Is it too much to ask to have a ChatGPT translation of 5,000 words edited in under 48 hours? Thread poster: Marianna Massa
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I was recently asked to edit a ChatGPT translation. The word count was nearly 5,000 words, and the client wanted it revised in under 48 hours, at a standard rate. I declined the job because, as a freelancer rather than an employee working exclusively for him, I don’t think it's reasonable for him to expect me to work under tight deadlines without additional compensation. Was I right to refuse?
I believe that with new AI technologies, some clients assume translation is now effortle... See more I was recently asked to edit a ChatGPT translation. The word count was nearly 5,000 words, and the client wanted it revised in under 48 hours, at a standard rate. I declined the job because, as a freelancer rather than an employee working exclusively for him, I don’t think it's reasonable for him to expect me to work under tight deadlines without additional compensation. Was I right to refuse?
I believe that with new AI technologies, some clients assume translation is now effortless — which is not always the case. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Holandija
Local time: 15:12
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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Marianna Massa wrote:
I was recently asked to edit a ChatGPT translation. The word count was nearly 5,000 words, and the client wanted it revised in under 48 hours, at a standard rate.
I declined the job because, as a freelancer rather than an employee working exclusively for him, I don’t think it's reasonable for him to expect me to work under tight deadlines without additional compensation. Was I right to refuse?
As a freelancer, it is your right to refuse any job offers, and you are allowed to refuse it for any reason that is not illegal in your country of residence. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable for a client to specify a preferred rate and a deadline for a job. Editing 5000 words in 48 hours is perfectly doable, in my opinion. If it is on a weekend, then you are free to make a counter-offer with a non-weekday surcharge built into it. If you are usually extremely busy and not usually able to deliver 5000 words' editing within 48 hours, you may offer to charge a rush rate.
Neither you nor the client was unreasonable in this particular scenario, although you (the translator) do come across as rather entitled (-:
| | | | Daniel Frisano
Italija
Local time: 15:12
Member (2008)
English to Italian
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| Outrageous, egregious, preposterous | May 4 |
Meanwhile, some of us won't mind taking 5k to translate in 24 hours, at our usual rate, because if my other projects are not urgent, what difference does it make which one I do first.
It's called "working", you see.
| | | | Dan Lucas
Ujedinjeno Kraljevstvo
Local time: 14:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
Marianna Massa wrote:
The word count was nearly 5,000 words
Never mind editing, I could have translated that volume from scratch in 48 hours, with time to spare.
The beauty of being a freelancer is, as Samuel says, that you're free to turn down a project for any reason you like.
On the other hand, one needs to eat, so sometimes one has to push oneself.
Regards,
Dan
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Lingua 5B
Bosna i Hercegovina
Local time: 15:12
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
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Nothing is too much for omnipotent, supercharged, highly skilled and unbeatable MT post editors.
| | | | IrinaN
Sjedinjene Američke Države
Local time: 08:12
English to Russian
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| There can be no correct answer | May 4 |
Before seeing the job.
5000 words in 48 hours is a normal to slow pace but(t):
Only a) the quality of chapapa production or b) if utterly unacceptable, client’s approval of translation from scratch at your normal translation rate could have given you a proper answer.
The room for bargaining was definitely there. If I were doing any MTPE at all, which I don’t, I would definitely decline sweating over garbage, in other words, rewriting it anyway, for mt... See more Before seeing the job.
5000 words in 48 hours is a normal to slow pace but(t):
Only a) the quality of chapapa production or b) if utterly unacceptable, client’s approval of translation from scratch at your normal translation rate could have given you a proper answer.
The room for bargaining was definitely there. If I were doing any MTPE at all, which I don’t, I would definitely decline sweating over garbage, in other words, rewriting it anyway, for mtpe rate while looking at a stopwatch. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Literary MTPE should be done slowly | May 4 |
The content I was asked to revise was literary translation, in which chatGPT seems to be pretty good, as it is in many translation fields.
But that kind of translation needs to be done slowly. That was my point. So, maybe as Irina said, there cannot be one correct answer.
It is useful to know that, until now, there is a general agreement about the fact that MTPE of 5K words in less than 48 hours is not too much.
This is new to me. Maybe because I am mainly assigned tran... See more The content I was asked to revise was literary translation, in which chatGPT seems to be pretty good, as it is in many translation fields.
But that kind of translation needs to be done slowly. That was my point. So, maybe as Irina said, there cannot be one correct answer.
It is useful to know that, until now, there is a general agreement about the fact that MTPE of 5K words in less than 48 hours is not too much.
This is new to me. Maybe because I am mainly assigned translation tasks, rather than MTPE tasks. But even when I translate, I strongly rely on AI tools. So, any translation now (at least in my case) is becoming some sort of MTPE. Post editing does take time though… especially with literary texts. ▲ Collapse
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Marianna Massa wrote:
The content I was asked to revise was literary translation, in which chatGPT seems to be pretty good, as it is in many translation fields.
