I gather it’s Squirrel Appreciation Day in the USA, so here are my most recent squirrel photos: a red squirrel in Fürth in November, and a grey squirrel in Upminster in December. I won’t be making an annual event of this, though.
13 thoughts on “Squirrel Appreciation Day/Eichhörnchenanerkennungstag”
Thanks for the heads-up. My sig.other here in Australia (where they don’t have these critters) loves squirrels, I had to tell him the good news about them having their own Appreciation Day! :-)
No wonder they did return badly translated documents. This will happen more often in the future because the lowest and less quality-oriented bidder usually gets the job. Professional freelance translators who can’t allow themselves to offer low rates simply don’t get thru. If the EU translation policy doesn’t change, it’s going to get even worse.
I’m afraid when I think about court interpreting and EU translations I tend to take a disillusioned view. But perhaps an improvement can be made!
Looking at the types of documents referred to, I’m sure some of them are done by full-time EU translators and not all by freelances, although I’m more familiar with the latters’ problems.
As far as outsourcing is concerned, my impression is that in the vast majority of cases, the job goes to the cheapest bidder with no regard whatsoever for quality. From my personal experience, agencies view their job as starting and ending at passing on jobs to translators at the highest profit possible for themselves.
I get the impression that the same goes for the EU organizations themselves when it comes to outsourcing. For example, only yesterday did I tell an EU organization that there was no way I, as a professional, could possibly manage to translate 30,000 words on my own over the weekend, from Thursday until Tuesday, even if I worked 24×7, as indeed I’d have to. They assured me that their Spanish translator had been translating the publication in question from French into Spanish for the last 4 years and “managed fine”. When I insisted there was no way I, for one, could do the job, they urged me to get a helper, for whom I’d be responsible (this could have been a “fantastic” opening for an unscrupulous person, to whom all the “profits” would have gone). I told them no self-respecting translator would help me out, even during a weekday, not to mention highly concentrated weekend work (in fact 24×7), for the sum of EUR 0.06 per word (yes, that was the mighty sum offered!).
In short, it’s high time conclusions were reached.
Thanks for the details. I have more – I will post another entry with links to the lists of translators currently working in various subjects and combinations – when I’ve finished my current translation!
I don’t know whether these translations were produced in-house or farmed out, but I do know a little bit about EU translations. A friend of mine has worked as an EU translator in Brussels, and he recently showed me his pay scale. At the moment, he comes in at around 8,300 euros a month, and he is not yet at the top. This is his gross pay, but because these folks do not have to pay income tax, his net pay is actually slightly higher than his gross because of travel allowances (the EU pays its officials a travel allowance based on their country of origin under the assumption that they will go back to see family, etc.). Notice the irony
Thanks for that information. I was aware that they were very well paid – how could you turn down such a job? What I know more about, indirectly, is freelances, who have to jump through a lot of hoops to apply for competitions – repeatedly – and set their own price, while applying psychology to guessing what their chances of actually getting work at that price will be. And agencies who apply using lists of actually or supposedly qualified freelance translators who may or may not be available for work at any given time.
MM, I can asure you that most of the agencies don’t have qualified translators enough for such kind of job. Anyway, what gives me jitters when I get a quote from such translation agencies are the underpriced offers. Every single one of them is offering dumping prices and looking for translators who’ll accept miserable rates. They simply care less if the translation quality is bad. I happend to do proofreadings in Croatian and Slovenian – if Croatian and Slovenian were the languages the English text was translated into. As stated before, the situation is going to get even worse if the EU translation policy doesn’t change. I can bet my 2 eurocents that it won’t change in the long shot.
It’s actually very difficult to become an official EU translator. My friend is really, really good, and I know more people who have failed to get in than I know people who succeeded.
Craig, aside from German and English I have Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian and Russian. still I failed to get in while others whose English isn’t very brilliant did. I qualified for Croatian but the only vague answer they gave me is that I’m supposed to have an EU passport and be less qualified to get in. What EU passport if Croatia’s joining the EU in July next year?! Why less qualified?!
