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Rates per hour for MTPE
Thread poster: F Bossard
Claudio Porcellana (X)
Claudio Porcellana (X)  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 11:54
English to Italian
Rates per hour for MTPE Aug 23, 2019

I recently experienced something quite the contrary. A few pieces of human translations I edited took much more time than I'd have spent on editing machine translations.


it is sad to see, but devilishly real!
and I can add that the quality of source sentences I normally see is steadily decreasing


[Edited at 2019-08-23 21:43 GMT]


mughwI
P.L.F. Persio
 
Bernhard Sulzer
Bernhard Sulzer  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:54
English to German
+ ...
What we charge for Aug 24, 2019

Claudio Porcellana wrote:

I recently experienced something quite the contrary. A few pieces of human translations I edited took much more time than I'd have spent on editing machine translations.


it is sad to see, but devilishly real!
and I can add that the quality of source sentences I normally see is steadily decreasing


[Edited at 2019-08-23 21:43 GMT]


It almost seems as if some people need to constantly tout how great MT is. When they do that, they don't seem to realize that they don't do the profession any favors. Why?
I would invite everyone to read through previous forum posts. And ... whatever a machine translates MUST be checked by a human. And the knowledge the human translator brings to the table is what he is selling. And that's what we charge for.

If a human translator performed awfully then that is no proof of how good MT is. Think about it.
Let's just be a little more careful with what we say about MT. Much obliged.

[Edited at 2019-08-24 21:57 GMT]


Daryo
Thayenga
Marilena Berca
Milton Guo
Jan Truper
Claudio Porcellana (X)
Theunis du Toit
 
Beatrice Schlegel, B.A.(hons.), M.A, MCIL
Beatrice Schlegel, B.A.(hons.), M.A, MCIL
Local time: 10:54
German to English
+ ...
Taus post-editors directory Oct 1, 2020

[quote]Jean Dimitriadis wrote:

- TAUS post-editors directory only lists per hour rate - https://taus.net/post-editors TAUS also offers a post-editing course. Of course, with a per-hour rate, you cannot justify training your skills from the ground up at the expense of the client. See point below.


Dear Jean,

sorry, I know I'm a few years late, which is the reason I suspect that the TAUS post-editors directory is no longer available under this link. Can you remember how much they quoted for the per hour MTPE at all?

thanks so much,best regards
B


 
Silvia Brandon-Pérez
Silvia Brandon-Pérez  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 03:54
Member
English to Spanish
+ ...
MT is generally nonsensical, and we are digging our own grave Nov 20, 2020

A group to which I belong bought expensive translation software, and have asked me as a group member to "look over" documents that they have created with their expensive piece of garbage. In general these are English to Spanish translations, and in the future they may include English to French.

The MT translations, despite the fact that they paid a fair sum of money for their "engine," are nonsensical. In one sentence, the "machine" uses male and female articles, adjectives, etc.
... See more
A group to which I belong bought expensive translation software, and have asked me as a group member to "look over" documents that they have created with their expensive piece of garbage. In general these are English to Spanish translations, and in the future they may include English to French.

The MT translations, despite the fact that they paid a fair sum of money for their "engine," are nonsensical. In one sentence, the "machine" uses male and female articles, adjectives, etc. without discrimination. Frequently lines are left untranslated, and more so if the term in English, for example, is in caps...

I was sent a translation to review on fencing (the sport, rather than the construction term). I didn't realize in the beginning why so much of the translation made NO SENSE. I finally realized that the program in some places was talking about the size and material used to replace fencing, and in others it was talking about the sport of fencing (esgrima, escrime). When I realized what the program had done, I spent some time laughing out loud... Ultimately, I charged the client for time spent "correcting" the mistakes, in addition to the words used... And I said, and I repeat that here, it would have been cheaper for you had you given me the document to translate in the first place.

