Translation - art & business » Business issues »
Charge for alignment job?
Thread poster: Katrin Volkmann
Katrin Volkmann
Katrin Volkmann  Identity Verified
Local time: 11:16
English to German
Aug 26, 2015

Hello everybody,

How much would you charge for an alignment job in Trados (language combination English > German)? I'm trying to work out a rough cost per hour for an amount of words for alignment. Any ideas?

Katrin
 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 12:16
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
I recently Aug 26, 2015

Katrin Volkmann wrote:
How much would you charge for an alignment job in Trados?


I recently did a post-alignment check job for a client who paid me half my proofreading rate for it. That said, the alignment was already done -- all I had to do was check whether the alignment was successful.
 
Vadim Kadyrov
Vadim Kadyrov  Identity Verified
Ukraine
Local time: 13:16
Member (2011)
English to Russian
+ ...
The thing is that Aug 26, 2015

you can see the difference between formatting of both files only when you have fed them into Trados. They can have absolutely different segmentation, and it means that you will have to manually align each sentence (i.e. the worst scenario).

In other words, don`t count words in the files. Set a per-hour rate for this service, and once again don`t count words. Even if segmentation is identical in both files (the best scenario), you can`t be 100% sure that Trados will do the job proper... See more
you can see the difference between formatting of both files only when you have fed them into Trados. They can have absolutely different segmentation, and it means that you will have to manually align each sentence (i.e. the worst scenario).

In other words, don`t count words in the files. Set a per-hour rate for this service, and once again don`t count words. Even if segmentation is identical in both files (the best scenario), you can`t be 100% sure that Trados will do the job properly. ▲ Collapse
 
Miguel Carmona
Miguel Carmona  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 03:16
English to Spanish
... Aug 26, 2015

I recently did an alignment job, and fortunately the amount of time I used in my quote was the actual time it took me to do the job.

It is difficult to predict how much work it will be because besides the known factor, the length of the documents, it also depends on an unknown factor, the amount of segments wrongly connected, which you will have to find and manually correct.

Maybe around 1/4 of the word based rate you charge for translations? That would be up to you. Ju... See more
I recently did an alignment job, and fortunately the amount of time I used in my quote was the actual time it took me to do the job.

It is difficult to predict how much work it will be because besides the known factor, the length of the documents, it also depends on an unknown factor, the amount of segments wrongly connected, which you will have to find and manually correct.

Maybe around 1/4 of the word based rate you charge for translations? That would be up to you. Just do the arithmetics to convert the word-based rate to an hourly rate.

Paul Filkin has a very useful video on how to proceed systematically, finding first as many misaligned segments as you can before the final alignment which you will have to check from beginning to end to make sure all segment pairs are correctly aligned. He posted it on YouTube.

Here is the link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKlkZEkLL8E

[Edited at 2015-08-26 16:18 GMT] ▲ Collapse
 


To report site rules violations or get help, contact a site moderator:

Moderator(s) of this forum
Margarita[Call to this topic]
James Heppe-Smith[Call to this topic]

You can also contact site staff by submitting a support request »

Charge for alignment job?







Trados Business Manager Lite
Create customer quotes and invoices from within Trados Studio

Trados Business Manager Lite helps to simplify and speed up some of the daily tasks, such as invoicing and reporting, associated with running your freelance translation business.

More info »
CafeTran Espresso
You've never met a CAT tool this clever!

Translate faster & easier, using a sophisticated CAT tool built by a translator / developer. Accept jobs from clients who use Trados, MemoQ, Wordfast & major CAT tools. Download and start using CafeTran Espresso -- for free

Buy now! »