An insight on TM pricing
Thread poster: Philippe Etienne
Philippe Etienne
Philippe Etienne  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 16:22
Member
English to French
Jun 16, 2020

Hello there,

(I chose the "Money matters" forum, but "MT post-editing" or "CAT tools" may be relevant as well.)

TAUS, one of the organisations that orbit around translation, sells TMs to train MT engines and what-not: https://md.taus.net/library
It turns out that the price of one translation unit (bilingual segment) starts at about one eurocent (€0.01).

Imagine y
... See more
Hello there,

(I chose the "Money matters" forum, but "MT post-editing" or "CAT tools" may be relevant as well.)

TAUS, one of the organisations that orbit around translation, sells TMs to train MT engines and what-not: https://md.taus.net/library
It turns out that the price of one translation unit (bilingual segment) starts at about one eurocent (€0.01).

Imagine you deliver 500kwords/year with CAT tools and a segment is 10 words on average. Whoever is smart enough to monetize your bilingual data can generate €500 and more per year.

Does TAUS get all its bilingual material on sale from its members (https://www.taus.net/membership/members )?
In this case, assuming none of my past and present first-tier agency clients has ever been a TAUS member, I am sorry to report that I have hardly contributed to feeding MT engines in the past 20 years.
The upside is that I could sell €10,000 worth of unique bilingual data lovingly created by yours truly!

Is €0.01 a fair price for one translation unit?

Philippe

Edit: formatting issues

[Edited at 2020-06-16 10:52 GMT]
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Christophe Delaunay
Christophe Delaunay  Identity Verified
France
Local time: 16:22
Spanish to French
+ ...
Dear Philippe, Jun 16, 2020

the answer to your question is included in... your question

[Edited at 2020-06-16 11:06 GMT]


 
Samuel Murray
Samuel Murray  Identity Verified
Netherlands
Local time: 16:22
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
@Philippe Jun 16, 2020

Philippe Etienne wrote:
Does TAUS get all its bilingual material on sale from its members (https://www.taus.net/membership/members )?


I got the impression that most of it is scraped.

Is €0.01 a fair price for one translation unit?


Do they pay €0.01 per unit or do they sell for €0.01 per unit? The prices for different corpuses differ (e.g. EN-ES medical is USD 0.04 per TU). Is it a fair price? I have no way of telling. I don't know of this price allows the aligners and validation volunteers and/or staff to break even. And I know too little about machine translation training to know of a 170 000 TU TM would be worth USD 7000 to buy.


 
Thayenga
Thayenga  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 16:22
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
The price Jun 16, 2020

One cent in any currency is not even a price, let alone a fair price for anything.

 
Sadek_A
Sadek_A  Identity Verified
Local time: 19:22
English to Arabic
+ ...
:) Jun 16, 2020

snap it from email, snap it from cloud, compile it, sell it, alter it, resell it, use it to train other human translators, use it to train AI translators. This could be a nice song. I'll try to get Beyoncé behind it.

All while the original human translator is not only having no say over how their "legally copyrighted" material is being used, but also is severely underpaid.

That's why every sane translator would be doing themselves a huge favor charging a rate for both
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snap it from email, snap it from cloud, compile it, sell it, alter it, resell it, use it to train other human translators, use it to train AI translators. This could be a nice song. I'll try to get Beyoncé behind it.

All while the original human translator is not only having no say over how their "legally copyrighted" material is being used, but also is severely underpaid.

That's why every sane translator would be doing themselves a huge favor charging a rate for both today and tomorrow when the transformation of the industry into a complete MAFIA is accomplished.
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An insight on TM pricing







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