The other atrocious thing that is happening with "automatic correction" on computers is that the spelling of words are changed. The computer or automatic correction rarely knows the difference between there, their, they're. And that is just one example.
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Rolando Rosa
 
Susanta Chakraborty
Susanta Chakraborty
India
Local time: 16:24
English to Bengali
+ ...
Neat and clean answer Nov 23, 2020

To the point answer. Ty

Thayenga wrote:

Just quote your regular hourly rate. After all, it doesn't matter what you are working on, an hour of your time is an hours of your time, and needs to be paid accordingly.


Jorge Payan
 
Claudio Porcellana (X)
Claudio Porcellana (X)  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 11:54
English to Italian
Rates per hour for MTPE Dec 2, 2020

I was referring to the quality of the source files, i.e. nothing to do with translators...


I really meant to say that the quality of manuals, IFUs, etc. is constantly decreasing
I hope you get my point, Bernhard Sulzer

Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
It almost seems as if some people need to constantly tout how great MT is. When they do that, they don't seem to realize that they don't do the profession any favors. Why?
I would invite everyone to read through previous forum posts. And ... whatever a machine translates MUST be checked by a human. And the knowledge the human translator brings to the table is what he is selling. And that's what we charge for.

If a human translator performed awfully then that is no proof of how good MT is. Think about it.
Let's just be a little more careful with what we say about MT. Much obliged.

[Edited at 2019-08-24 21:57 GMT]


[Edited at 2020-12-02 22:53 GMT]


 
Beth Jones
Beth Jones  Identity Verified
Austria
Local time: 11:54
German to English
Relieved I'm "no longer alone" in warning about MT's impact on a once-respected profession Dec 15, 2020

Running across this discussion long (!) after the fact, I still feel compelled to agree with many of the comments here. I am also very relieved to finally note that others in this once-respected, intellectual, bi-lingual writers' profession are also up in arms over our younger / less insightful colleagues' blithe acceptance of the dumbed-down, CAT tool and machine translation trend.

I did not work at reseaching and compiling thousands of pages of detailed technical and business glo
... See more
Running across this discussion long (!) after the fact, I still feel compelled to agree with many of the comments here. I am also very relieved to finally note that others in this once-respected, intellectual, bi-lingual writers' profession are also up in arms over our younger / less insightful colleagues' blithe acceptance of the dumbed-down, CAT tool and machine translation trend.

I did not work at reseaching and compiling thousands of pages of detailed technical and business glossaries for hundreds of diverse clients in dozens of fields over 30-plus years to be demoted to being an editor for Google Translate's GIBBERISH for a pittance, just because some agency decides to kowtow to a clueless corporate client.

But then, many of my clients had to learn to respect how translators WORK -- that we DON'T just push a button somewhere and deliver 20K words over the weekend, nor do we passively accept what a grade-school dictionary (or search engine) spits out.

I've had to repeat my motto many times over the years: “There are super-fast translations and there are good translations. Which kind do you want?"

Translators research terminology and localization and deliver not just a 1:1 match-up of words, we transform the nuanced message of one language into another.

And no translator/proofreader worth their salt will meekly accept just any deadline for any price.
But that is precisely what many agencies (and even some translators) are demanding by cheerleading for MT and thereby misrepresenting and demeaning our profession -- while driving prices into the cellar.

I also agree that the automation of tasks (without the benefit of human intelligence/knowledge of nuance) leads to lower quality translations. I’ve encountered multiple, serious errors when proofreading technical & scientific translations that were produced by the (otherwise excellent) translator innocently running a SpellCheck right before submission.

In short, I feel so sorry for my younger colleagues, who I've sadly noted have little to no idea about the existence of the intellectual, well-paid profession I've just described here.

And as for the writing "skills" their current MT activities foster... SIGH.
Fuggeddaboutit.
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writeaway
Christopher Schröder
Beatriz Ramírez de Haro
 
Christopher Schröder
Christopher Schröder
United Kingdom
Member (2011)
Swedish to English
+ ...
A+ Dec 16, 2020

Beth Jones wrote:
A quality rant

But I fear the horse is out of the bag and the cat has bolted.

