You will only find what you bring in.

Master Yoda

About seven or eight years ago, I was asked by a translation agency in the UK bidding on a tender for translation services to send them my CV, samples of my work and a copy of my university diploma. Although I had never done this before, and although I had never worked for the agency before and didn’t know anything about it either, I sent them what they wanted. What do I have to lose? I thought to myself.

After the agency received all of this information from me, they thanked me for sending it, but after that I never heard from them again.

Now I know that I was very naive. Stupid would be in fact a better way to put it because I did have a lot to lose. When people you don’t know have a lot of information about you, they might misuse it and what you will lose in such a case is your good name.

What probably happened in that case seven or eight years ago was that the agency submitted its bid and either failed to win the tender, or won the tender based on the qualifications of translators who like me obediently supplied them with information about their education, experience and other qualifications, and then decided to go with cheaper translators.

There is absolutely nothing preventing a translation agency from doing that and many are doing exactly this. This kind of professional identity theft, for lack of a better term, is very popular in “the translation industry”. Personal information and translator résumés now represent a valuable commodity that is used not only by real businesses, but also by any number of fly-by-night operations, say, a guy sitting with a laptop in a kitchen, not a very clean kitchen at that, who may be promising to successfully undertake and complete a very complicated translation project for a few pennies a word based on a few résumés obtained in an unsavory manner and a completely made up Internet identity of a translation business that doesn’t really exist. A made up business that exists only temporarily on the Internet and that can easily disappear without a trace and leave you holding the bag, which is exactly what dozens of them do.

What should you do if an unknown translation agency contacts you with an urgent request to send them your information, a copy of your college diploma and translation samples to help them win a potentially lucrative project?

I don’t think that giving your information to a complete stranger e-mailing you out of the blue from “the translation industry”, which Master Yoda would describe as The Dark Side, is a good idea. I did it myself, but only once and I will never do it again. It could be a guy sitting in a kitchen with a laptop who may do serious damage to your reputation. Even if you do the work and do it well, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll get paid for it.

I prefer not to give a lot of information about myself or my services, even to translation agencies that I know that really exist because I worked for them at some point. I’ll quote them a rate and a fee for a project if they have one and show it to me, but other than that, I ignore them. Sometimes I ignore them even when I know them, or because I know them.

Yesterday I received another e-mail from an agency in Europe that I did some work for about five years ago.

Dear translator,

I hope you are well.

Last week I contacted you in regards to a tender we are applying for … The translators should have previous experience working for UN organizations (WHO, UNIAIDS, EMA, etc.) within the fields of medicine, pharmaceutics, life sciences and similar … I am really looking forward to your reply as I think your profile would match this project well!

I didn’t respond to the e-mail from last week and I’m not going to respond to this one either. I translated several long Japanese patents for this agency about five years ago and they eventually paid me, although I see in my files that I had to send them a reminder before I finally received the money.

But back then the Euro:US dollar rate, which is today about 1:0.92, was about 1:1.37 which means that my fee would be 26% higher at the same price in US dollars, and thus most likely too high. So even if my résumés helped the agency to win a bid, they probably couldn’t afford me anymore even if it isn’t one of the many dishonest brokers who at this point seem to represent the bulk of “the translation industry”.

After my initial patent translations for the translation agency in Europe, I’ve periodically been receiving e-mails from this agency in which a project manager was asking me again to send him or her my résumé and my rates. Because I have been receiving these inquiries about once a year and every time it was a different project manager, the manager burnout rate at this agency must be pretty high.

I ignored these e-mails as well because even if I did send them my information, and even if the agency could afford me, next year there would be a different project manager asking me the same information again.

As Yoda put it, “You will only find what you bring in”. And the problem with so many translation agencies these days is that they expect everything from us translators, without bringing in anything. There are so many “linguists” in their database, they don’t even bother to remember who you are anymore.

The project manager who needs my résumé to bid on a translation tender didn’t even have the time to input my name in the e-mail that she sent to me. How long would it take to use a name instead of saying just “Dear translator” when you send the same e-mail to a dozen translators? About 3 seconds to input the name, x 12 = 36 seconds.
But according to calculations of the corporate business model in the current version of “the translation industry”, a dozen translators aren’t worth even half a minute’s time of a project manager, who is probably young, underpaid and who will be probably replaced in a few months time by another project manager who will be younger, cheaper, and even more clueless.

I will end my silly post today with another inspirational saying of Master Yoda, “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.”

Once you start down the dark path of trying to please people who never really bring anything to a transaction between two parties and never really try to establish a real relationship with their translators because to them translators are interchangeable and easily replaceable cogs in the magnificent machinery of corporate profit, mere translators who to the translation agency are just as easily replaceable as its project managers, consume you it will.

Better to stay away from the Dark Side.