Are you a professional translator? 5 pitfalls to avoid when choosing the agency you work with
Translation would be a fascinating occupation and profession, a veritable linguistic art and a bridge between cultures, if the following five types of translation agencies could be avoided at all costs. Why? Because they turn what should be a bridge into a fragile rope ladder on which the hapless translator sways between polyglot aspirations and nightmares come true.
The quote chasers
These are the translation agencies that always manage to request the most complicated quotes possible – for example, translations of documents in a variety of exotic formats that take an enormous amount of time to understand. Will you include this lost time in your translation invoice? Surprisingly, there is always a problem, for reasons only God knows. So, in the end, you send the quote and they tell you they will review it. So you stay glued to your phone and computer for the rest of the day, waiting for them to confirm the job. This never happens, of course. And just like that, a working day has been wasted.
The rush-job fans
In second place are those translation agencies whose clients, for mysterious reasons, are always in a hurry. And by “in a hurry” we mean “we needed this translation yesterday”. Moreover, since everything is always extremely urgent, urgency becomes the new normal and the extra rush fee no longer applies. As for agencies specialized in the pharmaceutical industry, they surely have an agreement with their client companies to make their translators feel the need to take antidepressants and sedatives regularly. The same method applies to agencies working with the coffee and energy-drink industries. But what is everyone else’s excuse?
The small-job fanatics
If you specialize in legal translation, you are certainly familiar with this type of agency. We are talking about agencies that only send you jobs of 200 or 300 words. Let us suppose it is worth it even if you lose money at first (since short translations are not profitable), because maybe one day they will send you something bigger and more attractive. However, this never seems to happen.
The rewrite addicts
There are also agencies that ask you every day for urgent rewrites of absolutely dreadful translations. It is the perfect business plan! Knowing they would have to pay for an editor, they offer very low rates to incompetent translators or shamelessly turn to machine translation engines. Then they hire you to “check” these “translations”. The problem is that a proofreading or revision fee is only worth anything if it means putting a punctuation mark here and there and correcting a mistake – you guessed it – here and there. If it basically means rewriting the translation, it is a totally unproductive proposition.
The word-count shavers
Finally, we have the translation agencies that try to cheat you on word counts. This happens especially with agencies working in legal translation, with clients who pay a flat fee for each document. In such cases all the documents are between 100 and 200 words, yet the fee stays the same for all of them. Unless you quickly realize that these documents do not in fact contain 100 or 200 words but rather a few more, you feel downright petty negotiating for a few measly extra words.
If you are a client rather than a translator, see how a reliable agency works in 5 myths about translation agencies.