If I could turn back time...

And yes, I am wearing an identical outfit as I type. I always do when working. And shopping. It’s important to put comfort first.


P.L.F. Persio
Tony Keily
 
Claudio Porcellana (X)
Claudio Porcellana (X)  Identity Verified
Italy
Local time: 11:54
English to Italian
Rates per hour for MTPE May 1, 2021

And while peers rant, as usual when some process improvement jumps out, PEMT goes on its own way

Currently, are LPs that take matters into theirs own hands, for example
https://www.proz.com/job/1791778

But it's just a matter of time (a little time) that most SMBs (large companies started a dozen of years ago) will start using an internal MT, then asking LPs to do the rest<
... See more
And while peers rant, as usual when some process improvement jumps out, PEMT goes on its own way

Currently, are LPs that take matters into theirs own hands, for example
https://www.proz.com/job/1791778

But it's just a matter of time (a little time) that most SMBs (large companies started a dozen of years ago) will start using an internal MT, then asking LPs to do the rest

Take care

P.S. I did PEMT audits for a very big LP, but I never did PEMT jobs; nevertheless I am prepared doing it if necessary in the future

P.S. 2: the rant about "the automation of tasks (without the benefit of human intelligence/knowledge of nuance)" is out of place because PEMT involves humans

[Edited at 2021-05-01 10:22 GMT]
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P.L.F. Persio
Jorge Payan
 
jyuan_us
jyuan_us  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 06:54
Member (2005)
English to Chinese
+ ...
An hour‘s worth May 3, 2021

Thayenga wrote:

Just quote your regular hourly rate. After all, it doesn't matter what you are working on, an hour of your time is an hours of your time, and needs to be paid accordingly.


An hour spent in task A might be worth very differently to an hour spent in task B. To me, one should charge a higher hourly rate for MTPE than for translating. One hour spent in translation may bring about a great sense of accomplishment, and you are happy with that. However, after fixing MT garbage for one hour, you feel tired and you could have a sense of spending a valuable hour of your time on something that is upsetting.

[Edited at 2021-05-03 17:38 GMT]


Kuochoe Nikoi-Kotei
 
Adam Warren
Adam Warren  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 11:54
Member (2005)
French to English
Hourly rate for MTPE Sep 10, 2021

Claudio Porcellana wrote:

IMHO, no LP will ever accept an hourly rate for MTPE!


Respectfully, that is exactly what a client of mine is doing in asking me to quote on the basis of 1500 words per hour. Since my working rate is a standard 1200 words per hour in revision, I apply a factor of 1500 / 1200 = 1.25 times my hourly rate for translation. That way, I don't have to haggle to get the client to accept my words-per-hour working pace. By the same token, any time in hours posted by a client for an MTPE assignment would need to be multiplied by the same 1.25 expansion factor to get an estimate of the actual time required for an assignment, for the linguist's own use, obviously.

The formula for an hourly rate is the standard output divided by an 8-hour day, times my standard per-word rate. Thus, in my case:

2500 / 8 times 0.11 = 42.96, rounded down to €40 / hour, which I have posted to the client as a basis for negotiation.

I should add that the quote I was asked to provide was for post-editing Neural Machine Translation, of which I find the workable yield to be worthwhile, being substantially higher than for Plain Vanilla MTPE. I also presume that my client is confident of the success of its NMT engine.

Hope this helps.

