For better or for worse, losing customers during your translation or interpreting career is normal and natural. That said, you should analyze why it is that you are losing customers. Are you losing customers because they've told you that your translation (or interpreting) work is subpar? As heartbreaking as it might be to hear that, you should look at it as an opportunity to improve rather than a threat. Let's leave that topic for another time.

Now let's look at the second way of losing customers. You could lose customers because you choose not to continue working with them, and that can be a very good thing. I've said it before, and I will re-emphasize it here: As an entrepreneur, the only resource you have is your time, and you need to make sure you use your finite time wisely - time is a non-renewable resource. I am not particularly fond of the term "firing customers," but what I am about to suggest is along the same lines. The truth is, some clients are just not worth your time, and you and your business are better off without them.

For instance, let's take a type of customer I like to call Homo Difficultis (HD). Homo Difficultis sends very small projects your way, but has dozens of questions about every little thing. You have to chase him for payment, and for some reason, his dog has a habit of eating the invoices you dutifully send when you turn in your translations. Homo Difficultis calls you evenings, weekends, and during major holidays with non-emergency issues and questions, yet expects you to answer the phone at all times. If you don't, Homo Difficultis gets mad. Actually, Homo Difficultis gives you a stomachache every time you see his number pop up on your caller ID. Here's the million-dollar question: Should you get rid of this customer?

Yes, you should. The effort-to-earnings ratio for this customer is not where you would like it to be. Simply put: This customer gives you more trouble than actual business. Determining how much trouble is too much is completely up to you - it can mean different things for different people - but remember that you are, after all, running your own business. Unless you have signed a long-term contract with the customer in question, you are free to walk away from this dysfunctional relationship at any time. Don't know how to? Next time HD contacts you for a quote, try this:

Dear Homo Difficultis:

Thank you for your continued interest in my/our services. Unfortunately, I regret to inform you that I am/we are completely booked for the next few months. I/we regret not being able to work on your translation project and would be happy to recommend a trusted colleague.

Have a great day,

Professional Linguist

Send. Repeat. If you are feeling more adventurous/want to be a bit more direct, try this e-mail (or any variation thereof).

Dear Homo Difficultis:

Thank you for your continued interest in my/our services. As the end of the month/year/quarter approaches, I've been doing a review of my translation clients and the amount of time needed to complete their projects. Unfortunately, as a small business, the only resource I have is my time, and I have to allocate it efficiently. In this sense, I would like to inform you that I will be happy to accept any future projects from you, but that I will bill you hourly for phone calls/after-hours consultations, etc. This will be in addition to the translation rate that we have agreed upon. This is very much in line with the pricing strategies of other professionals, and I appreciate your support and your continued business.

Have a wonderful day,

Professional Linguist

If Homo Difficultis is cheap or completely fails to see your point, then you will never hear from him again. If, on the other hand, he does have some introspection into his actions, then he might realize he's been taking advantage and might repent by agreeing to your terms. Of course, if you've let HD get away with this for so long, you are partially responsible for this troubled relationship.

The one thing to remember is this: You have to be financially and emotionally ready to lose the customer. That's the only way you can have a strong negotiating position. If you really want to/have to keep this customer for one reason or another, then you are better off not saying anything.

Let's look at another example. A few months ago, a dear colleague told me about a challenging situation she was having with a German customer. Let's call him "Homo DIY." Forthe uninitiated: Many German (and Austrian and Swiss) executives speak English fluently (or so they think), and thus don't see the need for a professional translator. In this case, my colleague unwisely accepted the job of editing this executive's own (very poor) English translation. Needless to say, it was a disaster, so my colleague was stuck with doing a new translation but was merely paid for the agreed-upon editing project. My advice to her included sending the client the following e-mail:

Dear Homo DIY:

Thank you for this very interesting editing project. I've enjoyed collaborating with you and think your company's products will be very interesting for the American market. However, please allow me to make a suggestion that might help you streamline the translation process. I believe it is a better use of your time and resources if you'd allow me the pleasure of doing the actual translation instead of you taking time out of your busy day to do it. I am a professional linguist and can achieve top-notch results in a relatively short period of time, allowing you to focus on what you do best: running your company. I look forward to taking care of your translation needs in the future!

