Getting independence right: as simple as ABC!

There's been a bit of a buzz lately in professional language service circles regarding a recent ruling by California's Supreme Court, which establishes a new, simplified standard to determine independent contractor status. For example, the corporate interest blog Slator reported on the panic among large language brokerage firms sometimes known for predatory and abusive practices with the companies and individuals whom they contact to provide services, while independent interpreter Tony Rosado offered an interesting perspective on how the ruling can have a positive impact on independent professionals in his field and, I dare say, independent translators as well.

The Court's decision established the "ABC" criteria as the new standard for distinguishing employees from independent contractors:

A) The individual must be free from the control and direction by the hiring entity with regard to the performance of the work, under the terms of the contract for the performance of this work and in fact. 

B) The individual must perform work which is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business. 

C) The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.

Failure to meet all three criteria will lead to a finding that the individual is an employee and is therefore not an independent contractor.

Now you might say – correctly – that California is a long way from New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, what has that got to do contractor conditions there? A lot.

Over the past three and a half decades, since the rape and pillage of unions and workers rights in general began by the rapacious disciples of Ronald Reagan, a system of work and service practices has evolved which I think could fairly be called social strip-mining. (After I wrote this term, I wondered if others have used it as well, and found, unsurprisingly, that this obvious analogy has occurred to quite a number of people.) Very few of the present practices by large corporate providers of language services (interpreting, translation, writing and editing) are in fact sustainable.

Like strip mining companies tearing down a mountain and utterly destroying its ecology of flora and fauna, polluting waters underground and on the surface nearby as well as other ecosystems, companies like Lionbridge, thebigword, TransPerfect, RWS/Moravia and others and their downstream companies in the service sewer put the squeeze on individuals at the end of their corporate digestive system to extract maximum resources for minimum benefit in a manner which often cannot sustain the living of the writers, editors, translator, interpreters and other service workers at the butt end of things. These individuals may cling for some time to their desperate situation as an alternative to prostitution or delivering pizzas, but there is very little incentive and few resources provided for them to develop as professionals and acquire greater skills to deliver greater value with time.

Some, like abused children, learn the lesson of what the abusers can get away with and continue the cycle on small and large scales, outsourcing or even founding new companies with similar practices.

In truth, nobody is well-served by these practices on the end customer side – the individuals, companies and government bodies who contract with the intermediaries for services provided by individual interpreters, translators, editors, etc. – nor on the end-provider side – those very interpreters, translators, editors, etc. And in the middle? "Growth" seems to derive largely from acquisition and from refinement of their marketing deceptions (many in the bulk market bog of language services have SEO-tuned web pages designed to capture searches for independent individual service providers), not so much from actual organic growth of internal service and quality offered. Price dumping practices are also common; many small service companies are unable to compete with "loss leader" prices to end customers which are lower than those they pay to real independent service providers of good professional business standing.

None of these abusive practices are new; they have been known in many forms throughout the modern history of labor starting more or less in the early 19th century. These practices ultimately led to the rise of unions and bodies of protective legislation in the past, so it is not surprising that some have called for "unionization" of international service providers. ("Workers of the world, unite!", anyone?) But these well-meaning calls for unions of interpreters and translators are not really practical in most situations. So many say there is nothing to be done.

Wrong. The California Supreme Court decision points the way toward ending the worst of corporate abuses of individuals providing service by creating a situation in which the true costs of these services are emphasized in the relationship with the service provider. There is nothing standing in the way of companies like Lionbridge or much smaller companies from increasing salaried staff to write, translate, interpret, etc. under local statutory conditions for ordinary employment. To the extent they find this impractical, these companies can contract with other companies or with individuals who meet the ABC criteria.

Such a requirement would also give a fair break to those companies who do in fact invest in the socioeconomic maintenance and professional development of their employees providing service to end customers. Under current practices, these good companies are unfairly disadvantaged by laws and regulatory practices which now permit these service strip-miners to operate as they do. Local and national governments would also benefit from and increase of benefit payments from registered employees or from taxes assessed on work transactions which fail the ABC test.

In the environment of expanding globalized trade and sophisticated corporate shell games to avoid tax liabilities, enforcement of necessary and proper good social practice at the "source" – the intermediate provider level or at the end customer level where there is a direct relationship between a company or government body with a presumed independent service provider – is perhaps the most practical way to accomplish some of the reforms needed on a global scale.

Low quantity surcharges in translation

This morning as I downed my first double espresso and prepared to translate an equally stimulating interim financial report, I scanned a few recent blog entries by colleagues. One post by German translator Susanne Schmidt-Wussow about a conversation with her uncle, a businessman involved with sales in another field, was particularly interesting.

When the subject of volumes and rates for translation came up, he was quite clear about the difference between the sort of work we do and commodities which may be subject to some volume discounts and he asked „Sag mal, nimmst du eigentlich einen Kleinmengenzuschlag für so ganz kleine Aufträge?“ ("Tell me, do you apply a surcharge for small orders?").

An interesting thought. Though she, like many of us, has a minimum order value, apparently this practice, common enough in some sectors, had not occurred to her.

I've occasionally applied a surcharge for large orders because of additional quality measures some of these require. And years ago, before compromises in a partnership led me to change my policy, I avoided taking on jobs that would involve less than half a day's work, because these tended not to be worth the administration and follow-up at the rates I was charging at the time.

But a surcharge for smaller volumes? That is a step beyond the minimum flat rate charge which I will consider, and it certainly answers those silly questions some have about volume rebates for translation. What do you think?

Update on the OTM integration with SDL Trados Studio

Since I learned earlier this year about plans to integrate LSP.net's Online Translation Manager (OTM) - the workflow solution I use for secure data transmission in my projects - and SDL Trados Studio I have kept track of the progress of this effort with some interest and satisfaction. Although it is unlikely to be of immediate benefit to me, an occasional user of SDL Trados desktop applications, I have followed the combinations of business process tools with their translation implementation counterparts for many years, and this seems to be one of the few efforts that really deserves the label "integration". Too often that word is used to describe reading a text file with an analysis of files and applying a scoping grid to ensure that one's profits remain suitably modest or non-existent.

When I contacted OTM's architect this week to get the latest news before heading to Warsaw for the translation management conference, he described the development and testing over the past month and the probable completion of the middleware component next week. By the end of October, the OTM workflow system should have a new range of features to complement the Trados workflows for analyzing and testing the viability of files for translation processes, applying customer-specific weighting tables to matches and more.

The release of the new version of OTM and the SDL Trados integration features is expected in November after testing with a pilot group is completed. Given the good record of LSP.net for releasing stable versions of its software over the past three years, I expect a well-tuned, useful advance of functionality. The integration will be available for testing and use free of charge for some months in its rollout phase to ensure that potential users have every opportunity to master its application to their business processes. Several licensing models are being considered afterward to allow users flexibility.

Contact LSP.net for further details on this product. When the test phase is completed, I hope to interview some of the current group of companies working with this solution and find out the best and the worst of its implementation.

Equivalent Rates in Translation Billing

This article appeared in its original form in September 2008 on an online translation portal. It has been moved here for better maintenance of the content and links. The original text has been modified  slightly and the link to the quotation tool updated. The rate equivalence calculator is part of the Sodrat Suite for Translation Productivity. An older post on this topic includes links to other tools for calculating rate equivalency.

