Where are the all fake translator resumes coming from?

We have reported on this blog in the past about scammers sending what look like genuine resumes to translation companies. These resumes all have one thing in common... they are fake.

Worse than just being an annoyance, they are dangerous for translation companies to ever respond to. The danger is that these scammers are only interested in receiving genuine documentation from established and respected LSPs so that they steal that LSP's identity and get real translators working for them.

The end result is always that the translator never gets paid and then mount a campaign against the company that they believe they were working for to try to receive compensation. Such campaigns when conducted on translator forums and websites can have a serious impact on the reputation of the targeted LSP.

Clearly the process of recruitment of experienced professional linguists has become not only more complicated, it is now even a very risky part of the business. These scammers are causing big problems for the industry as a whole.

But who is interested in investing time in tracking the offenders down? The answer is that no one will because it is almost impossible (not to mention expensive) to get any kind of redress! These scammers are on a free run and they know it. The issue also is impacting on the hard working freelancers who wish to try to promote themselves and widen their client base. 

The only defense seems to be to the same as for any unsolicited email that comes in - delete it immediately and get on with your day. But if you are a resources manager and under pressure to recruit more linguists to expand your existing pool of talent, how to then proceed? The answer is to find a competent, established language supplier who offers economical rates and provides turnkey solutions for localization projects.

Should You Start Translating for Free? Or Even Pay for the Privilege?

Linguists are being squeezed more than ever these days, even to the point of translating for free for the good of the "cloud."

Now Lionbridge takes it to a new level--you pay them to be able to bid on project of a certain number of words. It's GeoWorkz Marketplace and there are varying licenses based on the number of words you want to translate.

It may be that it is hard to tout this system properly as the concept is so counter-intuitive. One of the bizarre selling points of this license is that there is "zero maintenance and upgrade costs, and the ability to pay as you go."

From a business perspective, it could be one of those ideas that needs to be tried every once in awhile. You take a given--you have to pay people for their labor--and posit "what would happen if the opposite were true? What if we make individuals pay up front for an opportunity to provide labor to us?"

After all, the industry is trying to move professional linguists to give away work in a "cloud" for free (or close too it). It is a small step to then see if they can make linguists pay up front to provide translation.

All this came to mind when we found this great article: 7 Reasons Why I Can’t Do “Free”

It makes a number of good points and should cheer linguists who see their livelihoods slipping away as cash-strapped localization companies move to various cloud systems.

We never understood why any end client with critical projects would want a "global crowdsource" working on their critical marketing, legal, and technical documentation.

But apparently they do. Many localization companies tout their crowd-sourcing right on their websites.

Is a system better than a project manager?

Back in the old days, trained and experienced localization project managers were considered an essential for any translation and localization company.

 The request email would be received either directly by the PM, or routed to the most suitable and available PM immediately upon receipt. The PM would then personally respond to the request within an hour or so with practical and useful feedback on the request, query, or hand off of project files. “Received and project is in progress.... “ “Received your RFQ and files are being evaluated now, and your quote will be sent later today... “ were the two most typical responses given. Clients smile, sales team go off to celebrate the sale, production team got busy with file analysis and production scheduling.

Well, that is how it used to happen. Now, since we finally got rid of those expensive project managers who have the nasty habit of slowing down the start of the project by asking questions to cover ambiguous deliverable requirements or pointing out how a project was likely to run off the requested delivery schedule promised by the company salesperson.

These days, anyone in the office (maybe the receptionist) handles client queries by simply logging them into a “project management automated system.” 

The new process looks like the scenario below when a client RFQ or hand off is received:

First response (automated): "Thanks again for your email. Our traffic manager has logged it in for attention. The first available qualified staff member for customer contacts will be in touch with you shortly. With our full monitoring processes for total quality control and assurance, we will have a response drafted within 24 hours, which is then posted on to our database system. It is then in the queue for checking for language usage, correct grammar and intonation, and suitable terminology that we are sure that you will be looking for with our professional attention to detail. Thank you for your patience and be assured that your request/query/project is being fully checked by our propriety flight checker application"

Within just another few short days, a “project coordinator” sends out a response that has attached automated word count spreadsheets, QA report spreadsheets on the source files, TM analysis log files, and a message that gives a bottom line dollar figure and delivery time.

All of this is thought to impress the client, even if no one at their end can actually understand any of it. 

The translation buyer simply wants to get their text translated to one or many languages, accomplish that with reasonably good quality and at a reasonable price that they can fit in their budget, and finally, within a reasonable time frame.

