Some people simply have no clue

First off, allow me to say that I love my clients. They're knowledgeable, professional, friendly and they know how to cooperate with translators.

But there are also many who don't have any clue as to what it is we translators and/or interpreters do. Take a look at a recent job posting on the TraduGuide website:

Do you translate movies off the screen as well?
There is no subtitles available for this movie as far as I know.
It was a tv movie. It can be translated to English, Polish or Russian. I speak these three languages.
I can provide with the movie od DVD or as .AVI
If you don't translate movies... could you tell us who does, please? [sic]

This is a private individual who's dying to see a certain movie that happens to be in French. Too funny. Well, I doubt he'll find any professional translator to agree to such a harebrained project, seeing how a professional subtitling job would cost him at least ten to fifteen times the price of a standard movie on a DVD.

As for companies providing these services, they only work for the movie studios, but not private individuals.

So, for this individual, who incidentally resides in Australia, I have only one, realistic, suggestion: Purchase all three levels of the Rosetta Stone French program, immerse yourself in the language, and then watch the movie.

Comments

[Aaron]

Actually there's another way: Use subtitle ripping software (like D-Subtitler for Mac or SubRip for Windows), then put the output through machine translation. It won't be pretty, but it's probably better than nothing.

[Fabio]

I get inquiries like those from private individuals all the time, but they want a book translation. It's usually easy to see that they have no clue, and that it would be a waste of time for me to make them a quote or to explain that a book translation would be extremely expensive for a private individuals. So I just never react to them.
:-)

[Judy Jenner]

That's a good one. I am all about gentle client education, and I understand that many folks simply are not familiar with our business and how it works. On the other hand, you have to draw a line at some point and determine how much time you want to spend making a quote for someone who is not familiar with the pricing and will be "aus allen Wolken fallen" (=be completely shocked/surprised) when he/she sees the prce. We agree with Fabio -- we get a lot of book translation requests, and usually make quick quotes (although of course, it takes at least 15 minutes), and most of the time, we don't hear back. Perhaps we should start considering Fabio's method or make a quick call to explain the pricing to the potential client; which might save some time.

[Richard Benham]

Yes, people can have totally unrealistic expectations as to prices of book translations. I had some guy asking me for a quote on his doctoral thesis in engineering. Surprise, surprise, it was highly technical, and the translator would require at least some familiarity with LaTeX (a technical typesetting package, for those who don't know). After receiving my (reasonable) quote, he said he had a budget of 800 euros. Well, that worked out at something under 2 eurocents a word, and I politely pointed out that he would be lucky to get a typist to type the thing for that price. He responded that mine was his highest quote, and that the second-highest was just over half of mine. Well, it is quite possible that he would get a reasonably competent job from a student at that price, but he was still not going to get anything worth having for what he wanted to pay.

I mean, if it was worth getting a translation done, then presumably it was something that was going to boost his career, and it would have been worth lashing out and spending a few thousand euros on it. If that was beyond his budget, he could have tried to get a publisher interested in publishing it, or found some other way of getting corporate assistance.

Pity; it was quite an interesting thesis too.

[Amelia]

What you say is so true.

Our customers are lovable, but sometimes we should guide them in linguistic issues or the times we need to work.

I write in a related translation blog:

http://blog-de-traduccion.trustedtranslations.com/

Just have a look!

Best regards,

Amelia