With kind regards, and best wishes for your success,

Adam Warren (IanDhu, translator 41189)


 
Adam Warren
Adam Warren  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 11:54
Member (2005)
French to English
Like the great John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, choose the ground on which to do battle! Sep 10, 2021

Beth Jones wrote:

an editor for Google Translate's GIBBERISH for a pittance


We must move with the times, but it would be wise to find out what your client's MTPE policy is, which MT engine, how it interacts with linguists, and make sure your hourly rate or other basis affords a decent - not astronomic - income over the long term. Eschew agencies which rely on Google Translate; its ineptitudes on a learned society's site make me break out in spots and my blood boil: for "Fellows" of this learned society, GT contributes "Boursiers," who are actually, as we know, students in receipt of bursaries, studentships or scholarships, not Fellows. I have tried to "train" this hopeless engine by contributing "Sociétaires", but the Google machine thanks you and yet grinds on, a juggernaut compounding error with heedlessness!

However, I am heartened by the workable yield from Neural Machine Translation, which I tried out on SDL/RSW's site, Trados Live, of which it is extending the deadline for allowing existing Trados Studio users to continue working on it free of charge. Their app site also posts free downloads for a glossary term extractor, among other goodies. And for people unfamiliar with the workings of the Studio CAT software and add-ons, it has explanatory YouTube clips, whose non-native speakers I found had commendably clear diction, a must in language-related communication.

I sense a diffidence with new technology, which I hope these YouTube explanations may help to dispel.

Perhaps you could ask each of your clients for more explanation of the post-editing task framework, ask for samples, and arrange a trial with your MTPE clients individually, so that you can sift out the craven users of Google Translate, among other disreputable practices. Machine Translation must have a reasonably high workable yield for linguists to Post-Edit, otherwise it's best to dismiss the translation as unworkable, and therefore requiring human retranslation.

Please feel free to contact me via my ProZ.com page, for further information should my suggestions prove useful to you. There are agencies that take a commonsense view, and are businesslike in their dealings.

With best wishes for your success in this changing environment,

Adam Warren (IanDhu, translator 41189)


 
Maxi Schwarz
Maxi Schwarz  Identity Verified
Local time: 05:54
German to English
+ ...
Your *client's* policy? Sep 11, 2021

Adam Warren wrote:

We must move with the times, but it would be wise to find out what your client's MTPE policy is, which MT engine ....

Why should a customer have any kind of "policy"? We're hired to produce a product. If a customer sends me text that is already translated, whether by a human translator or some program, I assess the quality of that translation. For editing/ revision I charge by the hour for obvious reasons. I inform the client how much it would cost to have it translated by me, versus fixed by me. If the translation is of poor quality, then it will be costlier to fix than to translate. Those are MY policies. A customer cannot have policies on the work that we, the professionals, do for them.


Beatriz Ramírez de Haro
Bernhard Sulzer
 
Tony Keily
Tony Keily
Local time: 11:54
Italian to English
+ ...
To be honest... Sep 11, 2021

MTPE can be useful where a pretty rough equivalent is fine, but if you want to use MTPE to produce a text that reads like a good translation, it'll probably take not much less time than translation. It's good to make customers aware of this fact before they commit.

 
Multiverse Solutions s.r.o. (X)
Multiverse Solutions s.r.o. (X)
Local time: 11:54
Polish to English
+ ...
Quality or greed: the client's sovereign choice Sep 11, 2021

The real problem is somewhere else, and it is the systemic downgrade of human performance in all areas, from secretarial work (which includes drafting up documents) to intermediate-level services (like translation) to management and result-obsessed CEOs.

In old-school businesses, every single person was a master at the workplace. Quality was embedded in the work. Bad results? Mistakes? Miscalculation? You were no longer needed. The management people were not hired or purchased from
... See more
The real problem is somewhere else, and it is the systemic downgrade of human performance in all areas, from secretarial work (which includes drafting up documents) to intermediate-level services (like translation) to management and result-obsessed CEOs.

