When did I become a paying ProZ member? February 22, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation Sites.3 comments
I googled “Dear Client” today and clicked on the third hit, which was the ProZ Blue Board listing. I learned something very interesting while submitting my non-payment report to the Blue Board. Apparently, unbeknownst to me, I somehow became a paying member of ProZ in December 2011. This is news to me. I never authorized a payment to them. Consider me gobsmacked. They must be really desperate to inflate their member numbers if they are adding members without receiving payment from those said members. Anyone care to offer any insight because I would never knowingly become a paid member.
Pipe dreams January 30, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.8 comments
I received the following request in my e-mail this morning:
Hallo liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,
bitte prüfen Sie sehr kritisch, ob die angehängten Text (nur Beispieldateien zur Ansicht) in Ihrem Fachgebiet liegen und ob Sie die Übersetzung (oder Teile) bis zum genannten Termin übernehmen könnten.
Sprache: GB (UK)
Umfang: ca. 49.862 Wörter / ca. 294 Seiten (15 Dateien)
Status: Angebot (nicht mit der Übersetzung beginnen)
Termin: 13.02.12, bis 10.00 Uhr (Teillieferungen vorab)
Wie viel Volumen könnten Sie von dieser Übersetzung übernehmen, sofern Sie Zeit und Interesse haben?
Das Angebot wird für den Kunden bis Dienstag, 31.01.12, bis 15.00 Uhr befristet. Wenn wir den Auftrag vom Kunden erhalten, benötigen wir die Übersetzung zum oben genannten Termin. Bei Beauftragung erhalten Sie alle relevanten Daten für die Bearbeitung.
Bitte behandeln Sie die Daten vertraulich.
For those of you who don’t speak German the agency basically needs translators to work on a 50,000 word translation by tomorrow at 3 p.m. German time. Oh, and they need it in UK English but sent it to me anyway. Desperate times call for desperate measures I guess. Desperate cattle calls like this only make me want to NOT work with agencies like this!
Yeah, good luck with that…
Update: Oh, that’s embarrassing. I am not usually up at 7:30 a.m., which is when I read this. I hadn’t had any coffee and actually went back to bed for an hour after posting this. Yes, the deadline is the 13th. I missed it in my sleep-deprived haze. Oops. Thanks to everyone for pointing it out. Guess I am human and make mistakes. 
Unprofessionalism in the industry January 18, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.comments closed
I received the following e-mail today and have to say I am speechless at the behavior of this “freelance translator.” I’ve heard of some unethical and unprofessional behavior on the part of colleagues in the past (telling a fellow translator to “go suck a lemon” is one example that comes to mind). But this just crosses the line and is all kinds of wrong. If I were to ever act like this I would never be successful. The industry is a small one. People talk to one another. I don’t know where the entitlement against test translations comes from. I see nothing wrong with a test translation to prove to a potential new client what you can do.
As you might remember from our previous correspondence, I work as a project manager at an agency in England as well as a freelancer. I have an issue I’d love to see in your blog, to get other freelancers’ takes on this:
About a month ago one of my project management colleagues sent an e-mail to translators asking for interested freelancers to choose any of the different test translations attached (different areas of specialisation) and submit them along with their CVs and rates if they wished to be added to our new database (our old one is being scrapped because it and the information in it are out of date). One translator replied with just two words: Fuck off [emphasis mine].
When our manager wrote him back to make sure the aggression wasn’t about a non-payment issue or some other valid grievance, he wrote back a long rant about how our “Wal*Mart approach” to translation was killing the industry and how he, as a qualified professional, should not be subjected to test translations.
First, I take offense to the Wal*Mart comment. I know that some agencies have automated systems and send around mass e-mails about potential jobs that never seem to come to fruition (and as a freelancer I send those messages straight to the “Deleted” folder), but we don’t. We are seven project managers and four in-house translators, we try our best not to bother freelancers until we know a job is confirmed, and we send out availability requests to ONE translator at a time unless there are urgent time constraints that make that impossible. Every job we handle is proofread or checked in some way by us ourselves, not just sent on without a second thought for quality. We are not some big corporate machine churning out high word counts at low rates with no thought to the translators or the individual projects. We never tell translators what to charge, although sometimes we may give fair warning if a translator’s rates are so high that they might not see much work from us (not in a threatening way, just as a fact in case they were counting on getting a lot of work from us). We try to keep to reasonable deadlines where possible.
