Should I Become an Agency?

Last week I wrote about suddenly hitting a feast period in terms of workload when I had expected the usual Summer famine. That trend seems to be continuing. I am working on a large project that will now take me through the end of the month. Yet, agencies with whom I have sometimes worked in the past keep contacting me about projects they'd like me to take.

So far, I have simply told these agencies that I'm too busy right now to take on more work. When asked who else I could recommend, I either gave the agency the contact information for a colleague or referred it to the American Translators Association's website referral service.

At the same time, my net earnings are rather low for the well-over 40 hours a week I put into this business. Freelance friends (not translators) have counseled me to "become a manager" if I wanted to make better money. In the translation industry that would mean opening my own (mini) translation agency.

My friends are probably right about the earnings potential - I could be earning money from translations performed by others while earning additional money from the translation work I do myself. There are large agencies who farm work out to small agencies who in turn work with individual translators. Becoming one of these small agencies seems possible, even without direct clients of my own.

Plus, a pool of translators who work in different language pairs might get me direct clients whose needs extend beyond my own language combination. If I specialized in into-English translations, I could edit/proof the translation without necessarily being fluent in the source language. (Always sending the edited version back to the translator for verification, of course!)

I was a middle manager once (in IT) and hated being squeezed between the boss' (read: large agency or end client's) demands and the needs of the people I managed (read: the translators with whom I would contract). On the other hand, I wouldn't be stuck with the same boss day in and day out. If an end client's demands were too unreasonable, I wouldn't have to accept subsequent projects from that client -- should they even be offered after I told the end client that his or her demands couldn't be met.

Then there is the whole question of vetting someone else's work. How would I know that the freelancers I contract with for other languages provide high-quality translations? Even if the English translation they sent to me were fluent, how do I know that it is accurate? If I limit my agency to languages I read (German, Spanish, French, maybe Swedish), I can catch glaring errors, but probably not more subtle problems. Besides, part of the idea of becoming an agency would be to offer more languages and this approach would severely limit the number of languages I could contract out.

Networking is the key to getting both clients and translators for an agency. I'm not particularly good at networking, even online - and worse face to face. Given a choice, I'd rather sit in a corner with a book than talk with strangers at an event.

So maybe this whole agency thing is not for me, after all ...

Are Translators Becoming Employees Without Benefits?

In his "GeekSpeak" column in the current issue of the ATA Chronicle Jost Zetsche notes that translation agencies increasingly ask translators to work with specific online tools. Some even require translators to pay for the agency's own tool. I have had several requests to use an agency's online tool myself last year, including from agencies with whom I had worked previously. As Mr. Zetsche points out, such a trend toward cloud computing erases the gains made in the ability to exchange data among different tools. In the still highly heterogeneous world of online tools we can rarely use a glossary we developed in one tool in another one, for example.

If we work with multiple agencies who use cloud computing, we also have to learn to use these tools, generally without being compensated for the time this takes. Once we have mastered the tools, we must constantly switch between different ones as we work on projects for different agencies. That makes it difficult to become thoroughly familiar with any one of them. We simply can't develop the necessary "muscle memory" for each tool. It also means that the agencies decide on the tools their independent contractors use. I tell agencies that I use a standard tool, Trados Studio 2009, and do not intend to switch.

Another trend I have observed during the last year is that translation agencies ask me to commit to specific periods of availability for them -- i.e., being "on call", but without compensation, except for whatever projects the agency might offer me for these times. My standard answer is that my availability varies depending on other projects I have accepted, but that I have always delivered any projects I do accept on time or early.

In addition, some agencies I have worked with in the past have asked me to accept lower rates, threatening that I would be unlikely to be offered projects from them in the future, if I refused. I refused anyway.

Taken together, these trends point towards agencies increasingly treating freelancers as if they were employees, but without any benefits or job security. Agencies require us to work with tools they specify, invest time in learning these tools, be available to them for specific periods of time, all with the promise -- not guarantee -- of projects to be assigned. We are only paid for the translation work assigned, and the rates we receive for that work are falling.

This reflects a trend in the larger U.S. economy to hire "consultants" to perform the work previously done by employees, often under substantially the same conditions, but without overtime pay or benefits. Unless all of us refuse such attempts at controlling our tools and time while being paid less, translators may end up becoming quasi-employees without benefits or rights.

What Does a Translation Agency Do?

I am editing the (British) translations for a large project - partly construction-related, partly business/legal documents. So far, so good. I have British translators edit my (American-inflected) translations for the British market and I'm happy to return the favor by "Americanizing" British translations. But this case doesn't just encompass various MS Word documents that have to be checked against the German originals and modified for a U.S.-based end client. This time, much of the original documents consists of scanned-in contracts, invoices, schedules, etc. -- some with handwritten annotations and crossed-out sections, some even with post-it notes containing handwritten comments still attached to printed matter when it was scanned. The scans were then converted to PDFs.


All the agency's technical department did, apparently, to convert these documents to something from which translators could work is to use "Save As Word document" in Acrobat. The resulting "originals" are of extremely poor quality, with much gibberish, missing sections and strange text boxes where items have been initialed or annotated.

This seems to me begs the question as to what exactly an agency's role is. Of course, part of a translation agency's job is to get end clients -- in particular, end clients who need translations into more than one or two languages -- and to match them with translators who will handle the end client's projects. But beyond that basic function, it seems to me agencies also should be educating end clients and evaluating the documents they receive for translation.

In this particular case, for example, I would have expected the agency to tell the end client that the quality of the "originals" they were sending (which included scans of entirely hand-written documents, by the way) was insufficient to provide a reasonable translation within a very tight time frame. I would also have expected the agency's "technical department" to assess the quality of the converted PDFs and, when it was insufficient, to use methods beyond "Save As" for producing decent-quality documents in the original language.

One such method might be to convert the PDF to image files (such as jpgs), then run these files through a multi-lingual OCR (character-recognition) program. For my own end clients, I use ABBY ScanToOffice and find that the quality (and translatability) of the Word documents generated by this process far surpasses that generated by simply using Adobe Acrobat. Any other process that produces originals which can be easily processed with standard CAT tools, such as Wordfast or Trados, would be equally welcome.

How do you handle low-quality "original" documents?

How Long Is Too Long?

After sending out follow-up e-mails, as well as brochures and holiday cards to the vendors I initally contacted at the tekom conference in November, I've now seen some return on that investment in the form of requests for test translations and agency application forms to fill out. After reviewing my translation, these agencies then send agreements for me to sign.

A good portion of these contracts covers fairly standard subject matter and conditions:

• Keep end client's information confidential
  
• Don't contact the end client without approval from the agency
  
• Adhere to deadlines
  
• Invoice the agency
  
• Fix the translation, if the quality is not up to par
  

None of these conditions are a problem, but the timeframes some agency attach to certain conditions do give me pause.

One agency, for example, wants to prohibit me from ever working with any of their end clients without their approval. I can understand such a prohibition for a year or two after ending work with the agency, but if I could never contact any of the end clients of the agencies with whom I work, I'd spend the rest of my career unable to even attempt to acquire end clients of my own.

Another agency wants me to agree to correct translations up to 2 years after submitting them. I can see an end client needing a month, or even two, to check all translation it receives for a large or complex project, but even my appliances don't have a two-year warranty.

What surprises me most is that apparently few translators object to such terms, otherwise they would likely have been stricken from standard agency contracts by now. Different translators will have different thresholds about what they're willing to sign, but we do need minimum standards below which we won't sign a contract. What's your standard?