Off topic: I need some help with my thesis Thread poster: jvdw
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Hi guys
I'm working on my thesis for my graduation. The subject is about the competitive advanced of a human translation in comparison with translation tools and internet. I need to do a survey and I hope you will help me to fill in this survey. It costs you 2 minutes of your time, there are 8 questions, 7 multiple choice.
I'm really thank you if you fill in the survey.
You will find the survey here:
<... See more Hi guys
I'm working on my thesis for my graduation. The subject is about the competitive advanced of a human translation in comparison with translation tools and internet. I need to do a survey and I hope you will help me to fill in this survey. It costs you 2 minutes of your time, there are 8 questions, 7 multiple choice.
I'm really thank you if you fill in the survey.
You will find the survey here:
https://johnvdw.typeform.com/to/l8GYps
Kind regards
John
[Edited at 2014-10-31 15:31 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Looked, saw, ... and quit | Oct 31, 2014 |
When I saw :
jvdw wrote:
Hi guys
followed by
I'm working on my thesis ... I need to do a survey ...
I was already thinking to myself: "Here we go - yet another student who's been told he needs to do a survey if he wants a degree."
Despite that foreboding, I had a look. And I found a bunch of extremely banal questions which could in no way contribute to a better understanding of the rather complex topic: "the competitive advanced (sic) of a human translation in comparison with translation tools and internet".
On a purely practical level:
Q7 - asking us about our experience on 'this website', was unanswerable because we don't know what website we're talking about. (Maybe proz.com - but maybe some other site we're not allowed to mention here like ... TC, or ... ?)
And Q8 - asking us to rate the difficulty of finding translation work, on a scale of 0 to 10, was also utterly unanswerable, because John doesn't tell us whether '10' corresponds to "easy" or "difficult".
At that point I quit.
John: back to the drawing-board! And remember: if a translator is unable to communicate meaningfully it matters little (nay, nowt!) what diploma ends up being nailed to your bedroom/office wall.
[Edited at 2014-10-31 22:02 GMT]
| | | | 564354352 (X) 
Denmark
Local time: 02:34
Danish to English
+ ...
| A bit more research needed... | Nov 1, 2014 |
Hi John
Just a few comments to your questionnaire:
1. You need at least one more option: Other or It varies.
2. There is no such thing as an average translation job.
5. Trados is an old product. Nowadays, it’s called SDL Trados.
6. I presum you mean Translation Memory (TM). And if so, which one? We all have a number of TMs. And there is no way of knowing how many sentences they contain. They save segments, not sentences only.
7. Which website a... See more Hi John
Just a few comments to your questionnaire:
1. You need at least one more option: Other or It varies.
2. There is no such thing as an average translation job.
5. Trados is an old product. Nowadays, it’s called SDL Trados.
6. I presum you mean Translation Memory (TM). And if so, which one? We all have a number of TMs. And there is no way of knowing how many sentences they contain. They save segments, not sentences only.
7. Which website are you referring to?
8. How long is a piece of string?
Just for the record, I didn't submit my answers, as I couldn't really take the questionnaire seriously.
As Robin says: Back to the drawing board if you want to present a questionnaire that can give you results that can be used academically.
[Edited at 2014-11-01 07:05 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Done John but questions were too general-e,g how many word I could translate in one day-depends on topic/text type/if there are errors in the text, formatting of text, on many things. You failed to ask about administrative work like invoicing, getting paid, researching the agencies. Still, good luck.
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| I tried to complete it | Nov 1, 2014 |
but the questions were too vague, so I'm afraid I didn't submit it.
| | | | Astrid_H
Germany
Local time: 02:34
German to English
+ ...
| What kind of research is this? | Nov 3, 2014 |
I'm with the others - too vague, not on topic at all.
Having done a survey for my Master's degree as well (in which some of you may also have participated), I somehow doubt that this is a survey for a scientific thesis - be it Bachelor or Master, unless it is only one part of the research and the second part is made up of literature study of machine translation, for example to compare with this survey's results.
During my own research, I came across many forums which do... See more I'm with the others - too vague, not on topic at all.
Having done a survey for my Master's degree as well (in which some of you may also have participated), I somehow doubt that this is a survey for a scientific thesis - be it Bachelor or Master, unless it is only one part of the research and the second part is made up of literature study of machine translation, for example to compare with this survey's results.
