

How I reduced translation costs of 200 articles from $9000 to $46 - maxklein
http://blog.cubeofm.com/how-i-reduced-translation-costs-of-200-articl

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CoreDumpling
As someone who has worked with many incompetent translators and often had to
completely redo their jobs, I'm a bit surprised that you're willing to risk
getting total crap from these random people. Perhaps this isn't a problem for
you if you are getting very low-value articles translated, but I don't see how
this scales to "real" translation jobs.

A good translator will proofread his/her work and make sure everything is
covered. They will ask you when they need clarification instead of skipping
over a passage or assuming they understand it (their assumptions very often
being way off base). Unfortunately, I've worked with plenty who are simply out
to make a quick buck, hoping that whoever is paying them doesn't actually know
the language and won't bother to check.

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mullr
The real trouble with bad translations is that, often, you don't even KNOW if
it's bad. Reputation goes a long way in this case.

~~~
CoreDumpling
I've even had trouble when I asked someone else to review the translation
work. Sometimes these people have a tendency to want to justify the cost of
hiring them, so they will go through the document correcting irrelevant
"mistakes" and otherwise try to prove themselves smarter than the original
translator. In fact, I've had a few who made the translated work demonstrably
worse.

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viraptor
Are you sure they were really "worse"? There are people who come from
different backgrounds, who will feel different things are better... I've seen
some translations and even though they were done by natives into my native
language, I would change something, because they just didn't feel "right" for
some reasons.

Just ask a person from UK, US and Australia to translate some text into
English. You're likely to end up with 3 completely different versions. The
same thing will happen with different regions in the same country. For one
person a sentence will be ok, for another it's something they'd never say, and
for you it will look like an "irrelevant mistake".

~~~
CoreDumpling
Aside from the ones that took something that was correct and turned it into
something blatantly wrong, you do raise an interesting point. However, I'd
maintain that if you end up with linguistic inconsistencies and it's affecting
your bottom line, then that's "worse" in my book.

I've learned that it must be made clear to the translator exactly what the
target audience expects (I've had to tell British translators to use U.S.
spellings, mainland Chinese to use terminology that's specific to Taiwan,
etc.). The most experienced ones know of these distinctions and make sure to
observe them. The ones who don't (or can't) are better reserved for the jobs
that are matched with their background.

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andrewljohnson
I had remarkable success sourcing translations similarly from Mechanical Turk,
also for a fraction of the cost of normal translations. I think translation
prices are artificially high, because the translations companies became
entrenched before the internet connected everyone.

I managed to get translations done for about .025/word, and then get the
translation edited at the same price. This is total of .05/word, which is way
way less than the average translation company that can charge anywhere from
.25-.75/word.

And, you ask, how do I know these are good translations? Well, besides
checking out the work with people I trusted, I also know they are good because
my iPhone app went from unknown to top 20 ranked in many countries - I had big
improvements in downloads, rankings, and revenue. The translations more than
paid for themselves in the first couple of days.

The most successful so far was the Chinese. My app is now the 2nd most
downloaded free navigation app in China, and it's top 10 paid. Before
translation, we never had a single sale.

EDIT: I went ahead and posted some charts and graphs from my own experience:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1157824>

~~~
corruption
To verify it would be super-cheap as well: setup another job in reverse (lang
-> eng), and see if the terms match. Alternatively you could just present them
both to another user and ask if the translation makes sense.

~~~
Vivtek
The first technique is called "back-translation" and is something the
pharmaceutical companies use for clinical trial instructions and similar text.

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Vivtek
At 10 cents a word, the typical 2000-word-a-day professional freelance
translator with the standard 250-working-day freelance year is making $50K US.
If you're going through an agency charging that little, which he seems to
imply, then you're also getting a proofreader to ensure consistency and
quality, at about 20% of the take, and a manager, for some unspecified amount
of the take, but let's call it 5% management overhead for the sake of argument
(it can't be much more than that if the total word price is only 10 cents).

Now your professional translator is taking home $37.5K US, before taxes,
before health insurance, and before retirement plans.

Translators are by no means raking in big dough. Well, some of us do OK - I
translate a hell of a lot more than 2000 words a day - but your average
translator is by no means overpriced, in terms of how much effort actually
goes into working with two languages in your head at once _and_ not being a
complete nincompoop with whatever subject domain is involved in the job in
question. (Of course, I'm speaking as a technical translator, where domain
knowledge or the ability to fake it is a significant asset. YMMV for general
topics.)

This is a tremendously great hack and food for thought, but there is _no way_
I'd trust a business model to it as it stands.

~~~
scscsc
At a luxurious 10 seconds a word, you would translate your 2000 words a day in
approximately 5.5 hours. I think 10 seconds a word gives you enough time to
translate one word, play one move of chess, and repeat. You could get really
good at chess this way.

~~~
Vivtek
I think you've never done translation.