Second, there are benefits that agencies bring to the industry. As an agency, we invest quite a bit of money into our marketing, which means freelancers don’t have to. We handle the administrative side of the projects, asking for reference materials and specific instructions beforehand so that freelancers get all of the information in one e-mail at the beginning of the job. We act as a buffer between difficult clients and hardworking professionals. We do the face-to-face contact to maintain good working relationships with clients, something that many freelancers are happy to avoid. These are some of the benefits that people like this translator should remember before being so rude and unprofessional. If he doesn’t want to work with us, or any other agency, that’s fine; he is well within his rights to ask us never to contact him again. But there’s no need to be so aggressive just because he has an overinflated sense of self-worth.
I have never been so shocked in my life at the sheer unprofessionalism. If you are running your own business, why sabotage it by offending complete strangers? Other freelancers who balked at the request for test translations (but were professional about it) were told they could send samples of their previous work if they preferred. If neither of those options suited them, we wish them all the best but have to respectfully pass them up when we look for translators to send work to. We just want an idea of the quality the translators are providing. As you know, our industry is not very well regulated and potentially anybody can walk around claiming to be a translator, without the quality or professional training/experience to back it up. Even a client you don’t want should be treated with professionalism at the very least. That sort of aggression is uncalled for, and not only does it mean that he will never be offered any work from us (OK, fine, clearly he didn’t want it in the first place) but word-of-mouth may well end up affecting his reputation and potentially have an impact on work from other clients. I can tell you now that after that e-mail he went straight onto our black list and no matter how desperate we get, that translator will never see an offer from us. We also warned a few of our colleagues outside of the company about him.
Is there ever a point where you and your readers would consider that level of rudeness and unprofessionalism to be acceptable or, at the very least, understandable? One colleague of mine said she might consider it understandable if we owed him money and were giving him the run-around about it, but that was definitely not the case here, and we even went out of our way to check that we hadn’t inadvertently forgotten to pay an invoice somehow.
This reader is not alone. As one of my colleagues (who is the owner of a small boutique agency) stated so eloquently on Facebook the other day in frustration because one of their favorite translators is also severely lacking in social graces:
Rant: Why are so many of the best and most talented translators complete and utter sociopaths?
The post generated 74 comments. My favorite comment in the thread was:
I get so excited when I can exclaim to one of our project managers that so-and-so is such a pleasure to work with. I wish that more translators would realize that that small thing can really move them way up the list. Pleasant or miscreant? Twelve e-mail exchanges or two? Hmmm..
Note: the same person wrote both comments!
So, fellow translators, what say you? Would you ever treat an agency this poorly? I don’t understand why some colleagues are hell-bent on viewing “agencies” as the “enemy.” Obviously not all agencies are alike. This agency is a smaller, more personal agency like the ones I prefer to deal with. I have never used this kind of language in correspondence – even towards the non-paying agency I like to call Dear Client:. I thought it, but I certainly never wrote it down and sent it. So, as the reader asks, “Is there ever a point where you and your readers would consider that level of rudeness and unprofessionalism to be acceptable or, at the very least, understandable?”
Beware the Blue Board January 11, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation Sites.comments closed
Kevin at Translation Tribulations has brought to light more questionable behavior at Proz.com in a post entitled “How low can ProZ go?“. I wanted to post it here in case some of you don’t read his blog (and if you don’t, why not? It’s very informative!). Apparently ProZ is supporting corruption in the Blue Board ratings by banning certain posts for arbitrary reasons. The person making the accusation illustrates her argument by presenting her recent history with a slow payer and her attempt to post a negative rating. It gives me pause to wonder just how accurate the Blue Board is. I’m glad I rely on Payment Practices, Zahlungspraxis and WPPF (WorldPaymentPracticesFree) over the Blue Board. Payment Practices does not censor ratings unless libelous claims are made. Rating are based on “just the facts.” Apparently the ratings on the Blue Board should be taken with a grain of salt. Definitely give Kevin’s post a read.
All play and no work makes Jill a grumpy, lazy person January 11, 2012
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices.comments closed
I preach on here about enjoying the lulls, but I am in the middle of a month-long lull and am now totally over it. After working full-time at a law firm for 3 weeks (end date was Dec. 4) and translating a large medical job at night (delivered on Dec. 2nd) I was ready for a break. I enjoyed the run-up to the holidays, because for the first time in a long time I was able to get my shopping done, relax and read some books. I translated probably 4 or 5 texts in December, all fairly small (under 1000 words). Thanks heavens for my financial cushion or I would be seriously sweating bullets.
