The Prosperous Post-Editor: Interesting Testimony on PE Rates

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If you grew up with holes in ya zapatosYou'd be celebrating the minute you washavin' dough

The following message was posted this week toan old item from a few months backon the ProZ-TAUS debate, in which the Holy Trinity of L10NAutomation was convened to recite the by now stale message that translatorswill not be replaced by computers (only degraded). It is an interestingtestimony because it is a counter to my thesis that post-editing will beaccompanied by lower absolute rates (i.e., both per word and per day, month,and year). Check it:
Higuys,Irealize this comment is really late, but speaking of PE payment, I justfinished a 2 year PE project that actually put some decent bucks in my coffersand was so incredibly easy for someone with my experience and education in translation.(10 yrs. experience, MA translation).Atthe volume I could do on it (paid at discounted word rate), I earned about 100bucks per hour. However, I agreed to it only because of the major concession onquality. This stuff was all internal and would not be published, so they didn'tcare about the quality. They asked for "understandable" and"good enough" quality."Goodenough" and "understandable" are subjective. I often found manyof the garbled, yet decipherable, sentences simply "good enough." ;-)Nocomplaints from them. However,I have had agencies approach me with projects that need to be publishingquality--and they want a discount for MT--my response is usually to look at theMT version, find it unusable and needing of complete re-translation and offerthem 2 options:1)inflated word rate by 50% if they insist on use of the MT.2)regular rate if they want it translated from scratch.Needlessto say, I don't normally get chosen for these kinds of ridiculous proposals.;-)MTcan be used well on the type of project I described, which I just finisheddoing. It all depends on the content and the purpose of the target text.Ipersonally think that MT has no place in publishing quality work--not yet atleast. No matter how many strides they make in MT, they are a loooooooooooongway off from replacing humans. WhetherPE becomes a viable market strategy will be up to us translators. I did it fora bunch of easy, repetitive internal garbage that is of interest only to the Csuits of a particular company--and made very decent dough. (I also did not losemy style--I can still translate at proper quality too.)If itbecomes the standard for publishing quality work, well, I'll be looking foranother profession.Sorryfor the anonymous post, I don't want this client to make a guess at who I am ifthey happen to stumble on this.Greatblog!
I don’t doubt this testimony is genuine.However, I doubt that $100-per-hour of post-editing is in the cards for manyindividual translators in the future. Two observations are in order:
1.- The market for translations is veryinefficient. I won’t go into the theoretical meaning of economic inefficiency,but I will only point out a symptom of that inefficiency. Any translator canconfirm this: Rates offered vary insanely from one job offer to another, byfactors of 100% or more. Not even websites such as ProZ have managed toconstrain the spectrum of translation prices. I already hear some ninny raisinghis hand to say: “Of course rates vary. That is true of any market. Rates willvary according to language pair, experience, difficulty, specialization,volume, regularity, etc., etc.” As usual, this is a truism that papers over thefact that a variation of one or two orders of magnitude is way too large for arational market.
2.- In an inefficient market, there will behuge outliers. Our anonymous poster is just such an outlier. My bet is that, inthe future, competition among cheap translation providers will tend to reducethe occurrence of such outliers. This $100-per-hour rate is an inefficiencythat will be gradually scraped away as one or two or three low quality playersbecome slightly more dominant in their niche. (Incidentally, the fact that theauthor of the message maintains his contribution anonymous confirms this. Hissuspicion is that if his clients discovered that the same tweaking of MT outputcan be obtained at a much, much lower price, they would turn to anotherprovider… because the service is a commodity.)
I agree with the anonymous author thatthere is not a place for MT in material for publication… yet. There would be, perhaps,if the MT people got serious about quality metrics. That way, when I came intothe office in the morning, with my Starbucks venti and munching on a croissant,and read 57% accuracy, I would simply eject the refuse into hyperspace and greedilykeep the 95% matches. But since some MT specialists have claimed on this veryblog that any Google Translate match is equivalent to a 95% Trados match, youwill forgive me if I remain a skeptic.
I wish I were wrong. If I am, and I end upas a post-editor making $100 an hour, I’ll be right there with you, ohanonymous contributor, filling up jacuzzis with Cristal, raising the roof, and lightingCuban cigars with one-hundred-euro bills while Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” blares inthe background. I will gladly sell my soul, sans sales tax, ifany such there is to sell.
But I truly, truly doubt that this willhappen. The impetus behind cheap translation is precisely to lower qualityexpectations and make the entire process as cheap as possible. You might thinkthat this is irrational, but the business model simply depends on volume, whichis why these companies are trying to convince Fortune 500 corporations totranslate Facebook status updates.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.