| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3] | Client frequently deletes spaces to reduce wordcount Thread poster: Bart Vergauwe
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2GT 
Italy
Local time: 05:06
English to Italian
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| Payment terms and conditions | May 16, 2016 |
LegalTransform:
At any rate, I have never been asked to charge by source word. Perhaps it is a U.S. thing.
An article in the ATA Magazine recently reported:
Traditionally, translation services in the U.S. have been billed by the source word, so the translator will know exactly how much she or he will charge the client before the process starts. Following this practice also provides the client with an exact figure, which is helpful.
http://www.atanet.org/chronicle-online/highlights/should-we-charge-for-translation-services-by-the-hour/
Anyway, I think any payment terms and conditions can be established between 2 parties, provided they both agreed and accepted all the conditions upfront.
Cheers
Gianni
| | | | | I would be adding nothing new, but | May 16, 2016 |
intentional or not, a mistake is a mistake. If you get:
"Iloveyou", unless it's a marketing slogan of a company, these are three words, not one. Therefore, you should charge three words, plus the time it took you to fix the mistake.
If the problem is recurrent with this particular customer, decline the project. If they insist on sending "denslypopulated" files, refuse to work with them altogether. Don't forget the word "freelance" contains "free".
| | | | Bart Vergauwe
Belgium
Local time: 05:06
Member (2010)
English to Dutch
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TOPIC STARTER
I have pointed it out to the client last week and received no reply.
Today, they have sent me a new job and it's the same thing again. In the middle of the text, 3 words are glued together, dates and numbers are glued together, several names, etc.
| | | | | Before starting the project | May 19, 2016 |
I would let them know that there appears to be some issue with joined words/numbers, which affects the word count and therefore your fee, and that you will be adding an estimated amount between X and Y to cover your losses.
I am sure they will react as you need confirmation before starting the project.
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Thomas Pfann
United Kingdom
Local time: 04:06
Member (2006)
English to German
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You didn't comment on the suggestions made by many colleagues that it might be a technical/compatibility issue. Did you rule that out already? Did you check which version of Word your client uses and which version you use?
If you ruled out a technical issue and are sure that your client acts maliciously (which I find hard to believe) then why on earth do still take on new projects from that client?
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Gabriele Demuth wrote:
I would point this out to the client, maybe they are not aware this is happening?
To be honest I find it very hard to imagine the client sitting there and labouring over documents, deleting spaces between words in order to safe a few pennies, this would probably take more time than it is worth?
Besides, it makes the text close to unreadable, unless you do the reverse and fill in all the spaces before translating. 
It's unimaginable, but it still happens. Some people's specific sense of justice won't suffer paying a penny more than they believe is fair, while others suffer from a particularly high degree of loss aversion, or rather expense aversion, so they waste disproprortionately more money (e.g. in man-hours) trying to prevent disproportionately less money from leaving their wallet.
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Katalin Horváth McClure wrote:
I am just throwing this out here, as an idea.
Are you sure it is a deliberate modification on the client's part?
I have Word 2007. Sometimes I get docx files that were created with newer versions of Word, and I have no problem handling them. Once in a while though, I get a docx file that when I open it, many of the spaces are gone. Not all of them, and I have not tried to figure out a pattern, although I remember the last time spaces disappeared from before and after words that were bolded, email addresses and web URLs that were in sentences. I am not sure which version of Word those docx files are generated with, but my solution is to ask the client to open the file on their computer, see if the spaces are there, and if yes, ask them to use "Save as" and save it as a "doc" file for older versions of Word, and send that file to me.
That solves the problem.
If the spaces are missing at the client's site as well, then they need to go back to the end client and request new files.
Katalin
I use the newest version of WORD, and I've occasionally found spaces to have been deleted from my work when I open files a week or two after submission from stored email versions. Not sure why this happens--must be a WORD glitch.
So I agree with Katalin that it is plausible that this is not an intentional thing (although I've never received a complaint from a client about this either, so for me at least it doesn't seem to affect the end recipient)
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Bart Vergauwe wrote:
I have pointed it out to the client last week and received no reply.
Today, they have sent me a new job and it's the same thing again. In the middle of the text, 3 words are glued together, dates and numbers are glued together, several names, etc.
Time for another email. Perhaps:
"Thanks for your email, I'm available for this project but can you first go back over the file and restore all of the missing spaces so that we can work with the correct word count? If you don't have time, I can do this for you at a rate of €xx/hr. I estimate that this will take xx hours."
Obviously this can happen by accident but either way I wouldn't work on such a project until we had agreed on the correct word count.
Sometimes you don't need to know whether it's just a ploy to save money or not. But I can confirm I have worked with clients in the past who would do this sort of thing simply because they're crooks.
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Georgie Scott wrote:
"Thanks for your email, I'm available for this project but can you first go back over the file and restore all of the missing spaces so that we can work with the correct word count? If you don't have time, I can do this for you at a rate of €xx/hr. I estimate that this will take xx hours."
