Chinese publishers annoy me again

I was just offered a job editing part of a series of mind-squelchingly turgid 'academic' books on the theory of tourism management in different parts of China.

I was offered a fee of 2,000 RMB. That's about US$270. Not good.

I said I'd take a look at it. Perhaps it was just a monograph. If the English was fairly good, and it was less than about 15,000 words long, I'd take it on.

No - it was a full-length book, 120,000 words. And the English was just abysmal. (It's supposed to be going through a preliminary edit by a Chinese English teacher, but - after much previous experience in this field - I am far from sanguine that this will produce a significant improvement.)

I figure this would take me a good 10 or 12 hours just to read, without making any edits at all. To give it the thorough re-write it needs would take probably at least 70-80 hours, maybe more. Now, the lowest-paid work for foreigners out here, the bog-standard English teaching jobs which are often filled by inexperienced, unqualified, or non-native-speaker teachers, usually pulls in US$20-$25 per hour. And editing is a rather more skilled and intellectually intensive task than teaching, even if you do enjoy the luxury of being able to work at home. The pay for editing work is usually, therefore, just a little higher.

So, this publisher isn't even offering enough money for a cursory read-through. An appropriate editing fee - even at the prevailing rates in China, which are hardly generous - would be 10 times as much. I queried whether my contact had made a mistake (the Chinese get very confused over numbers, especially over orders of magnitude: there's a generally very low level of numeracy here, I think, and this is compounded by having two systems of representation - Western figures and Chinese characters - and a different method of dividing large numbers [by 10,000s rather than 1,000s and 1,000,000s]). Was the fee being offered in fact 20,000 RMB? Alas, no: the fee was indeed only 2,000 RMB. Take it or leave it. I'm leaving it.

The outrageous penny-pinching that goes on in Chinese businesses never ceases to dismay me. It is, alas, particularly extreme in educational institutions and educational publishing houses.

Allegedly, there are a bunch of native English speakers already working on this book series. I am sceptical. Sceptical, that is, as to whether they are "working". Nobody can afford to work for such pitifully low pay. I've seen this kind of thing before: unscrupulous English teachers (or people whose scruples deem it acceptable to abuse employers who are abusing you; I suppose there may be a valid point there - if they're really not paying you anything, why should you bother to do any work for them?) will just take the money and run. They'll probably run SpellCheck and GrammarCheck over it, and perhaps spend 2 or 3 hours (or, if they're uncommonly conscientious, 10 or 12 hours) doing basic fixes on the gaffes thus highlighted - but that's not nearly enough to iron out the horrific convolutions of academic Chinglish.

I have pointed out to the lady who contacted me from the publishing house that if they can't allocate an appropriate budget to editing & polishing, they'd do better to save their money and not try to hire foreign editors at all: they won't get any kind of proper job done for a pittance like that. It would be a better idea to pay more money to their Chinese editors, so that they might take a bit more trouble over the work.

No, it would be a better idea not to bother publishing this drivel in English at all. It's a pure vanity project. Even if they do manage to render it into half-way decent English, no-one is going to want to read it.

Things that make you go Ggggrrrrrrrrrrr.........