*****

Billing questions are seen very frequently in the forums of popular translator portals or professional association sites. Often these concern whether translations should be billed by the word or agglomerated words (thousands or hundreds), lines, pages or other units in the source or target text. The answers to these questions reveal a wide range of approaches, which are often dictated by local convention, habit or simple fear. Often it is claimed that a particular method "does not make sense" because of compound word structures or other issues (which is frequently claimed for my language pair, German to English, for example). These claims are interesting, because other successful translators with the same language combinations often view things very differently. Who is right?

Before answering that question, let’s ask what sort of an answer can be trusted most. Would you stake your business on a “gut feeling” recommendation of another translator or translators when many others argue just as vehemently without evidence? Or would you feel more secure using a mysterious online calculator on an agency web site which purports to be based on a large body of text in the respective languages? Or would you prefer to see hard numbers based on your own translations that you have carried out in a number of different fields for various customers? Which approach do you think would give you the best basis for making your business decisions and protecting yourself against getting shortchanged in pricing?

I prefer to deal with real data from my own work. It not only reflects what I have been translating but also what I am likely to be translating in the next year or two. If I make a radical change I can quickly check and make sure that my pricing model is still “safe”.

To answer my own pricing questions, I created a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, which allows me to enter the actual data from individual projects and see what the relationship between target and source text pricing would be for words, lines and pages. You can have a copy of this spreadsheet to use yourself by downloading it here.

Because the true measure of price appropriateness is reflected in what one actually earns for the time spent working, a tracking calculator for the hourly earnings on each job was included in that spreadsheet to serve as a "control", but here I would like to focus on the relationship between different unit costing approaches and how to “adjust” prices to the units your prospect or customer is most comfortable with.

When I entered actual data from two types of translation work that I do (one specialized, the other a general category), I discovered some interesting things. I set up my spreadsheet to calculate the relative standard deviations (RSD) of the data, and what I found was that these were generally under 5%. What does this really mean? It means that if the data for your translation jobs is normally distributed, about 60% of the time the “actual” price relationship between two methods will fall in a “band” of plus or minus one RSD around the average, 95% of the time the actual relationship will be plus or minus two RSDs and 99% of the time it will be plus or minus 2.5 RSDs.

Still confused? Here’s a specific example from the downloadable spreadsheet:

If I want to earn € 0.15 per target word for a chemistry translation but the customer I am dealing with wants me to bill in source lines (allowing a “fixed price” to be calculated in advance – line rates are also common in Germany), I enter my desired rate in the little calculator table in cell B20. In cell E20 I see that I need to charge about € 1.27 per source line of 55 characters. How reliable is that figure? The relative standard deviation of the source line to target word ratio is just under 5% (some versions of the calculating spreadsheet in circulation do not include this figure, but it is accurate). This means that 99% of the time if you use this pricing, the “worst “real target word rate you achieve will be about 13.1 euro cents and the “best” you’ll do will be about 16.9 euro cents. If you work consistently with this pricing strategy your average earnings will be 15 euro cents per word. In many cases the bandwidth of variation will be much narrower than the example I have presented here. Compile your own data and see.

But what about the “exception” the fearful translator might say? One indicator of trouble for my language pair if I am using a source word pricing strategy might be an unusually low source word to source line ratio, which would indicate the likely presence of very long compound words in German. What do you do in a case like this? Raise your price if you feel like it. Use real data to show that this text really is different and must be priced differently from other work. Not everyone will agree with this idea, but you may have more success with it than you would expect. The important point here is that, by tracking actual data from your own work, you have a much clearer understanding of when rates may need adjusting. 

When you examine your own data you will find that the actual variation in earnings between the calculation methods presented is small in most cases, at least for European languages. If this is not the case for your language, then you will have hard numbers to use in your quotation. Negotiations based on fact often work better, though all this can be greatly outweighed or offset by psychological factors.

By using the rate equivalence spreadsheet or creating your own similar tool, you can navigate the hazards of various quotation methods with greater confidence, quickly determining equivalent rates in the units expected by prospects and customers. This will ensure that you reach your average earning targets and achieve the same average hourly earnings as with your familiar unit pricing. You’ll know how much you have to raise your word price or how much margin you have to reduce it if you are asked to quote by source word instead of target word or vice versa. Now get down to business.

European LSP frustration with the US: a typical example

When discussing the problems of a European language service provider (LSP) working with customers in the US, a friend remarked recently that alles, was sich außerhalb ihrer Landesgrenzen abspielt, existiert für Amerikaner nicht... sie sind einfach zu dämlich.

I suppose dem should be fightin' words and I should defend the honor of my countrymen, but the guy is too often right.

I decided long ago that it is seldom worth the bother to do business with those in my country of origin. But that was so long ago that the reasons had faded in my mind, and when I was approached recently by a polite PR rep for a small translation (a page and a half press release) for a trade show in Germany, I thought why not? 

My quotation was accepted without much delay, and then came the familiar request for me to fill out (on behalf of the German limited company that would be invoicing) a W-9 and several pages of a New Vendor Authorization form that asked if my company is a Small Business Concern and asked me to to mark the relevant categories:

• Small Business Certification (SBC) self certified 
• Small Disadvantaged (including minority-owned) Business (SDB) 
• Women-Owned Small Business (WOSB) 
• Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) 
• Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) 
• HUBZone Small Business concern (Historically Underutilized Business Zone) certified by the US Small Business Administration 

And I was to supply my Dun & Bradstreet number. And there were terms and conditions, which as I scanned them set off a good number of alarms. I have terms and conditions under which I work, and I have no interest in other terms with more words than the text to translate.

Life's too short. I gave her the name of a nice agency local to her. I hope they can help her out.

It puzzles me that someone involved with international clients can be utterly unaware that US forms like the W-9 have no relevance to contractors abroad, but I've found that this and other misconceptions are the rule rather than the exception among my business contacts on the other side of the Pond. And the idea that I would need to juggle paperwork like that for a small, one-off job is more puzzling still. Had I known in advance that this would be expected, I could have added two hours of administrative fees to the quote for the translation of less than 500 words.

Perhaps I've squandered a marvelous opportunity here, and I certainly hope the person wasn't insulted by my rather abrupt about-face on the quote. But I find that good business is usually very simple.

Your Cheating Agency

"The translators have no bread," said the buyer with some alarm.

"Let them eat MT," the head of Purchasing replied.

O globalised world. That has such translation services in't!

The people who brought you Each time we fire a “professional linguist”, our quality improves parts 1, 2 & 3 now offer the world the Cheating Translators platform, which is not a new social media venue for those of us with libido issues, but rather an opportunity represented to identify the use of machine translation in work received.

The result of this stunt analysis of my work is very revealing:

There's a link there on the "printout" to the bozo agency who dreamed this one up. The Germans have a lovely word for this. Unseriös. These idiots promote some sort of "cloud" based scam for slicing and dicing texts to be translated and doling the bits out like bread and soup in a charity kitchen to save us all from the horrors of life as independent translators without a Benevolent Protector.

This is just one of the many carnival sideshows to be enjoyed as the Great Profits Prophets do the l10n circuit of technological inbreeding to promote systems and strategies of questionable intelligence.

I wish them good fortune and godspeed. All of them. I hope the softened pitch for postediting paradise succeeds alongside the full frontal flashers of purely automated workflow. I hope all the big translation agencies of the world join the party and inhale deeply of whatever solutions get passed with the pipe. Really. I can't imagine a more delightful result for me, my business and those whom I honor and respect in the written language service professions. It would be delightful also to see VoiceMT implemented for the benefit of my interpreting friends.

I dream of a world in which the dirty carpet of service providers is hoovered free from those who don't belong on it as these are sucked safely into the bag to "support" machine processes. Those remaining will then be less distracted as they focus on processes that really matter, waste less time in conversation with fools (thus enabling the difference to be better recognized) and produce results that make a real difference.