Don’t get me wrong – I thoroughly enjoyed the holidays with my family and attending holiday events like the Messiah Sing. But I’m ready to get back to it! In the past work has picked up again fairly quickly after the holidays, but my lull just keeps on yawning on. My finances are ready for the tax accountant, my office is organized, and my files are ready for 2012.
I had a business meeting yesterday with a potential new client. It promises to be quite challenging and quite lucrative, but I will most likely have to give up working from home. I’m not sure how I feel about the idea, but at this point I might just be ready for a change. In any event, I am sick and tired of not having any work. There’s only so much lying around I can do without going absolutely stir crazy and getting a wee bit depressed. Come on, Universe…
Advice for a new translator on job hunting December 6, 2011
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Translation.comments closed
I received an interesting comment from Martha, a new translator. I felt this was important enough that it shouldn’t be buried on a page no one will see. Martha has agreed to my posting it here for everyone to comment on. I particularly hope that some of my former students will share their insights (May, Justin, Emily, etc.) since they broke into the market more recently and are busy in their own rights.
I have to say that as a new translator, I’ve read these ideas to keep rates standard 100 times but find it very difficult to find any work at all if I can’t show I have much experience in any field yet. Does anyone have a good strategy of how to hunt for potential jobs (besides proZ.com)? I thought working for one agency and showing them that I could complete a quality translation would be an effective way to start and yet I finished a large project for my first employer and am now questioning whether I’ll be paid a dime for it or anything I’ve done since. Other translation agencies do not seem to be interested once they find out I have limited knowledge of a trial version of a CAT tool and have only offered small and sporadic work so I’m starting to feel overwhelmed. Do you seasoned translators have any suggestions?
Here are ten tips from me to get started. I hope others can share what worked for them.
1. Start marketing yourself to as many translation agencies and/or direct clients as you can. They won’t know you are available if they don’t know you exist. I wrote a guest blog post at Naked Translations explaining how I broke into the U.S. market when I moved back from Germany in 2001. Think about what makes you stand out from all the other translators out there looking for clients and highlight it to new clients.
2. Get active on the local, national and international levels. I was the president of the Northeast Ohio Translators Association for eight years. Not only was I the face of NOTA to local and regional businesses, I established good relations with my NOTA members (both agencies and freelancers) and kept urging my members to act professional at all times. I also highly recommend attending some of the smaller ATA regional conferences that are more specialized in the fields you work in or would like to work in. At the national and international level I attend (and present at) the ATA conference every year, am active on various translation listservs in the U.S. and Germany (word of mouth and referrals from colleagues who are too busy are VERY helpful – both when you are starting out and once you are established and you have a lull), maintain this blog, and use social media like Twitter, XING and LinkedIn. I have also written articles for our local newsletter (the NOTA BENE) and the ATA Chronicle. People actually do remember them years later.
3. Have you read Corinne McKay’s book, How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator, or Judy and Dagmar Jenner’s The Entrepreneurial Linguist yet? Both offer valuable advice for new and experienced translators alike.
4. Use a full version of your CAT tool – not a trial version. There are some excellent tools out there like Fluency or OmegaT that do not cost an arm and a leg (in fact, OmegaT is free!). Once you start earning more money you can consider branching out and purchasing one of the more expensive translation environment tools (if you feel you need to). This is where I feel sites like Proz.com can come in handy, because they occasionally offer group buys that make a software like MemoQ more affordable.
5. Stay strong on price. I just announced to my favorite client that I was raising my word rate by $0.01, and they were okay with it. Quality agencies are willing to pay for quality work. Don’t let yourself be beaten down by the bottom feeders. Have you spent any time on No Peanuts! for Translators? They offer some convincing arguments you can use when you are pressured by a lower paying agency.
6. Be sure to check out the agencies on non-payment sites like Payment Practices, Translator-Client Review, the ProZ.com Blue Board and Translatorscafe’s Hall of Shame. Get on non-payment listservs like WPPF and Zahlungspraxis (in German). This ensures you won’t be taken in by unscrupulous non-payers who prey on (desperate/less-informed) translators.
