What I am moving towards is an entry on TextCount, a German text counting program, and counting text in MS Word. But basics first:

Some broad generalizations here:
Translators usually charge by length of the text, roughly speaking. At least, that’s the starting point. Sometimes a translator and client/agency have a standard rate. With direct clients, it’s more common to look at the nature of the text before deciding a rate.

Length can be measured by words or by keystrokes.
Words are normally actual words (typing speed is measured by theoretical words 5 letters in length): German words are on average longer than English words, and average length varies by subject matter, so you have to be careful when agreeing on payment.

In Britain, charges are per 1,000 words; in the USA, per word.

Keystrokes: in Germany translators measure by the line, usually of 50 or 55 keystrokes.

Literary translations are often counted by the standard page (Normseite). (In Germany, this means taking the lines as they come – if a line is half full, it is still a line. Literary translators fight against attempts to introduce a Normseite of 1800 keystrokes per page, where every line is full – I suppose the traditional standard page is nearer 1500.

On the computer, you can count a text as a whole and divide it. On a typewriter – and typewriters still leave their traces on some counting practices – you can’t. Sometimes rules like this are used: ‘If an incomplete line is over half the length of a complete line, it is counted as a complete line; if it is less, it is disregarded’.

In Germany, translations are often charged by the lines in the target text. The target text is always on the computer and therefore easy to count; but the customer doesn’t know the price of the translation until it is finished. Translations into Chinese, for example, are counted from the German source text.

Now that many translations are received as computer files, and I scan and OCR nearly all the rest (using the Russian program FineReader), I usually give the customer a quote in advance, because I know the length of the English (in keystrokes) is about the same as the length of the German (but in words, about 15% longer, I imagine). Continue reading →

On the blawg review, Stephanie Tai has posted an annotated bibliography of amusing law review writings:

bq. Professor Thomas Baker of the Florida International University sent me his article, A Compendium of Clever and Amusing Law Review Writings: An Idiosyncratic Bibliography of Miscellany with in Kind Annotations Intended as a Humorous Diversion for the Gentle Reader, published in the Drake Law Review, for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

Of course, it is only useful to those near a library, preferably in the U.S.A. But the annotations make it worth looking at. Categories include biography, book reviews, case studies, contracts, law practice, legal humour and miscellany. A quote from miscellany overleaf: Continue reading →

From the Christian Science Monitor on July 25th (via rebecca’s pocket): Nationmaster is a site where you can generate graphs comparing various countries on the basis of the data sets offered. You can choose which countries to compare. The most square-eyed country is Christmas Island (1,265.82 TVs per 1,000 people).

Under the new Civil Procedure Rules in England and Wales, claims are allocated to ‘management tracks’: the small claims track, the fast track, and the multi-track. Normally, claims under £5,000 go to the first, between £5,000 and £15,000 to the second and over £15,000 to the third – but there is more to it than that. The multi-track is so-called because the court can deal with cases of widely differing values and complexity.

It is a bit foolhardy of me to attempt to translate these terms into German. It has come into my mind again because I have just read about a case management track in Maryland (via The Volokh Conspiracy).

So is ‘case management track’ a standard term, meaning a particular route or course taken through a court or some other context? I found a legal technology show where the different strands were called tracks. Is there a synonym for that? Is it a term in social work?

Well, I haven’t solved it but am nearer to understanding it. I found a law firm, Bevan Ashford, with a nice description of English civil procedure in German:

bq. Ist die Klageerwiderung bei Gericht eingereicht, sendet das Gericht beiden Seiten besondere Fragebögen zu (Allocation Questionnaires) und setzt eine Frist für deren Rücksendung an das Gericht. “Allocation” bedeutet, dass der Richter den Rechtsstreit zunächst einer bestimmten Verfahrensart zuweist. Sobald das Gericht den ausgefüllten Fragebogen erhält, oder wenn die gesetzte Frist verstrichen ist, weist es den Fall folgenden möglichen Verfahrensarten zu:

bq. dem “Small Claims Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert bis £ 5.000,00);
dem “Fast Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert von £ 5.000,00 bis £ 15.000,00); oder
dem “Multi-Track” (gewöhnlich für Fälle mit einem Streitwert über £ 15.000,00 oder für Fälle von besonderer Komplexität).

I like the Verfahrensarten here.

The following message/mail is frequently seen in mailing lists or email. At least it gives the correct title of the book (Dave Barry is constantly being quoted with no attribution), although the author is missing and the details confused (the book wasn’t published by court reporters, but the examples were taken down by them):

bq. This is from a book called Disorder in the Court. The book is about things
people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published
by court reporters. Here is one of the exchanges I like best:
Q: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for blood pressure?
A: No.
Q: Did you check for breathing?
A: No.
Q: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the
autopsy?
A: No.
Q: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
A: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
Q: But could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
A: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law
somewhere.

I have the book Disorderly Conduct. Verbatim excerpts from actual court cases selected by Rodney R. Jones, Charles M. Sevilla and Gerald F. Uelmen, with illustrations by Lee Lorenz, 1987, ISBN 0 393 30597 X
I used to read bits to students, so I recognized them when they were quoted on the Internet without attribution.
Charles Sevilla wrote a later book, Disorder in the Court
At www.amazon.com it’s possible to ‘look inside’ books nowadays. Continue reading →

openbrackets has an entry giving statistics on how often translators are characters in films. She cites the Internet Movie Database.

Here are a very few of the entries:

Leonardo da Vinci: 16
Interpreters: 215
Translators: 136
Serial killers named Bob: 1

You do the search by selecting ‘Characters’ in the pull-down search field and entering ‘translator’ in the second search field. It gives 99 men and 37 women. I wouldn’t trust the database to distinguish accurately between translators and interpreters, however.