Safe deliveries

The process of creative writing has occasionally been compared to that of giving birth, though for most of us writing, the result is less miraculous as a rule. The same is true of translation. Yet an undeniable common element is the importance of a safe delivery, and indeed with some translations, such as urgent medical instructions or nuclear safety training materials, the consequences of a failed delivery have greater potential for harm than childbirth complications. In some cases, even minor delays can have longer term effects on the health of one's business.

A typical translation assignment for a typical translator typically does not contain life-critical instructions on follow-up medication and treatment or a plan for preventing a meltdown, but it usually is important to the translation buyer and it is often important that the work be received according to some sort of agreed schedule. It should be self-evident that some reliable system of tracking these delivery schedules is useful to reduce the chances of forgotten deadlines; this system should reflect the realities of one's working life and environment. For some, sticky yellow notes on the edge of a monitor work fine. A few others still use paper notebook schedulers, and increasing numbers of professionals rely on software tools such as the Outlook Calendar, AIT's Translation Office 3000, Plunet or the Online Translation Manager (OTM) to keep an overview of their job schedule.

Once a job is completed, however, there remains the challenge of getting it to the customer. At this stage a number of things can go wrong.

First of all, e-mail is by no means fail-safe. Just because a message was transferred to the Sent folder of your e-mail client does not mean that it made it to the client's Inbox. The messaging connection from your computer to mine is not direct, and along the way many things can go wrong with host servers, spam filter algorithms, virus or DoS attacks that shut down the relay stations temporarily and more. Lately I have even seen headers from one message grafted onto the bodies of others so that a mailed inquiry with confidential documents from one agency appeared with the name an e-mail address of a competing agency. Thank God I noticed that one before responding. By now most of us have probably seen e-mail messages that arrive hours after they are sent. Or days. Or months sometimes. Or never. I have mail accounts on four or five servers, and I have experienced intermittent problems with every one of these over the years. No e-mail system is foolproof when it comes to delivery on time all the time.

What can be done? In urgent cases when I think of it, I make a personal call to the client to ensure that the mail has been received, though often the person I want to reach is out of the office, in a meeting or using the office's sanitary facilities, so the important question of the delivery's arrival remains frustratingly unanswered. I'm not fond of this approach for other reasons as well. While I do enjoy talking with my clients, often one or both of us don't really have the time for the contact, and when I call ten times in a row and all is well each time I begin to feel a bit like Chicken Little and stop at some point. Then the next delivery e-mail doesn't make it. And of course I find this out when I'm far away from my office up to my knees in mud with a rifle in my hands looking for boars or trying to keep the dog under control. Not the best time to take a panicked client call.

My personal solution for this recurring problem was to adopt a bit of agency infrastructure for my freelance business and use translation business portal accounts from LSP.net, a platform for which I also now do the English localization. I've written about this online translation management system on my blog rather often, and I find that the 30 euros a month or so the company asks for a project manager account is cheap insurance among other things. The delivery e-mails from that system so far appear to be more reliable than with my various other hosting providers (Hosting Matters in Florida, ProZ in God-knows-where and some German company), but being somewhat paranoid I do not rely on this. Like many translation business portals, the SaaS solution OTM allows me to create free login access for my customers where they can check on their own to see if a delivery is ready, then download it without my intervention. This has proved useful a number of times in the past year when clients did not receive the files and called me as I was racing down the Autobahn at 160+ kph. With just a short reminder to log into their secure private area they got what they needed in just a few minutes.

Security is another important difference with portal solutions of this kind. OTM and others offer encrypted HTTPS access, far better than the common frightening practice of attaching confidential client files to insecure e-mail. Some of my clients are well aware of the problems inherent in ordinary e-mail attachment of unencrypted files and have in the past demanded various encryption schemes, some public key variations of which have caused havoc with my Windows operating system to everyone's confusion and consternation. Another occasional client has a system of passwords for zip files that I often find confusing when I am in a hurry, and when I substitute the wrong special character as a separator for the password elements the poor fellow tears his hair out trying to crack the file. A secure connection to an encrypted online portal solves this problem. It also provides a more convenient way to transfer large files, far less confusing that dealing with FTP servers, each of which has its own unique operating quirks. Clients can also upload large jobs to such a portal, avoiding the problems sometimes associated with large e-mail attachments.

