| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] > | Highly elitist translation agencies Thread poster: Inge Schumacher
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Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:40
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Inge Schumacher wrote:
.... when I see agencies whose translators are HEC (Hautes Etudes Commerciales), Sciences Po, Ecole Polytechnique or, why not, ENA (Ecole Nationale d'Administration) graduates (these are the main French elite universities), I'm actually a bit perplexed.
Elites only exist if we recognise them as such. Nobody is better than anybody else. Or as my American friend Mallory once put it, their **** smells as bad as mine.
[Edited at 2024-01-09 15:04 GMT]
| | | | Zea_Mays 
Italy
Local time: 22:40
Member (2009)
English to German
+ ...
| what makes a good tourism translator? | Jan 9 |
What, if I've been a tourist myself, I mean living in France, discovering France, landscapes, seas, oceans, mountains, regions, cities, food, people, culture, art, history, architecture, politics, "geopolitics"
This is true for many of us, but it doesn't make us automatically good tourism transcreators.
As has been said, many think tourism is an easy peasy field. But it is not.
| | | | | Am I the only person to whom this elitism smells of incompetence? | Jan 9 |
They don't know how to secure good vendors or how to verify if their outputs are any good, so they want safeguards on top of safeguards. Funny if you think about it. I'm really amused by what modern education is producing. Tourism, of all things.
A meme as good as any memes
| | | | Samuel Murray
Netherlands
Local time: 22:40
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
Denis Fesik wrote:
They don't know how to secure good vendors or how to verify if their outputs are any good, so they want safeguards on top of safeguards. Funny if you think about it. I'm really amused by what modern education is producing. Tourism, of all things.
No, the client isn't asking translators to have degrees at those universities.
The agency's owners and PMs just say in their bios that they have degrees at those universities. The job is no longer "active" in ProZ.com's job system, so you can no longer find it in the jobs list, so you can no longer see that name of the agency, but it was visible yesterday. Some of their PMs had degrees from Yale, Columbia, etc., etc. although others had merely impressive sets of experience.
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Kay Denney
France
Local time: 22:40
French to English
Inge Schumacher wrote:
This is exactly the reason why I would like to work in this field! I'm a true "Frenchy", a life-long lover of French, France, French countrysides, culture (including food), art, history, fashion, way-of-life, and I've lived, worked and travelled in France for more than 30 years. There is no other place in this world I would want to live.
That's the spirit! This is what you need to put across to your potential clients. I have translated a lot, via agencies, for various Tourist Boards. They love it when you show that you know the place and love it, and they know you'll do a good job because your love will shine right through in your translation. You're selling a product you love basically.
It's not so much your experience as a tourist as the ability to write well, but the love is the spark that sets your prose apart.
FWIW I actually printed out my LinkedIn blurb for consideration when applying for French nationality, because I wax lyrical about how much I love France and my job is basically telling the English-speaking world just how wonderful France is. My application was accepted of course.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 22:40
French to English
Samuel Murray wrote:
The agency's owners and PMs just say in their bios that they have degrees at those universities. The job is no longer "active" in ProZ.com's job system, so you can no longer find it in the jobs list, so you can no longer see that name of the agency, but it was visible yesterday. Some of their PMs had degrees from Yale, Columbia, etc., etc. although others had merely impressive sets of experience.
Imagine paying a fortune to go to Yale and ending up as a PM in a translation agency! I mean, I found it to be pure drudgery, I felt like a glorified letterbox and a buffer between clients wanting something yesterday and translators telling you they can't do it till tomorrow.
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Samuel Murray wrote:
The agency's owners and PMs just say in their bios that they have degrees at those universities. The job is no longer "active" in ProZ.com's job system, so you can no longer find it in the jobs list, so you can no longer see that name of the agency, but it was visible yesterday. Some of their PMs had degrees from Yale, Columbia, etc., etc. although others had merely impressive sets of experience
I don't check jobs or agencies' profiles here, and my answer was based on some observations, it wasn't just a random comment. And tourism is still a funny field of expertise for a translator (at least here, tourism, hospitality, etc. are known as non-serious study areas often picked by someone who wants an easy way to get a degree with no hard work involved). They want someone with a flowing pen, but why do they insist on hiring a vendor who has spent years reading and writing about tourist destinations and can prove it by showing a paper? I can write interesting texts about those things without a degree in tourism studies (and I have done it for my former employer). You won't be able to translate texts about hardcore mathematics or geodetic surveying without special knowledge, but it only takes great writing skills to translate texts about countries and places, imho
| | | | | Gigantic Profit Margins | Jan 10 |
Gigantic profit margins (I have seen up to X5 times the client's "package" price vs. what they pay the translation team) is the driving force behind so many agencies popping up all over the place. In almost 100% of cases, none of the founders or executives or project managers were ever translators, not even for one day of their lives.
I was surprised when I found that Europeans did not know that this is the No. 1 business practice in the United States in the last 20 years, which as I see h... See more Gigantic profit margins (I have seen up to X5 times the client's "package" price vs. what they pay the translation team) is the driving force behind so many agencies popping up all over the place. In almost 100% of cases, none of the founders or executives or project managers were ever translators, not even for one day of their lives.
