| Pages sur ce sujet: < [1 2] | Translation quality labelled "weak" by two reviewers Auteur du fil: queen123
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Gerard de Noord 
France
Local time: 15:55
Membre (2003)
anglais vers néerlandais
+ ...
| Misspelling is weak | Aug 25, 2013 |
queen123 wrote:
I translated 5 different food leaflets from English into Arabic for a translation agency. The latter delivered the translation to the client and after a couple of weeks I received an email from the agency saying that the client wasn't satisfied with the translation and thought it was "weak". I asked to see the comments of the reviewer. Unfortunately there were several typos in the Arabic texts but no inaccuracies, inconsistencies or syntactic mistakes. I wrote back to the translation manager explaining that there were indeed typographical mistakes, which I regretted, but labelling the translations as "weak" is exaggerated and, in my opinion, unprofessional. The TM wrote back saying that this was the opinion of not just one reviewer but two!
I understand that the TM is incapable of judging the quality of my translation given that she cannot read Arabic and that she is more likely to go along with the opinion of the two reviewers. I now started doubting my own translation abilities, which is not a good thing.
I would be eternally grateful.
I translate into Dutch and my mistakes only get caught by the best of proofreaders (who speak my language too). I don't know anything about your target language but maybe a professional proofreader has pointed out your mistakes easily. 'Several typos' in 5 leaflets is too much, full stop. Weep and learn like the rest of us.
Succes,
Gerard
| | | | MariusV
Lituanie
Local time: 16:55
anglais vers lituanien
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Gerard de Noord wrote:
queen123 wrote:
I translated 5 different food leaflets from English into Arabic for a translation agency. The latter delivered the translation to the client and after a couple of weeks I received an email from the agency saying that the client wasn't satisfied with the translation and thought it was "weak". I asked to see the comments of the reviewer. Unfortunately there were several typos in the Arabic texts but no inaccuracies, inconsistencies or syntactic mistakes. I wrote back to the translation manager explaining that there were indeed typographical mistakes, which I regretted, but labelling the translations as "weak" is exaggerated and, in my opinion, unprofessional. The TM wrote back saying that this was the opinion of not just one reviewer but two!
I understand that the TM is incapable of judging the quality of my translation given that she cannot read Arabic and that she is more likely to go along with the opinion of the two reviewers. I now started doubting my own translation abilities, which is not a good thing.
I would be eternally grateful.
I translate into Dutch and my mistakes only get caught by the best of proofreaders (who speak my language too). I don't know anything about your target language but maybe a professional proofreader has pointed out your mistakes easily. 'Several typos' in 5 leaflets is too much, full stop. Weep and learn like the rest of us.
Succes,
Gerard
Several typos can be a quality issue (and even a serious one) and I agree on this. But yet another thing is when some scam tells the translator that the "job was bad, the client did not like it"...And cannot identify any single quality issue (whether a real one or "supposed")...I am not even speaking about such situations when the proofreader inserts mistakes (or even deletes/re-words/re-writes whole sentences) instead of noticing and correcting them. Would you like your language pairs be reviewed by some agency (just an example) Egypt or India where the PM does not even knows how you language "looks like", and revision is done by someone who is not even the native speaker of the target language?
[Edited at 2013-08-26 14:04 GMT]
| | | | inkweaver
Allemagne
Local time: 15:55
français vers allemand
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Depends on how you define "weak".
A translation with typos only is careless in my opion, a weak translation would be a translation with grammatical errors, mistranslations, badly researched technical terms, the inability to translate idioms properly etc.
| | | | queen123
Local time: 14:55
anglais vers arabe
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AUTEUR DU FIL | My point exactly | Aug 26, 2013 |
inkweaver wrote:
Depends on how you define "weak".
A translation with typos only is careless in my opion, a weak translation would be a translation with grammatical errors, mistranslations, badly researched technical terms, the inability to translate idioms properly etc.
This is exactly my point Inkweaver. Jan Willem and Gerard also seem to look at a translation from the point of view of orthography only (don't get me wrong, I consider that to be extremely important and I am actually ashamed of this incident), however, deeming a translation to be weak just because of that is shortsighted and shows that a reviewer is incapable of providing proper feedback.
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queen123 wrote:
inkweaver wrote:
Depends on how you define "weak".
A translation with typos only is careless in my opion, a weak translation would be a translation with grammatical errors, mistranslations, badly researched technical terms, the inability to translate idioms properly etc.
