It was on a 25,000 words project, which was divided in about 10 batches. I immediately contacted my client because the translation was full of non-sense. Even after that, the texts kept on coming with lots of mistakes, even those we had agreed to change for good. It seemed that the translator didn't care at all about the changings, but I also understand that he didn't have much time to do that translation (since I had little time to do my proofreadings as well and the client was always caling me and putting pressure on me to finish the job).
I had to proofread some texts twice because there were still vocabulary mistakes. When I do a proofreading I usually don't care much about vocabulary because I think that it is the translator's job (at least, I always search the vocabulary when I'm doing a translation and I never expect the proofreader to do so for me. (However, once I had a proofreading to do where the translation left some words in the original language and I had to search for its translation...).
This was the worst proofreading I had to do in my carrer so far! I had already agreed with the price and the client couldn't do anything about it. The worst thing is that I haven't been paid for this job yet (since October!!!) and the client keeps on telling me that his client hasn't paid him yet so he can't pay me. It irritates me whenever I think of the subject.
I've learned two things:
1) Doing a proofreading and charging an hourly rate is the best thing I can do (if it's a good translation I don't spend much time with that and it's OK; if it's a bad one, the client will have to pay for all the hours I work on it. I think it's fair enough!
2) I will never work for that client again! I have never waited so much time for a payment. If it was a long-date client who had never been late with his payments, I would understand (It happened once and I still translate for this client). In this case, it was the first time I worked for this one!
You all can't imagine how this proofreading really got on my nerves (and work never gets on my nerves because I LOVE what I do; honestly! Even though sometimes it's hard to find a word, or to make a sentence correctly, etc.). Knowing that I won't probably be paid is driving me even more mad! The problem is that the client lives in another continent far from mine and I feel I can't do much about it.
A good day to all of you,
Ivana
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Aurélie DANIEL Spain Local time: 06:20 Member (2004) English to French + ...
TOPIC STARTER
Epilogue
Jan 4, 2005
Thanks to you all for your comments and words of encouragement, they helped me taking the right decision.
I finally told the customer what was going on, and asked for more time and more money. They accepted immediately, and it turns out they were having similar problems with the other language pairs...
A couple of comments:
- the job comes from an English agency, not a Spanish one.
- when I said "I can't complain", it was also partly because I didn't tell the customer right away, and I knew I was letting my scruples get in the way of a professional attitude. I totally agree with Fuad.
Anyway, all's well that ends well, and next time I'll know what to do right away.
Cheers!
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Jeff Allen France Local time: 06:20 Member (2011) English to Haitian-Creole + ...
a case study
Mar 13, 2005
Esther Pfeffer wrote:
Two different regular clients of mine have at some point discovered machine translation and thought they could save money by sending me the machine translation for editing instead of the original text for translation. Since I only do editing when paid by the hour, I was in a position to let them know that editing machine translation is more costly than translation. I have kept both clients and have never seen machine translation again.
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