Say What?

January 20, 2006 6:36 PM

I have some 30 and 50 page articles from France, Germany, maybe Korea, and would like to read them. Are there people here who have experience with translators and translation services that could initiate me? What kind of prices and service times am I looking at? What are my options for this problem? Thanks.
posted by dgaicun to Writing & Language (14 answers total)

I've seen English to French translation ranging from a few cents to a dollar a word (at the higher end, it was for speechs that required jokes, which requires often more than just simple phrase for phrase translation). And generally, longer documents get economies of scale on pricing.

My feeling is that languages that don't share the same root and basic grammer structure would cost more - but then I don't know anything about the grammar in Korean.

If you can get the documents in an electronic format, and have some jist of what you're expecting to find, an online translation service might do the trick for starters. You'd have to do it a few paragraphs at a time though, and you'd be out of luck for proper names and a lot of terminology. It would depend on what type of things were being discussed.

Online services are bad to fair, I've never seen a really good one, but they're often (not always!) better than nothing for simple content.
posted by tiamat at 7:07 PM on January 20, 2006

Usual prices are around 7-15 cents per word for French and Japanese, 12-20 cents per word for Korean; this will be more if it's a highly technical subject, less if you can find a desperate university student and don't need the translation to be super professional.

Proz.com is a translator bid site; you can post your job and get freelancers to bid on it. And there are any number of translation agencies that you can Google or look up in the yellow pages; French and German should be easy enough to find.
posted by Jeanne at 8:47 PM on January 20, 2006

Oh... and online translators aren't much use, except in one instance: if you need to figure out whether a document has anything useful in it or not, it might just give you enough information.
posted by Jeanne at 8:48 PM on January 20, 2006

Send me an email if you want, I do French --> English for a living.
posted by Wolof at 11:28 PM on January 20, 2006

I did translation as a side gig for a short while, and I usually charged per-page rates back in those days. It was something like $30-40 per page. This was Italian to English translation by the way; I also did a little bit of work that was French to English.

Anyway, you will have a lot better luck with the European languages than the Korean, most likely. The people with Asian language experience that I saw were able to charge a lot more than the European language types.

Couple of other things: Jeanne is right, machine translation is useless except for getting a basic idea of what an article might be about. Even then it's likely to be wrong. And if you end up getting the translations done, look for someone who is a native speaker of the target language (in your case English). I routinely passed on jobs that went the "wrong way" because I had seen how bad "wrong way" translations went in English--even when you are extremely fluent in another language, you will not be able to convey idiom and metaphor like a native.
posted by lackutrol at 1:08 AM on January 21, 2006

PS--wolof, what services do you use, if you don't mind? I'm not opposed to doing translation, but I am opposed to doing it for shady characters who don't end up paying. I've done this sort of stuff for the Italian government, so credentials shouldn't be a problem. Where do reputable people go to find gigs?
posted by lackutrol at 1:15 AM on January 21, 2006

I don't mind at all, but I don't use any services — been working for Cambridge University Press (please send more work, Mr Cambridge!) and Adelaide University.

Can anyone else answer this question? Like lackutrol, I would find this a tremendously useful thing.
posted by Wolof at 5:09 AM on January 21, 2006

If you happen to live in a city with a foreign consulate, they usually maintain lists of translators that they recommend/endorse. This comes in useful if you've got something that has to be 'official'. I speak fluent French, but had to have one of their people do an official version of some documents before the consul would give it their (literal) seal of approval.
posted by richmondparker at 5:45 AM on January 21, 2006

Native french speaker here. Shoot me an e-mail my nick at gmail.com
posted by Clementines4ever at 8:55 AM on January 21, 2006

If each page is about 200 words, and you find a really cheap translator doing French>English for, say, a penny a word, that's $60 for a 30-page article; it'll take anywhere from 1-4 days, depending on how fast he is and whether it's on the back burner or not. Multiply from there for every penny/word.

I'm a Japanese-English translator (I know you don't have Japanese) and I'd charge you at least 15 cents/word, which would work out to $900 for a similarly long document in Japanese. Korean would probably be about the same.
posted by adamrice at 4:44 PM on January 21, 2006

seconding the recommendation to find a native speaker of English to do these translations, and preferably also a professional translator (read - someone who does it professionally) rather than someone who just 'knows the language' - there is a lot more to translation than a lot of people think. Assuming 250 words per page, a 50 page article would be 12,500 words long, which you could expect to take about a week.

As for pricing, well you can pay very little (as Adam says, a penny per word) but you will very likely get quality to match. I would charge you at least $0.08 per word, which for a 12,500 word article gives $1000. (I do French to English).
posted by altolinguistic at 8:34 AM on January 22, 2006

I just remembered a couple of things (though this is two days old now and probably no one will see it).

I worked for a college translation service about ten years ago, and the going rate there was $25/page. They had a standard for fonts and spacing and such, so this always worked out to something like 300-350 words a page, thus something like 7-8 cents a word. You didn't have to be certified or pass any tests or do anything other than be a student there, so I think that's probably your minimum for a decent job. I think a penny a word might be possible in Europe--anecdotally, I heard translation was much cheaper because being multilingual was much more common--but in the US this would get you a person who is either incompetent or desperate, most likely.

Also, I remember that even earlier, before I knew any better, I did a 90 page rush job for something like $200, during finals. They let me just dictate directly into a tape recorder for it, I was basically delirious the whole time, and I knew it was nowhere near a great job. So I felt guilty about it until I realized how much I should have charged them, and then was just angry about it. Don't do this to some unsuspecting student.
posted by lackutrol at 3:24 PM on January 24, 2006

Response by poster: No, I saw it. Thanks everybody. Basically I've learned that I'm not rich enough to read what people say in other languages. Before this I thought there was nothing I wanted in my simple intellectually-centered life that I couldn't afford. I was wrong!
posted by dgaicun at 9:59 PM on January 24, 2006

(Going over my old answers) No, dgaicun, you just need to convince someone to do it for free! Or a nice trade of some kind. Not for nothing do real translators ask for money.
posted by lackutrol at 1:16 AM on June 24, 2006