Skystats Ltd. - Urgent, Technical EN>German-Polish-Portugese-Swedish for Less than Peanuts

Translation Times reports the following ProZ.com announcement as their "Job Offer of the Week":

We need some translation work on urgent basis & regular basis there after.
English to German-Polish-Portugese-Swedish Translation: URGENT

We have some 500 product descriptions and some site banners and ads that needs translation.

It is mostly technical and repetitive.
Our target price is $1500 to $2500 per pair.

No per word math please.

Product Description and other details: 21 days.

It is around 750 web pages. Word Count is approximately: 215,000
Unique words: 133990 (Product description) and rest repeat.

NO MACHINE TRANSLATION PLEASE.
Only Native speakers!
So, if you're from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, please do not bid. As we need native speakers and writers.

Writes Translation News: "We did the math for you, and if you were to get paid the maximum rate of $2500 for the 215,000 words (not the unique words), you would be making $0.011 per word. If you got the low end of $1500, your per-word rate would be $0.0069. Any takers?"

The outsourcer is a mysterious organism known as Skystats Limited, which may or may not be based in Australia. Skystats registered on ProZ in August 2009 but lists no contact information or website.

Please note the comments below as well, especially the one written by Anne-Sophie: "Maybe the people at Proz should put some limits to the kind of offers being published." Gee. Ya think?

------------------

joy mo said...
I'll be more interested to know if anyone actually applies for the job. The low pricing game is partially some translators' fault. They are either incompetent or shortselling themeselves by accepting jobs like this.
MARCH 17, 2010 3:08 PM

Daniel said...
LOL - "No per word math please."
That's hilarious. Even if you get the $2500 and only count the unique words, it still comes out to under 1.9 cents a word. And you'd have to translate 6,380 unique words every day for 3 weeks straight!
Are you sure this isn't a joke? ;)
MARCH 17, 2010 3:42 PM

Krzysiek said...
It's not a joke. I received this job. I was wondering whether I'm really bed at maths or they put something wrong. I couldn't believe it!
MARCH 17, 2010 4:23 PM

Anne-Sophie said...
Maybe the people at Proz should put some limits to the kind of offers being published. If it were for a good cause (like an NGO or something like that), but it's not!
MARCH 17, 2010 6:00 PM