Musings from an overworked translator

What would happen if you passed away? August 31, 2009

I know this is a morbid topic, but there was a brief discussion on Zahlungspraxis this morning about an agency owner who owed a translator money – and had for the past 3 years (which I hope would never happen to me. I would be sending reminders 14 days after the bill was overdue…). It seems this person was a 1-woman show, which happens a lot in the translation industry. Someone wrote in and stated that the person in question had passed away in September 2008 and chances were slim that any creditors would receive payment from the estate.

This got me to thinking about death – and specifically about estate planning and managing your online profiles. Have you given any thought to what might happen if you were to suddenly pass away? I have given this some thought recently. It has nothing to do with the fact that I turned 40 over weekend. I started last year when my grandmother passed away and my immediate family members started talking about their wishes for their funerals, burial plans, etc. I now have a notarized Living Will and Medical Power of Attorney for my personal side of things, but what about my business and online contacts? Would your family and/or executor know where to find the bills that need to be paid?

Right now I have two outstanding invoices for work I subcontracted in the last month. If something were to happen to me I would hope my executor would find the bills and pay them, but I realized I haven’t shown her how my system works. I need to have her over and show her where to find the information she will need (and how to use my money management software). Do you have an executor? Do they know where to find your legal documents and access your financial accounts? Also, something that is never discussed by estate planners but is very important in our field: do they know who to inform if you pass away unexpectedly? Do they know how to access your e-mail and notify the various forums in which you are active?

You might want to consider asking a colleague you trust to be your “online executor.” That person should have the password to your e-mail accounts so they can set up an autoresponder to notify your colleagues and clients of your untimely death. If you have a blog and/or website, it isn’t a bad idea to give the password(s) to that person as well so that they can log on and post the bad news – and eventually shut the sites down.

Just a little food for thought. Take a few minutes this week and jot down who might need to be notified if you were in a car accident or something. Your friends and family will be very grateful you took the time to do this. It is a very stressful time and careful preparation makes things a lot easier for your loved ones.

Paypal is not a good solution for translators August 19, 2009

According to a recent blog post, Paypal adds new fees with no notice, Paypal quietly started charging new fees last month to its customers with personal accounts without notifying them of the change.  As the blog post states, “The new fees apply to payments marked as “Goods” or “Services.”  Such payments were previously free but will now be charged a fee of about 2.9% plus 30 cents.” This obviously applies to translators, since we provide services (and if you provide hard copies or files to clients one could conceivably argue we also provide goods). I have a personal Paypal account that I only use for eBay purchases and am the contact person for my translator association’s business account. I never received any notification of these changes for either account. According to a follow-up post published a week later in which Paypal tried to explain themselves and did not do a very good job, Paypal allegedly sent out an email “trumpeting how those with Premium or Business accounts no longer had to pay fees for personal transfers.” I can’t say I received this notice either…

The moral of this story is that nothing in life is free – and in light of our economic climate anything that used to be free will soon not be. When asked about banking and international business dealings, I never suggest using Paypal, because the fees can be so horrendous. For smaller amounts it isn’t that bad, but for large amounts it is a better idea to maintain a bank account in an alternate country and initiate occasional wire transfers. In my case, I maintain a bank account in Germany – but I am shopping around for a new alternative as well, because my German bank just started charging me a monthly fee of almost $10. Whatever I do decide to use, it certainly won’t be Paypal!

The Perfect Storm August 7, 2009

The term ‘”the perfect storm” has come to mean how circumstances and bad judgments come together to create havoc and death. In my case there was definite havoc – and most likely the death of any chance of ever working with this agency again. Let me tell you the story of my Perfect Storm this week. Heed my warnings, my friends, and make sure that this does not happen to you.

I took Monday off to recover from walking 60 miles in 3 days over the weekend in the Cleveland Breast Cancer 3-Day. It was an absolutely amazing experience. I ended up walking 55 miles out of 60, but then again no one said we had to walk all 60 miles. We had already done the hard work of fundraising (I raised $3,215) and raising awareness. It was a good decision on my part to take it easy on Day Two, and that and all the training I did over the last 24 weeks resulted in the fact that, apart from some blisters on the balls of my feet Sunday night, the blisters had subsided and I was feeling good on Monday. I had my auto-responder on for my e-mail accounts, but I did not think anything of it when the phone rang at around 5:30 p.m.

It was a project manager from an agency that I have long admired and never worked with before asking if I could translate a little over 7,000 words of real estate/business by Thursday. I told her no and explained that I was out of the office that day. She then somehow talked me into accepting it for delivery on Friday. I gave her my backup e-mail to view the file, because I did not have my work computer on, which also complicated things. I knew things were going to be tight, but she assured me there were plenty of reference materials and glossaries so I accepted.

I already had two smaller jobs lined up for Tuesday and Wednesday from the week before for two of my favorite agencies, one medical report and some legal documents. I figured I could start working on the job on Wednesday and would be in good shape by Friday.

My first inkling that things were about to go south was when I tried to OCR the large PDF files so that I could import them into a TM and leverage them for the translation. I don’t know why, but ABBYY FineReader had problems with the 80-page files. The consistent capital letters in the headers came out a garbled mess of capital and lower case letters. Worst of all, the program was dropping “i” and “l” in the middle of some words (like financial) for absolutely no reason while duplicating them perfectly in others. I spent an exorbitant amount of time fighting with the OCR and then gave up and saved them without spellchecking. Then I tried to align them in WinAlign… and soon gave up.

