| Pages in topic: [1 2 3] > | Off topic: Are translation agencies devaluing our work? Thread poster: Radim Rozumek
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Hi all,
I haven't raised my rates for ten years, instead I am constantly pushed to lower them. Even the most prestigious agencies start asking ridiculous rates... but who is actually pushing?
The end client needs the job to be done and will pay whatever the market price is. The translator pool is plus minus constant so regardless of from which agency the work comes it is at the end distributed amongst them. So, the only party that benefits from lower prices is the trans... See more Hi all,
I haven't raised my rates for ten years, instead I am constantly pushed to lower them. Even the most prestigious agencies start asking ridiculous rates... but who is actually pushing?
The end client needs the job to be done and will pay whatever the market price is. The translator pool is plus minus constant so regardless of from which agency the work comes it is at the end distributed amongst them. So, the only party that benefits from lower prices is the translation agency itself - ensuring the contract (and the profit) for themselves.
There is no benefit for translators (regardless of reassuring how "invaluable we are for them") and there is questionable benefit for the paying client - they get compromised quality! Very compromised. I can see it day by day. "Here, we are giving you supreme MT, but you need to cut your earnings..." So, everybody takes the supreme MT and tries to take as much advantage as possible of it - which, especially in some languages, leads to "mechanized language"; and the translators becoming the cheapest labor. I believe that the idea of MT (and the work behind it) is (was) genuine - but the result is not... I can see it day by day.
Am I missing anything essential?
Best Regards,
Radim ▲ Collapse
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Unfortunately that is simply is how capitalism works.
You want higher prices, do something fewer people can offer.
But yes, almost all agencies are ******** *********.
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:26
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Radim Rozumek wrote:
...... there is questionable benefit for the paying client - they get compromised quality!
Many agencies use our Proz profiles to find the best translator for a particular job, and then offer the cheapest translator to the end client (doubling or tripling the rate quoted by the translator).
Too many clients still don't realise they could have done that work themselves - cutting out the agency and getting themselves a hand-picked translator for a much lower cost.
Some of my best clients have found me that way.
However I think there are many things Proz could do to make that process much more user-friendly for clients, as well as making it more reliable and more focussed. At the moment our profiles are labyrinthine and generic in appearance. They could be reconfigured to give more prominence to our specialisms, our experience, our professionalism, and above all, the examples of translations we've done (which at present are hidden away in a mysteriously-named "portfolio" section).
Either way, the writing is on the wall for the agencies; by undercutting one another and relying more and more on MTPI, to the point that prices and quality have now hit rock bottom, they are actually driving themselves out of business.
[Edited at 2022-02-01 08:33 GMT]
| | | | ATIL KAYHAN 
Türkiye
Local time: 07:26
Member (2007)
Turkish to English
+ ...
| ProZ Community Rates | Feb 1, 2022 |
I believe this rates issue is a pain in the neck for most translators at ProZ. There have been many occasions I have been contacted by an agency for a translation job asking for my rates and my resume. After I send the agency my rates along with my resume, I could not hear from them any more. So, I can assume either my resume or my rates turned them off.
Just for the facts, I am a mechanical engineer with an undergraduate degree from Turkey and graduate degrees from the Universit... See more I believe this rates issue is a pain in the neck for most translators at ProZ. There have been many occasions I have been contacted by an agency for a translation job asking for my rates and my resume. After I send the agency my rates along with my resume, I could not hear from them any more. So, I can assume either my resume or my rates turned them off.
Just for the facts, I am a mechanical engineer with an undergraduate degree from Turkey and graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh in the US. I have substantial experience in my field(s). I had lived in the US for about ten years. It is safe to assume that it was not my resume that turned the agency off. That only leaves one other suspect, my rates.
Sometimes I try to direct such inquiries to ProZ Community Rates (under the tools menu) because it is such a well-rounded statistical representation of global rates. For example, the average rate for my language pair is $0.10 per word and the minimum rate is $0.08 per word. I can see that I am at the minimum end of this scale. Therefore, I feel perfectly safe and confident as far as my rates are concerned.
