| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Where have all the proofreaders gone? Thread poster: Anna Sarah Krämer
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| We need to do something about marketing, but how? | Oct 28, 2014 |
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:
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2. Some agencies that don't give up on the final polish are shifting the responsibility for providing it onto translators, turning them into effectively small agencies and generalist subcontractors. Get your own proofreaders, editors, native speakers and professional consultants, keep the formatting and provide DTP, do all this within standard agency rates.
(Because of lazy marketing and no serious zeal to sell on quality or anything else than low price.)
(My emphasis)
I have to plead guilty to working for agencies because I am not interested in marketing, and they do it better. Perhaps.
Up to a point, when you are a one-person company, it is necessary to outsource some functions. No one person can do everything.
This should not mean we just lie back and let them decide how to run everything. It is not enough to boycott them passively, either, because there are always going to be amateurs and crowdsourcers who will keep the bottom feeders going.
We have to take a stand and make ourselves visible - stop being lazy about marketing, and demand that the professional service we provide is marketed as just that, not a cheap commodity.
We probably have to do some of it actively ourselves too.
It is certainly worth the effort to tell agencies when a text is never going to be good, no matter how much time is spent 'proofreading', revising and editing. Getting it right first time is really the only efficient way.
That is simple logic in so many other professions and industries. So why not in ours?
| | | | Phil Hand 
China
Local time: 14:04
Chinese to English
Christine Andersen wrote:
...Getting it right first time is really the only efficient way.
That is simple logic in so many other professions and industries. So why not in ours?
I agree 100% with you on what should happen. But it's not easy in any industry. Big pharma produces killer drugs all the time; cars blow up; banks implode; oil leaks everywhere; smartphones crash; supermarkets sell horsemeat; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We will have to fight for every inch of quality against people who are not bad, just uninterested. And then we'll die, and the next generation will have to do it all over again.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 08:04
French to English
| Less ambivalent than Phil! | Oct 28, 2014 |
Phil Hand wrote:
... I *love* being proofread by a really good colleague. Having my mistakes picked up, getting suggestions for other ways of handling tricky bits... it's one of my great luxuries. I certainly believe that the *perfect* translation process does involve two translators - of equal quality, or the proofreader the more experienced.
But much of the time, it is as Marcel says. And it's actually quite easy to understand why: imagine you're an agency, and you have two translators available for a job. One is more experienced; the other less. Which way are you going to assign the work? All other things being equal, you're more likely to give the translation to the more experienced person, the proofing to the less. But that just leads us straight to the situation Marcel describes.
I almost never accept proofreading jobs these days, for all the reasons mentioned above. And I get little from most experiences of being proofread. But I've been doing some more literary stuff lately, where there is more willingness to spend some time with the text, and the editing I've received has been really high quality.
Of course the agency gives the translation to the more experienced translator, because the experienced translator doesn't want to have to correct the mistakes of the least experienced translator.
It can be a most enriching and heartwarming process when the pair get to discuss the job together. This is possible in-house and I enjoyed it immensely, but it rarely happens with freelancers, because the agency doesn't want the pair to start discussing rates. So the agency rarely even bothers to let the translator know what happened to their translation. And the proofreader will often try to criticise the translator in order to get the translation next time...
I often had to proofread better translators than myself when working in-house and it was a truly delightful way of getting myself up to speed. I hope I didn't ruin anyone's work, I certainly respected them deeply. I'm really happy to have had that opportunity to learn and I made some wonderful friends that way too!
| | | | | Do you really think so? | Oct 28, 2014 |
[quote]Texte Style wrote:
Phil Hand wrote:
And the proofreader will often try to criticise the translator in order to get the translation next time...
Let me disagree on this. I had to evaluate some translators' projects as "excellent" and other translators' projects as "poor" or "very poor". I do not understand how can you tell your customer that a brilliant translation was actually poor. Who will buy it?
I think one way to get more work is actually being totally honest with your customer, and with yourself. This generates trust.
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Christine Andersen wrote:
I have to plead guilty to working for agencies because I am not interested in marketing, and they do it better. Perhaps.
Some years ago they used to. And there were no batpoo-crazy non-disclosure agreements, so you could still own up to your work and reap the fruits. These days, on the other hand, they sweep you under the rug while competing on the price.
Translator marketing is notoriously awful, but agencies are worse because there isn't even much marketing, more like some DIY copywriting to wrap up the 'USP' of being cheaper, better and faster than everybody else, just like everybody else.
We have to take a stand and make ourselves visible - stop being lazy about marketing, and demand that the professional service we provide is marketed as just that, not a cheap commodity.
We probably have to do some of it actively ourselves too.
Yes, Christine, and for some reason I thought you personally might be interested in Jane's blog. But I'd recommend it to everybody else too. A lot of it is marketing and online presentation advice for authors. We should take after fiction writers, copywriters, lawyers, not the kind of sorry excuse of marketing/PR we see these days in the translation world.
It is certainly worth the effort to tell agencies when a text is never going to be good, no matter how much time is spent 'proofreading', revising and editing. Getting it right first time is really the only efficient way.
On the contrary, with the advent of risk management theory and growing interest in simple mechanics of economic balance engineering, their biz wizards believe in just outsourcing the heck of out it, i.e. shoving whatever they can outside of their company, so that ideally they'd outsource the PMs too and even outsource the outsourcing and just collect a cut. (Which is already taking place in long agency chains.)
That is simple logic in so many other professions and industries. So why not in ours?
Because while there is some tension between lawyers, doctors etc. and the senior partners and owners at firms, at least those companies still rely on the profession and the professional. Agencies have already decided that their interests are opposed to the interests of translators, and they have that desire to appear as the substantive LSP even when 'outsourcing', i.e. doing nothing but forwarding and maybe fronting some risks.
(Let's note how 'to outsource' initially meant to hire external service providers to replace company functions. On the other hand, in modern translation industry it means collecting jobs from other people's companies and then delegating them outside your own company. And whatever the heck are 'outsourcers' doing between clients and individual linguists, anyway, as opposed to proper translation companies or at least agencies? But I'm ranting now.)
[Edited at 2014-10-30 14:49 GMT]
Phil Hand wrote: Christine Andersen wrote:
...Getting it right first time is really the only efficient way.
That is simple logic in so many other professions and industries. So why not in ours?
I agree 100% with you on what should happen. But it's not easy in any industry. Big pharma produces killer drugs all the time; cars blow up; banks implode; oil leaks everywhere; smartphones crash; supermarkets sell horsemeat; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We will have to fight for every inch of quality against people who are not bad, just uninterested. And then we'll die, and the next generation will have to do it all over again.
It's not really a question of doing things right the first time, unless we're talking about a sizeable quantity of mistranslations and unjustifiably poor writing, but rather the second pair of eyes, double check and everything else.
Doing things right in this context means actually running the full QA before a client complains, not after. Writing process has for ages now required editing and proofreading, so why not translation.
Regarding other industries, only maybe solo lawyers who don't have a smart secretary or paralegal will send their stuff out without having them read by someone else. There's probably even more double-checking and supervision in health care, obviously in engineering (written/verified/approved makes 2-3 signatures on some construction-industry documents I translate).
Clients don't want to pay for proofreading, editing or QA in general, but unlike what the general weakness of business culturall rooted in the Anglosphere (probably more the US than the UK, but I'm not entirely sure) tends to move people to think, feel and act like, clients need to be educated rather than have everything adjusted to whatever misconceptions they may be harbouring at the moment.
As for intermediaries, they obviously need to stop cutting corners for margin and learn to rise above their predatory approach to translators.
[Edited at 2014-10-30 14:57 GMT]
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