I also copied out my portion of the 175-page document and discovered there was a discrepancy, so I wrote the project manager to ask why the word count was 3,000 words off and specified exactly where I understood I was to start and end. It turns out the page numbers she was referring to were in the FOOTERS of the document and not the page numbers in Word itself, but that is just indicative of the communication problems we had from start to finish.

At that point the project manager called me to ask how things were going. When I asked how much of the reference material was repeated in my file she told me “none.” Oh crap. I felt the bottom of my stomach drop and started getting a panicked feeling. I expressed my panic to her at that point, because it was now Thursday morning and I was just getting started on the file. I asked her to find someone else for the remaining 3,000 words, but she never told me that she had. She asked me to deliver what I had finished in the morning and let her know if I could do more. I ended up translating 4,500 words yesterday (Thursday) and delivered them this morning. I then got back to work and translated 700 words this morning when she called to confirm delivery and told me to stop.

I realize that this was not my finest moment and tried to apologize and explain that the job was characterized by lots of miscommunication on both sides. I understand my actions put her in a bind, and I do not fault her for the fact that I kept translating. I do, however, wish she had told me she had indeed found someone else to take a portion of it instead of saying “stick to the original plan,” which indicated to me that I had to translate the entire 7,000 words. I probably would have slept a lot better last night, for instance.

So, kids, if your gut tells you to say no to a project, by all means say NO and do not let the agency talk you into accepting it. You will only be hurting yourself and the agency. And if you truly screw up like this, accept any accommodations the client suggests without complaining, in this case billing for a lower word count than you submitted. I screwed up and have to pay the consequences. It happens to the best of us.

ProZ.com implements Turn-key Translation Service July 20, 2009

I can’t get upset about anything ProZ.com does. I am not a paying member, nor do I ever plan on becoming one. I steer clear of Henry D. and the ProZ.com staff and booth at the ATA conference every year (you can tell they are with ProZ.com because they all wear black bow ties and black suits). I can honestly say that I have never respected ProZ. I feel it has driven translation prices into the ground and encouraged a bottom feeder mentality among translators and clients alike. I never understood the point of bidding on jobs, because jobs almost always go to the lowest bidder and not to the most qualified. ProZ.com’s founder Henry is also known for making up lots of rules as he goes (see I’ve got a rule for that). Locking discussions on the forums is another trick the ProZ.com staff is good at.

The latest brouhaha is about its turn-key translation services, in which ProZ.com is functioning as an agency. As they claim, “[t]urn-key translation offers an easy way to get quick translations done via the world’s largest network of professional translators… The system automatically handles routing the work to the most suitable translators, delivering the completed work back to you, and paying the service providers.” The system does not calculate any taxes and many translators are questioning prices, invoicing, etc. Kevin Lossner is doing a better job following this issue than I am. You can read all about it here. ProZ.com then made it worse by locking a discussion on the service and then locking a follow-up discussion because it was “against policy” to start another discussion after the initial discussion has been locked. Sounds to me like the ProZ.com staff gathered up their toys and went home to play by themselves.

What I want to know is why do translators continue to put up with the abuse from ProZ.com? If you are unhappy with their policies, stop paying to be members. It’s as simple as that.

P.S. If you liked Rules, Rules, Rules you might also enjoy PointZ, PointZ, PointZ.

Das gehört nicht zum guten Ton July 15, 2009

I am so livid right now that I can’t see straight! I started work an hour later than I usually do, because yesterday was such a grueling day. I had delivered a medical report in the morning, then spent the next six hours translating 3,904 words about diarrhea medication, while also making my 2 PM deadline for a big medical report that I had sent to a proofreader. I took a couple hours off to take my dog to the dog park and then came back and finished two short proofreading jobs, calling it a night around 10:30 PM.

I open my e-mail to find an e-mail that was sent from an agency in Munich at 5 AM my time that says “Bitte QS Machen! Bitte bestätigen Sie!” with the PO pasted on the bottom. I assumed it was in regards to the short proofreading job I delivered to them last night and responded that I had sent the file last night at 9:43 PM. A little further down in my inbox were two e-mails – one at 8:05 AM and one at 10:39 AM – stating “Wo bleibt die QS?” I scrolled back to the original e-mail and saw that it was a brand-new job that was due at 12 PM German time – 6 AM my time. At that point I got really upset and wrote the client a rather irate e-mail asking them to not contact me anymore. Normally I am calm and professional, but it’s hard to stay that way when you are being yelled at on e-mail.

I had recently started working with the client again, after almost 6 or 7 years of not hearing from them. I had worked with the agency back when I lived in Germany, when it was a one-woman show. She would call and ask me if I was available, and since I usually was we had a nice working relationship. The agency has grown a bit, and I have a feeling the PMs are overworked – and perhaps not native Germans. That still doesn’t excuse the lack of etiquette in the request, because I am not a native German and I can compose polite e-mails when I’m not really upset.

In the meantime the PM has written back apologizing because she hadn’t considered the time difference, but it’s too late. I don’t need a client who can’t be pleasant on e-mail. “Bitte QS Machen!” is not the way to ask a translator to accept a proofreading job from you.

For those of you non-Germans who are wondering about the title of this post, zum guten Ton gehören basically means “to be in good form” or “follow the rules of social etiquette.” Ton can also mean tone, and I certainly didn’t like the tone of her e-mail job request!