| Pages in topic: [1 2] > | No payment in Switzerland for repetitions? Thread poster: Linda Flebus
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Linda Flebus
Belgium
Local time: 12:58
German to Dutch
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Dear colleagues,
I work with a Swiss agency and they claim that customers in Switzerland are not willing to pay for
repetitions. As I only have 1 Swiss customer I cannot verify this. The reason for having just 1 Swiss customer is that the bank costs for payments of the invoices to Switzerland are very expensive and if the statement of my customer is true I do not want to work for Swiss agencies anymore!
Can someone help me out? Maybe I should only translate the n... See more Dear colleagues,
I work with a Swiss agency and they claim that customers in Switzerland are not willing to pay for
repetitions. As I only have 1 Swiss customer I cannot verify this. The reason for having just 1 Swiss customer is that the bank costs for payments of the invoices to Switzerland are very expensive and if the statement of my customer is true I do not want to work for Swiss agencies anymore!
Can someone help me out? Maybe I should only translate the new words and leave the repetitions untranslated ) ?
Linda ▲ Collapse
| | | | Adam Podstawczynski (X) 
Local time: 12:58
Polish to English
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| Exploitation is not nation-specific | Sep 29, 2012 |
Linda,
I cannot imagine how not paying or paying for repetitions could be a matter of WHERE an agency or client is based. Isn't this a matter of business approach and best practices rather than national diversity?
| | | | Linda Flebus
Belgium
Local time: 12:58
German to Dutch
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TOPIC STARTER | @Adam Just want to check how honest this agency is | Sep 29, 2012 |
This agency just tells me "in Switzerland customers never pay for repetitions" and I just wanted to check if this claim is true... If this is not true the conclusion is that I cannot trust the agency and will hence stop working for them.
The jobs I have done them were very small (few hundred words at a time) and there were never a lot of repetitions so I did not care. They now have proposed me a job of 3.000 words with 746 repetitions and charge for 2279 words (which I will not acc... See more This agency just tells me "in Switzerland customers never pay for repetitions" and I just wanted to check if this claim is true... If this is not true the conclusion is that I cannot trust the agency and will hence stop working for them.
The jobs I have done them were very small (few hundred words at a time) and there were never a lot of repetitions so I did not care. They now have proposed me a job of 3.000 words with 746 repetitions and charge for 2279 words (which I will not accept ofcourse!).
Linda ▲ Collapse
| | | | Cetacea
Switzerland
Local time: 12:58
English to German
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Linda Flebus wrote:
This agency just tells me "in Switzerland customers never pay for repetitions" and I just wanted to check if this claim is true...
Linda
That is not true, at least not for the agencies I work with.
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Jan Willem van Dormolen (X)
Netherlands
Local time: 12:58
English to Dutch
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Just another crazy scheme to squeeze money out of us translators. I've worked for several Swiss end clients, they always paid reps.
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Linda Flebus wrote: Maybe I should only translate the new words and leave the repetitions untranslated ) ?
If autopropagation and marking of repetitions are featured in the CAT tool used, then you don't lose a second on repetitions: autopropagation will do its job, and marking will tell you that it is a repetition, so you skip it (or the CAT tool will automatically skip it).
If repetitions cannot be easily propagated and spotted in the CAT tool, then it's abuse, and the agency assumes that you will not be able to avoid checking them in context, but won't pay you for it. How smart.
Whether they fit in context is not part of your assignment. There will be an overall editing stage where repetitions will be checked in context (at least that's what I say to myself...).
This is how I would handle the issue. Make sure you state very clearly that you will not spend a single second on repetitions (what else? You don't work for free, do you?).
I find this scheme very risky if you ask me, but then it is their decision.
And then with each delivery, you state again that repetitions have not been checked because you are not paid for them and you won't be held liable for any absurdity unpaid repetitions may lead to. Also advise them that you've noticed at least one occurrence where the caption Play on an MP3 player image was propagated to replace Play, the title for the summary of a Beckett play. There may other examples in the text. Too bad you're not paid for repetitions, otherwise you could have made sense of it all.
In real life, I've been in contact with agencies who don't pay for repetitions, But I've never actually been assigned any work in this kind of setting. Maybe because I have been clear enough about my not working for free...
Philippe
| | | | Thayenga
Germany
Local time: 12:58
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
| Repetitions vs. repititions | Sep 29, 2012 |
Philippe Etienne wrote: Linda Flebus wrote: Maybe I should only translate the new words and leave the repetitions untranslated ) ? If autopropagation and marking of repetitions are featured in the CAT tool used, then you don't lose a second on repetitions: autopropagation will do its job, and marking will tell you that it is a repetition, so you skip it (or the CAT tool will automatically skip it).
Still the translator needs to pay close attention to the repetitions, e. g. than vs. then - to name the most frequent one.
Philippe Etienne wrote:
If repetitions cannot be easily propagated and spotted in the CAT tool, then it's abuse, and the agency assumes that you will not be able to avoid checking them in context, but won't pay you for it. How smart.
Whether they fit in context is not part of your assignment. There will be an overall editing stage where repetitions will be checked in context (at least that's what I say to myself...).
This is how I would handle the issue. Make sure you state very clearly that you will not spend a single second on repetitions (what else? You don't work for free, do you?).