Best,

Professional Linguist

The end result: The client was delighted and gladly accepted this very reasonable proposal. The key is framing things in such a way that you never insult the client's skills - even if they are very poor. It's called diplomacy, and it's an essential tool in the translator's toolkit. Of course, any smart person can read between the lines of the e-mail and understand the gist of what is being said. Naturally, the client could have reacted negatively and thrown a tantrum, insisting that his translation skills are good enough and emphasizing that he merely needs an "editor." The solution to such a scenario is declining the work politely, yet firmly. Trust me: This is a customer that you do not want.

To sum it up: Remember that you are, technically, at liberty to decide with whom you would like to work. That's part of the power and the freedom of being a freelancer. When I worked in-house, saying "no" to unreasonable requests, deadlines, and demands was simply not an option. As a freelancer and an entrepreneurial linguist, you are very much in control - you set the rules and make (many of the) decisions. That said, the success of your business will very much depend on landing repeat business, and some might have unreasonable demands that you might just have to deal with to preserve the relationship. I've also worked with some HDs who have turned into wonderful customers once we had a conversation about reasonable expectations. Others have disappeared without a trace. Most of my clients are long-term happy repeat customers, and I've gone to great lengths to make them happy. How much is too much? You decide.

Have you fired a customer lately? If you haven't, maybe it's time to do so. Good luck!

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A few weeks ago I wrote about TranslateCAD, a ridiculously inexpensive tool for extracting text out of computer-aided design AutoCAD files. I was in the middle of a large project with CAD files myself and had run a few tests with files that all extracted beautifully. Only later did I discover that there are issues with CAD files that contain long, multi-line text segments which are all broken at the end of the line -- they were not extracted in the right order or, for that matter, any reasonable order. Naturally this made the translation very difficult because the partial segments were spread throughout the project and made the translation more like a huge jigsaw puzzle than anything else (in my case, a jigsaw puzzle of more than 300,000 segments -- no joke!).

I contacted Vicente Victoria, the man behind this tool, and he spent a couple of sleepless nights to create an additional tool that allowed me to sort the segments in a perfectly good manner so that translation can be done without many headaches. You can find the new tool right here.

I love stories like this. Reminds me of when I found a bug in Windows and contacted Steve Ballmer, who also spent a couple of nights fixing it before sending me a patch.

OK, that was a lie. Great personalized customer service like this happens with small vendors, not with large organizations. 

At what point do you know that there is a real need for something in the language technology space? When three different organizations start to work on (almost) the same project completely independently of each other.

This is what happened with the "Linport" project. Linport stands for "Language Interoperability Portfolio" and it's the next logical step in the evolution of data exchangeability. Right now we have standards such as TMX for the exchange of translation memories, TBX for termbase exchange, and XLIFF for the exchange of the actual translation file (and I know that you are getting tired of reading this again and again, but bear with me for just a little bit longer).

The reality is that these three different file types are often not exchanged as individual files but as part of a package. These packages are typically compressed files that follow the .zip format without making this particularly obvious (the extensions are typically something tool-specific.) The idea is good: It makes it easier for the project manager to send off just one file and receive back just one file rather than lots and lots of different files. And for the translator it's essentially the same thing: Rather than wasting time sorting out which files to place and where and how to process them, the package essentially opens in the corresponding TEnT and the translation can be immediately launched.

The problem lies in the "corresponding" part of the statement above. While all tools support the common exchange standards, the packaging system is essentially a way to sidestep the exchange of data because only the savviest of translators knows how to get into the data contained in the packages to translate it with another tool. And in case you're wondering which tools use the packaging method of exchanging data (typically as one of the possible options to send data), they include Trados 2007, Trados Studio, Déjà Vu, Star Transit, memoQ, and others.

The idea of Linport is essentially to provide one standard way to send .linport packages around that can be opened by any tool that supports this format. The .linport packages would actually be ZIP files that contain a folder structure for the different components of the project, and the folders would contain things like the translation file, translation memory and termbase (ideally all in the corresponding exchange formats), as well as information about the project. This information would include anything from such no-brainers as target language and delivery date to less obvious things like other supporting documents, target audience, or other parameters.

