mar 24, 2021

James Frost wrote:
Do you charge articles (a/the) and prepositions (in/of, etc)...

Do you translate them or do you leave them in the source language? Of course you translate them, even if that means omitting an article or preposition because one isn't called for in the target language. So you must charge for processing them.

On a practical point, how could we exclude all such words from the count? I know of no software that can do that automatically, whereas Word and all CAT tools will give a total word count.


P.L.F. Persio
Stepan Konev
Philippe Etienne
Esther Dodo
Jorge Payan
Barbara Carrara
expressisverbis
 
Philippe Etienne
Philippe Etienne  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 10:56
Member
English to French
What's in a word Mar 24, 2021

Pay-per-word charge system - Basics only, the issue of CAT word-slicing custom is another matter altogether (time saved):

A word count is a simple, unbiased and predictable way of anticipating how much time you're likely to spend on a typical translation. The word count is a quantity that buyer and seller can easily agree on, save a few possible, and marginal, discrepancies with apostrophes, hyphens and the like, depending on the word-counting tool used.
In languages other tha
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Pay-per-word charge system - Basics only, the issue of CAT word-slicing custom is another matter altogether (time saved):

A word count is a simple, unbiased and predictable way of anticipating how much time you're likely to spend on a typical translation. The word count is a quantity that buyer and seller can easily agree on, save a few possible, and marginal, discrepancies with apostrophes, hyphens and the like, depending on the word-counting tool used.
In languages other than English (or even in English), the "unit" can be the character, the standard line, the page or the whole assignment. For instance, translations from German are often priced by the character, because German tends to "link" "words" together, therefore a "word" unit may not really reflect the translation effort needed.

If you are typically able to translate 1000* source words (all of them) per hour, final quality, ready for delivery, taking into account overhead such as communication, formatting if any, conversions, whatever;
If your target hourly rate is 1000 beans, considering that no employer pays anything for you and you want to be able to get treatment when you're ill, have a break when you're tired, and buy a new computer when yours is obsolete;
Then you should charge 1 bean per word.

Keep in mind that we're selling our time (a service), not buckets of words the way hardware sellers sell bushels of nails. At the end of the day, your hourly rate is what matters, not the unit you use to reach it. Knowing my target hourly rate, I could for instance work out a unit price per letter E: I'd just take a large sample of typical source texts translated and associated money earned, then count the E's to get a unit price per letter E. Similarly, provided I had this weird idea that prepositions or articles should be discarded, I could work out a longer-than-3-letter word rate based on my translation history and associated income.

*Number for illustrative purposes only. I "do" about 400/hour, and Google Translate/DeepL several millions at a unit rate of almost zero. No wonder why we're still in business.

Philippe
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Christel Zipfel
expressisverbis
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Christine Andersen
 
Kevin Fulton
Kevin Fulton  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 05:56
German to English
If the client doesn't want to pay for articles ,,, Mar 24, 2021

... just leave them out

Christel Zipfel
Stepan Konev
expressisverbis
Philip Lees
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Philippe Etienne
Kay Denney
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 10:56
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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@James Mar 24, 2021

James Frost wrote:
Do you charge for articles (a/the) and prepositions (in/of, etc.) while using a pay-per-word charge system?


Yes. The idea is that you charge a single rate for long words and short words (no matter how long or how short they are) so that the character counts average out in the end.

What qualifies as a separate word may depend on the language and on the tool that counts the words. For example, "L'argent de Louis-Philippe" can be three words or five words. However, if you consistently use a certain word counting tool, you should on average get the same indication of how much text there is. Also, word counts depend on mechanical word boundaries. The word counting tool doesn't know which words are articles or prepositions. In languages that have very, very long words, it may be best to quote per character instead of per word. Word counting tools are typically not intelligent enough to e.g. count stems of compound nouns separately.

Sheila Wilson wrote:
On a practical point, how could we exclude all such words from the count? I know of no software that can do that automatically...


Some CAT tools do maintain lists of stop words in major languages (they use this to enhance fuzzy matching). And for languages whose articles etc. are *separate* words it may be quite simple for such a counting tool to maintain a list of such words in a large number of languages. You can then count them differently (e.g. at half price).

But I don't know which languages such a system would be useful for. I know that most translators use word counts for invoicing or price-setting purposes, but word counts are also useful for figuring out how long the work will take.


[Edited at 2021-03-24 21:08 GMT]


expressisverbis
Philippe Etienne
Christine Andersen
 
Heinrich Pesch
Heinrich Pesch  Identity Verified
Finland
Local time: 11:56
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
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Why not? Mar 25, 2021

It matters if you translate "a word" or "the word". But I usually look also at the character count and charge a total price according to that. It's the amount of keystrokes we should charge.

Christel Zipfel
 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 10:56
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Definitely - they have to be translated! Mar 25, 2021

Are you joking?
It is quite a skill to know how to translate articles.

In fact my source language normally attaches the definite article to the end of the word (except when it doesn't ...) So they do not always appear in the word count.

Cat = Kat
the cat = katten
the white cat = den hvide kat

the cats = kattene
the white cats = de hvide katte

However, it is quite an art to translate the definite article correctly into En
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Are you joking?
It is quite a skill to know how to translate articles.

In fact my source language normally attaches the definite article to the end of the word (except when it doesn't ...) So they do not always appear in the word count.

Cat = Kat
the cat = katten
the white cat = den hvide kat

the cats = kattene
the white cats = de hvide katte

However, it is quite an art to translate the definite article correctly into English.
Danish often uses singular where English uses the plural.
Danish often uses a plain definite article where English uses a possessive. And then a translator can get into trouble.
For example, Danish happily refers to possessions or parts of the body in the definite article form. Plain and simple and gender neutral, everyone has a head, a hand, a foot.