Stating conditions

Over the course of the past year I've worked from time to time on a post on the importance of general terms and conditions for freelance translators as a tool for avoiding trouble or defining procedures for problem resolution. But the hurly burly of daily life and business has kept me from finishing that particular article as well as my reluctance to publish on the subject before I get around to translating my own T&Cs from German into English.

I do regret that. So many of the "problem" threads I read in public forum are matters where clearly stated terms and conditions might provide some guidance for a better resolution of a dispute. And today I got a little request for an opinion from a friend who might have been helped by such a document as well. In his case, he quoted a job to an end client for the translation of what he thought was a two-page PDF. The customer was some industrial client who requests translations in various languages on an occasional basis, some of which are in language combinations he outsources. The little job was outsourced, translated and delivered, presumably on time. Alles klar, as they say here. But not quite. There was a second page with quite a few more words. It was overlooked in the PDF. And the customer pointed out that this extra text should be translated at no additional cost, because a quotation had been accepted in the belief that it covered the entire document.

I don't know what the ultimate resolution of this will be for my friend; the costs involved are annoying, but not back-breaking if he ends up eating the charges for the second page. But I thought to myself "this is a case where terms and conditions should clearly reserve the right to amend quotations where serious errors are found". And of course he has no written terms and conditions for his business, even though he's been in this game more than twice as long as I have.

It's not enough just to have T&Cs, of course. To apply them to a business transaction, you must make them available, perhaps as an attachment to a quotation, or as I often do making them part of my e-mail signature block.

There are so many issues that come up routinely that can be dealt with this way. Rights to rework an order if deficiencies are found. Limitations of liability to the value of an order except in cases of malice or gross negligence. Interest on payment in arrears. Whatever is important to you and your business can and should be covered in your general terms of business.

But one thing I do not recommend. Often in T&Cs and contracts, I read some nonsense about a particular language version being "authoritative" and translations being for information purposes only. That's bullshit. It may work in some jurisdictions, but certainly not in all. And it is simply insulting. If you can't trust the quality of your contract translation, maybe it's time to stop shopping for language services from linguists with tails. Offering a customer binding terms they can understand (in a language they read well) is a matter of basic respect and in some places a precondition for having an enforceable contract.

The high cost of linguistic incompetence

Time and gain we hear the warnings. Sometimes we utter them ourselves in a desperate attempt to squeeze a bit more margin out of a difficult project we hope to undertake. But is it really true that top quality translation is critical in today's fast-paced, globalized world? Or is understandable 'good enough' as the MT crowd and many a high volume, low quality zookeeper LSP would have us believe? Are we looking out for a client's interests by charging more to cover the cost of careful work and checking by another skilled linguist, or are we just greedy, hungry, whining perfectionists out of touch with real business needs?

My Munich correspondent, English and Italian to German translator and business IT specialist Aniello Scognamiglio once again brought some interesting research to my attention. BBC News recently published an article detailing the work of Charles Duncombe, an online entrepreneur in the UK, who found that a single spelling mistake on a web site can cut sales in half. It makes one wonder about the possible impact of correct, but ineptly expressed language, or even language which flows well in one culture, such as the UK or India but not in another, such as Canada or the US. Half! That's a lot of money potentially.

If I were into online selling, right now I would be creating various microsites and test pages to see for myself how sales would be affected. But I don't really need to do that. It's been done, and the results have been discussed a number of times by people like Pat Flynn (who publishes the Smart Passive Income blog). These other amateur studies have involved not only language but also elements of design, but the relationship to Mr. Duncombe's research does not require an advanced degree in psychology or marketing to understand. Think of your own experience.

I was checking the website of an esteemed colleague two nights ago as I wanted to refer someone requiring an expert in physics who translates from German to English. I know this person's project management work reasonably well, and I trust her quality. Yet I swallowed hard when I noted the word "Germn" on a page discussing her high quality language services. How would a stranger react? Closer to home, a fellow translator who contacted me privately with some questions about technology for audit-compliant archiving (something I dealt with in my time as a consultant and application developer at EASY Software AG) kindly pointed out some stupid mistakes I had made in a text I translated quickly into German myself and posted on a site which I use as a repository for my online terms and conditions. While this may be of some help in my present situation where I continue to ward off business to allow myself to recover some "life" after considerable changes in my private situation this past year, this sort of thing is not healthy for a business long-term.

When I see information such as that from Messrs. Duncombe or Flynn, I cannot help but realize that the 200 dollars saved by paying someone 10 cents per word to translate a 1000 word web site rather than the exorbitant rate of 30 cents a word to get a translator with copywriting skills and a good quality assurance process is lost again many times over when customers remain unengaged by the language of the site or are put off by its errors.

If you are one of those translators who can't spell or who frequently makes mistakes or slings language like sludge after midnight, think about what you are costing the client. We all want top rates, but we must deliver and demonstrate the value to earn them. Do I do this? I could weasel the answer here by making comparisons, and I think my customers would generally answer "yes", but I know when I see a marketing text weeks later that I could have massaged it just a bit more and added some brilliant twist that might help sell yet another machine at € 500,000 a pop. Or when a fuzzy match pops up from my TM and I see a typo that I read over and missed. There's usually room for improvement with anyone and any organization, and smart customers in the right niches are aware of this and its potential payoff. And they are willing to pay for the value they will receive, the value that we should deliver to earn more than a bag of peanuts.

Pricing right

Some topics are more persistent than a swarm of mosquitos at swampside; translation rates is one of these. Many of these discussions become quite lively, and often points are made which are fully opposite to one another yet quite right in their respective contexts. The contexts to consider include, of course, the translation submarket served, the level of service offered and, inevitably, the chutzpah factor. Some of my best rates for translation derive from that last alone: call me at 5:30 pm on a Friday afternoon after a long, hard week with a 10,000 word rush job for Monday morning and ask for my 'best rate' and I'll promise you my very best :-)

Not long ago there were a few thoughtful and thought-provoking threads on Corinne McKay's Thoughts on Translation blog that explored the issues of earnings and setting rates for language services. It started off with a thread on how much freelancers earn (with more than 80 comments to date!), then after shots were traded between Chris Durban and others over the magic 40-cent-per-word milestone, a follow-up post carried the discussion further. Both of those and the discussion of volume discounts on the same blog are worth reading and considering for your situation.

Except for the laziness of most wannabe translators in matters of research, one might think that this discussion would have died out ages ago except perhaps for strategic exchanges of information on how one might quote more appropriately in a particular market segment or for discussions of new developments like a real or imagined economic crisis and the opportunities it provides. The routine answers are, after all, available for anyone wiling to wade through a swamp of dis- and misinformation.

There are basically three approaches to pricing levels: (1) determining sustenance levels by calculating expenses, available time and approximate productivity and hopefully not forgetting long-term needs like retirement savings and medical insurance where relevant, then setting rates accordingly; (2) herd pricing (charging what others charge more or less, or what you think they do); and (3) value pricing (what the market will bear).