Two of the groups that are working on a packaging standard -- the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission; and a group that was formed after the demise of LISA a few months ago and is now represented by GALA, FIT, and the Translation Research Group at BYU -- have already joined forces and are pressing ahead with the Linport standard. The third group -- Interoperability Now -- which counts among its members Kilgray, Andrae ontram, and Welocalize -- is presently conducting talks considering whether to join the other effort (please do!).

Interestingly, things are moving along astonishingly fast with all of this. Alan Melby presented Linport for the first time to the general public last week at the FIT conference and asked for comments (they were overwhelmingly positive), and the 1st Linport symposium is already scheduled for September 27 of this year in Luxembourg (everyone is welcome). 

I should be grateful to the EU for giving me so many opportunities to write about the twists and turns of their decision process regarding the tool that is supposed to replace the pre-Studio version of Trados as the tool used by the 4300 EU translators. But the development this last week left everyone -- including me -- truly speechless. And to say that I've now reached great clarity over the situation would certainly be over-exaggerated.

In the last couple of issues of this newsletter I talked about the failed EU tender to modernize its translation technology. A long process of evaluation went up in smoke when none of the vendors was apparently able to fulfill all the required criteria, some of which were, as I pointed out in that newsletter, very narrowly focused and further complicated by the fact that there was no loop-back to the vendors allowing them to possibly put in little changes that might do the trick.

All this was history, and the process was officially finished. But then on Monday the tender website stated:

Corrigendum 2011/S 127-209984 is modified as follows:

Instead of:

The awarding procedure has been declared unsuccessful.
None of the submitted tenders met the minimum quality criteria. The contract has not been awarded.

read:

Corrigendum (2011/S 127-209984 of 6.7.2011) stated that the awarding procedure had to be declared unsuccessful and that the contract had not been awarded. Since a new substantial element has appeared, the procedure needs to be reopened.
The awarding authority revokes the decision of closing the procedure without awarding the contract. The prior corrigendum (mentioned above) is therefore to be considered null and void.

Excuse me?

I asked Paula Álvarez, the person in charge, for some more clarification and, not surprisingly, she answered:

According to the relevant legal provisions, no information can be disclosed about the procedure as long as it is still open.

So what happened?

Here is what I hope happened: Upon a further review of the "Must-Have" criteria, it was decided that, given the relevance of this decision, they needed to be re-classified or otherwise rewritten or that the previously mentioned information loop with the vendors had to be built in. Again, I don't know whether this was what happened, but I really hope so. What I also hope is that there will be a decision this time around -- and here I can only strongly believe that will happen. If not, it would seem nothing short of an embarrassment.

So, yes, it might appear easy to blame the Directorate-General for Translation for all these strange proceedings. But here is one thought that might at least partially explain some of the uncertainty: Remember when machine translation vendor Systran won a 12 million Euro verdict against the EU in December of 2010 for "infringing the copyright and know-how" of Systran? This might begin to explain why it hasn't made it easier for the EU to decide for another commercial vendor to furnish them with technology they can only license rather than own.

The Endangered Alphabets project is an undertaking that many of you will enjoy. It's a venture by Tim Brookes, a Brit living in Vermont who creates gorgeous wood carvings with samples of writing systems (he calls them alphabets) that are about to go extinct. Presently he has finished carvings in Inuktitut, Baybayin, Manchu, Bugis, Bassa Vah, Cherokee, Samaritan, Mandaic, Syriac, Khmer, Pahauh Hmong, Balinese, Tifinagh, and Nôm that he plans to take to the originating countries to raise awareness for the threatened languages.

You will enjoy scrolling through his website and looking at some of his beautiful specimens. And if you are as enamored as I was, you might even want to participate in Tim's time-sensitive fundraising effort. I did.

Thanks to Liv Bliss (what a fantastic name!) and Donna Parrish for pointing me to this.

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Here is one website that added the Tool Kit link this week:

www.flarus.ru

© 2011 International Writers' Group