Tuesday 23 April 2013

ELSEVIER TRANSLATION SERVICES in their WEBSHOP




Elsevier, part of the Reed Elsevier Group,  is one of the largest publishers in the medical and scientific journals sector. It publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals, and its archives contain seven million publications. 

Elsevier is now offering an online translation service for scientists who wish to get their work published in English language peer reviewed journals.

Specifically it offers:
  • Translations into American or British English, by native speakers only 
  • Translations by PhD or PhD candidates selected according to field of study 
  • Double-checking of translations by successful academic authors
  • Return of all manuscripts within 11 business days

No publication guarantees are of course provided for any potential clients, but two points of their marketing strategy stand out above all:


PRICING STRATEGY



The pricing strategy is extremely non linear. One normally expects a “bulk discount” on translation work, but Elsevier’s model seems to take this concept to an unusual new length. Small papers are comparatively much more expensive to translate than larger papers.  It is also not clear whether the word numbers would include reference lists (which of course should never be translated).  According to their scale, for small paper of 500 words (i.e. long abstracts or letters) the word rate would work out at almost 44 Euro cent per word (or even higher for shorter jobs). For a mid-sized paper of 5000 words the word rate would be 10 cent per word, while for a large review of 12000 words this drops to just 6.7 cent per word.    






This is an interesting pricing structure which arguably reflects the priorities that scientists entertain  when creating scientific or medical literature. Short communications are necessarily brief and concise, and take much more care to write than larger papers which often contain standard methodological descriptions and long reference lists. The impact of an abstract or short communication is often as great as that of a longer paper, which is often produced to “set in stone” results published in abstract form prior to a conference.  When translated into English, shorter papers often also have to conform to word number restraints.    

  

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE



Although Elsevier offers no guarantees for publication, it does offer a money back guarantee for rejection on the basis of the quality of the language employed. No translator can be entrusted to providing a translation that will be accepted by an expert reviewer, it is the author and the reviewer who are experts and who can discuss the scientific validity or relevance of a particular manuscript. The translator can and should have no liability in this process, even if, as a translator with an additional scientific qualification, he may also be able to provide feedback of a scientific or technical nature. Anyone who understands the review process for peer reviewed journals also knows that there is still a residual risk that a perfectly well written paper may be rejected on the basis of “poor language”. The review process is only as good as the reviewer, and the reviewers are often delegated junior scientists whose strengths do not always lie in their use of the English language.  In my time as a scientist I often saw papers rejected on the basis of language from reviewers who themselves did not have the best command of the English language.

Presumably Elsevier has factored this into their calculations, and they can afford to provide such a guarantee even where rejections on the basis of language are unjustified upon closer inspection.


 
Currently, Elsevier only offers this service for Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese, but it will be interesting to see if it expands the service and model to other language combinations.  

Dr. Julian P. Keogh
http://www.pharmacad-services.eu
http://www.dr-julian-keogh.de  

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