Given the many vulnerabilities of an online business, it makes good sense to take the extra step in technology and use a secure online platform for business communication and data exchange. There are a number of solutions available, and the implementation expenses and effort fall in a range where any viable business can find a cost-effective option.

Why I moved on from a great tool like Translation Office 3000

I have to smile when I hear colleagues, even some who run agencies, tell me about how they run their entire business with Excel spreadsheets. Or how they had the perfect custom solution whipped together by a genius Access programmer. I used to do that shit. As part of my plan to give up medical device consulting, sell my farm and move to the urban horror of NRW, Germany I did a stint learning to develop database-backed web applications using Active Server Pages, Cold Fusion and other tools popular at the time. I was pretty good at it and used to annoy the Hell out of the developers at a transitional employer by scripting working solutions in hours that they had told management and customers would take many man-months of effort. Never believe what developers tell you; I don't think they are liars, they just don't have a clue, and I don't think all the recent fads of "lean" and "agile" development and whatnot have changed that much. There are organizations with plausible roadmaps that underpromise and over-deliver (Kilgray and LSP.net come to mind), but your average software cowboys, however skilled, aren't real strong in the project management and planning department. Thus these custom solutions are nearly all unsustainable or far too expensive in the long run.

A direct client of mine in the nutrition industry is a case in point. They have their labels, product literature, contracts, etc. translated into at least 20 languages. All this is done with Excel spreadsheets (where they keep trying to shove more text into the cells than certain versions can hold, so content is forever being truncated and lost). Projects used to be managed by the company's purchasing agent in his copious free time. I'm sure he used to be a PM at a major translation agency, but maybe not. Anyway, he's no dummy: he talked his bosses into hiring someone to coordinate those projects full time. And a full time job it is when you do everything with scratch pads and Excel sheets. After I spent several years advising them on the benefits of TM technology, they considered Déjà Vu and other solutions, but finally opted to have the head of their IT department write their own solution. Last time I asked (a year ago) the costs were in excess of 30,000 euros and all the system could do was import and export Excel spreadsheets. Conversion of the data to various layout formats still proceeds by copy and paste. They want and need the control offered by off-the-shelf solutions like Ontram, the memoQ Server, SDL Teamworks, OTM from LSP.net, etc. but somehow they are convinced that they save money and gain control by growing, rolling and smoking their own.

They're smoking something, alright. Take it from an IT fool with his foot in that swamp for nearly 40 years now: if you are doing more than minor custom integrations of off-the-shelf, well-supported solutions, you are probably driving blindfolded down a dead-end alley. Early in my career I saw Avery waste a fortune developing its own LIMS to handle data from the corporate analytical laboratory, only to dump it for a standard commercial tool that offered standard data migration options. The wealth of old data was probably never rescued - last I heard the custom database format could not be cracked. Things have gotten better since the 1980s, but not as much as some believe.

Which brings me to AIT's Translation Office 3000 and its proprietary database. At least the developers created some reasonable data export options; it's hard to imagine any viable application without that today. TO3000 is a popular solution for individual translators who do not outsource. I like it, and I used it for three years after my original tool (the agency version of LTC Organiser) was discontinued, and the disturbing lack of internal coordination at LTC in 2006/2007 caused me to pull back from adopting their new Worx solution. Customer support from the AIT team in the Ukraine is also prompt and cheerful, if not always informed on matters like local legal requirements for invoices. If you are a freelancer who never outsources or run a language services office that does everything in-house, TO3000 is a viable, affordable solution that is easy to learn and implement. I like the company and think they do great budget products for translators. That's why I have links to AIT on my blog, to help colleagues find respectable solutions for managing language service projects. Their support is also very good; I recently needed help to load my old database on a new system to handle a legal matter, and the AIT told me exactly what I needed to know and provided me with all the resources to accomplish it. I give them top marks.