This is exactly my point Inkweaver. Jan Willem and Gerard also seem to look at a translation from the point of view of orthography only (don't get me wrong, I consider that to be extremely important and I am actually ashamed of this incident), however, deeming a translation to be weak just because of that is shortsighted and shows that a reviewer is incapable of providing proper feedback.
I agree. While orthography is extremely important, overfocusing on it is a possible sign of being unable to comment on much else. Proper orthographical mistakes would be enough to term a translation weak but evident typos not really. One could even say sloppy, but not really weak. IMHO, a weak translation is one that shows weak writing skill or poor equivalence.
| | | | Gerard de Noord
France
Local time: 15:55
Membre (2003)
anglais vers néerlandais
+ ...
| Yes I'm shortsighted, and longsighted too, by the way | Aug 26, 2013 |
queen123 wrote:
inkweaver wrote:
Depends on how you define "weak".
A translation with typos only is careless in my opion, a weak translation would be a translation with grammatical errors, mistranslations, badly researched technical terms, the inability to translate idioms properly etc.
This is exactly my point Inkweaver. Jan Willem and Gerard also seem to look at a translation from the point of view of orthography only (don't get me wrong, I consider that to be extremely important and I am actually ashamed of this incident), however, deeming a translation to be weak just because of that is shortsighted and shows that a reviewer is incapable of providing proper feedback.
Dear queen123,
Until now Jan Willem and TransAfrique have expressed that they value correct spelling too, but I'm only talking for myself. When I see several spelling errors in a few pages of text I lose all confidence in a translation. I know this sounds stupid but I actively try to avoid proofreading texts with typos, and I spot them within minutes. Time is on your side: modern Dutch and Manx citizens don’t mind an occasional typo, they make them all the time.
Regards,
Gerard
| | | | queen123
Local time: 14:55
anglais vers arabe
+ ...
AUTEUR DU FIL
To Gerard, You are still missing the point!
Anyway, move on. This is the latest on this issue:
I forgot to mention in the beginning that I had offered the TM a discount (approx. 5%) to make up for the typos. She replied saying that she would look into that. Today she emailed me asking for 15% discount because 1) she had apparently sent the translation to a third reviewer who confirmed the findings of the two previous ones regarding typos (but not anything else) and 2) t... See more To Gerard, You are still missing the point!
Anyway, move on. This is the latest on this issue:
I forgot to mention in the beginning that I had offered the TM a discount (approx. 5%) to make up for the typos. She replied saying that she would look into that. Today she emailed me asking for 15% discount because 1) she had apparently sent the translation to a third reviewer who confirmed the findings of the two previous ones regarding typos (but not anything else) and 2) the DTP person had to recreate the leaflets (which I find extraordinary because one should be able to just correct the typos in InDesign without having to start anew, am I wrong?). We agreed on 10% in the end.
My question to colleagues, who are willing to have a constructive discussion without quibbling about what proper reviewing entails, is whether anybody has come across something like this before and how s/he dealt with it.
I didn't want to think about possible dubious schemes from the part of the TM, but I now started thinking perhaps MariusV has a point here. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Stephen Emm
Local time: 14:55
français vers anglais
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| The agency needs to provide proof | Oct 10, 2013 |
It is easy for a reviewer to say that the translation is "weak" (whatever that means), but they need to provide some sort of objective evidence from the text to back this up.
I reviewed a French to English translation a couple of months ago that was poor. It had numerous terminology errors, grammatical mistakes, poor style and inconsistencies that I was able to provide as evidence to back up my assessment.
A few spelling mistakes is not the end of the world, but before acccepting any... See more It is easy for a reviewer to say that the translation is "weak" (whatever that means), but they need to provide some sort of objective evidence from the text to back this up.
I reviewed a French to English translation a couple of months ago that was poor. It had numerous terminology errors, grammatical mistakes, poor style and inconsistencies that I was able to provide as evidence to back up my assessment.
A few spelling mistakes is not the end of the world, but before acccepting any "discount" from the agency I would ask them to provide the actual feedback from the reviewer and evidence of the mistakes that supposedly make it weak.
