Agency & Translator Relationship

As Internet expands, the language translation market is expected to continue to grow at a staggering rate of 30% from the present value of $30 to $40 billion. The numbers of translator and interpreters are expected to increase 20% till 2014. We have some advises here to translators who wish to work with translation agencies.

Take the trial seriously

When translators apply to a translation agency, it is common that the agency requests a trial test. The content of the trial test is usually selected based on the translator's background and it often requires specialized knowledge and skills. The quality of translations and background of translators are the main factors that agencies are interested to know. However, whether the quality of work matches the translator's rate is also critical. It is important that the translators are able to judge their own translation rate objectively. The quality of work and translator's asking rate should not vary too much. There is no harm asking the agencies for information such as a benchmark for translation rates. If possible, ask the agency to provide works done by other translators who passed the trial test and their rate as a reference. There are many kinds of translation jobs that require different levels of skills. As long as your quality of work matches the rate, the agency will keep you in mind and inform you when there are any suitable assignments.

Build up your translation speed

When you start off as a translator, you may find the translation process takes time and painstaking. However, after your 10th translation of similar kind of documents, such as a contract agreement, you will find yourself with more confidence and experience in translating documents of similar nature. The basic vocabularies and expressions used in a contract agreement are standardized. The important thing is to pay careful attention to every phrase during translating. Take additional effort to find out related words and expressions. After your 10th work, you will see improvement in your translation speed and accuracy.

Before you begin your translation, check if you are familiar with the content, estimate completion time and additional time for any unexpected incident that may occur during the time you are translating. Consider incidents such as the lost of internet connection, document unsaved due to power failure, computer virus infection, etc. For example, add 3-4 hours of additional time to a translation that requires 10 hours work. This will buy you some insurance in case of unexpected incidents.

In some cases, the translation agency may request you to complete the translation in a short time frame due to the client's urgent need. You should check with the agency the exact time that they require the translated document and negotiate a favorable time for delivery. All urgent documents must be handled with additional care. If there is any chance that you think you cannot complete the translation in the specified time frame, do not attempt to take up the job. Otherwise, you may not only put the agency in a tight spot, but also lose the agency's credit.

Delivery format

Regardless of the source document format, it is important to know the exact format to deliver at completion. In addition, you need to know beforehand if the delivery format requires "Source Language" & "Target Language" collation or only the translated document without the source document. During translating, translators usually keep the source words in the same document as they translate paragraph by paragraph. After proofreading, the source words are deleted, leaving behind the translated words. Clients usually require the translated text only. Nevertheless, there are some clients who request source words to be left in the document for their internal inspection.

Perform Quality Control (QC)

Translators should never attempt to submit translations without checking. Translated documents should be reviewed at least 3 times before submission. To my knowledge, there is no translator who hits a home-run during his or her first attempt. Common mistakes made by translators are missing sentence, incorrect numbers, wrong choice of word(s), wrong symbols, and typo errors. Microsoft Word has a spellchecker feature which underlines suspicious words in red and sentences in green. Pay careful attention to these, as the word or sentence probably require correction or revision. Even small mistakes can leave bad impression to the agency, which in turn can cause damages to mutual trust. Appreciate every jobs provided to you and take each of them seriously regardless of the job size. This is an important step to build great relationship with the translation agencies. Upon recognizing translators' work and effort, the agency will supply more jobs to so-called preferred and valuable translator.

Blending with other translator's work

Agencies may request you to translate a part of a document, which has formerly been translated by someone else. It is usually not easy to translate and blend into someone else work. Nevertheless, if you do have a good working relationship with the requesting agency, it may be advisable to do them a favor. Else, just simply reject the job.

Getting paid

Each agency has its own practice for the payment. Before you get jobs from a new agency, make sure you know their pay out date(s). It is generally acceptable to request translation agency to pay within 5 days for the first assignment. For subsequent jobs, you can follow the usual practice of the agency. Payments can get messy when the pay outs becoming late. Therefore, it is important that the agencies you work with pay on a timely fashion. In this way, both parties' (agency and you) payable and receivable accounts are crystal clear and easy to account for. It is important that translators manage their monthly account properly by themselves. In some cases, the figures with the translators may not be the same as the ones that the agency provided. The reasons can be due to the currency exchanging, bank remittance charges, bank's administrative charge, or even agency forgot to include certain payment, etc. There are many financial templates (usually in excel spreadsheet) available on the Internet. Modify it to suit the nature of your work.

Conclusion

We hope the article this month can help to provide some good insights for those who aim to become a professional translator. Keep good communication with agencies and work towards building a strong working relationship.

*Translation job listing available in our monthly newsletter issue at synergy-focus.com synergy-focus.com

Eric is a provider of multilingual language translation services, Synergy Focus, in Singapore. But more than that, he is passionate about setting goals and achieving them. He is action-oriented and has a strong work ethic. He enjoys reading, writing, socializing, meeting people, and traveling.