If I can justify my rates using statistical data as well as my qualifications, that leaves the agency to prove themselves and their rates. Do you think the agency can justify the low rates they are proposing us? I doubt it. That also means I am in a much stronger position than the agency. I will certainly continue to defend my rates in the face of such ridiculous low rates and poor agencies that propose them. ▲ Collapse
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:26
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| What it means | Feb 1, 2022 |
ATIL KAYHAN wrote:
........There have been many occasions I have been contacted by an agency for a translation job asking for my rates and my resume. After I send the agency my rates along with my resume, I could not hear from them any more. So, I can assume either my resume or my rates turned them off.
Just for the facts, I am a mechanical engineer with an undergraduate degree from Turkey and graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh in the US. I have substantial experience in my field(s). I had lived in the US for about ten years.
WHAT THIS MEANS:
You were the ideal translator for that particular kind of job and your rate was reasonable, but the agency doubles or trebles the rate when quoting a price to an end client.
See my post (above). I suggest you try to use Proz to help prospective clients to find you themselves, without going through agencies. You can do this by working on your profile and on the keywords at the bottom of your profile (so that search engines will find you).
| | | | | Everything depends on quality | Feb 1, 2022 |
Radim Rozumek wrote:
The end client needs the job to be done and will pay whatever the market price is. The translator pool is plus minus constant so regardless of from which agency the work comes it is at the end distributed amongst them. So, the only party that benefits from lower prices is the translation agency itself - ensuring the contract (and the profit) for themselves.
Yes, the price is somewhat dictated by the market, but in proportion to quality. Really good translations and translators are hard to find, and when the client needs top quality, many agencies can't find adequate translators and have to resort to two or even three consecutive editing/proofreading steps. If your work quality is so good that the agency can safely omit one of them, or better yet, if you are the only translator in their pool who can handle the given subject properly, you can persuade them to pay you more (sometimes 2-3 times as much as they pay to others).
"Here, we are giving you supreme MT, but you need to cut your earnings..." So, everybody takes the supreme MT and tries to take as much advantage as possible of it - which, especially in some languages, leads to "mechanized language"; and the translators becoming the cheapest labor. I believe that the idea of MT (and the work behind it) is (was) genuine - but the result is not... I can see it day by day.
Some colleagues may disagree, but in my book, if a translator can take any advantage from MT when working on a highly specialised text, then his/her work quality isn't good enough. In my working language pairs, editing MT output to a level that meets my own quality criteria takes me longer than translating the same text from scratch. The only language pairs where I find MT helpful are those I don't know well enough to work professionally.
[Edited at 2022-02-01 10:13 GMT]
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:26
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Cut out the middleman (or middlewoman) | Feb 1, 2022 |
Anton Konashenok wrote:
.... If your work quality is so good that the agency can safely omit one of them, or better yet, if you are the only translator in their pool who can handle the given subject properly, you can persuade them to pay you more (sometimes 2-3 times as much as they pay to others).
Better still: if you are the only one who can handle the job properly, you shouldn't be working through an agency; you should be working directly with the client and charging the rate you want (which will always be much less than what an agency would charge to the client).
[Edited at 2022-02-01 10:24 GMT]
| | | | Radim Rozumek
Czech Republic
Local time: 06:26
English to Czech
TOPIC STARTER | The role of the translation agencies | Feb 1, 2022 |
Well, during my 10 year translation career I worked for just a few end clients (if at all). I always understood agencies as a standard, and also recognize their value for both translators, and the end clients (for instance in case of a need for several languages, complex services, etc.). But they should better care for the translators and be less greedy! They do anything to get an interesting contract - in which case offering lower price wins... caring nothing about us ("devil take the trans... See more Well, during my 10 year translation career I worked for just a few end clients (if at all). I always understood agencies as a standard, and also recognize their value for both translators, and the end clients (for instance in case of a need for several languages, complex services, etc.). But they should better care for the translators and be less greedy! They do anything to get an interesting contract - in which case offering lower price wins... caring nothing about us ("devil take the translators" as we say ) ▲ Collapse
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:26
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Coming to an end | Feb 1, 2022 |
Radim Rozumek wrote: Well, during my 10 year translation career I worked for just a few end clients (if at all). I always understood agencies as a standard, and also recognize their value for both translators, and the end clients (for instance in case of a need for several languages, complex services, etc.). But they should better care for the translators and be less greedy! They do anything to get an interesting contract - in which case offering lower price wins... caring nothing about us ("devil take the translators" as we say )
The growing trend is for clients to do their own search for the particular translator they want. In that way they pay less and get a much better translation. Time is running out for the agencies, which are running like lemmings towards the edge of a cliff.
