A Riddle for Fellow Linguists

~ Clarissa

If you are translating a text from English into Russian and are charging per word, does it make more sense for you financially to base the word count on the source text or on the translation? Explain your answer.

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Published by Clarissa

13 thoughts on “A Riddle for Fellow Linguists”

  1. Not a linguist, but I’m going to guess Russian because you can stretch out Russian sentences like taffy with very little effort, and English tends to be comparably more clipped and concerned about run-on sentences.

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    1. I had a dream about you tonight, Leah Jane. In the dream, you published a novel and gave me a copy. It was very long. I started reading it and it was very good. My dreams tend to come true, by the way. 🙂

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  2. Going on my experience with Polish (though I only work Polish to English), I’m gonna to say Russian (unless you mean words as words and not a convention like 5 characters with or without spaces). Then it might depend since my impression is that Slavic languages use fewer (though longer) words per sentence.

    Still, be that as it may, the cultural preference in Polish (and I assume Russian) is for a more verbose written style. It’s possible to have a translation in Polish that’s no longer than the English but the result usually seems kind of abrupt and in poor style – it gets the point across but no one (including the translator) would enjoy reading it. So I’m gonna still say Russian.

    From years of comparing multi-lingual labels and descriptions the Euro champions in brevity are the Scandinavians (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) and the champions in longwindedness are the Germans and French (Spanish not too far behind).

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    1. Hint: there is a grammar phenomenon, so to speak, that makes any English text contain more words than the Russian original, even though the text itself looks shorter in English. Of course, extremely literary translations that are more like retellings can be tricky. But here I’m talking about more clear-cut, regular sort of translation.

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  4. Hm. I am going to say English, as English has the indefinite and definite articles which Slavic languages don’t. Also much of the information in English is conveyed via the use of prepositions as opposed to through different declension cases of nouns in Slavic languages (so often the preposition is not needed).

    But, I wouldn’t be a good scientist if I didn’t encourage you to perform an experiment. Translate no less than 2-3 pages of text that you would consider typical for the job and count the words in both languages. If bored, repeat on a few other pieces of text. See which number is larger. And make sure you tell us the findings! 🙂

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    1. That’s precisely what I’ve been doing. I’m translating batches of texts and every single time I thank my lucky stars that the customer is paying per every English word because the Russian translation ends up being significantly shorter (usually, about 1,000 words shorter for every 6,000 word text!!!) than the English original.

      And yes, of course, it’s the articles and the post-positions (to do something ABOUT, to get results of off, etc.).

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  7. I’ll quickly mention that IME I usually get paid by the “translaor’s page” (1800 characters including spaces) in the final version. I do a character count of the final version, divide it by 1800 and use that as a base.

    It would generally make more sense to standardize ‘words’ across languages* as five keystrokes (including spaces and punctuation). That’s what’s done for calculating typing speed.

    *at least languages that use the roman, cyrillic or greek alphabets, other writing systems might work best differently

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