The first approach is one often recommended to beginners or those who are struggling to pay bills, perhaps despite a heavy workload. It is indeed a useful exercise to do the math: add up all your expenses, your anticipated need to save for the (un)certain future, and divide it all up by how many hours you expect to work to get an hourly rate. Divide that by your output, and you'll have a target piece rate for your slave labor below which you should not go lest hunger take you in its greedy jaws. For those lacking an overview of such matters, there are any number of useful guidelines for this available on the Internet; even ProZ offers a somewhat reasonable "rate calculator" for determining this baseline. It's useful to do these calculations from time to time as one's life circumstances change to ensure that the rates charged are at least sustainable; in highly competitive situations with price pressure, this may be essential. But ultimately I consider this a foolish, limiting approach that may either ignore opportunity or be totally irrelevant given the realities of a particular market. If you calculate a required target rate of ten cents per source word with your output and your 'niche' will expect you to charge three cents, it's time to change your game.

Herd pricing seems to be the path most taken, possibly because it requires no math and often less thinking. "What do you charge?" is a frequent question among translation colleagues, and to the extent that it is honestly answered, it may provide some useful information. I prefer my answers of this sort pooled in some way, such as the BDÜ rate surveys, though with these I sorely miss information on standard deviations. How can I aspire to being a six-sigma translator when it comes to rates if I don't know what the standard deviation is? I like to know what my 'competitors' charge as much as the next guy or gal, but ultimately, this is really not what my pricing should be based on.

From a proper running dog capitalist perspective, a 'fair rate' is what the market will bear. If, for the instructions shipped with an electric toaster, the market will bear a piece rate that translates to three euros per hour net earnings for me, then dems da breakz, I accept it, let that work go to Calcutta with a smile and move on. Given a recent chat I had with an agency owner and friend, there seems to be more of this, so much so that he described anyone willing to pay my rates for ordinary technical translation as simply 'clueless'. Maybe. I like to think of my customers as 'lawsuit averse' or 'marketing savvy' rather than clueless, but then the national motto where I come from isn't Geiz ist geil.

'What the market will bear' is in reality quite variable, and fair is a subjective thing however objectively some attempt to define it, but I rather like the fact that this requires us as business people to stay awake and be sensitive to our needs and those of our customers as well as their perceptions. I live in Germany, the land of 'thought experiments', so I'll propose one to the cut-rate colleagues in various developing corners of the world:

Imagine that your client requires the translation of a project proposal overnight. The amount of work to be done is horrendous and requires a carefully coordinated, all-out, all-night effort by skilled specialists. Competitors in this RFP will most likely not be greatly differentiated in price or delivery times; in the end, if the decision doesn't rest on a bribe it may come down to naked persuasion, the psychology and semantics of the proposal itself. If successful, this bid will result in millions of euros in new business and strong, guaranteed growth for the next few years.

What is the fair price for that work? Or to consider a simpler example, one frequently encountered by translators, what is the fair price of 'translating' a culturally sensitive marketing slogan? Would you price it by the word? By the line? By the hour? Any of these would be wrong I think. And if the value to the customer is low, the price should be low. If the stakes are higher....

Who's afraid of the big, bad MT post-editing job?

Still somewhat groggy without my third double espresso eggnog latté of the morning, I was woken up quickly by an interesting tweet from Andrew Bell, curator of the translator's social network The Watercooler. It pointed to a PDF file with eight slides summarizing the results of a global TAUS survey on MT post-editing by translation agencies.

The data are interesting and could be spun quite a number of ways. There were altogether 75 respondents out of God-and-TAUS-know-how-many-approached. I presume the latter figure was mentioned in the live presentation. About half of these actually provide such services to their clientele. Given all the talk about MT and "our" post-editing future, what fraction of business do you expect this activity to represent among the respondents? For 86% it was less than 10% of current revenue. I'm guessing much less. A mere 1.8% reported in the 26 to 50% range and none above that. Reality Check #1. The tsunami of MT hasn't hit the profession, nor do the waters appear to be retreating at the beaches. So don't head for the hills just yet. I assume that a certain company which MT'd and post-edited some fifty kazillion Wikipedia articles into Thai was among the respondents, and even that visionary firm didn't break 50% for MT-postedit revenues. So, people, there probably is other work out there in at least the near future.

Reality Check #2: The majority of respondents also reported little or no increase in such business in the past year. Most (75%) of the "post-editors" are in fact part of the regular stables of translators at these agencies, but I suspect these workhorses are those unable to digest better feed and make more than horseshit out of it. Or they are starving. Or a bit adventurously masochistic and can't find where they left the cuffs and leather whip.

If you want to surf the MT-postedit wavelet, do so by all means. It could be an interesting diversion, and as in with any path taken in life, I expect you'll meet some people, possibly even ones worth knowing. But if this isn't your sport, don't think you're doomed to starvation and oblivion.

I don't know how large the total market is for my German to English translation pair, much less for any other combination. An estimate of 100 million euros would be far too low based on a quick napkin calculation of how many translators it supports and what they probably earn on average. Some billions I expect. In any case, even in a relatively small "market" for a common language, a translator would need to capture only a miniscule fraction of the business to make a moderate to good living. I suspect that even our blogging overworked American translator serves somewhat less than 0.001% of the German to English market. The line between starvation and survival and between survival and prosperity is not drawn by the available volumes in the FIGES markets nor even really by the average rates charged in them. Nor by skill as a translator beyond a certain reasonable standard to be expected in a particular discipline.

If you want to earn "enough" as a freelance translator in major language pairs and avoid the ball-and-chain future of an MT posteditor, and you have sufficient linguistic and personal skills to avoid embarrassing yourself or anyone who recommends you, getting "there" is mostly a matter of organization, discipline, initiative and a good service attitude. My attitude is mostly bad, and I still do OK. And I strive to improve that attitude by shooting and skinning pigs instead of customers that may appear to share some of their characteristics. Find a way to get the message of fair service to those who need it and you'll have the freedom to worry about other things, like if the apple grafts in the garden will take. If you're clueless as to what to do, I can't help you. But I can offer you a link to 25 things translators should never do.

The future, tense

This morning as I gulped my mocha I was greeted by a tweet announcing the demise of the New York Times column On Language, begun more than three decades ago by the late William Safire. The last article of the column ended on a positive note as author Ben Zimmer contemplated the lively linguistic future of his four-year-old son, who will grow up in an environment of beneficent grace with the wonders of Google, iPads and All The Wonderful Things To Come.

Elsewhere in the NYT the prospects of the future looked a bit less bright. Bob Herbert's meditation on the commentary of Justice Powell on the power of organization elaborated clearly one of the great difficulties facing those in the social trenches today. This is a dilemma not unfamiliar to the freelance language service provider, though individual experiences vary widely. There is widespread talk of "the erosion of rates", though where I have examined the statistical data available, this appears to be as much myth as reality if one tries not to think too much about inflation. At least the magnitude of the problem is usually a few orders smaller than the perception of it.

Responses to this have varied and include quite a few from translators who are perhaps to young to realize that L'Internationale was translated long ago and singing its various language instances got workers mostly nowhere. Petitions to a portal like ProZ, which despite its great popularity with Indian and Chinese LSPs is largely irrelevant to purchasing departments in the formerly civilized world are an amusing diversion, but largely a waste of time. While a translator in Stuttgart might get hot and bothered by what King Henry plans to do with Turncoat Translations, she ought to be giving greater thought to matters like the impact of recent changes in the law governing reporting of business activity within the EU, the so-called zusammenfassende Meldung, which she probably failed to comply with in 2010. Or perhaps with the requirements for qualification as a court-sworn translator and the lack of uniformity in these among the German federal states. Translators in every country probably face similar issues.

Translators who look toward the future with trepidation are right to do so, but not because of the blown-hard "threat" of machine translation and the presumed future status as post-editing galley slaves. The real threats have little to do with translation per se but rather with the stepwise dismantling of social safety nets and necessary controls for the protection of people and the environment. As voting citizens they can accomplish more in the long run than as whining "professionals".

