ProZ.com Translation Forums

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | ...

Jan Truper — Sat, 04 Jun 2022 05:23:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Jan Truper
Post title: ...

[quote]ProZ.com Staff wrote:
What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? [/quote]

- Companies with bad business practices.

- Companies or their agents that do not clearly respect the difference between a freelancer and an employee (which can be either due to ignorance or wilful exploitation).

- Companies with kafkaesque elements in their systems.

- Incompetent or overzealous proofreaders (and companies that let such proofreaders thrive within their systems).

Unfortunately, one of my main subtitling clients (yes, that one) is ticking all of these boxes, forcing me to focus on greener pastures.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Payment delays + “text killers”

Merab Dekano — Fri, 03 Jun 2022 08:24:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Merab Dekano
Post title: Payment delays + “text killers”

Payment delays + “text killers”

When payments are delayed more than a week, I can’t stand it. It makes me nervous no matter what the amount is (the very fact that I am not paid on time what I am supposed to be paid).

Another thing is the phenomenon of “text killers”. Fortunately, it only happens occasionally. Imagine you translate a text. It’s edited and the editor is happy. Then, during the final stage (say, QA), some “text killer” “professional” butchers the text so badly that you only see track changes (digital blood) in the file that was perfectly fine. Of course, 90% of the changes are preferential and 9% are errors that the “text killer” introduced ex novo. The problem is that you cannot tell the client to just ignore those; you need to go through the changes one by one and explain the absurdity of the situation… And it takes time, but more so – stresses you out (stress + anger).

Another thing that was stressing me out was “tight deadlines”, but save very few exceptions, I simply stopped accepting “same day/same hour” projects. Even though I can do it the same day, I just aske the client to let me deliver it next day in the morning (and usually do deliver the same day).

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Days

WolfgangS — Thu, 02 Jun 2022 13:49:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: WolfgangS
Post title: Days

having only 24 hours as I could live with 36 hours days easily.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | PDFs, fancy formatting

Muriel Vasconcellos (X) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 19:20:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Muriel Vasconcellos (X)
Post title: PDFs, fancy formatting

There's nothing worse than a PDF resulting from an OCR scan of a printed document. Next worse is trying to squeeze a translation into a box that's too small and formats that go crazy when the translation is longer than the original.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Other

Robin LEPLUMEY — Tue, 31 May 2022 14:37:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Robin LEPLUMEY
Post title: Other

I used to stress out when my main clients got quieter than usual. But now more than ever, the worst part of my job is having to work for unethical or environmentally unfriendly companies. Or maybe just having to work at all. The world is f****d up and I just sit there translating marketing bullsh*t several hours a day while I should be enjoying life with my wife and kid. Is this my quarter-life crisis?

[Edited at 2022-05-31 14:38 GMT]

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Payment delays

Evgeny Sidorenko — Tue, 31 May 2022 13:28:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Evgeny Sidorenko
Post title: Payment delays

Unstable workload, multitasking and tight deadlines are manageable, but having to give somebody a hard time to receive your past-due hard-earned money is infuriating. Some people think deadlines are for translators only. Being ignored and having to remind about the same thing 2-3 times to get a result is also very irritating.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Other

neilmac — Tue, 31 May 2022 07:43:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: neilmac
Post title: Other

Mainly high workload, but not just juggling the work to meet deadlines. In my case, it's more about achieving a work-life balance, which is often difficult when life gets in the way.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Unexpected labour

Philip Lees — Tue, 31 May 2022 04:44:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Philip Lees
Post title: Unexpected labour

[quote]Tom in London wrote:

Scanned PDFs or PDFs with tables etc..

[/quote]

Taking Tom's point a little further, when I find myself spending longer on the reformatting of a single complex table (i.e. recreating it from scratch) than on the entire translation, and as a consequence my whole work schedule is thrown off.

That doesn't happen very often, but I have one of those jobs right now. I told the client in advance I would be charging extra for the formatting, but it's not going to be enough to cover the time involved.

Oh well.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | replacement with post edit request

Chié_JP — Mon, 30 May 2022 19:35:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Chié_JP
Post title: replacement with post edit request

It is truly painful to deal with MT written by real half-wits (sorry for strong word), humans are at least more sensible even if they make mistakes. It can harm my skill by making compromise all day, so if there are no other job than MT I will certainly quit my career. All other pains like paperwork and multi tasking can be mitigaed, but I simply can not stand even making very small interaction with idiot MT. I always asked for intellectual job when becoming a linguist and hoped to grow that skill.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Makeover required!

Sadek_A — Mon, 30 May 2022 19:04:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Sadek_A
Post title: Makeover required!

The whole current, flawed you-translator-take-all-the-risks-while-I-sail-unharmed freelancing model, where the "I" stands for any person/entity not appreciating (neither money- nor health-wise) translator's value in their success.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | .

Kay Denney — Mon, 30 May 2022 18:52:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Kay Denney
Post title: .

