Marketing translation in Trados Thread poster: Dorota Oleś
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Dorota Oleś
Poland
Local time: 18:32
English to Polish
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I would like to hear your thoughts on using Trados for translating marketing content and charging per word according to Trados grid instead of charging per page. Do you think it's a good idea or not as translating marketing content often requires transcreation?
How do you charge for marketing translation: per word, per page or per hour?
| | | | Stepan Konev 
Russian Federation
Local time: 19:32
English to Russian
| No matter whether you translate marketing or not | Nov 9, 2021 |
Trados (and any other CAT tool as well) is not designed for specific limited themes or domains. Apart from remembering translated fragments, it has many other features to facilitate the translation process. From this point of view, it doesn't matter whether you translate marketing or something else.
What regards units, I don't think it matters either. A page contains a number of words. Words contain a number of characters. In this regard, you can easily convert between pages, words and cha... See more Trados (and any other CAT tool as well) is not designed for specific limited themes or domains. Apart from remembering translated fragments, it has many other features to facilitate the translation process. From this point of view, it doesn't matter whether you translate marketing or something else.
What regards units, I don't think it matters either. A page contains a number of words. Words contain a number of characters. In this regard, you can easily convert between pages, words and chars. On the other hand, different pages can contain different number of words, which makes words a more precise unit of measurement. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Joakim Braun
Sweden
Local time: 18:32
German to Swedish
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Trados should never be used if style and linguistic quality are paramount. Nor should any other CAT tool.
Transcreation should be billed by the hour or as a lump sum. Certainly not per word (at least not by the translator's usual rate).
That said, "transcreation" is often used as a synonym för "translation that is good, idiomatic and readable".
Apart from slogans or campaigns, general marketing content isn't that difficult and shouldn't count as "transcreation".
| | | | Stepan Konev
Russian Federation
Local time: 19:32
English to Russian
| Using tools = low quality? | Nov 9, 2021 |
Joakim Braun wrote:
Trados should never be used if style and linguistic quality are paramount. Nor should any other CAT tool. Do you mean that quality depends on whether you use tools or not? That is any text translated with a CAT tool is worse by default than the same text translated without any CAT tool at all, right?
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expressisverbis
Portugal
Local time: 17:32
Member (2015)
English to Portuguese
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| Quality is created by a human, not by a CAT tool | Nov 10, 2021 |
Joakim Braun wrote:
Trados should never be used if style and linguistic quality are paramount. Nor should any other CAT tool.
CAT tools do not replace humans’ unique ability to interpret meaning and translate/transcreate texts. Instead, they compare, store, and retrieve data.
Technology helps, but does not replace the human talent.
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Dorota Wypych wrote:
...How do you charge for marketing translation: per word, per page or per hour?
translations that aim to market a product or service, ie flowing, idiomatic and pleasant to read. I suspect it was simply called a "good translation" before the Internet.
I charge all types of content per word and I use CAT tools for everything.
But as mentioned above, whatever the unit, what matters is your hourly/daily/monthly/yearly earnings.
Philippe
| | | | Joakim Braun
Sweden
Local time: 18:32
German to Swedish
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Stepan Konev wrote:
Do you mean that quality depends on whether you use tools or not? That is any text translated with a CAT tool is worse by default than the same text translated without any CAT tool at all, right?
Depends on the translator.
I find CAT sequencing distracting (and certainly the horrible 1990s-style UI of Trados). It breaks my flow and puts my brain on some predefined track. Normally I'll split up or join sentences for style, and seeing the actual document layout as I write will definitely give me ideas about tone and phrasing. So yes - speaking for myself, the result will by default be worse (as far as style goes) than if translated without CAT. Not by much, but it's noticeable.
There are other aspects and benefits of CAT, of course (especially for longer documents with lots of tables).
| | | | Dorota Oleś
Poland
Local time: 18:32
English to Polish
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TOPIC STARTER | I've had problems defining transcreation | Nov 10, 2021 |
Joakim Braun wrote:
Apart from slogans or campaigns, general marketing content isn't that difficult and shouldn't count as "transcreation".
Thank you for your answer, Joakim. I've had problems differentiating whether a marketing translation is already a transcreation or not.
[Zmieniono 2021-11-10 15:38 GMT]
[Zmieniono 2021-11-10 15:38 GMT]
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Dorota Oleś
Poland
Local time: 18:32
English to Polish
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TOPIC STARTER | Thank you for your answer | Nov 10, 2021 |
Philippe Etienne wrote:
translations that aim to market a product or service, ie flowing, idiomatic and pleasant to read. I suspect it was simply called a "good translation" before the Internet.