Translation Office 3000 is a single-user desktop system. It includes a customer database, project quotation, scheduling and invoicing, some e-mail features and other basics needed to keep track of your business. The RTF templates are easy to customize to meet your personal or local statutory requirements. There is no database for suppliers (subcontractors), which is why I don't recommend it as a solution if you outsource. That requires a second tool, and the more places related data must be maintained, the more effort you have to maintain it and the greater the likelihood of some sort of organizational meltdown eventually.

It's a great system, but... I have learned, sometimes the hard way, that a healthy business really requires more to avoid wasting time and possibly losing clients and projects.

I'm a lone freelancer. I hardly ever outsource. Once in a while I'll work in a team on something, well, maybe rather often if you count those who edit my work, which you really should. Right there the issues with TO3000 begin.

But as I've mentioned elsewhere, there were certain specific issues that led me to look further:

• I needed a second person to access the records to enter customer and project data and issue invoices
• I needed to avoid the time and expense to maintain a local server, and I needed regular backups that could not be forgotten
• I needed to check the status of projects and correspondence while traveling 
• I needed to reduce the number of programs I juggled to manage my business
• Most of all, I needed reliable deliveries to my customers. With secure encryption. Deliveries kept getting swallowed in e-mail systems, and delivering huge projects was a major nuisance. If my partner at the time needed to make a big delivery, I had to do it, because she had no idea how to upload to the FTP or web server. All this was a huge drag on my time and created uncertainty. And clients were not happy to learn that the delivery had occurred hours or days before but never arrived.
• I needed to handle transactions in a legally compliant manner that meets international auditing standards. This includes a requirement for time-saving templates that are correct and do not require legal research on my part.

Although TO3000 is a great program backed by a great team, it fails on every one of these points. Its real advantage is price: for under 200 euros you can get a license and get started. But you're on your own for security, backups, legal compliance, etc.

So even for a "little" freelancer, a more comprehensive solution makes sense. And there are plenty of these. The Translation Office Manager (TOM) is one solution that I've looked at repeatedly as it has improved over the years, and one agency I work with in Düsseldorf has apparently made it the backbone of business there. AIT offers Projetex for agencies, though I never managed to get the database scripts to work, and feedback I've heard from others using it is not good. AFAIK both of these require local server maintenance: once again security, backups, legal compliance, etc. at your own risk.

The current Worx, Plunet and others provide a more professional approach with options closer to my needs and some that I would hope to see eventually in the solution I do use. However, the costs for these are hardly transparent upon casual inquiry, and they are inevitably higher than the system I adopted. I've done way too much IT support over the years; I am good at it, but I hate it. So I wanted a hosted solution that requires a minimal time investment on my part. And I need absolute reliability for my deliveries, easy, accurate record keeping and full legal compliance for an international business. (I may be small-time, but I have clients scattered around the world.) Most of the time TO3000 largely covers my project organization needs, but more and more I find myself in team situations for larger projects that require agency organization functions. And I am on a strict budget: paying full college support costs for a kid isn't cheap even in a country without tuition charges.

The Online Translation Manager from LSP.net offers me all the flexibility, scalability and access I need for a monthly cost that is half my rate for a single hour of work. I adopted this solution 14 months ago, and I have used it in 5 different configurations for various businesses and test systems. After half a year I began to support its localization, because I believe in the value of what the system offers and I see rapid progress in its development for the diverse needs of an international market. Right now I'm working on dialogs and instructions for the version 4.1 release scheduled for next Monday, a minor one, but one which contains more real improvements than I experienced with my other business management solutions in several years. This is not a perfect system. No system is, because requirements of users vary widely. But it is the best general system I have seen so far, and is likely the one with the most potential as evidenced by its support policies and development roadmap. Time and again I see parallels with Kilgray, a company with a product (memoQ) not ready for prime time when I first saw it a few years ago, now beating the pants off the industry "leader" SDL for functionality, user-friendliness, support and cost and charging ahead with useful new innovation at a rate that shows no signs of slowing. Which horse will you bet on? The charging thoroughbred leaving its competitors in a cloud of dust and gravel? Or the lame mare who plods along remembering former victories and daydreaming about a quiet pasture? (I have a nice one here at Vehlefanz Manor where she can retire.) I'll bet my small stack of cash on LSP.net, because OTM keeps me winning, gives me security and leaves me time for life.