Professionals? Ah, there's part of the problem as well. Translation is an unregulated profession, and rightly so. I strongly oppose the notion that the practice of the profession should be restricted to protect rates and the security of those now in possession of the "prize", simply because doing so is ludicrously impractical. Years ago when I sat across a table from a person authorized to search my home and generally make my life difficult while i attempted to sort out a problem with tax arrears. I was sternly informed that I could be forbidden to practice my profession. Ven an achent off ze German state tells you zat, you must be afraid. I laughed. I asked how he planned to tell my clients in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Switzerland, Finland, the Netherlands and a number of other countries not to contact me by e-mail and make payments via any one of the many online international options or to a foreign bank account. He admitted sheepishly that this was not possible, and the conversation returned to reality and realistic options and the problem was soon resolved.

It's really not practical to tell an international corporation that it cannot get its translations from some stoned hippy in Goa if it really wants to, and with a bit of searching on the Internet, your neighbor can have that same hazy Proz-certified Pro translate the CV that he hopes will land him the Dream Job in New York. Except that if he's smart enough to get that job and keep it, he won't.

There are means of organization which can prove effective and paths of professional development which can protect one's rates and perhaps improve them, but very few people choose these options. Too lazy perhaps. Whining is easier, and its costs are not as apparent as the warm glow of self-righteous, if unproductive, indignation. We don't want no peanuts, after all, we want respect, fame and fortune! At a local and national level, many countries have professional organizations offering continuing education, networking opportunities and excellent referrals. My own experience with the German BDÜ in this regard is overwhelmingly positive. "Ah, but that's a closed shop, I don't qualify," you might say, and you might be wrong. Recent changes in the BDÜ's qualification policies open membership to experienced professionals who can document a certain amount of activity and provide a few recommendations, similar to the ITI in the UK. I believe that local and national professional organizations, properly supported and encouraged by their members, are probably the most effective ways of achieving the stated goals of movements like NP to achieve stable, sustainable rates and professional respect. Those active in such movements might do well to set aside the Molotov cocktails for a bit so their hands will be free to fill out an application to the ATA, NAATI, ITI, IoL, BDÜ, AdÜ, etc. and once in, make life Hell for the governing board until they shape up and defend the members interests in a socially appropriate and sensible way.

Organization at a lower level is also effective: formal or ad hoc teams can work together for more effective marketing and project handling. You are free to chose the route taken here, and if you can't think of any that might work, your mind may not be fit for creative activity. Or you may be a hermit, like me. Still, readily available collaboration technologies, project management tools and even online translation management technology provide a host of intriguing, possibly attractive possibilities.

At a personal level there is much that one can do with organization as a business person to present a better image and attract better clients, be these agencies or end customers. Lots of hints in this regard here and elsewhere; some of the books reviewed here are great places to start, but don't ignore other resources like your local chamber of commerce. I got a great outline for a business plan from one of these online years ago, and variations of that plan have served me well over the years.

I think two key words summarize the steps that can be taken to secure one's future: responsibility and action. When one is tense from the heavy-caliber, rapid-fire bad news of daily reports, the future can indeed seem forbidding. But when I read in those reports of a double amputee hurrying in his wheelchair to protest in Tahrir Square to secure his future and that of his country, confident of his power to make a difference, I think some of us in quieter, safer parts of the world can also move on and secure a future less tense.

Price and project templates!

One of the things I look forward to the most in the version 4.0 release of the Online Translation Manager from LSP.net is a new feature for price and project templates. It has been discussed for quite a while, and the lack of a price list feature up to now has put off some of those who tested this project management environment, but in the end the implementation is better than I had hoped for. I saw a live demo of the feature for the first time last Tuesday while I was visiting the company's offices to discuss localization and training issues.

It has been possible to keep price information for customers in OTM in the past, though not quite in the way to which one is accustomed to seeing in similar software solutions. Notes features in the customer master data as well as the ability to store documents and contracts for particular customers does provide a useful way of keeping track of rate agreements and terms. But what has been "missing" up to now is the ability to plug in volume information for a service and have quotation amounts calculated automatically. Such features are probably found in most language service project management software, from TO3000 and TOM to Worx, Plunet, Project ]open[ translation et alia.

There are, however, some problems with data maintenance in the other applications that I have used. I have worked most extensively with LTC Organiser (the predecessor to Worx) and AIT's Translation Office 3000 and used them to run my business since 2003. (Before that I used Excel templates. Yuck. Don't ask and I promise not to tell.) In both environments I maintained customer-specific price lists, reflecting individual terms, subject areas, rush job policies and more. After a while I found that the data were not very easy to keep current (my TO3000 master price list was rarely useful for anything, as it was always hopelessly outdated or irrelevant to the individual terms), and so many types of projects required special quoting that the price lists were often useless anyway. When my partner tried to use the software for quotation, she could rarely remember the various surcharge policies negotiated with customers, which occasionally led to confusion. I think that is pretty typical of current solutions. You have to work hard to stay on top of things, and that's not always easy when things are hopping or your day is filled with interruptions.

The OTM 4.0 solution I saw appears to solve that problem nicely from several directions. There are no price lists as one usually sees them, no Excel-like grid of rates and services to be maintained. There is something which I believe is much better: general templates for project structures including prices as well as the ability to use any project from the customer's history as a template for a new project. In fact, several templates can be applied to a new project if it uses the combination of services from those individual templates or past projects. A simple interface for sorting project histories also makes it easy to find the right similar project to use as a template.

All this saves a lot of time and is closer to the reality of our workflows! And if I increase rates, then I can simply use the date-sorted project history to choose "templates" reflecting the new rates. Any completed project can also be used as a template. Template access can also be governed by rights in the system, so project managers at an LSP can have their own personal templates and choose to share these or not.

There are some rather interesting discussions about building on this feature for CAT analysis integration, but in its first released form I think this is a powerful, unique tool that will save me a lot of time personally. I appreciate the fact that the system architects didn't just pull a "me too" and implement pricing tools the same way most others do it; they were aware of the problems of data maintenance and had left the feature out for that reason. Only after careful consideration of possible solutions and testing was a decision made to introduce something that is more powerful and sustainable than anything I had available before. Thumbs up!

The Entrepreneurial Linguist and Online Media

One of my goals for 2011 is to catch up on a backlog of reading that has been accumulating on my shelves and disk drives. One professional resource that was particularly high on my list is the Jenners' book The Entrepreneurial Linguist; I had followed reports of its production with great interest for about a year as well as enjoyed their business tips on the Translation Times blog. I enjoy the perspectives and tips shared by my colleagues in a number of publications, and I have learned something valuable from every one I have read. I particularly value, perhaps more than many would, subtle variations on the same theme, because these help me to discover the context that works best for my business.

But how much is there to be said about the business of freelance translation that is really different or original? More than I realize, as I am reminded time and again. This profession is evolving quickly, though not always in the ways that the prophets of machine translation and others would have us believe.

The Entrepreneurial Linguist starts off with an excellent discussion of the business mindset needed for successful positioning and negotiation and follows with a chapter on organization and accounting that is for the most part good and relevant, but not particularly distinguished compared to similar expositions I've seen. The third chapter, however, on "Social Media and Web 2.0" is gold. As can be expected in a rapidly evolving field, some minor parts are already in need of updating, and I was surprised to see an excellent, extensive discussion of Facebook without a mention of Facebook "pages". But this is the best overview of the various online media options that I have seen yet for language service professionals, covering blogs, professional networks such as XING and LinkedIn, Twitter and more in a very focused, relevant way.

