Price as Signature: Advice to New Translators and Agencies from India by Pritam Bhattacharyya

Joy and Concern:

I started my career in the domain of translation as a linguist (Bengali / Sylheti) and then started an agency while being based in India (1999). In this one decade, I had observed with joy how many talented people in India joined the area of translation and localization and excelled as well. It was wonderful to associate with those individuls and I learnt a lot from them. Many young men and women of this group enriched the marketplace with knowledge, know-how, service and optimization of cost.

Optimization of cost is one thing and journey to rock bottom is another thing. For a few years, while observing posts by Indian agencies and quotes by Indian translators, I thought of writing this article, which I am sure, is not the most politically correct thing to do. However, as I remain essentially a linguist, a worker with words and that too from India, I think it is my duty to bring forth some of my ideas in front of this audience: linguists and agencies of India who have entered the area recently or those who are going to enter anytime soon. I have divided the advice into two parts, one for Linguists and one for Agencies.

For Linguists:

The world respects those who respect themselves: If you quote a rate which is abysmally low, three things are happening: first, it tells that you dont respect your work, secondly, you also send a message that you dont have work and third and most important: truly committed people and agencies will avoid you and you have marked yourself as a low-cost factory by your own doing. Hence, you are destroying the very potential that people may consider you for hi-value work. Dont kill the fulture for today.

To make the choice: part-time vis-a-vis Career: If you are interested in this domain as a career, please do announce so at the begining. If you send signals at the begining that you are kind of a part-timer — in spite of all your talents — valuable customers, long time suppliers and collagues would avoid you. It will be very tough to make a career once your reputation as a part-timer is established.

The price quote by you is your signature: Just like you cannot change your signature off and on, without getting many accesses blocked or raising suspicion, the price quoted by you is the siganture of you in the marketplace. Just as you are careful with your signature, be careful with the price quoted. Google does not forget, even if you and your prospects forget!

The price quoted by you is your integrity: With the emerging machine translation technologies, an unreasonably low price even raises the deepest suspicion that you be substituting human interface (i.e. you) by a machine interface.

The price quoted also indicates your investment: An abysmally low rate also means that your investment in your career — monetary and non-monetary is very low and you have no idea of market forces. You are trying to leverage over one of the components only — cost — and in an open and quite unregulated market, coupled with the distribution system of the Internet will soon find it out. And will label you as a low-end, low-investment, low-committment category. This means: low respect, low trust and low long term low value for you.

For Agencies

You are a value aggregator and facilitator: An agency becomes a low-cost post office or worse, mail switcher if its only parameter is to get the lowest cost translator. On the downchain, you are going to surround yourself with low-value, part-timers only and on the upchain, you are cutting yourself from the hi-value, high-committed clients. No hi-value and long-term clients would be delighted with your best rate! Your presence in the market place can be ensured only if you provide four things in your services: Value Addition, Project Management, Selling Convenience and low-friction environment for your client. A hi-value and long-term player is always ready to pay for these intangibles other than the MS Word or pdf documents, which are shifted by attachments from one email address to another.

Be a friend, not a tough auctioneer: Being a friend of a linguist is hard and easier is to become a tough auctioneer because there are plenty of linguists who are too eager for the journey to rock bottom. Eventually, you will find yourself alone as many will crash and the best will avoid you. Alternatively, you will be always surrounded by that low-value, low-cost-factory hallow preventing growth and enrichment.

Understand the arithmetic behind the price you quote: Even though your price is a single arithmetic entity to a client ($X per word), this X is a combination of three quantities:
X = your cost price (from the linguist) + your margin + value added by you in monetary terms (your capital and operational expendiure in form of investment) + your experience and expertise.
An abysmally low rate either means you are sourcing from a low-cost-factory linguist or you work with such a razor thin margin that you have nothing left to invest and of course, you add practically zero value.
This arithemetic will not be much respected by clients whose respect matter in the long term for you.

Conclusion:

For both linguists and agencies from India, your price quote tells almost everything about you, your committment, your investment, and your trust and respect-worthiness. Since we sell highly perishable products like translation, your reputation is built not on individual projects but on parameters, which are public. And reputation is everything in our business.

Pricing is one of the core means to protect, promote and sustain that reputation.

We may not be aware, that in your pricing you are communicating many things, which a thoughtful, aware and long-term player will figure out. And that matters for you so much so that your very survival depends on it.

The price you quote is your signature in the marketplace. Be careful about this signature. This is true for both — linguists and agencies.

评论该文章

“How-To” 图书馆