Cutting costs – at any cost?

This week is turning out to be an interesting one. Practically all work that I’m doing is reminding me of the negative consequences of the practices that are being adopted by some of the larger international translation agencies.

So far, I’ve worked on five different jobs this week. One of those was for a translation agency in Germany that is not, as far as I know, in any way linked to the bigger international agencies. The job went smoothly, no problems at all.

For the four remaining jobs I worked either directly with one of the leading international agencies or with one of their subcontractors. One of the jobs was fairly standard and presented no issues. The other three were a different matter alltogether…

Job 1 was a user manual for a sperm selection device used in ICSI procedures. A previous version of the manual had been translated earlier, but the translation had not been stored in the Translation Memory that I was supposed to use, because the end client had expressed concerns about some errors in the previous translation. My client (the subcontractor) did send a PDF version of that translation for reference, though, but later instructed me not to look at that too much, because the quality was ‘not very good’.
I started translating and discovered that the new version was practically the same as the old one. So, hoping to find some useful terminology and possibly some reusable translations, I did turn to the PDF anyway. I soon discovered that ‘not very good’ had been an understatement. I was absolutely shocked by the (lack of) quality of the translation. The text had obviously been machine-translated but not post-reviewed and the translation was completely unintelligible. When I mentioned this to my client and expressed the hope that this translation hadn’t been published, she informed me that the Finnish translator had made the exact same remark. Someone somewhere in the workflow had probably wanted to save some money by leaving out the post-editing round. Had they not done that, they would have been able to leverage the previous translation, making the new translation a lot cheaper.

Job 2 was a review job, directly for this large agency. The text was a speech by the CEO of an international Group, active in chemistry. The company is based in Belgium and the speech, in French, was to discuss the results of the financial crisis, an acquisition and strategic plans for the future. The translation, into Dutch, had obviously been performed by a Flemish translator, and not a very good one. The main positive thing that I can say about it, is that the translator must have run a spell check, because typos were the only type of error that I didn’t find. I had to make stylistic and grammatical changes to practically every sentence, and in several cases the translator hadn’t understood the French text at all. He or she had used incorrect verb tenses and had used literal translations for French idioms. The result was a text that could certainly not be used by a CEO as a shareholder speech. Fortunately, my client agreed to double my review rate to compensate for the additional time I’d have to spend to create a better translation. My guess is that their budget would have allowed for that anyway, as they’d probably used a translator charging rates that are far below the generally accepted minimum rates. If they’d had the text translated by a quality translator charging normal rates, a short spotcheck QA would have been enough.

Job 3 was for the subcontractor again. This time I was asked to translate software for a CPR defibrillator – the text that is displayed on-screen. Now, there were several problems with this job. First of all, the software had been extracted into an Excel file. Additional columns had been added with information about the meaning of the software strings and about length restrictions. A macro had been added to the file to check if the translated strings would comply with the length restrictions. So far so good. Unfortunately, the file had been sorted alphabetically, so any context information had been lost. Also, because of the length restrictions, many of the English strings had been abbreviated and it wasn’t always clear what the unabbreviated string would have been. There was a PDF manual with a little more context information. The file consisted of more than 1,500 strings, though, so I would have been required to look up 1,500 strings in the PDF to make sure I had translated them correctly.

That would have been bad enough as it is. But to make matters worse, the end client has their own online translation memory software. They require their translators to use that software for all jobs, one of the reasons being that in that way they are building up material to use for their machine translation system.
And so the column with translatable strings from the Excel file had been copied into a Word file that I would have to translate using that online software. All additional context information and all length restrictions had been stripped from the file.

Providing a decent translation would therefore take a lot of additional time. For each of the 1,500+ strings in the Word file, I would have to consult first the Excel file for some context information and then the PDF for more information. I would then have to think of a proper Dutch translation, and then have to consult the Excel file again to see if the translation fitted within the length restriction. If not, I’d have to abbreviate it without loosing its meaning. And all of this for the normal word rate, which isn’t all that high in the first place.

I did start on the translation. I’d taken it on without checking it properly beforehand, so I felt obliged the make the best of it. But the more I translated, the more I started to doubt. I felt that I could in no way guarantee that my translations were correct, or that they were still intelligible after I’d abbreviated them. If this had been some innocent piece of software, that would have been bad enough. But this wasn’t just any software, it was CPR defibrillator software, used in emergency situations where there’s no time to consult the manual. With incorrect or unintelligible on-screen instructions, people could die. I did not want to be responsible for that and returned the job to my client, who said they would find ‘another solution’ and mention my concerns to their client, the large agency. It’s my guess that ‘another solution’ means finding another translator who doesn’t have my concerns.

There are several things here that cause my concern. Obviously, the main problem is that this agency, as many of the large multilingual and multinational agencies, is trying to offer the lowest possible rates to their end clients. And because they still need to make a profit, they are using several methods to cut costs. They are using machine translation, as in job 1, but don’t always want to pay for a post-editing round. They are lowering their word rates to the extent that quality translators no longer want to take on their jobs, as was probably the case in job 2. And they are shoving all additional work on the shoulders of freelance translators without paying for the additional time needed to produce a quality translation, as in job 3.