Innumerable times I have listened to friends and colleagues who "just don't see the point" of various social media for business or personal use or who are put off by all the stupid hype. In thirty well-written, balanced pages, Judy and Dagmar Jenner make the case and the limitations very, very clear. That by itself is worth the cover price of the book and a lot more.

Of course there is a lot more useful content as one would expect from freelancers with business degrees who successfully work exclusively with direct clients rather than agencies. What the authors excel at most of all is communication, both in online media and more traditional venues, and this provides the reader with a lot of unique, valuable and highly digestible fare.

Life 3.0 and the holidays

The past year has been an interesting one; crises come in many forms, and the financial and economic ones, no matter how great their impacts may seem, are really the trivial ones. As we break bread with friends and family in the coming days, let's remember the purpose behind the business. If there isn't one, and it's an end unto itself, that's a problem to be addressed sooner or later. Alex Eames, whose humorous, on-target advice was such a help to me a decade ago when I started translating commercially in a serious way, expressed the importance of priorities with some eloquence, both directly and indirectly, in the updated version of his classic guide for creating a viable business as a freelance translator. If you are struggling financially or personally, there may be something there to guide you to a better path. Alex deals with the conceptual and personal side of the business as well as Jost Zetzsche does the technical (though I think he too has a great store of wisdom in non-technical matters). For many of us today, both sides are important to get right and harmonized, and I am personally grateful to both men for sharing their knowledge and advice with us.

Jost, by the way, did a brief review of my project management environment (the Online Translation Manager from LSP.net) in his latest Toolkit newsletter (#181 I think it is, but he hasn't updated the "current" link on his site). As usual, he showed great insight into the essentials of the software and where it may or may not fit in a freelancer's business. I think there are a few key issues that were missed, which I will deal with in a later article, but these are not obvious considerations until one has been broadsided by a serious business disaster and needs to ensure that processes and data are really, really secure in all circumstances. Nonetheless, I agree with everything said more or less, and as usual the rest of the newsletter's content offers me a lot of useful information to run my business in better ways and avoid potholes in the information highway. Jost has been promoting the Toolkit newsletter as a possible gift to colleagues or translators who work for you; he should have done this years ago I think, because this is actually a good idea. He's a good educator at many levels.

The past year has been one of considerable change for me as well, not all of it voluntary, though when viewed from a Nietzschean perpective all for the good. My headquarters are now in a former HQ used by Napoleon on his way to get his butt kicked in Russia in 1812: an old Amtshaus built during the reign of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Here I can train my dogs in peace, hunt and raise whatever pheasants, quail and ducks I need for various purposes. There are excellent facilities for keeping fowl here, and the keeper died six months ago, leaving the facilities abandoned, so perhaps I can make arrangements that will enable me to make a contribution to the attempts to support the gray partridge population in Brandenburg. Since leaving Oregon eleven years ago, I've missed my chickens, too, so 2011 will probably see a few of those scratching around my garden. But no bloody Araucanas. They are much too devious.

I'll also be spending a lot of time in the coming year rehabilitating my dog Ajax after he was subjected to about 5 months of ill treatment by a breeder and trainer in Lower Saxony.

This individual had expressed an interest in buying the dog from me after seeing him at a trial last April, but he's not for sale. In the summer after hearing about some distracting issues at home, the fellow contacted me again with an offer to put the "final touches" on the dog's training and take him through his hunting trials in the fall. Given that he has done this with more than 1000 dogs in the past with usually good results in two countries, I reluctantly agreed, because it had been emphasized to me time and again in a most penetrating way by some traditionalists that I lacked the experience to get the full potential from such a fine dog. The end result of my stupidity was a dog who is now afraid of his own shadow and who is 5 kilos below the trim weight he had when I delivered him in July. He was caked with shit from his filthy kennel when I finally managed to pick him up three months after he was expected. As for the testing, well... a dog raised on love in your home knows that there is more to life than confinement and isolation, ear pulling and other rough handling, and that life with a tail between your legs is no life at all. Prisoners with any spirit left seek to escape such conditions, and he did so, running away from the SOB on a number of occasions. He disappeared for a long while in the first few minutes of the most important test for a breeding hunting dog of this type in Germany and failed of course. Good for him. We'll work together over the next year to see what can be salvaged, but we'll do it at the dog's pace with respect for his right to exist.

I'm sure there's a parable there somewhere for the situation of some colleagues trapped in abusive relations with themselves and their customers. Another time. Go read No Peanuts for now.

After rescuing Ajax, I had the pleasure of spending a few days visiting colleague Alison Riddell, riding horseback for the first time in 19 years (well, on a saddle at least - a bit of bareback on my Arabian in Oregon or my donkey doesn't count), and hunting with her boyfriend in the Alsace.

Now Alison has got that work/life balance thing pretty much right, but it's hard not to living at the top of a mountain in wine country with a stable of friendly equines.

The coming year will see a lot more changes in my life and in my business, perhaps in some of the topics covered in this blog. A Canadian colleague of mine whose insights I have always appreciated but whom I lost track of for a while after the purges of thoughtful moderators and colleagues at PrAdZ remarked that there really isn't an adequate forum for dialog anywhere. I'm not sure I agree with that; there are many places for collegial exchange, but the dispersion of bodies and talent in our profession does complicate things. Just be grateful we don't always rely on letters, ships and other life-threatening means of travel to enjoy a bit of professional company any more.

If anyone has some topics or questions they might like to see explored, I welcome a comment here or a private e-mail to that effect. I can't guarantee I can write competently on those subjects, but maybe I can whisper the suggestion in other, better ears.

Scalability

In one way or another, issues of scalability have been with me for a long time. In one dramatic lesson in the thermodynamic considerations of scaling a picric acid synthesis during Easter vacation in my sophomore year of high school, I leaned that the consequences of getting it wrong could be rather corrosive. In later research efforts, the scalability of formulations and processes was just as critical; what looked good in a small flask on the lab bench didn't necessarily translate to success in pilot-scale or commercial formulation equipment. To make things work on a large scale, different models of thinking were often called for.

Scalability isn't just an issue for chemistry and engineering; businesses face these challenges in many ways. The business of language services is no exception. If we intend to allow our business to grow in volume (as opposed to focusing on other kinds of development and growth), it is imperative that the processes used in running the business be scalable. "Good enough" for today could mean hopelessly over your head with a modest increase or interference from other factors like health problems. In addition to being scalable, processes must also be robust - well designed and well documented - so that they can withstand setbacks and/or be delegated to trusted others in an emergency or when the growth of the business makes this a necessity. Or when you simply need a holiday.

If you never feel the urge to write a business plan, you should at least be clear about the basic goals of your translation business and think carefully about the implications of growth, demand cycles, illness or family troubles and other major factors we inevitable encounter time and again in our careers.

Think of processes and issues like

• receiving and responding to requests for quotation
• safely transferring and archiving information to meet client needs and the legal requirements of the relevant jurisdictions
• scheduling
• outsourcing
• invoicing and collections
• efficient retrieval of information even after long intervals
• limited retention periods required by some clients

and others that may affect you now or in the future. Are you ready to deal with the events and changes ahead? Growth? Or shrinkage?

Where is the most time "lost" in your current processes? Most of us probably don't even know. Time and again I read surprised comments by fellow translators or others who actually begin to track the use of their time, only to discover that it really gets spent in ways they did not realize.

