a question for translators

[li3wei1]

(apologies if this is in the wrong forum)

 

I've seen Chinese-to-English translation jobs advertised with 'per word' rates, or asking for quotations in the same terms. Normally words are counted in the source language, so that both parties know what the final price will be and there is no incentive to waffle, so I'm assuming they're talking about Chinese 'words'. Do they mean characters? If not, is there an accepted way to count words in a Chinese text? Is there an accepted standard, or do you have to agree everything with each new client? If you're counting characters, do you include punctuation?

Thanks

[Lu]

If indeed the Chinese source text is counted, it's always per character. When I translate from Chinese, I just run the wordcount of my word processor and count the characters. This includes punctuation I think.

 

I usually agree with the client on a rate per character, and before I start I let them know how many characters the text has and thus what the final cost will be. Sometimes different word processors count words in a different way, and this way there are no surprises for anyone.

 

I think there are some standards or guidelines here and there, but in the end it's about what translator and client decide between them. Sometimes the translator has set rates (that they can still tweak a little if they want to: if the job is really interesting/boring, or really small/big, if the client is an annoying client/a friend, doesn't have much budget, etc), sometimes the client has set rates.

 

One interesting story, perhaps I've told it before: An organisation I used to work for occasionally hired a translator English-Chinese who wanted to be paid per character in the final translation. This in itself is not really an issue. But one time we had a rather long text translated with quite a lot of words that were to remain in Dutch/English (some words that were explained in the text, some names of foreigners). When the final bill arrived it was significantly higher than I had expected. Not that it was going to break the bank or even the budget, but the difference was big enough that it couldn't be explained by different word processors having a different wordcount or something. Turns out she was paid per character, so she basically was paid extra (because it was per letter) for all the words she didn't have to translate. We paid it that time since everything had already been agreed, but I made note that this was something to be careful of in the future.

 

I hope this helps!

[roddy]

I sometimes have clients who prefer a 'target word' quote - often, eg, magazines, who are used to paying writers per word. I'll usually explain how it usually works, then give them an estimate of how many target words it'll be* and what it'll cost. They're usually happy with that. 

 

*I use 1 English word per 1.6 Chinese characters as a rule of thumb, but if I have previous similar translations or something to calculate from I might adjust that.