Thanks for the heads-up. My sig.other here in Australia (where they don’t have these critters) loves squirrels, I had to tell him the good news about them having their own Appreciation Day! :-)
Do they really need appreciating? They are such a pest! In every place we ever lived in the U.S.
Although I don’t find the German ones quite as bad. The ones we get in England are American immigrants though.
Cool. I didn’t even know that there is a SQUIRREL APPRECIATION DAY! :)
Nice pictures…
No wonder they did return badly translated documents. This will happen more often in the future because the lowest and less quality-oriented bidder usually gets the job. Professional freelance translators who can’t allow themselves to offer low rates simply don’t get thru. If the EU translation policy doesn’t change, it’s going to get even worse.
I’m afraid when I think about court interpreting and EU translations I tend to take a disillusioned view. But perhaps an improvement can be made!
Looking at the types of documents referred to, I’m sure some of them are done by full-time EU translators and not all by freelances, although I’m more familiar with the latters’ problems.
As far as outsourcing is concerned, my impression is that in the vast majority of cases, the job goes to the cheapest bidder with no regard whatsoever for quality. From my personal experience, agencies view their job as starting and ending at passing on jobs to translators at the highest profit possible for themselves.
I get the impression that the same goes for the EU organizations themselves when it comes to outsourcing. For example, only yesterday did I tell an EU organization that there was no way I, as a professional, could possibly manage to translate 30,000 words on my own over the weekend, from Thursday until Tuesday, even if I worked 24×7, as indeed I’d have to. They assured me that their Spanish translator had been translating the publication in question from French into Spanish for the last 4 years and “managed fine”. When I insisted there was no way I, for one, could do the job, they urged me to get a helper, for whom I’d be responsible (this could have been a “fantastic” opening for an unscrupulous person, to whom all the “profits” would have gone). I told them no self-respecting translator would help me out, even during a weekday, not to mention highly concentrated weekend work (in fact 24×7), for the sum of EUR 0.06 per word (yes, that was the mighty sum offered!).
In short, it’s high time conclusions were reached.
Thanks for the details. I have more – I will post another entry with links to the lists of translators currently working in various subjects and combinations – when I’ve finished my current translation!
I don’t know whether these translations were produced in-house or farmed out, but I do know a little bit about EU translations. A friend of mine has worked as an EU translator in Brussels, and he recently showed me his pay scale. At the moment, he comes in at around 8,300 euros a month, and he is not yet at the top. This is his gross pay, but because these folks do not have to pay income tax, his net pay is actually slightly higher than his gross because of travel allowances (the EU pays its officials a travel allowance based on their country of origin under the assumption that they will go back to see family, etc.). Notice the irony
Thanks for that information. I was aware that they were very well paid – how could you turn down such a job? What I know more about, indirectly, is freelances, who have to jump through a lot of hoops to apply for competitions – repeatedly – and set their own price, while applying psychology to guessing what their chances of actually getting work at that price will be. And agencies who apply using lists of actually or supposedly qualified freelance translators who may or may not be available for work at any given time.
MM, I can asure you that most of the agencies don’t have qualified translators enough for such kind of job. Anyway, what gives me jitters when I get a quote from such translation agencies are the underpriced offers. Every single one of them is offering dumping prices and looking for translators who’ll accept miserable rates. They simply care less if the translation quality is bad. I happend to do proofreadings in Croatian and Slovenian – if Croatian and Slovenian were the languages the English text was translated into. As stated before, the situation is going to get even worse if the EU translation policy doesn’t change. I can bet my 2 eurocents that it won’t change in the long shot.
It’s actually very difficult to become an official EU translator. My friend is really, really good, and I know more people who have failed to get in than I know people who succeeded.
Being an American, I am not even eligible
Craig, aside from German and English I have Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian and Russian. still I failed to get in while others whose English isn’t very brilliant did. I qualified for Croatian but the only vague answer they gave me is that I’m supposed to have an EU passport and be less qualified to get in. What EU passport if Croatia’s joining the EU in July next year?! Why less qualified?!