Now that I only work with decent clients who know how long it takes and pay well and promptly, the main cause of stress for me is the very rare hiatus without any work. I know that more translations will come, but I can't help but think nobody loves me any more, and panic and start wondering if I should have made myself a website after all.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Uncertainty

Richard Jenkins — Mon, 30 May 2022 17:51:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Richard Jenkins
Post title: Uncertainty

Funnily enough, I have just received payment from a very difficult customer that I have decided not to work for again. It's simply not worth it.

Imagine doing work at the beginning of March, but not even receiving a purchase order for this work until the end of May and therefore not being able to invoice or plan for payment. Luckily, I did get paid, so no harm done, but when a customer is this disorganized, my advice is to dump them. Find customers that respect your payment requirements and don't keep you hanging on until it suits them.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Ignorant Clients Who Make Unreasonable Requests/Emotionally Unbalanced Clients

Barbara Cochran, MFA — Mon, 30 May 2022 14:46:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Barbara Cochran, MFA
Post title: Ignorant Clients Who Make Unreasonable Requests/Emotionally Unbalanced Clients

I get extremely annoyed when a prospective client asks for "free" samples of umpteen words, which could take as long as a day to produce, esp. since I have translated a large number of books for other clients anyway. My attitude is "just contact my previous clients", since more than a few of them are listed on my CV anyway. Other than that, a woman who was acting as a PM for a publishing company hired me to do two book translations. She told me how great the first one I did for them was, but when I was about three-fourths of the way through the second one, all of a sudden, right out of the blue, she showed up in my inbox, even though I hadn't been in contact with her for more than a few weeks, and sounded like she was going off on some kind of totally psychotic (maybe she was) rant, and like a total screwball. But I figured she was trying to get me to react in a way that could justify her not paying me. Sure enough, after I submitted the second translation, there were other red flags that she was going to try to duck out of paying me. I didn't respond to any of that, since I had moved on to my next project and didn't have time for such nonsense. And as far as I'm concerned, I never do. After waiting about a month, after which I still hadn't been paid for the second book (I already had received payment for the first), I was fortunate enough to find the general address of the publishing company itself. I wrote to them and they, unlike that PM they hired, proved to be quite ethical, and I had the money in my bank account before the week was out.

[Edited at 2022-05-30 14:51 GMT]

[Edited at 2022-05-30 14:54 GMT]

[Edited at 2022-05-30 14:56 GMT]

[Edited at 2022-05-30 14:58 GMT]

[Edited at 2022-05-30 17:57 GMT]

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | .

Gerard Barry — Mon, 30 May 2022 12:22:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Gerard Barry
Post title: .

Difficult and/or boring texts.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Non-payers and scanned PDFs or PDFs with tables etc.

Tom in London — Mon, 30 May 2022 12:05:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Tom in London
Post title: Non-payers and scanned PDFs or PDFs with tables etc.

Non-payers: it's stressful to find out that after you've done a translation, the client who asked you to do it is trying to not pay. I have a way of forcing them to pay, and in the end they always do; but it's an unnecessary added stress to my life.

Scanned PDFs or PDFs with tables etc.. In this case the stress comes not at the end but at the beginning, before I even accept a job and begin the translation. With the client waiting, I have to quickly assess whether I'll be able to convert the PDF they sent me into a usable Word file. If I can't, I then have to tell the client I can only do the translation if they provide the conversion. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don't. This is all stressful because it takes a lot of time without even knowing if the job will go ahead or not.

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Other translators

The Shredder — Mon, 30 May 2022 10:28:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: The Shredder
Post title: Other translators

Right now, I'd say dealing with previous translations is the most stressful part of my job.

Even on the rare occasions that they're any good, they mean a lot of extra work tying everything in.

Today, I'm asking myself yet again why I still choose to fill gaps with bits and bobs from agencies that send a memory full of incorrect and inconsistent matches, resulting in unexpected and unpaid extra work. Aaaaaargh!

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Dealing with clients

Gennady Lapardin — Mon, 30 May 2022 09:13:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Gennady Lapardin
Post title: Dealing with clients

with a certain sort of clients.
Managers of one-off XXSmall super-secret over-confidential projects are true walking stress. They wander in the dark, and the linguistic dark is the last of their many 'twilights'.

[Edited at 2022-05-30 09:14 GMT]

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Almost none

Anton Konashenok — Mon, 30 May 2022 08:39:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Anton Konashenok
Post title: Almost none

To me, translation is a low-stress occupation. All the things listed by the poll author are my conscious choice. One source of mild stress used to be a consistently poor quality of the translations I received for editing/proofreading, so I stopped doing that altogether. By the same token, I never do post-editing. Other than that, well, maybe some clients' and colleagues' misconceptions about quality - but I won't cry foul about that anymore.

[Edited at 2022-05-30 18:59 GMT]

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator? | Other

Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida — Mon, 30 May 2022 08:33:00 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida
Post title: Other

Two quick polls in a row on the same subject. What's going on?

Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?

ProZ.com Staff — Mon, 30 May 2022 08:10:04 +0000

Forum: Poll Discussion
Topic: Poll: What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?
Poster: ProZ.com Staff

This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "What are the main causes of stress in your job as a translator?".

This poll was originally submitted by M. Carmen Lozano Arnaldos. View the poll results »