Price Reduction Trend in Translation Industry
April 5th, 2010, Roman Mironov
In a recent post, I explained how a higher price might have a positive impact on translation quality. However, the current trend in the translation industry is the price reduction. This topic is now hot in the blogs and translation forums (e.g. see posts by Wendell Ricketts or Jill Sommer), as translators are increasingly pressured to lower prices. Here is my two cents worth:
Our Situation
Indeed, more customers are now interested in discounts. Some also insist on applying a standard minimum rate to each translation instead of negotiating the prices individually, depending on the difficulty or deadline. As a translator, this is certainly frustrating for me. I do believe though in the supply and demand rules of the free market. If the buyers have an increasing demand for cheap, lower-quality translations, they should be able to buy them. I think this is a natural trend in the sagging economy and therefore see no reasons to resist it specifically. If the end users accept this quality, why pay more? Otherwise, the company that buys and uses such translations will lose some of the business due to low quality, review the lessons learned, and proceed with more caution next time.
Recent Quality Issues
Unsurprisingly, we are now receiving more requests to re-do someone else’s work after it was rejected by the client. One of them was a large, almost 100K-word translation. Receiving the client’s feedback on this one is something I would never want to experience as a supplier. Personally, if some day I am forced to always deliver such work and face the risk of similar embarrassment, because I cannot get any better-paid projects and therefore have to translate more to maintain profitability, I’d rather quit this business.
We have recently translated a medical user manual from English to Russian. This job involved a translation memory created by someone else. In many 100% matches, the word “haptic” (element supporting intraocular lens) was translated as “sclera lens.” While this is an outrageous error itself, it is the fact that it still resides in the TM, that is more alarming. This error was once made by a translator and then missed by an editor and proofreader (or were there any?). It might have been spotted by the end users, but no one cared about correcting the TM, hence about the quality of any future jobs. Or, this manual might have never been read, so high quality is just unnecessary.
The other day, I proofread a Russian to English translation made for a large global client. While I had my share of bad translations as an editor over the years and developed a thick skin, this nightmare penetrated my low sensitivity threshold easily. It was literal and unprofessional beyond readability, with the meaning of many sentences escaping me completely. I guess the only reason why such translations make it so far in the supply chain is the low price.
Our Policy
We did not decrease the prices and are unlikely to do so. As the cost of living in Russia continues to increase drastically each year, our rates are bound to increase only. Regardless of the current trend, we will continue to pursue quality and serve our clients to the best of our ability.