I charge all types of content per word and I use CAT tools for everything.
But as mentioned above, whatever the unit, what matters is your hourly/daily/monthly/yearly earnings.
Philippe
Thank you for your answer, Philippe. It is really helpful.
I usually charge per hour for transcreation, and per word for other projects.
| | | | | CAT tools can do that | Nov 10, 2021 |
Joakim Braun wrote:
I find CAT sequencing distracting (and certainly the horrible 1990s-style UI of Trados). It breaks my flow and puts my brain on some predefined track. Normally I'll split up or join sentences for style, and seeing the actual document layout as I write will definitely give me ideas about tone and phrasing. So yes - speaking for myself, the result will by default be worse (as far as style goes) than if translated without CAT. Not by much, but it's noticeable.
You can split and join sentences in a CAT tool. And you can see a preview of the document layout as you translate too. So using a CAT tool should not be a barrier to a quality translation for those who choose to use them.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 18:32
French to English
Rachel Waddington wrote:
You can split and join sentences in a CAT tool. And you can see a preview of the document layout as you translate too. So using a CAT tool should not be a barrier to a quality translation for those who choose to use them.
It's not a barrier to quality translation but it's definitely a barrier to transcreation.
If I'm transcreating, I pay no attention whatsoever to the order in which ideas are presented. I'll make sure every idea in the source is also in the target, but I'll often completely change the word order and even the sentence order. An adjective attached to a noun in the source might end up as a subordinate clause of the previous sentence. I'll often turn whole sentences if not whole paragraphs upside down.
If a client insists on me using a CAT tool, I will, and it might just catch some terminology and strings of words that have cropped up previously. But then once I'm done in there, I'll export it into Word and then I'll let rip and chop it all up and throw it back together in whatever order seems most logical. Basically, the CAT tool lets me do a bad first draft, nothing more than that.
| | | | Joakim Braun
Sweden
Local time: 18:32
German to Swedish
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Rachel Waddington wrote:
You can split and join sentences in a CAT tool.
Yes, of course you can.
Rachel Waddington wrote:
And you can see a preview of the document layout as you translate too.
Depends on the file format. Anyway I don't want to see a preview alongside a bilingual pane, cluttering up the screen even more. I want to write my translation directly into the final layout, without being distracted by segmenting or 1990s-era UI design. (This thread was about transcreation and I'm mainly referring to Word files and the occasional Indesign file here.)
Rachel Waddington wrote:
So using a CAT tool should not be a barrier to a quality translation for those who choose to use them.
I do use CAT and I do think style suffers. (It's not about IT literacy, I use considerably more complicated software than Trados in page layout, programming, animation and film editing.)
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| Transcreation | Nov 11, 2021 |
I suspect those who think you can use Trados for transcreation don’t really know what transcreation is. As Kay says, it’s about translating messages, not sentences. It’s also about adding and subtracting text, which CAT tools really don’t like. Copywriting would be a better term for this kind of work.
Of course, most marketing texts do not require that level of intervention from the translator. But I still wouldn’t want to use a clumsy interface like Trados, and I would al... See more I suspect those who think you can use Trados for transcreation don’t really know what transcreation is. As Kay says, it’s about translating messages, not sentences. It’s also about adding and subtracting text, which CAT tools really don’t like. Copywriting would be a better term for this kind of work.
Of course, most marketing texts do not require that level of intervention from the translator. But I still wouldn’t want to use a clumsy interface like Trados, and I would always choose to be paid by the hour as it’s the fairest measure of how much work you’ve put in. ▲ Collapse
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Kay Denney wrote: Rachel Waddington wrote:
You can split and join sentences in a CAT tool. And you can see a preview of the document layout as you translate too. So using a CAT tool should not be a barrier to a quality translation for those who choose to use them. It's not a barrier to quality translation but it's definitely a barrier to transcreation. If I'm transcreating, I pay no attention whatsoever to the order in which ideas are presented. I'll make sure every idea in the source is also in the target, but I'll often completely change the word order and even the sentence order. An adjective attached to a noun in the source might end up as a subordinate clause of the previous sentence. I'll often turn whole sentences if not whole paragraphs upside down. If a client insists on me using a CAT tool, I will, and it might just catch some terminology and strings of words that have cropped up previously. But then once I'm done in there, I'll export it into Word and then I'll let rip and chop it all up and throw it back together in whatever order seems most logical. Basically, the CAT tool lets me do a bad first draft, nothing more than that.
I didn't mean to suggest that CAT tools are perfect or always appropriate. But the idea that anyone using a CAT tool is by definition producing inferior translations is clearly not true either.
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