But that kind of translation needs to be done slowly. That was my point. So, maybe as Irina said, there cannot be one correct answer.
It is useful to know that, until now, there is a general agreement about the fact that MTPE of 5K words in less than 48 hours is not too much.
This is new to me. Maybe because I am mainly assigned translation tasks, rather than MTPE tasks. But even when I translate, I strongly rely on AI tools. So, any translation now (at least in my case) is becoming some sort of MTPE. Post editing does take time though… especially with literary texts.
You didn't initially say that this was a literary text - that may well change things (it's not my field, I don't know what's reasonable and what isn't).
You are the expert. You get to decide what is feasible and reasonable for you. You get to set whatever urgency supplements you see fit.
And then - and this is probably the difficult bit - you need to convince the client that it's in their interests to to along with your recommendations.
Clients are often open to negotiation on deadlines so it's worth letting them know what you can do, rather than flat-out rejecting their enquiry.
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PAS
Local time: 15:12
Polish to English
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| Scratching the itch | May 5 |
..."I could have translated that volume from scratch..."
Depending on the situation, it might even be easier than editing whatever Mr. Gee Pee Tee may have spewed forth...
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I wonder which language pair is one "in which chatGPT seems to be pretty good" with literary translation. It sure can't be English to Arabic (now that the OP is based in Egypt), can it? Our main client is doing a big project in Egypt, so I've seen many examples of machine translations (AI-enabled or otherwise, they didn't tell me) from Arabic to English. Basic texts, but crippled to the point of being unusable for anything productive. Since my task was to make sense of those texts, I had to stre... See more I wonder which language pair is one "in which chatGPT seems to be pretty good" with literary translation. It sure can't be English to Arabic (now that the OP is based in Egypt), can it? Our main client is doing a big project in Egypt, so I've seen many examples of machine translations (AI-enabled or otherwise, they didn't tell me) from Arabic to English. Basic texts, but crippled to the point of being unusable for anything productive. Since my task was to make sense of those texts, I had to stretch my language intuition to the max (being unable to test the source Arabic with a bunch of MT engines myself since Arabic characters are never recognized; our Arabic translator always works on unrecognized .pdf files). Maybe English to Arabic works better, but then there's the literary aspect. I love translations of all sorts of literature from Arabic. A big part of what makes them special is how different they are from anything else you can read. I can't imagine how a translator working in a pair with Arabic involved (unless the second language in the pair is related to Arabic) can rely heavily on AI. To produce anything of value and to make the translation idiomatic, they'd have to rewrite everything so thoroughly that the meaningful contribution from AI would amount to a very small percentage. So, my guess is that the pair in question does not involve Arabic. Which one is it then? ▲ Collapse
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Hello, Denis. It was indeed English to Arabic. The texts were literary critic, not literary creation.
My colleague who did it in the end, worked from 9am to 1 am of the following day… the client added an extra 1000 words. So they were 6000 in total. I don’t think one should that. Why would someone work 16 hours straight? You see why I refused…
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Thank you for your reply. 6k in two days is a tiring stretch of work indeed, but it's doable in most cases unless you're exploring virgin ground and the subject-matter is at the edge of your abilities. And that's when the "scratch" factor from above should come into play judging from my experience, which might be somewhat relevant to your pair as an undoubtedly difficult one with relatively small high-quality bilingual corpora to train AI on. My longest "work days" as a freelancer, years and yea... See more Thank you for your reply. 6k in two days is a tiring stretch of work indeed, but it's doable in most cases unless you're exploring virgin ground and the subject-matter is at the edge of your abilities. And that's when the "scratch" factor from above should come into play judging from my experience, which might be somewhat relevant to your pair as an undoubtedly difficult one with relatively small high-quality bilingual corpora to train AI on. My longest "work days" as a freelancer, years and years ago, would last about 52 hours each with a couple of 2 to 3-hour breaks with or without sleep. Can't remember how many words I'd cover during each such session in pre-MT days of yore (more than 6k, that's for sure). Freelance battles, that's how they are fought today ▲ Collapse
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Marianna Massa wrote:
Hello, Denis. It was indeed English to Arabic. The texts were literary critic, not literary creation.
My colleague who did it in the end, worked from 9am to 1 am of the following day… the client added an extra 1000 words. So they were 6000 in total. I don’t think one should that. Why would someone work 16 hours straight? You see why I refused…
Two days is fine for reviewing a 6,000-word translation from MTP in Western languages, but between English and Arabic... I've done tests in Arabic-Spanish and vice versa, and for example, Deepl works quite well with standard Arabic, but ChatGPT often gets confused with Egyptian Arabic. I think you'll have to get used to this kind of thing, as it's going to be the norm from now on.
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