We English speakers have two hands and two feet, or a crowd has a whole lot of hands and feet between them...
Of course, there are ways to get round the problem, but thought is often needed to avoid raising the question of gender when it is totally irrelevant.

On other occasions Danish uses the plural definitive article form where English uses the plural with no article... And just when Scandinavians think they have cracked that system, English native speakers put in definite articles where Danes leave them out!
____________________________

Prepositions are actually one of the most difficult parts of speech to get right. They are not as simple and logical as people imagine.

So whatever you charge for articles and prepositions, it is probably well earned!

[Edited at 2021-03-25 21:55 GMT]
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expressisverbis
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Michele Fauble
Christopher Schröder
Beatriz Ramírez de Haro
Kuochoe Nikoi-Kotei
Laura Kingdon
 
Kay Denney
Kay Denney  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 10:56
French to English
. Mar 25, 2021

This one is new.
I did have a client asking me to deduct all instances of his company name from the wordcount, in that the name would not be translated (it was a name that would be translated were it not a name, like "The Furniture Company").
I explained that I would simply delete all those instances of the name from the text and translate what was left, and let him put the name back in. He started to protest that he wouldn't always know where to put it, and it was wonderful to lis
... See more
This one is new.
I did have a client asking me to deduct all instances of his company name from the wordcount, in that the name would not be translated (it was a name that would be translated were it not a name, like "The Furniture Company").
I explained that I would simply delete all those instances of the name from the text and translate what was left, and let him put the name back in. He started to protest that he wouldn't always know where to put it, and it was wonderful to listen to his voice trailing off into uncertainty as he realised that simply putting the name in the right place was one of the skills he could be paying me for.
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Peter Shortall
Giovanni Guarnieri MITI, MIL
Barbara Carrara
expressisverbis
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Christine Andersen
Tina Vonhof (X)
 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
Time is the essence Mar 25, 2021

Heinrich Pesch wrote:
It's the amount of keystrokes we should charge.

If we were merely typists, yes. But we're not.

It's the amount of time we should charge.


Christine Andersen
Thomas Pfann
Beatriz Ramírez de Haro
Matthias Brombach
Philippe Etienne
 
Stepan Konev
Stepan Konev  Identity Verified
Russian Federation
Local time: 12:56
English to Russian
Who suggested this idea Mar 26, 2021

As long as you are in Russia, can you tell me which agency suggested this approach?

[Edited at 2021-03-26 01:45 GMT]


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 10:56
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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Nuts Mar 26, 2021

Chris S wrote:
Heinrich Pesch wrote:
It's the amount of keystrokes we should charge.

It's the amount of time we should charge.

I have said so myself in the past, but... if that were true, then the faster (and better) we got, the less we'd earn. Let's face it, the word count is just a simple way to measure the physical length of the text. Computers can count characters just as easily as words, but in the old days when translators counted the words by hand, counting words was quicker than counting characters. In fact, in the old days, those who have gone before us would often just count the words in five lines, divide by five, and then multiply that by the number of lines. It's an estimate, but it's more useful than "oh, it's 5 pages long".


Christine Andersen
Kevin Fulton
 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
Speed is of the essence Mar 26, 2021

Samuel Murray wrote:
Chris S wrote:
Heinrich Pesch wrote:
It's the amount of keystrokes we should charge.

It's the amount of time we should charge.

I have said so myself in the past, but... if that were true, then the faster (and better) we got, the less we'd earn.

No, the faster and better you get, the more you can charge per hour!


 
Michael Wetzel
Michael Wetzel  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 10:56
German to English
Might be a good advertising gimmick. Mar 26, 2021

There's a carsharing company in Berlin that has big advertisements on the sides of its cars about paying to get somewhere instead of paying to wait in traffic. Apparently, they charge customers by distance instead of time. In the end, however, all they can do is use a different formula to come up with the same price, because the units they happen to place on their invoices doesn't change their overhead or their profit margin.

So maybe:
"Hey Ivan, ever wonder why you have to p
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There's a carsharing company in Berlin that has big advertisements on the sides of its cars about paying to get somewhere instead of paying to wait in traffic. Apparently, they charge customers by distance instead of time. In the end, however, all they can do is use a different formula to come up with the same price, because the units they happen to place on their invoices doesn't change their overhead or their profit margin.

So maybe:
"Hey Ivan, ever wonder why you have to pay for words that real languages don't even have?"
"Totally, bro, what's up with that."
"Well, guess what, I've got a macro for you."
"No way."
"First, I filter out all the fake words and then I use the real words to give you a real price."
"Straight up."
"Straight up and peace out, bro."

Then you just write a macro to delete all articles and prepositions at the press of a button. Compare the number of words in the text with fake words to the number of words in the text without fake words and adjust your per-word rate. And presto change-oh: One less discussion with a weird agency client or with a direct client asking a question that is not patently unreasonable if you're not a translator.
Alternatively, you could also charge half for all the easy words and 10-20 times your normal rate for all the hard words to arrive at your usual rate.

Sarcasm aside, maybe it is the case that source texts do substantially vary in terms of the number of articles and/or prepositions they contain and maybe the time it takes to translate them really does substantially increase and decrease according to those differences. You could do an experiment to see, but I'm certainly not going to, because the theory seems pretty implausible.
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Christopher Schröder
Sadek_A
Philippe Etienne
 
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Do you charge articles (a/the) and prepositions (in/of, etc) while using pay-per-word charge system?







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