Musings from an overworked translator

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!

Not all clients are created equal July 14, 2009

Maybe I’ve been spoiled by my wonderful clients, but I am always surprised when a less-than-wonderful client contacts me. Maybe I reacted differently than I usually would because I had just finished translating 3,904 words in six hours and was looking forward to some time off, but I like to think I would have reacted in the exact same way on any normal day. A client with whom I have never worked before called me at 5:15 p.m., which isn’t that unusual, about a potential job that they were looking to fill. I agreed to check my e-mail, take a look and get back to her. If I had heard the name clearly and not assumed it was a call from the client to whom I had just delivered the job, I probably would have told her I was busy. I was surprised to see it was from this other agency (BTW, why do all translation agencies have names that start with Tech, Trans or Lingo – and why can’t project managers speak slowly and enunciate their words on the phone?). Anyway, I received the following e-mail with four PDF attachments:

We have a new potential order that we need a translator for. This will be from German to English, and the turn around time will be for 7-16-09. I need a word count to determine the price for our client, please let me know as soon as possible.  Thank you.

Do you see what irritated me? Trying to be diplomatic, I wrote back stating that she had not specified a deadline when we spoke on the phone, I was already booked for tomorrow, and I would need at least two days for the job. I then not so subtly (or I guess subtly because she missed it) referred her to ABBYY FineReader or PDF Transformer and Practicount to determine the word count, but estimated the files to be around 3,300 words. What can I say? I was feeling generous…

She responded with “Let me see if I can get an extension, but in the meantime if you can provide a word count that would be great.  Thank you.”

Um, how can I put this diplomatically? Dear clients, it is not your freelance translators’ job to do the word counts or other project manager duties for you. If you want us to do word counts you should offer/expect to compensate us for our time. Also, if you want Word files back it would be very much appreciated if you could OCR the files yourself and send source Word files to us. Otherwise we reserve the right to charge you a surcharge.

As one colleague put it so eloquently on Twitter: “PDF xl8 – plus 20%. Doing her job counting? Your minimum fee. :)”

Translators should read Kevin’s eHow article on How to Profit from PDF Translation to get some good ideas on how to negotiate rates that involve PDFs. I personally prefer to OCR the files myself, because then I know what the source document looks like and can fix any potential incorrectly scanned words. If you don’t know how to OCR files and are attending the upcoming ATA conference, I invite you to attend Tuomas Kostiainen and my presentation, “Making Portable Document Formats (PDF) work for you” on Saturday, 10/31/09, from 9:00-10:30 a.m.

In the meantime I had accepted another job from another long-standing client and was no longer available for the rest of the week. I then politely let her know she should find another translator. I am so glad that I did not spend time OCRing the files and then running them through Practicount, because that would have been an uncompensated waste of my time.