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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