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Dear all,
I have a question regarding fuzzy matches (and fuzzy match based pricing) in regard to Japanese source texts.
From my subjective experience, fuzzy matches don't seem to work well with Japanese source texts, at least not as well as they do with say English source texts. I feel that this is based on the fact that the Japanese language doesn't have white space between words and has a completely different structure compared to Western languages. Therefore, automatic concordance search as well is not working with Japanese source texts, only when I do a manual concordance search, it works.
Fuzzy matches do show up when I translate a Japanese text in Studio, but they are often not really useful (I can give examples if it helps the discussion). And the percentage (e.g. a 60% Match) seems to be wrong, the actual matching parts in the segments seem much lower.
Therefore, I tell my clients that I don't accept discount rates for fuzzy matches when translating from Japanese.
Now, I have a new Japanese client (an agency in Japan) who asks me to kindly accept fuzzy match based rates because they always use them and their clients demand it.
What is the experience of translators or LSPs here in the forum? Do fuzzy matches work with Japanese source texts and are the levels (Low Fuzzy, High Fuzzy, xy-%) for Japanese texts reliable enough to base translation rate discounts onto them? Do you accept to be paid based on fuzzy match based rates for translations from Japanese? And if not, what do you explain to the client so that they understand?
Thanks a lot in advance,
Andrea Bernard