Are There Examples of “Fuzzy and Full Matches” in Other Professions?

The concept of work and compensation for the product of this work has evolved over time.

Only two short centuries ago, most people did not have a job that they would have to commute to in order to make money. That is a relatively recent invention. Not so long ago, when most people were working as farmers, people called serfs had to work for free a certain part of the year for their feudal lords, while the rest of the year they were allowed to work for themselves so that they would not die of hunger.

The trading of work measured in working hours for money was gradually invented because industrial revolution needed urgently new workers, which turned former serfs into laborers to be exploited, perhaps slightly less ruthlessly, by people with the means to build a factory and to pay for the labor of workers providing the necessary work.

This model, later further perfected to include a punch clock with time cards, has been in place for so long now that most people assume that the traditional type of 9-to-5 employment is something that is natural and desirable.

But this natural and desirable model of employment has very deep cracks in it now, only about two short centuries after it has been invented. The 9-to-5 employment model would still be quite desirable if it were the same model that existed in this and other countries only a few decades ago.

But it is not the same model, not any more. Although as an entry level employee, I had a relatively low salary 30 years ago, the salary was automatically increased every year and the job came with a number of substantial benefits, including medical, dental, and vision benefits, life insurance, vacation, sick days, and a pension as a reward for loyalty. Most of these benefits have been eliminated now for most employees with the exception of top level managers whose perks are now much better than 30 years ago.

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The concept of a craftsman, a person who has a specialized trade, predates the concept of a 9-to-5 job. A few centuries ago, when butchers were cutting meat, bakers were baking bread and candlestick makers were making candlesticks, nobody cared about how many hours they spent on the job. They were simply paid for the products that they were creating – if they could sell them.

Which is exactly how most freelance workers are being paid now. Website designers may base their cost on the number of hours they will need to create a website, and freelance translators may charge for their translations based on the number of words or pages to be translated, but the number of words or pages is only used as a rather simplistic quantifier, as convenient as the number of loaves of bread or candlesticks.

But these days it seems that only some translators can be considered craftsmen. Those who agree to discounts that they must give for what is called in the industry “full and fuzzy matches” agree to have the worst of both worlds: on the one hand, they are being paid on a piecemeal basis, namely based on the number of words, which means that in theory it does not matter how much time they would need to translate for example 500 words.

But at the same time, if the text contains similar or identical passages, the time factor is then used to reduce the translator’s earning potential by some translation agencies. If it is easier for you, translator, to translate 500 words per a certain number of minutes or hours, then you shall be paid less for those words, and the basic, non-discounted per-word rate will be applicable only to the parts of the translation that are more difficult to translate because they are completely new and thus take significantly longer than the easier passages.

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I can’t think of a single example of another profession that would agree to such a rule, with the possible exception of serfs in good old feudalism.

I have been with my tax accountant for 26 years. Every year I send him the same information and he probably spends about 20 minutes, quite possibly less than that, to prepare my taxes.

Then he sends me a bill for several hundred dollars, which means that he probably makes about a thousand dollars an hour on clients like me. But as long as he does not charge too much, why should I care how much he makes by the hour? If he can do it faster than anybody else without making a single mistake, good for him, and good for me.

If you compared my tax returns over the years, something like 90% of the information that I send to my accountant would quite justifiably qualify as “fuzzy and full matches”. After all, the same fields are filled in on a computer screen every year, and the information I supply to my accountant is very similar every year, the differences are mostly in the numbers because some years are good and some not so good.

But I don’t pay my accountant based on the number of minutes spent on my tax return or the number of words produced. I pay him because I myself don’t want to keep track of all the changes in the tax code, which is hundreds of thousands pages thick and getting thicker every year. I pay him for his expertise, which is something that cannot be easily quantified in terms of minutes or words.

If I asked him for a discount based on the full and fuzzy matches contained in the highly repetitive information that he is processing for me, he would think I’m crazy. And rightly so.

But it is not crazy when some translation agencies demand deep discounts for what is called by some operators in the industry full and fuzzy matches from translators.

The inescapable conclusion is that unlike accountants, translators are simply not professionals. They are basically low level data entry operators who don’t really have any expertise.

So get over it already you greedy translators! Fuzzy and full matches are here to stay!

Be glad that you have any work at all, and that you can still eke out a living after the steep discounts …. before you are completely replaced by software and machine translation.