The Scribe Who Came in from the Cold

The freelance life has its ups and downs. For me the upside by far predominates, but the administrative downside can be rather wicked, particularly in an arrangement where I have more than my own personal administration to deal with. I like to create products, write, negotiate and find innovative ways to solve problems, but the mundane tasks involved in dealing with local authorities (even trying to get them on the phone when they aren't on vacation) can inspire great feats of cursing. And when writing invoices at 4 am after a long, long day becomes routine, one's health and a lot more suffer, and it's time to consider alternatives, even exit strategies.

My myriad business partners are, for the most part, well aware of what I do well and what I don't or cannot in a situation of administrative duress. As part of my long effort to find solutions, on the recommendation of colleague Ralf Lemster I tested lsp.net's Online Translation Manager (OTM) for the first several months of this year. Ralf managed to switch his entire business to use the system within two days I think. With three dogs to walk and a large house full of sandy dog tracks to vacuum, I progressed more slowly, but my impression of the solution and its potential to make my life easier was quite positive on the whole. A key factor here for me was the secure online access to my data, projects and project correspondence from anywhere and the ability to offer my clients secure, encrypted deliveries via HTTPS.

I like AIT's Translation Office 3000 and use it routinely for billing, but it falls completely flat if you are trying to use it in a team situation. The agency version of the software, Projetex, never got off the ground for testing with me, because the database update scripts required to make it work were screwed up somehow, and while I still had the time to deal with it, I never really understood the suggestions from tech support on how to sort things out.

So when a trusted acquaintance at a local agency which uses OTM proposed a novel solution to my administrative challenges as well as a unique cooperation, I was intrigued but disinclined to go for it. I am so thoroughly allergic to German employment laws and practices after sucking up smoke in the workplace in Mülheim an der Ruhr in the first years after my arrival in the Fatherland that I've flatly turned down every offer of an in-house position from partners whom I trust completely and for whom I have the greatest admiration both personally and for their business practices. So the idea of turning over my client billing to a "competitor" is daft on the face of it.

Or maybe not. Individual translators and SME LSPs face many challenges in today's translation markets, the diversity and scope of which are so great that it is often difficult to have a coherent discussion on matters. In Zurich after The Great Pig Hunt, I had the pleasure of spending some hours dining, drinking coffee and gossiping with the proprietors of a local agency (not a client, just friends), who complained about how it was becoming more difficult to get their standard rates from end customers. These rates are, on the whole, about 30 to 40% less than most Swiss agencies (which often charge well in excess of CHF 3.00 per line of 55 keystrokes), but more than twice what I know many German agencies charge. With about 400 agencies in Switzerland (their estimate), it's also hard to stand out in the market when your administrative work is handled in Excel and on the backs of envelopes. Different agencies in different countries face different challenges, even for services in the same language pairs.

My language pair, on the whole, is an easy one with which to make a living (that's part of my problem - the demand for good German to English translation is so high it's often hard to get translation work and administration done); the challenges faced by those in other pairs are often far more complex and usually more difficult.

But I do believe that certain common principles apply to all our situations, and one of these – which applies to any business – is the need for flexibility and openness to creative solutions to improve the quality of life and work. And that is indeed what my new back office partner offered. For my clientele, all that will really change is the e-mail address for inquiries and a series of multiple confirmation mails for various project steps, different bank details for payment and more secure delivery options. If anyone is freaked out by seeing an actual quotation attached as a PDF document to a mail message, I can turn all that off and just let them know when the job is done. I can e-mail it, give them a download link or provide a secure area where all projects are safely archived for access at any time. And the invoices will go out on time. If I were inclined to outsource (which I generally am not), the interface of the online tools supports that beautifully, and there is also a network of registered, fully evaluated translators to draw upon.

Those are probably among the reasons why Ralf swears by this system. For me the reasons are simpler: more sleep, more time for quality work and more time for my dog and the rest of my life.

