Have you seen offers on the web promising delivering within the day (or even the hour!) the best quality translation at 7c per word? If you haven’t it is not hard to find half a dozen of them online.
These sites claim immediate access to thousands of translators and hundreds of languages at a fraction of the cost that professional translators usually charge other professional translation service providers. For the experienced person that has performed translation services, this is simply an oxymoron. There are hundreds of reasons that we deal with on a daily basis that can disprove their claims. For simplicity sake, here are three of them.
Quality is best achieved by having the best fit translator work on the translation project and then by having another pair of trained eyes look over the translation and make necessary edits. When translations are rushed to the first available and lowest bid offer and when the review is short-circuited, how can quality be maintained? It is like depending on any person in your company who’s available to write your urgent marketing copy and then releasing it to print right after he or she is done writing it!
Translation services also often depend on a two-way communication channel between the translation team members and the translation consumer. Queries about the source and the correct terminology to be used have to be answered before the final product is delivered. This requires diligence and time. Not providing the time or the access to the people in question is like asking your PR agency to come up with a new brand for your company without access to your marketing group or clients.
Once translations are completed correctly, they become live assets that should be maintained and reused on future translation services. Don’t you want your translation quality to be consistent throughout all your translated text? Don’t you expect continuity in the translation style and terminology? Wouldn’t you like to get credit for already translated and paid for text? Translation management systems exist today to deal with these requirements, but they come at a cost that can be justified with better quality translations, reduced liability exposure and lower long term translation costs.
It is no surprise that one disgruntled user of these translation services wrote, “it is BAIT & SWITCH with translators who speak very little English and provide verbatim Google machine translations with no quality control”. What do you expect for 7c/word?!
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3 Comments
It is very sad that serious translation agencies have to constantly compete with this!
It is a good question to ask the client: What do you expect for 7 cents a word and overnight turn-around. Is that how you create your English materials? Probably not. What makes them think that English is different from any other language?
I’m a translator who recently started working with myGengo. I have been witnessing that quickly after you place an order, a translator will accept it and deliver it back to you within the time limit. I have translated legal documents for its clients, which myGengo had planned to give it a quality ‘defence’ by having reviewer to check it, but the clients were satisfied and accepted my translation without the reviewer — judged by the length of period between submitting time and acceptance time.
I have just gone through the first two paragraphs and found a match of what happens every day in China when competitors wrangle with each other, and the only thing that can be trusted is your own intelligence.
Also, in contemporary China, competitors have stopped making speech like this saying A is bad, B is ridiculous, C is swindling around, etc., and the speech maker is the only genuine high-quality service provider, because they had done enough in the past that it will just create a background message that some of their market share has been taken away and they are trying to get them back without self-improvement, instead, trying to work the magic of “积毁销骨” (ruin a person by using petty talks).
Traditional translation agencies still have reasons to survive, don’t worry about it, while fast turn-around ones exists for a reason — I have experience working for both the types, so I guess in this case, easy jobs that don’t need quries or discussion with the client have been taken away by the fast turn-around, leaving only highly technical documents to the traditional.
As a myGengo’s translator, I would like to tell you my different opinion about that article (as this kind of companies just caught up my attention, this is the only company I am currently working with; will tell more about them if I work with some other in the future).
Usually the level of difficulty of the document isn’t very high.
Even there needs to be any query, I can add it to the comment box.
Usually the time assigned is pretty enough.
About consistency, I believe the client knows the matter even from the moment they shift the choice of service.
Seven cents USA per word !!!! That’s even less than seven cents Euro !!!!! In my opinion, middlemen i.e.: translation agencies should be wiped away from the face of the earth !!! Why “agencies”???? It should be direct contact = Translator Client!!!! Since translation is mostly a Free-Lance job…..translators should have the right to have an officially recognized profession (which, alas, is not the case in Brazil) and have an officially registered firm (fortunately, in Brazil anyone can have a Registered Small Enterprise) so as to have proper documents (I mean: Factura Pro Forma or Bill for Collection or whatever fiscal document is required) and therefore do business directly with the client.