In old-school businesses, every single person was a master at the workplace. Quality was embedded in the work. Bad results? Mistakes? Miscalculation? You were no longer needed. The management people were not hired or purchased from outsourcers, they grew up with the company, they knew every step with its intricacies and traps, so naturally, in the final stage, they were promoted to the highest positions. There was no need for loyalty clauses (rebranded as ‘no competition’), just because employees wanted to work in a place from day 1 to the last day of their lifetime employment.

Then some out-of-the-blue genius came up with an idea of reducing labour costs. ‘Reducing’ is translated in this context into ‘eliminating’, not ‘lowering’. In the complex spider web of taxation, incentives, reliefs, international or holding settlements, lease vs ownership tricks, plus stock exchange, currency rate fluctuation or inflation scams, the human component is simple irrelevant. CEOs, management and administrative people of all levels are paid absurd monies for everything (or anything) but work. And work - the real work, where ideas are transformed into concepts and concepts are converted into tangible objects - is no longer the human domain. It’s all about machines.

Have you noticed how easy it is for a hospital to buy a ‘modern’ machine for 5 or 10 million of currency units? Which may be the equivalent of 8 years of salary (at ca. 2,000 currency units) for 50 highly trained irreplaceable medical specialists… Somehow ‘acquisition’ of STUFF is valued more than investing in STAFF.
The automotive industry is the extreme case of this trend. The technological level in this field has been practically frozen for the last 50 or more years. Fuel consumption by vehicles of any type has not changed since 1920s. The production technology has not advanced other than by using large-scale standardisation, which in itself reduces costs beyond our belief. Yet, new vehicles are more and more expensive, reaching the audacity of demanding extra hundreds or thousands of currency units for absolutely standard electronic displays, air conditioning units (in reality produced at a fraction of the catalogue price), or that glossy superb apparently not-found-anywhere-else paint coating.
If the principle of depreciation would be actually applied to the automotive industry, the latest premium-class limousine should never cost more than say 10 average monthly salaries. Why, it is nothing more than one tonne of metal, plastic and glass, all skilfully piled into one (not always) working mechanism. Plus, it is just a tool to travel from point A to point B. Plus, this travel in most cases does not take more than 1-2 hours per day…

Added value does not come from real human effort, but from manipulating perception of the naive and gullible client. More money is ‘generated’ by selling hugely overpriced glossy boxes on wheels at a price of an apartment sufficient for decent living. You cannot afford to buy one of these toys? Friends from financial institutions will solve your problems right away. These ones are also masters of distortion of perspective. They ‘sell’ ‘products’, although in reality there is no sale transaction, because there is no product…

Distorting perception has become the business.

MTPE offers great opportunities in this context. The client wants you to think and work in the category of characters. Can you see how irrelevant translators have become? With an average $0.05 per word, your character is worth less than 1 cent. This measure of 1 cent has become the standard to ‘value’ the human, highly-specialised, professional performance in translation. How can you expect any respect from your clients? For 1 cent?
Even that is too much for them. So they use repetitions and fuzzy matches to blackmail you into degrading yourself almost to zero.
Sometimes these ‘clients’ exceed their own standards and flood you with objections and complaints - how dare you err at 1 cent price?
To crush you for good, you may be ‘required’ to politely ask for your (?) money in 60 days from the invoice. Clearly, no one will care about your invoice. You need to be humiliated even more and then, hopefully, one day someone will ‘enter’ this $25 transfer for your ‘benefit’ (or ‘credit’). Have no illusions. The money will be sent to you not in gratitude for your invaluable work. Not even to respect the law. The only reason is to settle balances…

The above scenario is here now. It will stay - unless you start valuing your work.

If you are good at what you do, and you appreciate your own work, and you are aware of the real value of your translation…
and you balance all this with standard living costs + expenses necessary to ensure high quality of translation for your clients…
and you add a healthy margin for future developments and contingencies…
and you add high risk surcharge of being in a one-off ‘client’ who promises incredible (literally) future…
…you will have a wonderful life full of daily humour provided free of charge by ‘character’ clients without any character.
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