Let 1000 mushrooms sprout

As incompetent hypermoderation and other difficulties such as security breaches and Google advertising display policies at PrADs (which even led to the opening of the Ukrainian office being linked to mail order brides) have continued to put the squeeze on the translator community, sites for peer support and professional exchange among translators have been sprouting like mushrooms after a warm summer rain. It is interesting to note that unlike other translator sites which have been around a while (such as Aquarius, Translators Café and Go Translators), these new sites place little or no emphasis on project opportunities which for many too often mean a race to the bottom on rates. (Personally, I see this differently, but that is a common perception. I find the recent call for a ProZ boycott because of the fact that some are unhappy with posters suggesting rates to be more than a little ludicrous. If I don't like a rate, I'm not shy about proposing a better one. I will admit, however, that when someone asks for my "best rate" and I respond with € 2.50 per line there might be a fundamental failure to communicate somewhere.)

I've mentioned one of these sites already: Watercooler, which is organized by Andrew Bell in Australia. The rate at which this site has been growing is phenomenal, and I've really enjoyed the developments at that site in recent months. Discussions are uncensored but respectful and there is a great community of experienced colleagues there. The Watercooler is not indexed by search engines, and it includes a personal blog feature where the scope of readership can be set by the poster. The site uses Ning as its basis.

Stridonium is another very interesting private site. It's a rather quiet paid site (somewhere between 50 and 100 members at present) with an interesting twist on terminology. I joined about a month ago and am not yet fully familiar with the environment; what attracts me most to it is the caliber of the people there and the fact that it is completely cut off from the search engines.

Then there's the new L10NCafé for the localization crowd. My eyes tend to glaze over when numbers and letters get mixed up without spaces in the same block of text, but if you're into that, it's there. Given some of the people involved with this new site I think it will develop in an interesting direction.

Last but not least in the list of recent social network sites for translators is Langmates.com, launched four days ago by AIT after a brief beta period. It seems to be picking up members at a rapid pace. While I'm sure that there is some commercial interest linked to the launch, I don't see that as a bad thing; I like the beginnings I see. The company makes a nice range of affordable tools for various important tasks that translators face. Although our two-person office has outgrown Translation Office 3000 (because we need online access for two or three persons), I still think it's probably the best all-round, affordable solution for project management, customer records, billing and business analysis for freelancers who don't outsource. So I like the company and I like what they have started with the new network.

There are also good networks for translators that have started recently in South America and probably elsewhere; I'm not yet personally familiar with any of these, so I hope those who are can share some information for others in the comments. In my own part of the world, the BDÜ launched a members-only site that has developed into a very good platform for information exchange over the past few years. The ITI and ATA and others also have good private sites for members.

All of these different forums and portals take rather different approaches which may match the needs of different individuals to very different degrees. And that's a good thing. Translation is a very individual, personal business, and while most of us share particular concerns, there really is no single set of tools or one environment that will meet the needs of everyone. As much as some colleagues like to throw stones at ProZ (and I'll include myself there on the right occasions), it's a platform that helped me a lot in the past and continues to help many others today. Ditto for some of the other "job sites" I mentioned. But there's a lot more, different and often better value out there for those who are ready for it.

TO3000 update: first invoices issued

The process of migrating to the new project administration and billing platform has been a slow one due to a lack of time. Nonetheless, with the help of the quick start information in the help file and a bit of fiddling, I was able to set up several clients manually (I plan to try a mass import later), configure their price lists and locale info and issue a few invoices for completed jobs. Everything has been much easier than expected so far, though it's also very clear to me that I could be doing all this much more efficiently. Still, it's already working better for me than LTC. Being able to adjust the RTF invoice template in a word processor is so much nicer than messing around with Crystal Reports. If I can just find a way of cloning the locale information so I don't have to individually customize the decimal, thousand separator settings and date formats for every German and Swiss client, I'll be in Heaven.

The Great Administration Platform Migration Odyssey

Since 2004 I have used the LTC Organiser from The Language Technology Centre Ltd. to handle my translation project organization, invoicing, customer records management, financial reporting and other related tasks. At the time it was the best option I found for what I wanted to accomplish as a single translator who needed to manage team records for outsourcing (Projetex had not been released yet) with an interface which I found superior to TOM (Translation Office Manager).

