Andy Watkinson wrote:
Tom Hoar wrote:
Did you ever wish an agency or customer would ask you what you want and how the customer/agency/translation should evolve? If so, this is an opportunity to tell them.
Do I wish the client would accept my (slightly inflated) stated fee rather than let me be haggled down to a merely acceptable one?
Yes
Do I wish the client would stop sending me the kind of PDFs which give me and my OCR nightmares and just send me a straightforward Word file?
Yes
Do I wish they'd be more realistic with their delivery dates?
Of course.
I've spent 40 years trying to convince them of the above, amongst others.
Don't think you or any of the various entities you've mentioned will do any better than me but if you think you can, that's fine by me.
Still don't understand what you're talking about though.
Dear Andy,
thank you for your feedback. We’d like to tell you a bit of our story.
Many years ago we started an innovative business model that helped us to grow together with our translators. This unique business model, that we are still using nowadays, consists in paying those translators, whose quality of work and reliability are excellent, a per word rate PLUS an hourly rate according to the time spent working on the translation.
We have a DTP department that convert PDFs into Word files, since we know that having an editable file is the best way of working for a translator.
Moreover, if the deadline is too tight, we pay a higher rate, of course.
We already do all this, but we believe that reducing the debate only to rates would be reductive. What we hope we'll manage to do is to improve our business model and to show to other companies and institutions that this is something possible to do. To achieve this goal it is fundamental to understand what are the needs, the wishes and the expectations of translators, not only in terms of money.