Velior's Corporate Blog about Translation and Translation Industry

In this post, I would like to share our recent experience of cooperating with a major Russian translation company. Any details and names are not disclosed for confidentiality reasons.

We received a cooperation request from this company in summer of 2008. I started by reporting our price (from EUR 0.05 per word), so that they could immediately decide whether this is acceptable and, if not, avoid wasting time on negotiations. The company accepted this price, and I returned a completed vendor questionnaire to them. The vendor manager confirmed the receipt.

In about a month, the manager called back and asked whether we are interested in cooperating with them and when they should expect the completed vendor questionnaire. I resent the questionnaire in reply to their confirmation of receiving this very questionnaire. Then, the manager provided a test translation to check our professional skills.

We completed the test and returned it. Then, the manager promised to send it to their editors for review. Next, they provided an Agreement and asked us to complete it.

In about a week, the manager called back and went like “Your price is too high for us. Actually, we charge the same price to our customers. We suggest that you decrease your price down to EUR 0.02 per word.”

I was very surprised since (a) previously, the manager accepted our price; and (b) even sent an Agreement. Well, I could imagine that this price decrease could have been due to the low test translation quality. In this scenario, the translation company could have disliked our translation and suggested EUR 0.02 per word as a fair price for such quality. But it seems that this was not the case:

• After sending the translation, we received the Agreement soon, without any comments about the test quality or high price.
• The manager never said that the decreased price was associated with the low test translation quality.
• The manager did not provide any comments to the test translation.
• The company decreased the price by 150%. It is hard to believe that our test translation quality was that low. As usual, we used five employees for this project including a translator, editor, proofreader, engineer, and project manager.

Clearly, we had to reject any cooperation and were left with the questions below unanswered:

Why did the requesting translation company first accept our price, but then reject, because they actually charge the same price to their customers? And why did they need to send a test, Agreement, etc, when our prices were initially unacceptable?

Why were the communications so inconsistent? Why did the manager confirm the receipt of the vendor questionnaire and then, after a month, ask us to complete it once again, as if they hadn’t received it previously? Why did they send the Agreement first and then suggest a lower price?

Tags: Russian translation companies, test translations, translation pricing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 24th, 2008 at 12:00:44 and is filed under Translation Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.