"Eine Maschine versteht keine Ironie" - taz.de: "'Was hier golden unterlegt ist', erklärt Willer, 'wurde bereits im Vorjahr übersetzt und editiert, dafür braucht mein Kunde heute nicht mehr zu bezahlen.'"
Who decides if a piece of work should be left out or included and thus billed for. It should be the service provider who decides if they feel text repetitions should be charged at a lower rate, if justified. the alternative is accepting these terms as dicatated by the customer.
But when customers start pressuring you to come down in price for matches and repetitions (a match is simply a later repetition), not only does the amount you earn decrease, but a gap is created between what you do and what you are paid. If the number of repetitions saves you 25% of the work, you can bet that the agency wants a 50% discount. So you end up doing more work for the same price. The only other option is an unprofessional one: translating disconnected sentences which are not yet in the database and not spending even a half a second reading from one sentence to the next. That is an approach which is reckless and runs counter to how texts should be skillfully dealt with during translation. It can be likened to a surgeon saying she doesn't need glasses, after all that ear is on the left side of the patient's head, since she knows where it is, she commands: "Scalpel." and lops it off. Oh, I'm sorry, it was the next person's ear!! Not to worry, I have malpractice insurance for that. Translators can say: "Oh, I have liability insurance for financial loss," I'll accept those terms (ha, ha, life is fun!). A gross and insanely absurd analogy which has a pithy logical core. Do you care about your patient, do you care about your text? The texts my colleagues translate are often for heavy machinery with high voltage and potentially dangerous situations can arise from incorrect translation. Anyone who voluntarily places others at potential risk while also jeopardizing their own reputation by agreeing to "blind" fuzzy-match-only translations is taking an uncalled for risk. In some cases a proofreader makes sense, but with fuzzy matches being blindly accepted, a proofreader is then forced to use production resources to fix things you as as the translator could have done right in the first place.
It is not the marketing damage large institutions inflict upon themselves when making bad decisions about translations. This is systemic. The problems with "Fluggastkontrolle" (airline passenger "control") being rendered as "passenger control" is not the question here, though embarassing enough for Munich's Airport when they closed it down and the unchecked and very translated sounding phrase "passenger control" is shown to millions and millsion on all the German TV stations and international stations, too. No.... this issue goes deeper than that.
So, try to avoid agents who allow customers to force this on them. And end-customers, you are risking things... Discourage dialogs about repetitions and fuzzy match discounts. You decide that, not them, for your expertise is required for a successful processing/translating of the patient/text.
It is not the marketing damage large institutions inflict upon themselves when making bad decisions about translations. This is systemic. The problems with "Fluggastkontrolle" (airline passenger "control") being rendered as "passenger control" is not the question here, though embarassing enough for Munich's Airport when they closed it down and the unchecked and very translated sounding phrase "passenger control" is shown to millions and millsion on all the German TV stations and international stations, too. No.... this issue goes deeper than that.
So, try to avoid agents who allow customers to force this on them. And end-customers, you are risking things... Discourage dialogs about repetitions and fuzzy match discounts. You decide that, not them, for your expertise is required for a successful processing/translating of the patient/text.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, except for maybe in the translation industry when critical sentences in a new manual don't get paid for - the customer/agent gets the free lunch, but uses the sentence for monetary gain in a transaction--publishing the content or selling it as a manual with a system or piece of potentially dangerous equipment. What bookseller is in the business of letting the same book be purchased for the price of one because the content repeats in the second book? I won't wait for your answer... As a colleague once said to me: "This is also true for filling up your gas tank at the pump." The major oil companies don't give a discount because their goods repeat themselves.