7. Take some college courses to expand your knowledge and experience in the field you are interested in and let potential clients know you have taken them. You don’t need to get a degree, but it shows you are interested in becoming a better translator. For example, Kent State University offers classes that they consider their core requirements (Translation Theory, Documents in Multilingual Contexts, Terminology and Computer Applications, and hands-on translation courses in the practice of translation, sci-tech-med, legal-commercial and literary-cultural).
8. Consider working on holidays, weekends and during the professional conferences (and advertising that fact) until you establish yourself. Many agencies scramble to find translators when their established translators are not available, and if you do a good job and impress them they will come back.
9. Be prepared to work hard. It takes about a year to establish yourself. Consider taking on a part-time job until you start becoming busier.
10. Most importantly, keep your existing clients very happy with quality work (hire a proofreader if you have to) and deliver quickly (if not early).
Non-payer warning: Ecole USA November 30, 2011
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Scam alert.comments closed
A word of warning against a notorious non-payer (there are quite a few – this one is my personal cross to bear…)
The company operates under the names EGS / Ecole USA / ecoleusa.com / Ecole Global Solutions. I like to call them Dear Client:. They don’t pay their bills. My unpaid invoice for $59.08 is 7 months overdue. Payment was due on April 11, 2011. They have given me nothing but excuses every time I contact them. You can read their excuses for why they can’t afford to pay a $59.08 invoice here, here and here. Their comment about there being a “global crisis around the world” had me rolling on the floor laughing. That’s good stuff! They are banned from posting jobs on Proz.com, but that doesn’t mean they won’t contact you directly. My hope is that translators will google them after being contacted and see this blog post as one of their hits.
I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this one unpaid invoice – my very first non-payment – four blog posts (not including this one). 
Luckily I never let the amount get too large. When they contacted me in July with another small job I said no because they hadn’t paid my first invoice. It is more of an irritation than it is a hardship, because I was so proud that I had never been stiffed on a job in 16 years. I’ll probably just write the invoice off as a loss when I do my taxes next April (when it will be a year overdue). But who knows what will happen – maybe they will google themselves and see this post and pay me And maybe tomorrow pigs will fly…
Update: this blog post is the fourth hit when you google “Ecole USA”. I’ve succeeded!
Agencies and their online “time saving” sites November 27, 2011
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Random musings.comments closed
It is 5 PM on a Sunday. I have a 500 word press release that is due tomorrow morning. I unfortunately won’t be delivering it, because I have been locked out of my agency’s website. I input an incorrect password three times and am now locked out for 24 hours. And since it is Sunday, it is a small client, and the client is in Germany, they don’t have tech support working today. I admit that I hold most of the blame in this, because I waited until Sunday night to translate the document. However, why do agencies believe that we will remember all the login information for their sites? I have about 30 clients. Those clients who have their own websites all have assigned me a unique user name and password. It’s enough to drive anyone truly batty. I have learned my lesson and have now started a master list on my hard drive of all the sites and the respective user names and passwords, but I really shouldn’t have to do this, should I? Oh, did I mention that the site only works with Internet Explorer, which is a browser I never use and therefore don’t have a password management tool like LastPass installed on it? It would have been much easier for this client to just attach the file to the e-mail last week… Maybe if I’m lucky they will be able to send me the file at 2 a.m. when they get into the office. After all, sleep is overrated and I guess I don’t need a good night’s sleep to function at the law firm tomorrow…
Update: the client sent me the files last night and I woke up at 6:30 to translate it. The file is now delivered, and I won’t be billing for it. I hate when I screw up like this, but luckily it doesn’t happen that often…
P.S.: I already use LastPass, but it is an add-on in Firefox. I will be looking into a standalone version.
Theft at conferences November 10, 2011
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in ATA, Business practices, Random musings.comments closed
This post deals with several recent experiences I learned about that occurred at the latest ATA conference, but it can apply to conferences in general. When people are at a conference they tend to act as if they are in a bubble and nothing bad can happen. This is not the case. One should behave at a conference in the same way as one would in a foreign country or even at home – with some caution.
One member of the Business Practices listserv was furious when her computer bag was stolen out of the room where the listserv was holding a happy hour. She had placed it on the floor next to the bartender station. After reporting the theft to hotel security, they found it 15 minutes later “on the 3rd floor, in an empty closed room, with all the zippers opened, conference materials left alone but [the] laptop was gone.” She was then upset with the way the hotel handled the situation because they would not give her the incident report because it was “confidential Marriott property,” claimed they did not have security cameras (although they initially told her they would check the cameras) and did not reported the incident to the police. She felt the Marriott was covering the incident up and asked people to contact her if they saw any suspicious activity.