If they get a response from a real person who clearly knows what he is talking about and offers these goals for their project, surely everyone in the process will be satisfied (except perhaps the sellers of the “systems” who assure us that they will eliminate much of our costs and make our work faster and easier – oh yeah?)

Admerix is one company who still lives in the real world. We believe that it is essential to have trained and experienced industry veteran project managers overseeing every project from inception to final delivery. Critical errors are avoided, time is saved in every step, alternatives are applied should things look like not going to plan, and the end client is kept in the loop with reasonable and rational explanations of each step.

Automated systems cannot help me when I call up the bank with an account inquiry--I need a real person who is experienced with the banking system and how to handle my problem.

In the translation and localization business, it is even more critical for customers to deal with industry veteran people, and not a “system” no matter how smart we are told that system has been made.

Why the Craving for Standards?

Again we are seeing Gala, now a major localization industry body, driving ahead with the process of overlaying the production process with more and ever more steps to "ensure" quality. They have announced that they are "rolling out several important projects" and are pleading for industry professionals to "reap the benefits through volunteer participation". At the end of this great show of how valuable their input is going to be, there is then the begging for money to allow them to continue with even more of this bureaucratic nonsense that actually never has an ending.

Given that we who live in the real world of producing quality translations for our customers already have excellent processes at hand to check files and ensure that what we are delivering to our customers is up to the required standard, it seems hard to understand why there would be the need for all the additional time and effort to be applied. However, there does seem to be a mindset that without going through these "important" standards steps on top of the real world business of getting the work done on time, we cannot be assured of the quality of the deliverables.

Having been in the industry for many years and running teams of project managers and legions of in-house and freelance linguists, we do have a view of why some projects finish with great quality, and why some projects end up with poor quality. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the "tools" that were applied to the work after the translation was completed!

The formula that is proven to work is simply to only have people involved in the project who actually know what they are doing and get on with the business of doing it carefully, responsibly, and with a single objective of delivering work that is up to a high standard from the outset. Our experience is that professional linguists take great pride in their work. They carefully check source texts and will refuse to take a project if they realize that it is outside the scope of their expertise. Trained project managers know how to select only those translators and editors who have the background and subject specialty required to competently carry out the work. They can often foresee problems in a given task and set in place solutions long before such problems are able to impact the production process.

Right now though, these two essential components, experienced and professional linguists and trained veteran project managers, are being viewed as expensive and dispensable appendages to the industry. The thrust is to develop sophisticated (and expensive) software packages that are claiming to make it all happen and can be placed in the hands of any junior admin staff who knows how to turn a computer on.

Translation and localization was and is a "people" business. The pressure on for LSPs to deliver more and more for less and less and this is causing garbage to infect even quality work that was done in the past. By using the cheapest available resources and let it be directed by project managers who were shop assistants last week, the only assurance that they can have it that they will always be looking for ways to improve the quality of the finished product that they used to have a few years ago.

Quality does not come from a “system” that can only ever handle commodities. Quality results come from competent management and the application of talent, experience, expertise, and an understanding of what is actually needed in each of the myriad of different project challenges that are faced every day by the localization industry personnel.

When it comes to the quest for quality, we at Admerix look for quality in the people who are handling every aspect of the work and find that this approach works very nicely!

Replacing Translators with Clouds of Amateurs

"Translation in the cloud" is another process that seems to be infecting the perception of translation in the minds of translation buyers. The concept seems to be that you just throw a document to the cloud and there it will be machine translated and then lots of translators are sitting “out there” waiting to proofread the result without charge or for minimal amounts of payment. It relies on the controversial notion that speakers of two languages are also natural translators.

However, professional translators are not sitting “out there” or anywhere else, just waiting to do work for free or for peanuts. Generally, if they are professional, they will refuse to work on MT output because they will not put their name and reputation at risk for the inevitable substandard results. That will leave cloud translation to hobbyists and amateurs, and the results of that certainly are predictable.

Nothing replaces a competent translator and editor team working with quality tools and an experienced, professional Localization Industry Project Manager (remember those people?) to coordinate the various process and keep the projects on track and compliant with QA guidelines and client instructions.

Nothing has replaced the industry standards for processes that generate quality translations in a reasonable time frame, and those companies who stick to such tried and proven industry standards will be the ones who succeed in maintaining a satisfied and loyal customer base.

At the end of the day, all the client wants is a quality translation of his documentation, software, website, etc. at a reasonable price and in a reasonable time frame.

Oh yeah, and you better not cheap out and use students either.