How is this for a strongly opinionated comment on counting words as a way to determine translation prices?

As useful as word counting tools may be, I can't quite conjure up your enthusiasm for them. It seems to me to show an excessive focus on word count as a basis for pricing translations. True, this is the norm in our trade, but shouldn't we try to counteract this trend rather than reinforcing it? This is, I believe, exactly what we're achieving by squabbling with clients over exactly which word count is to provide the basis for pricing.

Translation is not a commodity, a bulk product (see Chris Durban's [and Alan Melby's] publication). Although I do use word counts as a guideline for pricing jobs, I have actually managed to significantly increase the prices most of my clients are prepared to pay by making it clear to them that what they are paying for is, essentially, my time and expertise. Which often includes a good deal of research that word counting tools won't include.

It seems to me that, especially among less experienced translators, excessive focus on word counts also has a negative impact on the quality of their output: a line worker rarely cares as much about the product as a craftsman.

And then Dominik Kreuzer ended his mail with a very clever quote from Blaise Pascal: "I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had time to make it shorter."

Now, the use of Pascal's quote would seem to imply that we are talking about target word counts -- which never made a lot of sense to me, but of course this is not the main point that Dominik is trying to make.

Overall, I think he is right. The language industry will have to move to a better model than "word counts" -- at least where pricing arrangements with the actual translation buyer are concerned. Dominik mentions things that are not covered by the word count like necessary research, and, sure, that has to be done. But that always has to be done, more for some kinds of text than others, and that can be averaged out by differing price schemes, even with a by-the-word-count. Where I see things becoming much more complicated is in the increasing mix of technology that is being used.

Here is an example. This last week, TAUS released the results of a survey, according to which

52 of 129 Language Service Providers (LSPs) are already using machine translation (MT) in their production environment and 86% of the remainder informed they plan to adopt MT within two years.

Admittedly, service providers that are eager to answer TAUS surveys are likely to be enamored with machine translation technology, so these numbers will be slightly thwarted. But, still! What LSP used machine translation technology 10 years ago? Those that did were typically not among the reputable ones. Today, however, it is done very transparently, with the full knowledge of the client, who expects to receive a translation that differs in quality from human translation. Depending on the level of post-editing, it might not be stylistically pleasant but is usable nonetheless.

Should those projects be charged by the word? And what about -- the much more typical -- projects where there is a host of parallel and successive technologies and human work being used? I think it's those kinds of projects that will eventually have us depart from the per-word schemes.

As for me, since I work relatively fast I much prefer the word count payments to things like hourly payments, but I am always open for improvements.

And what was that quote from Pascal? 'Nuff said.

I have shared my enthusiasm about Mike Farrell's search tool IntelliWebSearch many times, but even after using it for a couple of years or so I gotta say that it's among the five or so most useful tools on my computer.

(And for those who have subscribed since I last talked about it: it's a tiny tool that runs without hogging many resources and allows you to highlight a word or phrase and press a keyboard shortcut to send the highlighted word as a query to virtually any online or offline resource. My pre-configured queries include a number of language-specific online and offline dictionaries and corpora, the EU's IATE, Microsoft's termbase, abbreviation databases, language-specific Google queries and many others. My wife knows that when my fingers fall into certain convulsions while I sleep, those are the IntelliWebSearch shortcuts that I use so often during the day.)

Here's something that you may have known forever, and I'll probably just embarrass myself by disclosing that I didn't, but what's life without risk, huh?

All of us know about our browsers' AutoComplete features that automatically complete an Internet address if we have already typed it before. (I remember when I first discovered this in something like Netscape 2.0 back in 1969 or so. I was under the impression that it actually looked at all available addresses out there. So now I don't only look slow but also stupid!) This is helpful, and nowadays it's used in many other programs as well: in form fields in browsers (which, as I just found out, function as a quasi translation memory if you work in a browser-based translation tool), in Excel, and in some translation environment tools, including Déjà Vu, Across' upcoming version 5, and Transit and Trados's latest versions.

What I stumbled on recently is that Windows Explorer and all the dialog boxes that are associated with it have this feature as well. And with very clever functionality to boot.

For instance, if you select the Save As command in a program, the Save As dialog comes up. Let's assume you are at the My Documents level. And let's also assume that you have lots and lots of subfolders in MyDocuments. Rather than clicking and browsing and clicking to find the right subfolder, you can just start to type its name. Windows will automatically browse through the available folders and files that start with those letters and auto-complete it for you.

Doesn't work? That's because you don't have the AutoComplete setting enabled under Internet Options. See, Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer share a large amount of the same code base. And if one of them has this feature enabled, the other one does, too. So, select Start> (Settings>) Control Panel> Internet Options> Content and select Settings under AutoComplete. Make sure that the appropriate settings are enabled and go back to a Save As (or Open) dialog.

If you do this in an Office program on Windows XP, the Save As dialog will also "remember" your original file name. (Let's say you have TranslatedDocument.doc that you need to save somewhere else. You open the Save As dialog and type yourself to the right location by overwriting the doc's name. Once you are in a new subfolder, the document's name appears again.) Unfortunately, this only works with MS Office programs in Windows XP, but what do you know, it was apparently such a successful thing that under Windows Vista it works with every program (that I tested).

I got a very wise note from reader Ben Rose in regard to which TEnTs support what DTP format.

He mentioned that his company tested one particular TEnT (which I won't mention because I have not been able to verify this) and its ability to process the .inx format of InDesign files. InDesign's .inx is an XML-based exchange format that InDesign has been using in the last few versions and which made it a lot easier for TEnTs to get to the content of InDesign files. Problem is that the XML these files are using is non-standard, so standard XML filters typically fail. This one particular TEnT vendor had apparently not tested its otherwise highly advertised InDesign filter well enough, causing a segment to split every time any formatting occurred within the segment . . . and that is obviously not a good thing.

In my last newsletter I talked about a style and formatting agreement for German that I had developed awhile back and that had come to the forefront again after someone had inquired about it. I had mentioned it a few years ago without receiving much feedback from you, but this time I received a lot more. Overall, the feedback was positive, though quite a few mentioned that it's unlikely to be very successful given the language-specific lack of knowledge of most clients, their fickleness (is that a word? -- if not, now it is!), and their lack of time to actually work through it.

I particularly liked Juce Evan's comment. After mentioning some of the above objections, she says:

The up side would be, if the customer then comes back complaining about the hyphen that you didn't use because they ticked "no hyphens," and in fact they wanted a hyphen, you would at least be able to hold your check list up and say "tough titty."

There's another new term that you may not have known existed in the English language in that context!

Some also wrote back with some constructive comments, and I've added them to the present version of the agreement that I re-uploaded. I had originally planned to publish it on Google Docs, because I was under the impression that you could make it completely public for everyone to work on. Alas, that is not possible, so the best thing would be to do this as a wiki -- I will do that at a later point after my vacation (or welcome any of you to do it) -- and it seems that this would also easily offer the possibility to have numerous language versions.

Also, I had to chuckle after I uploaded the file to Google Docs. The document's careful formatting was completely lost, supporting nicely a comment in the New York Times earlier this week. It quoted a Microsoft executive speaking (a bit arrogantly, but truthfully, it seems) about the upcoming Office 2010 and its much stronger online component:

Lots of competitors are doing nothing beyond copying what we have done in our product for years. They have weekly releases to add things like bold and italics and more than four fonts. We have to redefine what productivity means to 500 million people.

Now you know. Happy summer!

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