I'm not proposing solutions this time around. There are many good approaches to these issues, but the best ones will generally depend on the goals you define. I make a lot of suggestions in my other posts, but these are often filtered by my personal goals or the particular characteristics of the country I live in or the markets I serve. Some or all of what works for me might be irrelevant or actively detrimental for you.

I can't say that I'm entirely in agreement that those who fail to plan plan to fail. A random walk through life can take us to some interesting places, but the experience is generally enhanced by some sensible guidelines and good support processes.

We have met the enemy and he is the customer

The Twitter stream from a colleague taking the train back to Berlin after the ProZ conference in Prague was unexpected and shocking. German railway employees assaulting unarmed Czech passengers, abusing them ever more loudly as their confused, embarassed victims waited for the boot to descend and the police arrive, which they finally did to back up their uniformed brothers from Deutsche Bahn. Only spirited resistance by other passengers and reminders that Kundenservice doesn't always mean serving your customer's head on a platter finally caused the uniformed tormenters to relent. Service is a foreign word, taken prisoner to do duty where no native word for the concept exists, and when it comes time to enjoy this serrvice, one is too often reminded that Deutschland ist kein Einwanderungsland, especially not for such ideas.

Face it, customers are the enemy. Isn't that so? My business isn't Burger King. How dare they presume to have it their way! You don't have to be a German railway employee to understand what a bother these people are, disturbing our perfect routines with their perfectly unreasonable projects. Vee muss train zem. Kundenerziehung. Now that's a word to export along with all those Mercedes cars and cool machine tools. Maybe it can come in a boxed set with a leather corset and a whip.

It's simply too much to ask that we recognize, accept and forgive the human fallability of our customers. That we forego the opportunity to enlighten them with brutally frank commentary on their second language competence and offer to let them kiss our college class rings in exchange for the grammar lesson. Emotional intelligence is a moron from Oxy when you're right.

Years ago, Mike (a consulting customer of mine) told me about his "big break" as a salesman for some sort of parts. His stuff was simply the best. Best quality, best price, best delivery time. Probably bore God's Own Seal of Approval, too, since he was in Oklahoma at the time. But the purchasing agent at the prospect was simply too stupid to realize that he and his company were missing out on the real deal. Mike tried for years to get that account, but the dummies just kept buying inferior stuff from the competition. And all the while he had to listen to the puchasing agent's piteous whining, his inferiority complex about being whupped by his brother-in-law at bass fishing. Finally, Mike couldn't stand it any more and brought him a package of his favorite rubber worms and explained how to hook and use them. The next time Mike visited, the guy surprised him with an order and bored him to tears with the tale of the jaw-dropping bass he caught the day bro-in-law got skunked. And he kept on ordering after that. But what did the customer learn about the better product he was now buying? Not a damned thing. Don't be like Mike. Teach your customers a lesson!

Why online translation business management?

This coming October it will be my pleasure to make a very short joint presentation with another colleague at the ProZ conference in Prague. The subject will be online translation management and a brief review of key features and issues to consider. The outline for the talk is somewhat challenging to develop, as the allocated time is thirty minutes, and this is a subject that could be discussed for hours without exhausting it, particularly if one begins to compare all the myriad online and offline options with each other.

For the sake of “full disclosure”, I'll remind the reader that I do now have a formal business association with a company providing such solutions: LSP.net. I'm technically on the payroll of an affiliated company, which simplifies my life by handling my backoffice functions and remembering to pay my health insurance, and as part of the arrangement I handle updates and many improvements to the English interfaces of the Online Translation Manager (OTM) as well as write occasional tips on how to use the system. I support that solution because I believe that this type of service is of great potential value to many of those with whom I have professional contact in the language industry. Here I mean online solutions of one sort or another, not necessarily the particular one I support because it fits my needs.

What led me personally to move from “offline” solutions – some of them very, very good – to online management tools for my translation business? Many people with businesses more complex than mine get by somehow with souped-up Excel spreadsheets or an Access database on steroids and a LAN. Tools like the Translation Office Manager (TOM) are network-enabled and do a great job even for agencies that have outgrown the kitchen table.

I had a very specific set of circumstances and experiences, which I think are not all too uncommon, even if their degree may be greater or less than my experience and they may occur in other situational clusters:

1. a large number of projects for a team of two which required better coordination of schedules;
2. responsibilities for portions of shared projects needed better definition (after a few incidents of accidental overlap in rushed projects with many files);
3. access to the project management and invoicing functions by multiple persons was needed so that everything wasn't bottlenecked by my busy schedule;
4. better data backup was needed after a hard drive with far more than a month's worth of unbilled work died unexpectedly and proved unrecoverable (very, very expensive);
5. more secure data transmission (for receiving and delivering project files) was required after various half-baked encryption schemes several clients wanted proved unreliable;
6. more reliable delivery of translations had long been required – several incidents each year occur where e-mail is delayed for hours, days, even weeks;
7. access to project information was often required when we were out of the office, traveling, etc.;
8. a better “filing solution” was needed for compliance with the legal requirements for retaining project-relevant documents such as e-mail, NDAs, master agreements, etc.

Points 5 through 7 really only can be dealt with via an online solution of some kind. Whether that solution is a VPN, SaaS or something else is secondary. The third point also required an online solution particularly when the parties involved are often not at the same location or hiring a remote assistant is considered.

There were other criteria to consider, such as workflow design and customizability where I was willing to consider some compromises, at least temporarily, but those eight points were my personal list of features that must be available to me in order to achieve the desired changes in my business. Much of the list had long since been satisfied by my desktop solutions from LTC and AIT, but the real stumbling block time and again came down to online multi-user access, data security and, in the end, cost and infrastructure issues as well.

Three times in the last five years I have had cost estimates put together for an in-house server for our two-person office. Each time, however, I put off the decision to buy. In one case I simply didn't have the cash for the whole complex system that was proposed, and later when prices fell dramatically I was simply irritated by a line item of 150 euros per workstation to “connect” to the server (i.e. plug in a simple cable to the RJ-45 sockets built into the walls of the office for a network years ago). Really, though, the biggest issue for me was the lousy feeling in my gut at the thought of having to maintain yet another piece of hardware (and all the associated software) in the office. I've been fiddling with IT hardware and software for too many years now and I'm simply sick of it. I want to do things I really enjoy now like translate interesting texts or work with my dogs.

So for me, the software as a service (SaaS) model is attractive for translation business management as well as for other applications I use like translation environments. If Kilgray were to offer an attractive SaaS package for using the memoQ Server (so I wouldn't have to mess with the supporting hardware), I would probably jump on it. As I did with the Online Translation Manager from LSP.net.

To some extent my chosen solution is like hunting rabbits with a cannon loaded with grapeshot, but I prefer to have more features than I need and have the option of growing without changing systems than to meet a very limited set of requirements well and have no further possibilities in the chosen framework. That was why, years ago, I chose the agency version of LTC desktop software, and the few times I needed to outsource to the few people I trusted not to screw up I was glad of the additional flexibility with provider records and price lists.

I really haven't seen a lot of good, secure, affordable options for SaaS to meet freelancers' needs. There are a few options for agencies, not all of them as transparent as OTM, but aside from a Swedish solution I stumbled across and didn't evaluate and the free but limited options at ProZ which I don't trust given the site's history of security breaches and questionable politics, I can't come up with any others that I would consider a viable option at this time. (If anyone has information to the contrary, please share it!)

Nonetheless I think this will be an area to watch in our profession; the potential value to many of us is high, and the existing solutions for software as a service will develop further as others come online. That will be good for all of us I think.  