During my own research, I came across many forums which do not allow ANY kind of survey links to be posted because often marketing or similar surveys were posted claiming to be academic studies. I can't see how this would be a useful marketing survey, however.
There are many details missing besides the problem of vague questions. Firstly, you need to state your contact details in an academic survey, secondly you need an ethics form which will allow for informed consent of the participants and much more. All of this needs to be done and signed off by your supervisor before you start the survey. Your course leader or supervisor would have told you this.
It would be nice to let your potential participants know what they are actually filling the survey out for - so they know whether they actually want to participate or not - informed consent. Anything else is just not right. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | I gave up too | Nov 5, 2014 |
What do you mean by a translation?
I translate anything from tiny snippets for marketing, under 100 words, up to academic books, maybe 60 - 70 thousand words.
Series of medical journals, sometimes fragments, sometimes thousands of words altogether.
Like everyone else, I use numerous translation memories, and have very little idea how many segments there are in them. Some are tiny, just a single job, some are huge. (25 000 words plus – I used the biggest t... See more What do you mean by a translation?
I translate anything from tiny snippets for marketing, under 100 words, up to academic books, maybe 60 - 70 thousand words.
Series of medical journals, sometimes fragments, sometimes thousands of words altogether.
Like everyone else, I use numerous translation memories, and have very little idea how many segments there are in them. Some are tiny, just a single job, some are huge. (25 000 words plus – I used the biggest to make an AutoSuggest dictionary for Trados Studio in each language pair I work with. )
Some segments are long, academic sentences, others are snippets like 'Yours sincerely', 'Contents', 'page x of y'.
Or names and addresses, numbers...
Trying to quantify things like that will tell you nohting except that I have been in the business for enough years and used Trados long enough to accumulate all that. It does not tell you how often I come across and delete errors and outdated segments, and how many I never find. Or how many segments are never used again, but the proportion is high.
I am offered more work than I can take on most of the time.
How many words can I translate in a day?
Sorry, I regard that question as meaningless too. There is a 20% difference between word counts in my source and target texts, simply because that is how languages work.
Germanic languages link words together, and Scandinavian languages link the definite article to the end of the word as well. (The cat = katten, the table = bordet, etc, etc.) The word count for a text in one of those languages will be very different from a translation of the same text into English, and I believe Latin languages go even higher.
Some days I rattle through 3 000 or more if my CAT really does some of the work - which in practice means a human has done it earlier. (I have some content from trusted colleagues and good agencies as well as my own work in my TMs.)
Other days I can barely manage 1000. I need to study the subject, collect terminology, revise and rephrase what I have written.
Or I have adminstrative work, get interrupted....
___________________________
Really, I would suggest looking at the difference in the whole approach of humans and machines to translating.
A human reads the text, understands it, and imagines the target reader, aware of the situation and the cultural differences. Then the translator expresses the message in the target language after an enormously complex process of association and intuition. Nobody knows how it works. A computer weighs up mathematical probabilities.
People try very hard to quantify languages, but it is a slippery business, and the more it is simplified, the less meaning it retains. Words can be counted, but separately, they are about as representative of language as grains of rice are representative of a whole meal.
It is possible to simulate translation, but it is rather like a photograph. With chemicals or pixels you can produce quite a convincing likeness of a person's appearance, but only on the surface.
There are a lot of standard situations in which humans exchange standard comments, ask predictable questions and get more or less predictable answers within a predictable range. Here computers can find equivalents if you feed a sufficient quantity of these standard 'conversations' into a database.
The same applies to structured texts, whether they are the routine medical check of a patient's temperature, blood pressure and pulse etc. or typical orders for goods, quotes of prices, orders and invoices.
Instruction manuals for machines are notable examples of very standardised language. But they are sometimes almost unreadable to humans if they are too standardised.
Sorry, what was the question again?
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| | | | Rachel Fell
United Kingdom
Local time: 01:34
French to English
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I only had a look after reading others' comments.
If you answer that you don't use a CAT tool, the next question is "How many sentences are saved in the database of your CAT-tool?", which you can't answer; if you answer "Where do you find translation work beside this website?" with "Other", the box expands, presumably awaiting details of he "other" but this is not expressly stated, so that means two questions are left unanswered.
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