For the past twenty-odd years, I have been a translator, editor, proofreader and consultant for companies and various organizations, private and public, non-profit and commercial, who require translation of documents either from English to Tagalog or Tagalog to English. In my professional experience, I have learned a great about the value of starting off on the right foot in a business relationship and about brokering win-win deals.
In any business, customer loyalty is essential. Securing reliable vendors or suppliers of goods and services is just as important because if the quality of the goods or services a business provides is uneven, it will lose customers. Yet there is a disturbing trend occurring among translation agencies that threatens to undermine that balance. It has to do with the way many translation agencies initiate their relationship with translators when negotiating the price of a job.
This brief article is intended to educate corporate executives and managers by telling them what they need to know in order to get an excellent translation the first time. It also is intended to admonish translation agencies who are guilty of the practice I am about to describe, and teach them instead how to develop positive relationships in their role of brokering between the companies needing translation and the translators whom they seek to contract to do the work.
In negotiating my price with translation agencies, I have had some pleasant experiences that have led to valuable and mutually satisfying long-term relationships. For me, this means repeat business as a vendor of my expertise; likewise, the translation agencies who proceed logically in negotiating the price of a particular job gain in me a vendor who delivers consistently high-quality translations. When an agency is able to deliver a high-quality translation to its client, they will come back to that agency. Frequently, the cost is stated as a per word rate.
It seems so simple, doesn’t it? And yet, many agencies approach me and tell me how much they can pay me for a particular job. This practice, besides being disrespectful, is ignorant and simply bad business. Usually, what happens is that they say they only have so much to pay for it because a client has told them that that is their budget. If what they say is true, then companies need to be reminded that when they shop for other services to seek the lowest price for the highest quality in the shortest time frame, they do not initiate that conversation by telling each vendor how much they are willing to pay. One does not build a house by telling the contractor how much he is willing to pay for materials, and translation is no different.
If what the agencies say is not true, it is likely because have already agreed on a price with their client before finding out what the job really costs. They are like a building contractor who, in a hurry to secure a contract, agrees on a low-ball price for materials and labor and then scurries off to build with even lower priced materials and labor so that he can profit from the difference.
The moral of the story for a company in need of translation is to realize that the cost of a translation is often as much or more than the cost of writing the original document. Knowing this, companies can anticipate these costs and build them into their production budgets. Knowing this, agencies can start out on the right foot with companies and translators by being more transparent and flexible. No two jobs are equal. Asking a translator to commit to a per-word rate or an hourly rate before they have seen the job or know of the time frame for delivery is a sure way to begin on a sour note. And the sour note becomes a bitter one when in addition, the translator is told, essentially, that they will be paid with whatever money is left over for them after the agency is paid.
The smartest strategy for executives and managers who know they will need translations more than once in a while is to find translators themselves. This can be done by going to the American Translators Association website where they can perform some sophisticated and efficient searches for just the type of translator they need. They can be found at the website of The American Translators Association. If you want to learn more about translation, here is a good website with reasonable - and short - answers to Frequently Asked Questions about translation.To learn more about the difference between translation and interpreting, see Maryam DiMauro's article Interpretation vs. Translation here on Bright Hub's Language & Culture Channel.