[Edited at 2022-02-01 10:31 GMT]
| | | | | @Tom in London | Feb 1, 2022 |
Tom in London wrote:
Better still: if you are the only one who can handle the job properly, you shouldn't be working through an agency; you should be working directly with the client and charging the rate you want (which will always be much less than what an agency would charge to the client).
I generally agree, yet there are several reasons to work with agencies, too. In some fields (such as clinical research), end clients only work with agencies because they need huge volumes in many language pairs. Some agencies bring you similar jobs from many end clients. Sometimes you simply don't have an editor/proofreader sufficiently competent in the given language and subject, so you can't comply with the "four eyes" requirement without an agency. Sometimes finding direct clients simply takes so much time that your effective hourly rate is reduced to what you would get through an agency.
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Tom in London wrote:
The growing trend is for clients to do their own search for the particular translator they want. In that way they pay less and get a much better translation. Time is running out for the agencies, which are running like lemmings towards the edge of a cliff.
Tom, could you share a link to the research in question please?
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Tom in London wrote:
I suggest you try to use Proz to help prospective clients to find you themselves, without going through agencies. You can do this by working on your profile and on the keywords at the bottom of your profile (so that search engines will find you).
My very limited understanding of SEO is that Google’s algorithm is not at all impressed by long lists of keywords.
Does it really work?
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 05:26
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Anton Konashenok wrote:
.....Sometimes finding direct clients simply takes so much time that your effective hourly rate is reduced to what you would get through an agency.
Ah, but I mean the clients look for you.
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 07:26
Member
English to Turkish
| Some thoughts | Feb 1, 2022 |
The agencies that seem to be steadily lowering down the rates are those of big conglomerate, first-come-first-served type agencies (not counting the Asian and Middle Eastern ones) that are widely looked down on by the veterans of these forums, who are mostly translating into English (and therefore commanding better rates than most of us translating from English) and working with what they call 'boutique/small agencies', which are said to be located in small rural towns of Denmark, France and Swi... See more The agencies that seem to be steadily lowering down the rates are those of big conglomerate, first-come-first-served type agencies (not counting the Asian and Middle Eastern ones) that are widely looked down on by the veterans of these forums, who are mostly translating into English (and therefore commanding better rates than most of us translating from English) and working with what they call 'boutique/small agencies', which are said to be located in small rural towns of Denmark, France and Switzerland and supposedly have a policy of caring for their translators by offering them higher rates.
I know that people don't want to hear about 'language pairs', but it's the heart of the matter. You, translating into Czech, won't get the same volume of work as an English to German translator does and those 'boutique agencies' will have very little work to offer in your language pair. But if you were translating into Dutch, you could get loads of work from them regardless of your location (i.e. you could live in Australia and the owner of the boutique translation agency would dutifully wait 10 hours for you to wake up and reply to their email).
I suspect the reason those translating into English command better rates and do not condescend to work for the agencies that you implied (or I thought you did) is that it's very easy to spot a bad translation in English, because you can see the end product in English, which is a language spoken/understood by, what, 92% of the world, whereas it's extremely difficult to spot a bad translation in Czech, because, barring the Czech ones, none of the PMs knows a word of it.
An incompetent Czech translator could get away with bad translations as long as they can, while producing large and cheap volumes of translation on a daily basis to sustain their lives in central Europe. Those translating into English can't do that (for very long). ▲ Collapse
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 07:26
Member
English to Turkish
Anton Konashenok wrote:
Really good translations and translators are hard to find, and when the client needs top quality, many agencies can't find adequate translators and have to resort to two or even three consecutive editing/proofreading steps. If your work quality is so good that the agency can safely omit one of them
I've recently done an assignment of that kind (what the client called "proofreading in context"). Apparently the translation was checked, proofread, edited/revised and I was the last person to read it to see if it read naturally in the target language, in other words, I wasn't meant to compare the translation with the source files (of which there were 15 or 16 of them). But, since I didn't have anything on that week and had my doubts about the translation, I checked the source files and found lots of translation mistakes and typos. The style in general was crap, but getting paid hourly there was only so much I could do about that.
If only they had had a 'good' translator who was willing to do a bit of online research to understand the nuances between "instructor", "facilitator", "trainer" etc., and employed proper Turkish grammar instead of social media lingo, they might have saved some money on the third assessor (while sacking the proofreader who didn't seem to have done a good job).
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