In the first two examples, the end clients were lucky that someone noticed the quality issues and that something could be done. This led to additional costs for the agency, which they may or may not have been compensated for by the end clients. However, in job 1, a horrible translation had been produced and (probably) published first. And in cases such as job 2, it’s all too common for the review round to be skipped for whatever reason. The blame is usually put on translators in general. Asked what we do for a living, we have all been presented with examples of badly translated user manuals for watches, cameras, etc.

But job 3 shows that it’s not just the translator’s reputation that’s at stake. Bad translations could put people’s lives at risk. It is completely unacceptable that people could die because companies and agencies are trying to save money in the translation process, at whatever cost…

Discounts required

My reply to the message I received this evening from Mr. Didier Hélin, Vice President of World Wide Vendor & Supply Chain Management at Lionbridge. The message, in which Lionbridge requires its partners to provide a 5% discount on all projects, was sent from a no-reply e-mail address, giving me no opportunity to reply in person.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Mr. Hélin,

As you have taken the liberty of e-mailing me without providing an e-mail address that I can reply to, I am taking the liberty of replying to you in this way. A copy of this message will be sent to my Vendor Manager in Amsterdam.

Let me reply to several points in your message.

• “industrial production in the USA fell by 0.2% in September, the first decline in more than a year”. – As it says, the first decline in more than a year. This means that for more than a year, industrial production has been rising. That is not a downturn, it’s an upturn. A 0.2% decline is a natural market fluctuation and is no indication at all of the economic situation in the translation and localization industry.
• “In October alone, the US Dollar lost 6% of its value against the Euro.” – I don’t understand this. On www.x-rates.com you will find that on September 29, 2010, 1 dollar was worth 0.7347 EUR. On October 29, 2010 (today) this had fallen to 0.721657 EUR. The difference is about 2%.
• “Most economists predict little or no growth in Europe and Japan for 2011.” – I would like to refer you to the IMF’s recent projection, dated October 6, 2010, stating, amongst others:
  - “The IMF upwardly revised its projection of world output growth to 4.8%”
  - “economic recovery is proceeding broadly as expected”
  - “the economic growth in the United States (…) is projected to accelerate to 2.6% this year and 2.3% next year, following a decline of 2.9% in 2006”
  - “the eurozone economy will grow by 1.7% this year and 1.5% in 2011”
  - “in Japan, the IMF expects the output to rise by 2.8% this year and 1.5% in 2011”
  - “In China, growth is projected to average 10.5% in 2010 and 9.6% in 2011”
  - “In India, growth is projected to be 9.7% in 2010 and 8.4% in 2011”
• “Against the backdrop of this negative economic context” – Now, I don’t think the economic context is as negative as all that after all…
• “we require all our partners to provide a 5% discount on all Lionbridge projects” – I am sorry, but this is not the way it works. Your partners may offer you a discount, but as a client you cannot require a discount, much the same as I, as a client, cannot require a discount from my supermarket.
• “Lionbridge bears the full burden and risk associated with exchange-rate fluctuations” – that is true. However, I have never seen an e-mail similar to this one requiring me to increase my rates by 5% in reverse conditions. In other words: Lionbridge also bears the full profit of exchange-rate fluctuations. This is all part of running a business.
• “as a USD denominated company this means that we have effectively seen our outsourcing costs rise by approximately 6% in the last month alone”. – As I’ve indicated above, this figure should be closer to 2%. The dollar lost 2% of its value against the euro – if your outsourcing costs rose by more than that, there must be other factors as well.
• “Lionbridge has taken extraordinary steps to reduce its fixed costs (…). We ask our partners to do the same.” – I would be very interested to hear what steps you would suggest that I take to reduce my fixed costs. I am an independent freelance translator working from a small office in my own house. Would you expect me to move to a smaller house? To stop paying my health insurance? Not to turn on central heating this winter to save on energy costs?
• “As our translation partner, your success is tightly aligned with our success.” – I would have phrased that differently. Lionbridge’s success is dependent on the quality work of its partners, and quality comes at a price.

As a freelance translator, there are no steps that I can take to make up for a 5% drop in my income other than raising my output by about 5%. That would mean that I would be spending less time translating the same amount of words (e.g. by not proofreading or spellchecking my work), which would have an unavoidable negative effect on the quality of my work. I am sure that that is not what Lionbridge would want.

However, having worked as a supplier for Lionbridge for several years, I know that there are quite a few areas where there is much room for cost reduction. I am amazed, for example, by the huge number of steps in your supply chain – each step adding unnecessary additional margins and overhead costs to the rates that I charge, all the way at the bottom of that supply chain. In addition, each step in the supply chain adds to the risk of mistakes being made somewhere along the process. Again, I’m assuming that Lionbridge is dedicated to deliver quality translations…

Another point worth mentioning is that Lionbridge has a dominant position in the translation industry. It would be good to see Lionbridge using this dominant position to change its end-clients’ view on fair translation rates, rather than to impose discounts on its suppliers. This would be beneficial for the translation industry as a whole.

In closing, let me rephrase your requirement to a request, in assuming that you are asking me if I would be willing to provide a 5% discount on my work for Lionbridge. My reply to that request would be a polite ‘no’, bearing in mind that the rates that I charge to Lionbridge are very competitive as it is.