Although the package made my administrative work much easier and I used the reports to great effect in my business plans which I had to submit to banks when we decided to build a house, I was never really satisfied with the product. There were many little bugs which were never resolved, such as the "tab bug" in the quotation view of the last released version, which would clear the data for an entire line item if one tried to tab between fields. I had serious doubts about the LTC programming team, which were fully confirmed when I was in discussions with the company about beta testing the new Worx product in 2006 and I was suddenly informed that the availability of that online tool would be delayed by about 9 months. The fact that top management had been unaware of problems in the development team up to that point says a lot. I am a former software developer, and I've been part of that game since I was ten years old. Any company that has so little oversight of its development is best avoided. Maybe they have their act together in the meantime, but I really don't care any more. The fact that close associates of mine had support issues with the product for years (though whose fault that was I really don't know, the company had excuses for this too) sort of closed that book for me.

We recently decided to migrate to one of the most popular tools for freelancers to do their admin and accounting work, Translation Office 3000 a k a TO3000. God only knows where the 3000 comes from - maybe it's an inside joke to say that the software is 1000 years ahead of its time. I can't agree with that, but I will say it's pretty good. I've owned a license for several years, but I never did more than play with it, because when I got it, we still did the occasional bit of outsourcing. After we finally stopped giving in to end client requests to manage projects for languages we don't work with and some Murphy's Law experiences with good translators we sent work to made us quote Poe's raven when it comes to outsourcing, the product suddenly became very relevant. When the LTC Organiser was discontinued last year, I realized it was just a matter of time before I would upgrade to the latest version of TO3000 and leave LTC behind. So a few months ago, I downloaded the fully-funcional demo version 9 onto my not-so-new-anymore laptop and tested it. I immediate realized that the workflow for setting up price sheets and quoting jobs was far better than what I have suffered with for four years, and many features which irritated me in version 7 had improved. And the templates for invoices, quotation forms, etc. are all RTF files, so my partner can update them if I don't feel like doing the work. With LTC I had to get Crystal Reports to customize my paperwork if I didn't feel like paying the company a zillion GBP per hour to do it for me.

So I played for a few weeks, decided that TO3000 was the future and promptly forgot about it in a blizzard of work. With the end of the year coming up, however, I want to make a clean break, and my partner has promised to help with a backlog of invoices to be written that goes back to last spring (we are very, very busy), and she doesn't want to waste her time with the old system. So I ordered the upgrade and got the license key today.

This was the point where I started to get nervous. I switched laptops about a year ago, and the other day I tried to install my legal copy of Abbyy FineReader 7 (yes, I know I'm out of date) on the new laptop, because I no longer use it on the old one. No dice. It was an upgrade from version 6, and I have long since lost the v6 files and license info on yet another laptop that died in a spectacular way, so basically I'm screwed as far as that Abbyy license is concerned. One of these days I'll contact tech support, and I'm sure the nice folks there will have a solution for me. It'll be a while, because I've got projects that will keep me distracted for a while.

So after my FineReader experience, I figured I would not be able to install an upgrade on a machine which had never seen version 7. When it worked without a hitch, I screamed "BLESS THESE PEOPLE!!!" so loudly that Monique thought something was seriously wrong. On the contrary. I love those rare instances when a tools provider gets it right. They know we are licensed users, so there's no bullshit about the upgrade key working. I was prepared for a long, complex correspondence with AIT to explain about the change of computers, etc. - but I don't have to waste my time. I wish every company were that customer-friendly.

My database from the test phase into which I had already entered a master price list and a few clients was taken over by the upgrade, so my work a few months ago wasn't in vain. With our client base and my schedule I assume that transferring all the relevant data will take me a few weeks at least unless there's a clever import function I haven't found out about yet.

Since there is a lot to do before the system is completely in place, I'll be posting updates regarding the individual phases to give an overview of the process. I'm sure I'll have a few false starts - or maybe a lot of them - since I have not spent a lot of time learning how to use the software up to now. General impressions were more important. So now, Dear Readers, you'll be able to follow the progress of a practical setup for an overly busy translator more or less in realtime. We'll see how it goes....