How about a Blue Board containing feedback on translators?

On 2002-12-17 10:33, Steffen Pollex wrote:



On 2002-12-16 19:10, kadamczyk wrote:





We need to know who is good at what type of work, what their weak points are and whether or not they can be relied upon to deliver as promised.



FWIW,

Karin



Yes, but it would still be your turn to find this out on a case-by-case basis or through private investigation instead of creating a \"mud-trowing board\" as Tayfun put it.



This is my opinion, yours may be different



Steffen









I don\'t know why you expect a \"mud-throwing board\" unless there is a reason.



Anyway, as I wrote privately to someone else this morning:



When I explained the concept of Payment Practices, and how strict the rules were, to agencies, they welcomed the idea because they saw it as a tool for getting rid of amateur shops and agencies that cheat translators, making the truly professional agencies stronger.



I would have thought that translators would be happy with a method of doing the same for freelancers, but many of them can\'t see past their noses. You see them complaining every day on ProZ about translators who bid ridiculously low rates to undercut others and downgrade the industry. They complain that people call themselves translators when they don\'t have the necessary skills. If they keep jumping down the throats of anyone who has an idea to help the situation, they won\'t have anyone to blame but themselves.



The thing is that someone will create an environment for rating translators. They would have been smarter to let me handle it because they already know how strict I would be about the type of information exchanged through their personal experience with me on payment practices. Oh well.



Take care,

Karin ▲ Collapse

On 2002-12-17 13:26, williamson wrote:

According to which NEUTRAL criteria are you going to judge a translation made by a freelancer?

How much importance are you going to attribute to different kinds of mistakes (typos, grammar, style) which might occur. (nobody is perfect) and what weighed value are you going to give these mistakes?

What figure is going to constitute your quality limit which has to be achieved.

How clearly are you going to define what you expect.

That and a limited (paid)test-translation about specific subjects with a certain degree of difficulty are the only means to be certain you are given a job to the right translator and the only way to judge his/her performance.



All the rest is hearsay and not neutral or businesslike. In business all boils down to figures and conclusions drawn from these figures and this includes the HRM-part of a company.





It could have been done with objective criteria (how else are exams rated?) and the criteria used could have been open to discussion with everybody participating.



Now you have no guarantee it will be done this way.



Take care,

Karin ▲ Collapse

I think all has to be done in the open, in order that people can defend themselves (without any kind of censorship - who of us is not biased by personal experiences and liking, environment, education etc.). Anything that has to be done in a hidden corner seems bad too me. If critical observations are justified they can be laid open.



Best regards



Kurt



P.S. There has been a wrong link from a profile to the Blue Board (negative entry), if this hadn\'t been public, who would have discovered the error?

[ This Message was edited by: on 2002-12-17 18:03 ]





I totally agree with Kurt.



I don\'t have anything against a translator\'s \"BlueBoard\", but it has to be open and a translator should be able to comment on any kind of rating.



Anything that is kept behind closed doors cannot be a fair solution and should be removed immediately.



Most agency ratings boards/mailing lists are opened to agencies as well, so they at least have the possibility to react. (Even if they usually don\'t, which is a pity, I think. It is very important to hear both sides of a story.)



Regards,



Sonja ▲ Collapse

On 2002-12-17 12:04, kadamczyk wrote:

I don\'t know why you expect a \"mud-throwing board\" unless there is a reason.



Anyway, as I wrote privately to someone else this morning:

When I explained the concept of Payment Practices, and how strict the rules were, to agencies, they welcomed the idea because they saw it as a tool for getting rid of amateur shops and agencies that cheat translators, making the truly professional agencies stronger.



I would have thought that translators would be happy with a method of doing the same for freelancers, but many of them can\'t see past their noses. You see them complaining every day on ProZ about translators who bid ridiculously low rates to undercut others and downgrade the industry. They complain that people call themselves translators when they don\'t have the necessary skills. If they keep jumping down the throats of anyone who has an idea to help the situation, they won\'t have anyone to blame but themselves.





Some comments. I know you are moving yourself off that idea, and that your list is no longer on yahoo groups but I nevertheless have some comments on your post.



About a year ago, one of my client\'s customers refused to pay. He asserted that my translation - and that of 3 experienced colleges - was of poor quality and did not deserve to be paid for. When after a couple months of back and forth discussions - no payment - the customer provided a list of the \"mistakes\". Out of my 15000 words, there were a couple spelling mistakes, and (these were financial statements) \"all the numbers were missing the comma\". The target language being French, it would have been a severe mistake to add comma.



Now, I just imagine what a client like that would say behind closed doors, with no need to back up his claims or even the translator being aware of it.



Most people are fine, and the translation market is made of very fine people, both in the agencies and amongst freelancers.



But most is not everyone, and translation quality is too subjective. Even comptabilizing mistakes is wrong, assuming it was done objectively. Quality of translations can not be summed up to \"4 spelling mistakes, 2 grammar, 1 ...\".



If translation was quantifiable as such, machine translation would work.



Yes, we would all be happy to see \"almost translators\" known for what they are. I once had a girl turning me in a \"translation\" that was still half in the source language, just a couple hours before I was to deliver the doc! (Yes, I felt like killing her, yes, me too!)



But the solution you had just wasn\'t it, and I am glad you removed it. Yet if anyone gets a bright idea to lift up the overall quality of translators on the market, I would certainly deserve extensive discussion. We could use it. ▲ Collapse