I was surprised when I found that Europeans did not know that this is the No. 1 business practice in the United States in the last 20 years, which as I see has also spread in Europe: chose any field (from soup production to translations to image processing to financial advising), find the clients and fish translators from websites, who are under the assumption that agencies are paid "30%". LOL.
The current client prices are 22-25 cents per word for translation only at any "non-budget" agency, and up to 32-40 cents per word for their premium packages (multiple steps without DTP), $70/hour for formatting (translator paid nothing for this), $100/hour for DTP, $95-120 minimum charge. Now, multiply these by 1.3 (30% up) for urgent projects ("urgent" meaning more than 2,000 words per 24 hours), and you get the picture. Translation Agencies have become gold producing machines, because of the willingness of translators to work for peanuts and the end clients being clueless of what translators are paid.
If you don't believe me, be the client for one day, and try collecting offers for an average 5,000 word general legal or medical (especially medical!) text.
As another example, contracts with telephone/video interpreting services, are $150-200/hour, and are often subcontracted from one agency to another, so that both agencies are paid to just sit back and watch translators do the heavy lifting for $20/hour.
If I had the profit margin they have, I would also feel a certain elitism about myself.
I have copies of contracts, copies of PM screenshots etc, collected over 25 years.
This also explains why certain project managers will set up fake bad reviews to block successful translators from future jobs, to give these jobs to "buddies" who will give them a nice kickback in return. "Quality Assurance" teams are involved in this, and sometimes you'll see some of them jumping from one agency to another (I got names!), as soon as they think their dirty trick may be discovered.
And you guys think you know the market... ordinary translators are so isolated, they know absolutely nothing about the market.
Cheers
[Edited at 2024-01-10 14:44 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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| PS. On "specialties" about tourism, medicine, etc. | Jan 10 |
They themselves do not know exactly what they're supposed to be asking or looking. If they receive 50 offers with everyone telling them they're specialists, they'll believe them.
If they knew what they were asking, they would also know people with at least good proofreading skills in the tourism industry, so the translator's specialties would be secondary priority, but they don't. Tourism is about good writing, short sentences, and incorporating some key common phrases, it's not nuc... See more They themselves do not know exactly what they're supposed to be asking or looking. If they receive 50 offers with everyone telling them they're specialists, they'll believe them.
If they knew what they were asking, they would also know people with at least good proofreading skills in the tourism industry, so the translator's specialties would be secondary priority, but they don't. Tourism is about good writing, short sentences, and incorporating some key common phrases, it's not nuclear science. Of course, they have presented themselves to the end-client as "specialists". Just like everyone does.
Just like anyone else setting up a small company nowadays (cost of incorporation in the US: from $0 to about $250), they're shooting in the dark and hoping for the best.
Word to the wise: translation of tourism brochures of about 300 words classifying as "marketing-advertising" are $200-300 per language (DTP not included) for "translation + 1 step of proofreading". ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kevin Fulton
United States
Local time: 16:40
German to English
| It's not the profit margin, it's the markup | Jan 10 |
Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
Gigantic profit margins (I have seen up to X5 times the client's "package" price vs. what they pay the translation team) is the driving force behind so many agencies popping up all over the place.
Cheers
[Edited at 2024-01-10 14:44 GMT]
There's a distinction between markup and profit, something that single-shingle operators such as translators don't understand. Although there is a great difference between what an agency pays a translator and what it charges the client, overhead accounts for much of that difference. A large agency has to pay its sales force, in-house staff (bookkeepers, PMs, local IT people, etc.), as well as external vendors (attorneys, cleaners, utility companies). The actual profit margin is relatively small, a small percentage at most. Profit is the owner's share of the net revenue, and in the case of the giant agencies, the owners/shareholders often get less than a cent per word. But multiply that by hundreds of million of words, they do quite well.
| | | | Inge Schumacher
France
Local time: 22:40
Member (2023)
French to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Gigantic Profit Margins | Jan 10 |
Lefteris wrote:
"And you guys think you know the market... ordinary translators are so isolated, they know absolutely nothing about the market."
Dear Lefteris:
"Us guys not knowing absolutely anything about the market"
Me, for instance, I've worked for long years in European companies (no translation agencies) and this allowed me to have a close insight into business methods (like calculating profit margins, terms of payment policies, "quality... See more Lefteris wrote:
"And you guys think you know the market... ordinary translators are so isolated, they know absolutely nothing about the market."
Dear Lefteris:
"Us guys not knowing absolutely anything about the market"
Me, for instance, I've worked for long years in European companies (no translation agencies) and this allowed me to have a close insight into business methods (like calculating profit margins, terms of payment policies, "quality management", and all the rest about how to make money).
What I didn't (really) know is that PMs don't have any experience with translation or linguistics in general! I just learned this when working on my last (very large) project, and when I naively asked the PM if he/she did some translation as well from time to time, the answer was: CERTAINLY NOT!! ... as if translation was such a subaltern task that a PM couldn't even imagine taking any interest in something so stupid and pointless. It's visibly very true that a lot of PMs or agency owners don't have a clue about linguistics... and don't give a *** anyway.
