How does Malay differ from Indonesian, or a story about how we translated the application into 35 languages

Man to man is a friend, comrade and translator. And especially the translator is a friend who works with localization. As a rule, it is easiest to localize mobile applications: the amount of text is small, there are few special terms. This is if there are few translation languages, say, ten. But we recently did localization for 35 (!) Languages.

About how you were looking for performers, overcoming difficulties and what funny moments there were - this article.

Foreword

We are a small IT company engaged in application development and augmented reality. The localization department works mainly on internal projects or makes transfers for client orders. Until recently, we worked with the main European languages ​​(English, German, French, Spanish, Italian) and some Asian (Chinese, Japanese). And this list was quite enough.
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One fine day, one mobile application needed to be translated into 35 languages. As a localization department manager, I can say that it is easier to organize the translation of 1000 pages into English in a week: make a glossary, divide between translators and calmly control them. Immediately I had to do the work virtually from scratch: look for translators, test them, immerse in the subject of work, accept translations, read statistics, monitor payments. But the more complicated, the more interesting: I'm just in awe of language diversity and how much one language can differ from another (yes, I'm a fan, and if I could endlessly study different types of scripts and grammatical structures ...) In general, the order turned out to be interesting and very valuable in terms of experience.

Some statistics

Lead time: about a month. Terms allowed not to rush the process. Most of the time was spent searching for translators.

Languages:

English Amharic (partially) Arab Azerbaijani Belorussian Bulgarian Hungarian Vietnamese Greek Georgian Danish Indonesian Italian Spanish (European) Spanish (Latin American) Korean Latvian Lithuanian Malay

Mongolian Deutsch Dutch Norwegian Polish Portuguese (European) Portuguese (Brazilian) Serbian Thai Turkish Ukrainian Finnish French Hindi Croatian Czech Swedish Estonian Japanese

Search for translators

How to find a translator? It would seem easy: there are freelance sites, there are even peculiar exchanges of interpreters. But everything is not so simple.

If you contact a person directly through such services or social networks, the response is not the biggest: one out of three to five replies to the message, one out of seven to ten takes the job. It’s good that one couldn’t pick and choose much in this order: the quality requirements were to prevent frank blunders and make better Google translate.

A good effect was given by placing ads on the search for translators in the profile group in the social network, so we closed six languages.

For some languages, it makes no sense to look for a Russian translator who has mastered the necessary language. It's easier to find a carrier who has mastered a Russian. So it was with Vietnamese, Mongolian, Hindi, Indonesian, Lithuanian, Estonian. In some cases, it is generally problematic to find a translator in a Russian pair, so it is easier to immediately make the English version and translate from it.

All kosyachat

There are two disappointing laws: “Everyone is kosyachat” and “If the task can be done somehow wrong, it will be done somehow wrong”.



An MS Word document with tables in three columns was sent for translation: Russian, English and the target language. Someone managed to make the translation in solid text. Someone did phrasal correspondence in a continuous text: a line in Russian - a line in a foreign one. Someone copied the entire huge table from google-tables (which was sent for reference only) and made a translation in it (wai-wai, there are more than forty columns in each sheet).

There were also under-translations, lost lines and paragraphs. Well, in European languages ​​it is quite easy to notice. And what about, for example, with Hindi? Language flair (something here is clearly not enough) and google-translate. Translators - the people, of course, for the most part responsible, but no one is immune from mistakes. In general, trust, but verify.

Funny moments

Working with people is always some kind of surprise. Sometimes funny. Our new Arabic translator has disappeared somewhere after receiving the assignment. I had to write, search. In response, I received a letter with the following content: “Sorry, I did not warn you, I have a wedding this weekend. I remember about the translation. How to get married, just do it. " The translator is like a soldier, always in the ranks.



Some translators behave very strangely. Someone refuses to accept “virtual money” (money transfer or PayPal) while living abroad. Someone openly takes offense when he sees the English version in the document next to the Russian text column, and declares that he will not translate from English into his language. Someone is very suspicious: sends the translation screen, asks for payment and only then sends the translation itself. But without such moments, the work would be monotonous and boring.

So is there a difference between Indonesian and Malay?

Everything is just like that. When I was a manager at a major Moscow translation company, we thought: “Malay is Indonesian, Flemish is almost Dutch, why complicate things?” And now there were hopes for such pleasant life hacking, but the Indonesian speaker refused to translate into Malay, saying that is not professionally fluent in this language. This made us think and find a separate Malay carrier.

Most non-specific language

I always thought that the language imposes an imprint on a person. Even if it is non-native. Somewhere it is. The most non-specific performers were the French translators. Someone took the translation and hung up for a week (“Yes, I will, but later. If it is not necessary already, I will do another ...”), someone responded to emails for several days. From owning a German or, say, Japanese, you will never get this. Everything is clear with these guys: translation - order confirmation - delivery on time or earlier.

The most difficult and expensive language

This turned out to be, oddly enough, Hungarian. At first there were difficulties with finding a translator: Russian-speaking interpreters either refused or did not respond. I had to look for a pair of English-Hungarian. And here at first there was silence too. Then many were busy (seemingly so much work with the Hungarian?). In the end, the performer was found, did a good job, but also took at a good average European rates.

So how much do translators earn?

If we are talking about money, I can say that the translator's earnings depend primarily on language pairs and the country of residence. The Russian-speaking market pays little (Ukrainians dump, there are many specialists, the competition is big). The cheapest language (it’s the most common) is English. You can find a translator at a rate of 180-250 rubles for 1800 characters with spaces. Other European languages ​​will cost a little more expensive: French, German - 300-400 rubles. Oriental languages ​​(Chinese, Japanese, Arabic) raise rates by another 200-300 rubles. Well, the most expensive are the so-called "rare" languages ​​(the list is usually blurred, there may be Farsi, Indonesian, Danish; at the discretion of the translator) - rates from 700 rubles. We called lower boundaries of rates, everything can change: with translation companies, freelancers work even cheaper, with direct clients - more expensive.

Yes, what is this figure - 1800 characters with spaces? This is a standard translation page. It is considered that the specialist performs an average translation of one such page per hour (with the exception of complex texts of technical topics, drawings, etc.). That is, the rates per page roughly represent the amount of money earned per hour.

The situation in the translation market of India is similar to the CIS countries: native Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and other similar languages ​​have learned English and compete with each other on price. But in European countries, many translators have their own websites and do not work on weekends. And in Malaysia, for example, there is the concept of a minimum order: even if you need to translate two sentences, you have to pay $ 25.

Instead of conclusions

The race with 35 languages ​​ended, and it was very cool. Thanks to him, we found great specialists in those languages ​​with which we had not previously worked. Some turned out to be real “treasures” for our company. We have learned a lot about the language subtleties of the translation. Worked with very different people and their worldview. And having fun, which is also not bad.

PS: So involved in the process that they forgot to answer the main question. What is the difference between Malay and Indonesian?
The main difference in phonetics and vocabulary. Despite the fact that the two languages ​​are close relatives, at a certain stage they diverged. Malay has absorbed a lot of borrowing from English, Indonesian - from Dutch. Therefore, a number of words (and especially scientific terms) is different. Some words are used in both languages, but have different meanings. For example, “polis” in Malay means “police”, in Indonesian - “insurance policy”. And there are many such examples.
Those. in principle, this difference is greater than between British and American English, so they are identified as separate languages.