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A WORD-PAGE OR A SHEET OF TRANSLATION ! Translations3l joined web in May 1998 and ever since our small group of interpreters for English, French, Serbian and Croatian and vice-versa started receiving messages from other interpreters, translators and clients in the world. We even established a data-base for all professionals who asked us to employ their services .We then decided to adopt a sheet of translation as a standard in all our relations with clients and translators.A word page that was frequently proposed to us, especially by Anglo-Saxon colleagues and clients, seemed rather indefinite and a consequence of some distant publisher-author relations that we did not want to accept. Briefly, we proposed 60 characters by 28 lines (a newspaper sheet) leading to a total of 1650 characters on a page of translation. Blank spaces (Good Heavens!)should inevitably be taken account of whatever the client's mathematical or other conviction . Then, you will say, all word processors have a word-count, it is easy and comfortable. You just count all the words divide them by whatever word-page standard you want, and that's it. Yes, yes, fine. The author of this text has been an interpreter and translator all his life. His pages have endured cross-wise and length-wise examination by competent and, by Jove, incompetent people as well. While translating from English into Serbian or Croatian, for example, an interpreter is very likely to end up his translation with somewhat greater word-count in relation to the source-text due to complex cases and swerving relative pronouns in these two languages. Whose fault? Surely not the interpreter's. The same applies to other Latin-origin languages and so on and on ... Now, a few weeks ago we received an offer from our East-European client saying that a 60 characters' line should contain 8.3 words! OK. This means that a 1650 characters'-page should contain 232,4 words, if you insist, but do not rely on it. The source-text word-count adoption is not so bad a solution after all if you want to avoid disputes with your promissing client. But even then some comparison to what is normally accepted as a page will be necessary. Absence of standards in our trade may cause serious damages to the translator. Another example: a year ago we rushed our client in the States 39-pages' long a translation on some plastic extruder without checking the length and width of his standard page! If our client says it is 39 pages, it is 39 and why should we bother to check! When everything was finished and sent out in the form of rtf file, we sat down for some mathematics and found out a net loss of almost fourty ( 40) per cent! Pages we translated from were 39 to 40 lines long and lines contained more than 80 or so characters! This will never happen again of course, but it is worthwhile mentioning to an Internet novice. Clients and various agencies are tough and so should interpreters and translators be working in Internet conditions.
So much on this problem, thank you for your attention and if you would like to hear from us please write to: http://www.i-france.com/translat-3l
or http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Agora/2162/ or
simply write your e-mail to: dejan@i-france.com
Dejan Jelacic, prof.
10 rue Jean Gilles, Apt.129
31100 TOULOUSE
France