This post is going to be about a rather controversial question. During the last weekend I read a lot about translation industry, blogs of well-known translators who literally rock the industry.
It seems a lot of translators have been contacted recently by certain direct clients who right from the start said that they didn’t need a translator at all. The only reason why they didn’t give the file to their bilingual secretaries or relatives was because he or she is too busy to take this assignment. That`s exactly why they just have to outsource it. Otherwise they would happily tell their personal assistants to do the translation. Why not? She speaks French fluently, her English is seems to be impeccable.
Logical consequences of this situation are twofold. You (as a contractor) feel that you have to talk them into hiring a translator. I’m not speaking about any person in particular but language professionals in general. You have to find certain words to persuade them that in case they have serious material to be translated, they have to deal with serious people. This is sometimes quite difficult to do. CEOs, CFOs, different heads of departments, etc. feel that no one is going to teach them how to do business. Now that’s the stance!
Second consequence (a logical one as well) is that price in this case becomes a very sensitive issue, due to general (sometimes absolute) lack of understanding what it takes to produce a translation of a highly technical document.
Why is it so? One of the reasons is that the market is inundated with the exact type of translators – expatriates who suddenly decided that they were translators, people who spent two years in Mexico and then suddenly thought they were able now to translate INTO Spanish, people who studied a foreign language in school. As they have nothing in terms of experience, it is natural that they use price as the main differentiator in order to enter the market. Vast majority of those amateurs will leave the industry very fast, but this little time they were there would influence the industry a bit. One more client will fall into this trap of perceiving translation as a mere leisure activity.
A few years ago I was contacted by a friend of mine who then worked in a company trying to import agricultural equipment here in Ukraine. The reason he contacted me was that they had a pile of manuals (in English) they had to translate into Russian/Ukrainian. These manuals were full of highly technical information, diagrams and graphs, tables, etc. I don’t want to mention this rate they offered me. It took me five seconds to see the first page of this manual to tell him that they would fail unless they multiply their budget by 10.
During the next three months I heard the same story from my colleagues in the city – they all were contacted by the same person (employee of the company responsible for “getting it done” – another buzz phrase such clients would use when talking to employees). I’m really sorry for this person because he was told to do something that people could not do for centuries.
This company still operates. I think they bought the equipment and had all documents translated. Sometimes I dream about seeing the face of this CEO when he eventually contacted right people and was told the price. Cognitive dissonance in its earnest form.
Recommendations: hire professionals. Don’t let your success in business overshadow the way the nature puts things right. People use wheels for centuries in order to transport things, so why do we sometimes try to invent a square wheel? There is nothing wrong to haggle a little. You can have a discount when the amount of words you have to translate is a six digit number. But like any discount, this should be a tiny fraction of a translator`s per-word rate.
As usual – have a nice day!
Behind the Enemy Lines 
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