Impact

Once in a while I find it useful to review the state of things in my life and business and consider what actions or tools have had the greatest positive impact. Ranking the effects is usually rather subjective, of course, but that's OK - we live by subjective impressions far more than most of us realize.

So I asked myself what has made the greatest positive difference in my translation business in the past year? In the past five years? In the past ten? It was fairly easy to narrow down the answers.

For the past year, the increased use of online management tools for project management, deliveries and invoicing has helped me the most.

In the past five years, two things have mattered most: greater collaboration with a competent partner (which made many projects possible which I would otherwise not have touched) and joining a professional translators' organization (BDÜ in my case) after passing the state exams in Berlin, Germany. That has brought in many nice referrals. I don't think I can narrow down the five-year factors any more, because the impact of all three actions has been huge, and all are rather closely related in various ways.

The greatest impact over the course of the ten years I have been engaged in significant volumes of translation has surely been the use of translation environment tools such as Déjà Vu, SDL Trados and memoQ (just to name the primary ones I work with). That's also why these are discussed so often in this blog. Properly applied, these tools can play a positive role in nearly any commercial translation business.

Of course, every translation business is unique, and needs and priorities differ. What has had the biggest impact for you in the past year, the past five and past ten?

Sometimes a great customer

I think that sometimes we get so caught up in the often nutso routines of the translation business that we don't recognize a big gold nugget in our own pans. Someone has to take it out and hit us over the head with it first.

Communication is important in most businesses, and translation is about communication really, so I would suppose you could say this applies even more so to translators. But there are many forms of communication and each exchange is unique. Maintaining the alertness to recognize that uniqueness and to respond in the best way to each individual situation is not easy at all, even for some people who are considered "good communicators".

I had an interesting project several months ago that was a bit of a nightmare in several ways. The source document was in MS Word format, but heavy footnoting and commentary as well as a huge number of hefty graphics caused most of my various translation environment tools to choke. After two days of trying to get the project set up, I finally discovered a complex conversion workflow involving several tools that enabled me to translate. Then the real nightmare began. The source text was a disaster. Written by Germans living abroad for many years, some of whom had no access to a German keyboard and showed obvious signs of having forgotten the proper use of their native language, it also showed signed of having been slapped together in a big hurry. Whole paragraphs were repeated, sometimes consecutively. Sentences ended like staircases into the ceiling at the Winchester Mystery House.

The rational thing to do in such circumstances is to have a chat with the customer about the state of things, perhaps suggest a bit of editing if possible before the actual translation begins. But I think more than a few of us have dealt with customers who become irate at the suggestion that a source text could be less than perfect, and too often I've received responses that essentially mean "shut up and translate what's in front of you". In one case there was a mushroom cloud seen over a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia as an end customer responded to ten pages of corrections for bad grammar, typographical errors and mislabeled diagrams in a source text. So gradually I've begun to give less feedback on the problems I see with source texts unless I see them as precursors to inevitable death or lawsuits. Simply looking stupid doesn't always count any more.

Well, as luck would have it, there were complaints about the aforementioned project. The exchange dragged out for more than a month (largely my fault as I tried in vain to get someone else to review the text and identify serious translation errors that were not apparent to me and I simply didn't feel like engaging in a conversation that seemed a bit Kafkaesque in the clarity of its issues). The customer asked repeatedly that I look at the edited text (which had been subjected to extensive, necessary editing of its content, the faults of which were the legacy of the source text) and make a "proposal" (for some sort of discount, obviously). I had told the customer that I was quite willing to reduce the invoice for the tardiness that resulted from the difficulties involved, but that I couldn't see anything in the translation to fault beyond a few typographical errors my proofreader had missed. In fact, the editor engaged by the customer had introduced serious errors into the text while making a few good suggestions for alternative terminology. That answer wasn't satisfactory.

Finally, after weeks of stress over the matter, I had largely ceased to care at all about the rather large invoice. I decided to put the ball back in the customer's court, accept whatever suggestion was made and if I didn't like it, then I was unavailable for further work. End of story. So in a relaxed state of mind, I called up the customer and we resumed our chat. I asked for a "wish", saying I simply wanted the matter resolved to their satisfaction, and they know better than I do what they might consider "satisfying". I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that the requested invoice reduction was less than what I would have considered acceptable. So that point was resolved immediately, and I could feel the muscles in my back loosen a bit. Then the interesting part of the discussion began.

My understanding at the end was that the real issue was not quality of the translation per se, but the quality of communication. The person with whom I had dealt with for years was rightfully upset at not being informed that she had passed on garbage to me for translation. And I was so caught up in various matters that I didn't stop and consider the particular nature of that specific customer relationship and the fact that this was a customer who is open to criticism and wants to see the best result in the end. A customer who understands that things can go wrong when people work under pressure and who tries to make intelligent decisions if the information to do so is available. In other words, for many of us the ideal customer! Gold in my pan, and I was too blind to notice. My other half, who had been very irritated about the whole matter, nearly broke out the champagne to celebrate when she realized how reasonable our customer really is. This is the kind who is really worth extra effort.

I'm sure this won't be the last such mistake in what I hope will be further busy decades of translation. But I hope that the lesson will stick for a while, and I'll ask myself more often if I am really responding to the situation now confronting me or to a completely different one with a different customer last week.

Alex Eames saves a life

Alex saved a fox tonight; I was so engrossed in reading a draft of the new version of his advice book for translators that I didn't see Meister Reinecke until he had finished off the tasty stink bait and was headed for the bushes to get out of the rain. Taking a netbook to the raised blind isn't conducive to hunting success it would seem.

The new themes of the book are found to some extent in the material of his recently revived tranfree newsletter, but there was a lot of other useful new content as well as interesting online media statistics. Although I suppose I could almost be counted as an "old pro" by now (well, "old" at least), I finished the book with a nice little to-do list of changes I need to make in my business marketing. Like earlier versions of his book, this one doesn't make any enormously surprising points if you are blessed with a little basic common sense, but it offers a nice, digestible summary and reminder list that can help brush the dust off the glasses of "old pros" whose vision of the profession has gotten a bit obscured. And the book is as useful as ever for those starting out in the profession. An earlier version was probably the best general advice I received on getting started and was worth in practice about two orders of magnitude more than I paid for it.

There are so many good points in the book that caused me to make a note to myself that I wanted to write a blog post on the subject. Simple, powerful stuff like the discussion of client acquisition costs and the high value of repeat business. Sure, it's "obvious". But how well have some of us learned that lesson if we are still inclined to turn the cannons on customers in difficult situations which, if handled with a bit of grace and intelligence, could be used as opportunities to reinforce one's professional reputation and increase customer loyalty? I've earned a few demerits there this year as I've dealt with reorganization stresses and other issues, and reading Alex's clear exposition on the subject was a fine and necessary mental Kur in a very real sense. The discussion of translator CVs (résumés) is another point which is discussed often, but the guidance of his clear examples will be a great help to many I think. It also reminded me that I need to trim half a dozen pages or so from mine... something I have been aware of and intended to do for a decade now as soon as things slow down a bit :-)

No idea when this year the book is scheduled for release, and some important additions and revisions of the content are apparently still under consideration. But the structure of what I've seen and the updates to the content make this book as relevant to survival as a freelance translator in today's market as the original editions were when I started translating full time. The markets for translation are indeed changing in some interesting ways now, and I think that this new edition of the book will be a valuable mixture of timeless good advice and strategies for staying of top of a rapidly evolving global situation that affects many translators. If you aren't already a tranfree subscriber, I recommend signing up for the free newsletter so you won't miss the release announcement later this year.