Well, anyway, I'm happy for you if you get paid these rates which seem to be normal on the market, which seems rather unbelievable, to be quite honest!
[Bearbeitet am 2024-01-10 15:32 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:40
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
Gigantic profit margins (I have seen up to X5 times the client's "package" price vs. what they pay the translation team) is the driving force behind so many agencies popping up all over the place.
Yeah, nice anecdotes, but the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
Please point us to a translation agency or LSP with these fabulous margins. I think RWS recorded an adjusted pretax margin of 14.9% in the first half of 2023, more like 8% at the operating level. That's what you call a "gigantic" profit margin?
Of course, we'd all be happy to see verifiable evidence of these "gold producing" translation companies of which you speak. Or is this a case of "Trust me, bro"?
And you guys think you know the market... ordinary translators are so isolated, they know absolutely nothing about the market.
I think most of the people on here realise that they're isolated and how little they know about the market. It's probably for that reason that they avoid throwing their chests out, strutting about, and making statements to the effect that other forum members are all deluded but they know what's really happening, because they're, you know, special. Well, yeah. "Special" kind of covers it.
TL;DR - none of what you have written is anything fresh or surprising. If you don't get out much and have only just discovered this site, you may not be aware of the past two decades of discussion on this forum. Suggest you search the boards for dozens of relevant past threads. This has all come up before, including your, er, "revelations" about how agencies price jobs.
Dan
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Kevin Fulton wrote:
in the case of the giant agencies, the owners/shareholders often get less than a cent per word
Really? They'd have to be doing something terribly wrong. (And yes I know they're doing plenty of other things terribly wrong, but with their markups they really ought to be minted.)
But thanks Lefteris for letting us "ordinary translators" know the score. I had literally no idea that the big agencies might be money-grabbing sharks.
| | | | Inge Schumacher
France
Local time: 22:40
Member (2023)
French to German
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | Summa Cum Laude master translater Matthieu Ledoré | Jan 10 |
Hi Matthieu,
I am very honoured to see a very high level linguist (master summa cum laude in translation) agree to what I said about the French elite .
You're even better than me in French (964 vs. only 950 in the Voltaire certificate)!
[Bearbeitet am 2024-01-10 16:04 GMT]
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Just 15 years ago we translators were getting paid from 12 - 14 cents per word!
And we were getting paid $30/hr for formatting. And $30-35/hr for proofreading, for 500 words/hour.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT! The $0.12/word was the most solid "standard" that prevailed among US agencies for 10 years straight (1995 - 2005). You didn't have to "negotiate".
Rates got lowered over time under pressure from new translators mostly located in Europe/Asia, who didn't know what prices wer... See more Just 15 years ago we translators were getting paid from 12 - 14 cents per word!
And we were getting paid $30/hr for formatting. And $30-35/hr for proofreading, for 500 words/hour.
EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT! The $0.12/word was the most solid "standard" that prevailed among US agencies for 10 years straight (1995 - 2005). You didn't have to "negotiate".
Rates got lowered over time under pressure from new translators mostly located in Europe/Asia, who didn't know what prices were, and they kept offering lower rates to get the jobs. The end-client rates have actually increased!
It seems that some people in here claim to have experience, but they don't. Or maybe 15 years ago they were not working with US agencies (local rates in small South European markets were low, although reputable Northern European agencies were also paying $0.12/word standard) or they were taking only a couple projects per month, not really full time occupation.
Maybe Dan Lucas would like to have a sample of said screenshots (which I will not publish here of course), showing markups. PMs know these things, and Department Manager screens show both the Markup and the "Project Revenue" and the maximum (and underneath, you also see the ridiculously low rates translators offer to get the treasure, since all their names are listed).
Maybe Dan Lucas would like to see copies or orders from last year, where the client (a large pharma company) is paying $0.29/word for the entire wordcount, and then the project is assigned with about 70% of the words matched from the agency's TM to the translators. Very few end-clients have gotten smarter about this...
Yet, you all refuse to just pick up the phone (or the computer) and ask any agency directly to translate something for you, formally as a client. As if you're afraid. There's no other industry in which so many participants have no idea about the prices of their own products in the market, it's astonishing!
I have had individual clients sending me checks before I even started or finished a job, because they knew that my price was less than half of what agencies were asking (for simple translations, no DTP), and they were probably thankful or afraid I might change my mind.
Let me repeat: The percentage of Agency Owners, and the entire employee force, who were once translators even for one day, is less than 1%.
The "agency model" (prevalent also in other industries), has been the most popular form of new businesses in the US in the last 3 decades or so. With the internet and bottom rate offerings from desperate translators, it has become an online plantation. And when some agencies stopped paying "minimum charge" (end client pays an average of $100), they became gold mines.
Why do you think that the larger ones never entered the stock market? (except only one). Because that would force them to disclose their pricing structure and payments to contractors! They prefer to remain strictly private businesses and pay the tax penalty for it, than disclosing their enormous profit margin. ▲ Collapse
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