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No Charge for Reps and 100% Matches?!?!?
I have been getting this line or similar lines for a couple of months now:
"...Unfortunately, pressure to lower prices is big and ever growing. One measure to - on one hand - please the customer and respond to his claims of an economic translation (maintaining high quality standards), without - on the other hand - doing excessive harm to our and the translators´ interests is not to charge internal repetitions and 100% matches. Both are hardly any additional work for the translator (this changes, obviously, for the proofreader), as it is "simply" click on "translate to fuzzy"."
I don't agree in practice or in principle with such thoughts and I sent the outsourcer a copy of the Trados Marketing Tipsheet on Price Leveraging and the 30-60-100 rule when I replied:
You refer to our negotiations for a "Siemens project." As I recall it was supposed to be a big project with plenty of volume and support. That project never materialized back in February. Negotiations and agreements made for a specific project apply to that project only and expire with project completion, but if the project never materializes any such specific negotiations become moot--they, too, expire. Besides, no work came thru from [agency name redacted] since that time. This is the first job sent.
No one, however, should require the use of expensive software and profit from the benefits for leveraging advantages with a customer without remunerating the translator for the translator's investment. That's almost tantamount to commissioning a printed color advert and then not paying for the coloration on the claim that the publisher profited by advertising for you. That is unethical.
Moreover, every translator knows that simply taking a log analysis log and accepting it to be Scriptural truth and accurate at the very least, naïve. Many times experience has shown that even so-called 100% matches and repetitions require checking and editing. If this is not done and there someone notes an inconsistency or a so-called mistake, who gets blamed? The translator.
Even you you cover yourself by imposing upon the translator the actual onus of quality assurance checks (please see the controversial wording of p. 2 of the EuroText job order form), you are still asking for services for which you task the translator but may not be willing to pay.
NO EUROPEAN professional translators organization condones a simple no-charge for 100% or repetitions; in fact, several professional organizations have published statements on specifically that question and have condemned it as bastardizing the translating profession. A simple web search will clearly support that statement.
While there may be pressure to lower prices there is also the marketing advantage of forming relationships and entering into honest dialogue with customers. If they want a cheap translation, there's Asia and they can have a translation that sounds like it's been translated by a Chinese or an Indian. If the customer thinks that such translations sell products or services, well, it's best not to do business with them because they'll soon be bankrupt. It's common sense. Furthermore, translators cannot be made to bear the burden of price-cutting or cut-throat competition; companies may settle to make €1 or €0.10 per 100 words; the fact remains that the translator has little or nothing to do with that and his/her expenses are not on a sliding scale based on what outsourcers negotiate or how they market their product to customers.
Moreover, it's not the Chinese and the Indians who are buying American and European products...they are selling the products to the US and to Europe! And the markets that are selling technology to the Chinese and to the Indians are very high-tech industries (medical imaging, aircraft, high-precision instruments, etc.) Either way, idiomatic, consistent translations are produced only by professional technical translators, and English continues to be the language of commerce.
Furthermore, if you have a TM that is created with Translator's Workbench and require a new project to be done in TagEditor using that Trados TW dbase, the analysis will show 100% matches but TagEditor will require editing to insert the tags. What is the solution to that?
While I do appreciate your competition problems, it would be unfair to make arrangements with one customer that cannot be made and are not made for other customers in the EU territory. In future, unless specifically negotiated for larger volume or ongoing project work, however, my rate for 100% and for repetition is and continues to be a minimum of € 0.02 per word or 25% of the word rate, whichever is higher.
This practice of requiring a specific software that is one of the most costly and problematic on the market, and then turning around and refusing to pay for what even Trados recommends in it's 30-60-100 rule, has got to stop.
Can anyone share some thoughts on this and perhaps provide some links to statements by professional organizations on the subject?
Thanks very much!
Harold
[Editado por Harold Vadney el día jueves, 22 de abril de 2010 13:26]
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