That does sound like a nice way out, and graceful, but always resist the temptation to offer an accommodating per-hour rate, for a number of reasons:
- low hourly rates send the wrong message to clients looking for status symbols; for example just about any medical or legal or similar practitioner will have a higher rate, whereas low-level jobs in services can sometimes carry similar rates to what translators end up charging
- you don't actually want that job, and for good reason — people who are qualified to write and write well shouldn't have to de facto clean .docs for just about any corporate employee
Sometimes you don't need to know whether it's just a ploy to save money or not. But I can confirm I have worked with clients in the past who would do this sort of thing simply because they're crooks.
In my experience, translation 'industry' attracts people with at least mild personality disorders and similar problems, both as translators and as translation buyers. Practically since starting in mid-2009, I believe it pays to be extra careful. As far as I go, this type of caution comes in two varieties: 1) avoiding (potential) problem jobs from (potential) problem clients*; 2) holding your ground, setting boundaries, projecting confidence, not showing too much weakness or indecision** etc.
* Everybody knows what this means; it's only that we usually tell ourselves it's not as bad.
** A bit like with animals. Humans too have instinct, intuition etc. and obtain, process and use more information that their conscious minds control. So for example not only dogs but humans too can sense weakness, fear or indecision and seize upon it. I'd risk saying everybody does that once in a while, but some people in a more antisocial way than most others.
| | | | Angela Malik
United Kingdom
Local time: 04:06
German to English
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| No problem, simply adjust the base rate | May 24, 2016 |
LegalTransform wrote:
Of course, one compares the source word count with the target word count and if the discrepancy is too large, then there is a problem.
Besides, charging by source count for German would sometimes result in a 20% loss of the word count.
You simply have two base rates, one for source and one for target. Many translators working German to English will accept a lower base rate for target counts on the basis that English usually expands. As another example, Finnish loves compound nouns and often expands by A LOT when translated into English, and I don't know a single Finnish translator who charges the same base rate for source and target. That would just be bad business.
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[quote]Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:
Georgie Scott wrote:
- low hourly rates send the wrong message to clients looking for status symbols; for example just about any medical or legal or similar practitioner will have a higher rate, whereas low-level jobs in services can sometimes carry similar rates to what translators end up charging
- you don't actually want that job, and for good reason — people who are qualified to write and write well shouldn't have to de facto clean .docs for just about any corporate employee
I was thinking about this when I wrote it. You're quite right, adding spaces in a source document is not something I would ever want to do and certainly not what I invested in my career to do. When I have used this tactic in the past, the hourly rate has been sufficiently high that no project manager has agreed to it (would you pay a graphic designer top rates to paint the walls in your house white?).
But I always think it is good to suggest solutions with visible parameters. It helps keep dialogue open and projects either moving forward or being shown to have clearly hit a brick wall.
[Edited at 2016-05-24 14:38 GMT]
| | | | Heinrich Pesch
Finland
Local time: 06:06
Member (2003)
Finnish to German
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| I always calculate on a character basis | May 24, 2016 |
No matter how many words I should get the right rate for a certain amount of text.
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Georgie Scott wrote:
I was thinking about this when I wrote it. You're quite right, adding spaces in a source document is not something I would ever want to do and certainly not what I invested in my career to do. When I have used this tactic in the past, the hourly rate has been sufficiently high that no project manager has agreed to it (would you pay a graphic designer top rates to paint the walls in your house white?).
Yeah, and that's the point. Showing them ('show, don't tell') a non-viable option removes the odium of flat-out refusal and instead of the job being too low for you makes you too expensive for the job…
But I always think it is good to suggest solutions with visible parameters. It helps keep dialogue open and projects either moving forward or being shown to have clearly hit a brick wall.
(continued from the previous comment) … Which, however, helps the PM appreciate the significance and relative rank of your qualifications.
The ease of contact, our usually informal style and accessibility, the fact we don't normally employ support staff, don't get promoted to higher job titles etc., all of this combined usually makes it hard for PMs to fully realize they aren't in fact dealing with candidates for an entry-level office job.
If more translators were more assertive in identifying menial office chores as no-go zones, the world would be a better place for us all.
Oh, and congrats on the photo. It's so professionally done. There should be a contest so you could win. And another one for job title/tag line. 'Whisky translator' is kinda impossible to beat.
| | | | | Another one for incompatibility issue... | May 25, 2016 |
I think it would be absurd for a customer to spend time doing though the document removing random spaces. To me this is a compatibility issue somewhere along the line (maybe not at the OP or the customer, but possibly on the part of the end client). I would deal with this as a technical issue and would try to help the customer identify the issue, as long as the OP has his computer and Microsoft Word in perfect condition and fully up to date.
| | | | | Incompatibility issue | Sep 23, 2016 |
Most probably an incompatibility issue between different MS Word versions. It has happened to me several times, but I cannot recall which Word version it is. The solution is to make your client aware of the problem (send them a screendump) and ask them to upgrade their Office version. It's most likely unintended.
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