OK, first of all, shame on her for leaving her bag unattended. I always remind the first-time conference attendees to be aware of their valuables and to look back when they leave their seat, room, etc. to make sure they have not left anything behind. I never let my laptop or purse out of my sight – or in fact out of my hands or off my shoulder. I would never in a million years leave it unattended next to a bartender station or anywhere else. The fact is that hotels in general are public locations, and anyone can come in off the street and blend into the crowd. Hotels warn theirs guests to protect valuables from hotel thieves by using the room safe and hiding expensive clothes under casual clothes. Why wouldn’t one think that an open room in a hotel bar would be fair game to thieves? Secondly, the hotel has a right to be skeptical of claims of theft, no matter how indignant the guest is. According to an online article entitled Protecting Valuables From Hotel Thieves, “[i]tems reported stolen from hotel rooms frequently turn up in the guest’s possession. And there is the not-uncommon possibility that the guest’s claim may be fraudulent.” I’m sure this was not the case here, but it helps to put yourself in the hotel’s shoes.
And may I remind my fellow conference attendees once again not to wear their conference name badges outside the hotel?!?! I can’t tell you how many people I saw walking outside or in the adjacent shopping malls wearing their conference name badges. Luckily the neighborhood was safe (unlike the neighborhood in Atlanta in 2002). If you are wearing your conference badge outside the hotel you might as well be carrying a sign saying “Hey, I’m a tourist. Please feel free to rob me.”
Finally, I was very upset to hear that one of our members had all her resumes, business cards and the plastic stand deliberately stolen/removed from the German table in the Job Marketplace. She went to get a copy of her resume for a potential client on Friday late afternoon or early evening, and it was nowhere to be found. How could someone do such a thing to a colleague? No matter how you feel about a person, you don’t do something like this and mess with their ability to work. I find this behavior childish and unprofessional. Whoever did this, shame on you!
I would like to conclude by saying that the ATA staff does a great job organizing these conferences for us, but one should never expect them to police the attendees’ behavior. It is up to us to act professional and be mindful of our surroundings.
Update on Dear Client: October 24, 2011
Posted by Jill (@bonnjill) in Business practices, Random musings.comments closed
Long time no hear! I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last post. I have been so overwhelmed with work that I haven’t done anything but work. I haven’t even gone out very much since I’ve gotten back.
I hadn’t even left Germany yet and had a large project lined up for when I returned – 78 pages of legal documents. Then I was in the airport in Newark on my layover and had two additional job requests from my favorite client – one I accepted and one I turned down. And the next day I had one of my other clients start bombarding me with medical reports. I’ve translated 26,982 words in the last two weeks and have about 1600 to go before leaving for the ATA conference tomorrow. I haven’t even had my resumes printed out or gone over my first-time attendees presentation with Ted Wozniak yet. So you’ll hopefully understand why I haven’t written a blog post or decided not to organize a blogger’s lunch this time around.
One thing I have managed to do is keep track of my finances. The invoice to my Dear Client: is now 6 months overdue. It really is ridiculous that this company can’t manage to squeeze out a measly $60 in 6 months… Anyway, here is the response to the scathing e-mail I wrote the accounting department promising to mention them and the non-payment to everyone I spoke with at the ATA Conference. I thought you all might get a kick out of the response. There may be a global crisis around the world, but none of my other clients see to be feeling the effects. And they are paying much larger invoices!
Dear Jill,
Please, accept our apologies for the delay.
As you know, there is a global crisis around the world, and we are not out of it.
Besides that, this company has been restructured, and I´m the new person in charge of the accounting department.I´m taking care of your issue, and I´m trying to get a payment authorization for Friday November 4th. Payments are going out on Fridays, and there are scheduled from one week to another. So, I´ll do my best to include yours by next payment series.
Our major customers are also delaying payments.
Nevertheless, we are working hard in order to distribute our resources among all our collaborators with maximum priority.
We understand this situation is difficult for you as well, but we are sharing what we have.
I hope you can understand the situation and we´ll try to resolve this soon and amicably.
Regards,
Lic. Bárbara Tessey
Accounting Department
ECOLE BA S.R.L.