I do about 4000 words in a nominal working day, and by the standards of the
industry I am hell on wheels, to the point that when I need backup on a job
because of scheduling difficulties _I can't find it_ because I literally don't
know anybody else in the world that works as fast as I do.

2000 words a day is not lounging, and it's not 5.5 hours of work; that would
be 363 words an hour, a pace most people can't sustain. For most translators,
2000 words is a hard day's work.

This is because translation is harder than just typing whatever comes into
your head; in case you haven't understood this point, the idea is to take text
that's already been written in another language, and express it in yours. And
ideally, you have to express it _well_ , as though it had already been written
in your language to start with. Since you are doubtlessly monolingual, I will
just note here that this is a hell of a lot harder than it sounds. I translate
well over a million words a year, and I still sometimes come out with
unbelievable Germanisms.

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compay
A lot of people seem to think that simply being reasonably fluent in two
languages is sufficient to be a translator. It isn't, unless your standards
are incredibly low. Translating is a skill, and if you entrust it to random
people, expect random results.

~~~
davidw
Exactly. As someone who has done the occasional professional translation from
Italian to English, here's what you have to go through:

* You have to understand the original text. Not just 'get it', but completely understand it. That includes understanding just what sort of bucket excavator a 'benne' is, or that an 'area golenale' is the area between a waterway and the levee, often where there is a curve in the river. And you often have to be precise about these things; my Sicilian friend knew that 'golenale' was something to do with a river, but since they don't have a lot of waterways like the ones in northern Italy, wasn't able to really describe what it was in detail.

* Once you have completely understood and digested the article, you have to rewrite it in your language. You can't just copy the structure of the original, because the tone and timing may well be off compared to what would be natural in your language. Sometimes, you just plain have to be creative with what you're writing, because it's more important to convey a sense of something than an exact translation. I once did a translation for a goldsmith in Vicenza whose original Italian text went off on how some piece was a "festival for all five senses" or some such nonsense (you're supposed to chew it?!), and had a whole article like that, which I had to basically write in a similar style, but adding 'flowery crap' that worked in English.

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tokenadult
The post would have more impact if it showed examples of the translations.

If a lot of Second Life players discover this market for their services, as
entrepreneurs discover this source for their services, the price will surely
rise if they are any good at translating.

~~~
romland
Not only that, should this catch on, you can bet your ass that people will
give you crap translations on purpose by throwing in various vulgarities.

Then we go to next step: You hire someone to proof-read. Well, at this point
you've already lost -- either you do it cheaply within the community (who all
chuckle at what gets delivered) or you go to a professional...

Credits to the early adopters, though. They might actually get some value. But
this will not last more than a month or two -- at least not (as you say) at
this price level..

As time goes by you will just get more and more Babelfish translations. Hell,
I wouldn't be surprised if 50% of what he got now was in fact that.

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ssn
Wonder if the author is aware of Amazon's Mechanical Turk and other
crowdsourcing ventures.

~~~
maxklein
mturk does not work for translations. You get about 80% machine translated
stuff.

~~~
harpastum
Wouldn't you get the exact same situation with this Second Life scheme?

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maxklein
No, it's different. In second life you meet with and talk with someone. You do
a little mini-interview, and then typically you test one sample of his work (I
have a native speaker friend for each of my languages).

Then he does the work, we proof read it, then pay.

mturk you put it out, people translate it (mostly machine), then you have to
reject it, put it again, same thing happens. Etc. Quite different beasts.

~~~
eru
You can use qualifications in mturk. Maybe this could help?

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durana
He's posting translation jobs in Second Life. Details on how this works would
make for an interesting post.

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volomike
This is hilariously clever. I wonder how many other affiliate marketing things
you can get people to do, such as article spinning, tell you what landing
pages they like better and why, etc.

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DenisM
The problem as many described here is that when there is that crowdsourcing
this kind of stuff, be it second life or mturk, will often result into really
crappy work which you can't even know that quality of. Yet somewhere there are
bored Japanese willing to translate for less that $0.10/word and do it
diligently. Some entrepreneurial soul should be able to solve this online
reputation problem...

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dbz
As soon as I saw the title, I figured it would be something like that. But I
mean, if people want to waste their time like that- meh. Let em?

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iamelgringo
I can see where you buy Linden Dollars on the Second Life site, but how did
you manage the buying of services? Did you do that in game?

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AndrewWarner
Clever. I'd like to see some details. Max, how did you get your data in and
out? How many people worked on it? How can other people do this?

Something like this would be really helpful:
[http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_...](http://waxy.org/2008/09/audio_transcription_with_mechanical_turk/)

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quant18
Are you planning to put the translations online? It would be useful for people
who want to see what kind of quality they can get (and whether that loss of
quality is acceptable compared to the savings they're getting over
professional translation).

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clistctrl
I seriously question the quality of work he's receiving, and if its decent
then I can only imagine the "deal" he's getting is short lived.