Translation is not some mystical process, where one feels that a translation is "weak", examples need to be provided from the text. ▲ Collapse
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| Agency or file-forwarder? | Oct 10, 2013 |
From the initial post it seems the "agency" simply forwarded your translation to the client, without any editing or even monolingual proofing. Later you mentioned layout in InDesign, so that means they actually took your translation, processed it in InDesign, and sent it to the client without any editing or even monolingual proofing. This is astonishing to me, especially that typos, which seems to be the issue here, could have (and should have) been discovered in the proofreading step, even if i... See more From the initial post it seems the "agency" simply forwarded your translation to the client, without any editing or even monolingual proofing. Later you mentioned layout in InDesign, so that means they actually took your translation, processed it in InDesign, and sent it to the client without any editing or even monolingual proofing. This is astonishing to me, especially that typos, which seems to be the issue here, could have (and should have) been discovered in the proofreading step, even if it is target-only monolingual proofing.
It seems to me that this "agency" does not have a proper quality process in place, and I would not call them an "agency", they are more in the file-pusher category, IMHO.
I edit and proofread and perform QA for several real agencies. I have a fixed hourly rate, and the cost of this quality assurance step does not depend on how many typos or other issues I find. As long as the translation is within the acceptable quality range, the cost stays the same, so the agencies can and do build this cost into their overall pricing model.
In the occasional case when the quality of the translation is so bad that it takes significantly more time to fix it than my usual budgeted time, I negotiate with the agency and they either pay for the extra work, or I refuse the job. I am not sure what they do with the translator, if they decide to pay for the extra editing work, it depends on what kind of agreement they have with them. If their agreement with the translator has a clause about bad quality, I would not find it unjust to share the extra cost with the translator, i.e. ask for a discount from the translator. But this is the only case. If the translation quality is within the normal range, since the normal cost of editing/proofing should be already built into the overall cost structure, there is no reason to demand a discount from the translator.
It is entirely the agency's decision to try and save costs by skipping the quality assurance steps, but with that, they are taking a risk. If the end client is not happy, and the agency has to make remedies (have the text retranslated by somebody else, or offer a discount to the end client), that has to be at their own expense, as they were the ones taking the risk.
Conclusions:
- learn what sort of quality process the "agency" applies to its projects
- check your agreement with them regarding quality clauses and be clear about who bears the risks
- regardless of the above two, try to provide the best quality you possibly can
Just my two cents.
Katalin ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Pays-Bas
Local time: 15:55
Membre (2006)
anglais vers afrikaans
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| What is a "typo"? | Oct 10, 2013 |
queen123 wrote:
Unfortunately there were several typos in the Arabic texts...
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I wrote back to the translation manager explaining that there were indeed typographical mistakes...
I have always thought that "typo" means "typing error", not "typographic[al] error". In other words, when I use the word "typos" to describe a translation, I use it to refer to spelling errors that were likely not the result of ignorance but that seems to have happened by accident. A typo is a finger error, not a brain error, in other words. It would not have occurred to me that the word "typo" could refer to typographic errors, which have very little to do with typing.
What say all of you?
[Edited at 2013-10-10 14:46 GMT]
| | | | Orrin Cummins
Japon
Local time: 23:55
japonais vers anglais
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Samuel Murray wrote:
queen123 wrote:
Unfortunately there were several typos in the Arabic texts...
...
I wrote back to the translation manager explaining that there were indeed typographical mistakes...
I have always thought that "typo" means "typing error", not "typographic[al] error". In other words, when I use the word "typos" to describe a translation, I use it to refer to spelling errors that were likely not the result of ignorance but that seems to have happened by accident. A typo is a finger error, not a brain error, in other words. It would not have occurred to me that the word "typo" could refer to typographic errors, which have very little to do with typing.
What say all of you?
[Edited at 2013-10-10 14:46 GMT]
From Wikipedia:
A typographical error (often shortened to typo) is a mistake made in the typing process (such as spelling) of printed material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual type-setting (typography). The term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typographical_error
A typo is purely a mechanical mistake, not a logical one. Although I am not sure that the distinction matters much for a translation, since ultimately both are errors. I doubt an end-user reading the text would think to themselves, "This word is misspelled! But I can clearly see that the writer just mistyped this word - I am sure they truly know the correct spelling - so that's quite alright."
| | | | queen123
Local time: 14:55
anglais vers arabe
+ ...
AUTEUR DU FIL | Typo is short for typographical error | Oct 23, 2013 |
A typo is short for typographical error and it is indeed a result of mistyping, not ignorance of the word spelling. Again, having said that, I am absolutely not suggesting that it is alright to have typos in a translation. My initial question had to do with me not being happy with the proofreader labeling my translation as weak without providing arguments to support the statement.
@katalin: Thank you for your input, I will keep your valuable advice in mind for the future.
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