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- What is a "standard" page?
- Taking into consideration that standards vary from country to
country I'm inclined to think there is no such thing as a "standard
page" of text. Some translators will say their standard page is
understood to contain 230 words, others will name a bigger number - 250,
330, or even 400 words. You may be also told it's exactly 1000, 1500,
1650, 1800, or 2000 alphabetic characters.
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- How to measure quantity of translation?
- Quantity can be measured in units of pages or words or even
characters, which are all related to each other. Sometimes text is also
measured in lines.
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- How do you price?
- My pricing is based on word count. This is the most objective way to
quantify what I do, and this pricing method is fairly standard in the
industry.
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- How do I count the number of words?
- Most modern word processors such as Microsoft Word or Word Perfect
come with a built-in feature that does this calculation for you. In
MS-Word, for instance, this is what you should do: Choose the
"Statistics" option in the "Tools" or "Utilities" menu (depending on
your software version). A pop-up box will show you the number of
characters (with and without spaces), lines, paragraphs, words, etc.
That is why if your text is not in electronic form it's easier to charge
for translated text.
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- What if I need custom formatting?
- In this case I will communicate closely with you about your
expectations regarding format. Custom formatting is usually measured on
a per hour basis.
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- How long will the job take?
- Obviously, the bigger the assignment, the longer it should take. A
rule of thumb that a translator can translate no more than 5-8 pages a day.
When I translate from Russian to English I need a bit more time in
order to have the translation proofread by a native English speaker.
Formatting your documents requires additional time - very often it takes
even longer than the translation itself. The demand for a faster pace
implies that your text should be split between several translators.
And of course, the faster you need it done, the more it is going to cost
you. I provide free quotation of the time required for your
text translation.
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- Are you a member of the ATA?
- I am not a member of the American Translators Association but I
don't think I have to worry much about it: membership in the Association
does not guarantee that a translator is any good at what he/she does.
Here is one of the FAQ along with the answer from the ATA official web
site:
http://www.atanet.org/bin/view.pl/13329.html/
How do I become a member of the American Translators Association?
Are
there any qualifications?
There are no prerequisites or
qualifications for joining ATA. To join, simply complete a membership
application and a payment form and return it with your remittance to
ATA Headquarters. See the ATA Membership
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- How can I install Cyrillic fonts?
- There is a comprehensive site dedicated to this question here.
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- Can I view Russian language using Word?
- In general, if you are using Word 2000 you should be able at least
to view and print Word documents in any language.
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- What is PDF?
- PDF is an abbreviation for "Portable Document Format." PDF allows
you to view documents in any language even if you do not have the fonts
for that language. For more information please, see the Adobe web site.
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- How can I view or print a PDF file?
- You need the free Acrobat Reader. Click
here to download it from Adobe's website.
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- What is a web site localization?
- The localization of a web site means complete adaptation of the site
for use in a different language. Apart from the translation itself, the
localization includes adjustment of the site contents and appearance to
the socio-cultural context, while preserving, at the same time, the
unique character of the site and the message it conveys.
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- Can't you just feed all that stuff into the
computer and turn my text translated by tomorrow?
- It's not quite so simple. "Fully Automatic High Quality Machine
Translation", though claimed by some advertisers, is still far from a
reality. Because computers do not yet possess "life knowledge," machine
translations are not perfect. A computer doesn't know that "dusting" a
field means putting dust on it, while "dusting" a table means taking
dust off of it. In another language the translation for "drive" is
probably different depending on whether one is driving a golf ball or a
car, and a computer can easily get it wrong. Most so-called Machine
Translation software really just performs dictionary lookups and makes
word-for-word replacements that very often results in incorrect
translation.
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