I find this scheme very risky if you ask me, but then it is their decision.
And then with each delivery, you state again that repetitions have not been checked because you are not paid for them and you won't be held liable for any absurdity unpaid repetitions may lead to. Also advise them that you've noticed at least one occurrence where the caption Play on an MP3 player image was propagated to replace Play, the title for the summary of a Beckett play. There may other examples in the text. Too bad you're not paid for repetitions, otherwise you could have made sense of it all.
In real life, I've been in contact with agencies who don't pay for repetitions, But I've never actually been assigned any work in this kind of setting. Maybe because I have been clear enough about my not working for free...
Philippe
It does seem to be quite frequent that agencies just "take for granted" that you will check those unpaid repetitions anyway, simply because your reputation is on the line. Very smart indeed.
And the "blame" is not on the agency, but on the translator who plays along, so to speak. This is where "if all translators" did the work they're paid for, agencies would soon start to pay for repetitions. We all know how "if" sentences turn out.
| | | | | A repitition is a repitition | Sep 29, 2012 |
Thayenga wrote:
Still the translator needs to pay close attention to the repetitions, e. g. than vs. then - to name the most frequent one.
Huh? A repetition is 100% identical to the original segment.
Example:
Original segment of 2 words: a word
Repetition: a word
Not a repetition: A word
Not a repetition: a word.
Not a repetition: French beans
Repetition: a word
Not a repetition: a word
Not a repetition: a wrod
Philippe
EDIT The penultimate non-repetition is supposed to have two spaces between both words. It won't display...
[Edited at 2012-09-29 17:07 GMT]
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Rad Graban (X)
United Kingdom
Local time: 11:58
English to Slovak
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...You don't get anything you don't pay for. I really don't understand people offering discounts for repetitions. Individual words/terms can match (can classified as repetitions) but there is always some 'fine-tuning' to be done, so the sentence and/or the whole context make the sense. [At least in my language pair.]
| | | | Parrot
Spain
Local time: 12:58
Spanish to English
+ ...
| Never heard of it | Sep 29, 2012 |
except in UN agencies.
The reason given for the UN was that those repeats were parts of official forms that come with their memories as official translations. (I checked, it's true).
That I don't mind. They also pay 100% for fuzzies of any kind. Now why don't others think that way?
But I haven't heard anyone else apply it.
| | | | | Propagating the repetitions blindly is sometimes dangerous | Sep 29, 2012 |
If autopropagation and marking of repetitions are featured in the CAT tool used, then you don't lose a second on repetitions: autopropagation will do its job, and marking will tell you that it is a repetition, so you skip it (or the CAT tool will automatically skip it). If repetitions cannot be easily propagated and spotted in the CAT tool, then it's abuse, and the agency assumes that y ... See moreIf autopropagation and marking of repetitions are featured in the CAT tool used, then you don't lose a second on repetitions: autopropagation will do its job, and marking will tell you that it is a repetition, so you skip it (or the CAT tool will automatically skip it).
If repetitions cannot be easily propagated and spotted in the CAT tool, then it's abuse, and the agency assumes that you will not be able to avoid checking them in context, but won't pay you for it. How smart.
Whether they fit in context is not part of your assignment. There will be an overall editing stage where repetitions will be checked in context (at least that's what I say to myself...).
In many situations, failing to check for contextual suitability is an easy way to lose a client. For instance, I remember translating a long equipment specification where one and the same one-word segment, "HP", could mean a high pressure stage for a compressor, horsepower rating for an engine, and Hewlett-Packard for a computer. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Vladimír Hoffman
Slovakia
Local time: 12:58
Member (2009)
English to Slovak
+ ...
| According to my experience, | Sep 29, 2012 |
amount of work that repetitions really require is very small (if any). Basically, it consists in fast reading repeated segments. No "fine-tuning" is usually needed, identical phrases in same translation have same meaning. Although I am reluctant to provide full discount (100%) for repetitions, discount of 90% is fully acceptable, there is not more work to be done.
Rad Graban wrote:
but there is always some 'fine-tuning' to be done, so the sentence and/or the whole context make the sense. [At least in my language pair.]
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airmailrpl
Brazil
Local time: 07:58
Member (2005)
English to Portuguese
+ ...
| remove the repetitions | Sep 29, 2012 |
> I should only translate the new words and leave the repetitions untranslated
Tell them to remove the repetitions - so you won't have to deal with them or even see them - if they don't want to pay you to deal with them
I once had a client who said they would not pay for spaces (they were paying by keystroke or character) - so I told them I would leave all of the spaces out of the translations since they didn't want to pay for them.
| | | | Nicole Schnell
United States
Local time: 03:58
English to German
+ ...
In memoriam | This agency is telling fairy tales | Sep 30, 2012 |
Linda Flebus wrote:
they claim that customers in Switzerland are not willing to pay for
repetitions.
Nonsense. None of my Swiss customers have ever come up with this bizarre idea.
Best,
Nicole
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Linda Flebus wrote:
I work with a Swiss agency and they claim that customers in Switzerland are not willing to pay for
repetitions.
Wrong. I have worked for Swiss companies and they do pay for repetitions alright.
In any case, the rate for repetitions is something you agree with your customer (the agency), and their dealings with their customers is none of your business. Therefore, you are free to request a rate you feel is adequate.
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