| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | funny behavior of translation agency Thread poster: Bruno Depascale
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Thomas Pfann 
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:55
Member (2006)
English to German
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| Lesson learned | Nov 9, 2019 |
Bruno Depascale wrote:
This sound extremely funny and unprofessional to me.
And it is quite understandable that you think that way. However, I wouldn't be surprised if the agency thought exactly the same of your behaviour.
As you said yourself, you thought that there was a 'fixed budget' for the project – and yet you thought that your client would just accept being invoiced a substantially higher amount than initially agreed.
Anyway, sounds like you've learned your lesson. It's annoying but misunderstandings happen from time to time. It's got nothing to do with being 'ethical' or in good or bad faith.
| | | | Kaspars Melkis
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:55
English to Latvian
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| I totally agree with you | Nov 10, 2019 |
Bruno Depascale wrote: Thank you all for your input. It has been really helpful to evaluate my conduct from a different perspective. While I think that the agency acted in bad faith, I do agree with you that I should have been 100% clear in my communication, and I MUST NEVER assume that the people I'm doing business with will act ethically or in good faith (which is sad but true, even though this is not always the case) Have a great weekend you all 
I work with agencies and if there is extra work that wasn't initially expected, I just let them know, and if they say “go, ahead”, it always means that it will be added to the final PO.
Sometimes there can be issues with the text that not even an end-client is aware of. It is a duty of an agency to negotiate with an end-client, including extra pay. Either this agency wanted to keep the extra money for themselves or they are inept and don't know how to do business.
Still, I always take the position that my clients will act in good faith rather than becoming cynical and distrusful. Based on experience, I discard bad clients and keep good ones. My first concern is the target reader and only then the financial aspects of my work. I don't think a successful freelance translator should be a good business person first. Because you could equally argue that those agencies who play those shady tricks with PEMT or payment rules to inrease their short-term profits are merely doing good business too.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 03:55
French to English
Bruno Depascale wrote: Thank you all for your input. It has been really helpful to evaluate my conduct from a different perspective. While I think that the agency acted in bad faith, I do agree with you that I should have been 100% clear in my communication, and I MUST NEVER assume that the people I'm doing business with will act ethically or in good faith (which is sad but true, even though this is not always the case) Have a great weekend you all
If you only asked for more time and didn't mention that you would have to bill more for that time, the agency was not acting in bad faith at all.
A highly conscientious PM wanting to make sure of avoiding future headaches might ask you how much extra you intend to charge, like the wonderful PM who asked recently if I could do a weekend job and stated upfront that they would accept a weekend surcharge. I told them exactly how much extra it would involve (and the mere fact that they offered upfront meant I only charged 20% extra rather than my usual 25%). Had they said nothing, I'd have brought the subject up before agreeing to the work, I would never have taken for granted that they knew my weekend rate.
If I've understood correctly, you hadn't worked with this agency before. They had no way of knowing whether you would apply a per word rate (nor even how many words were involved) or a per hour rate (you did say how much extra time it might take but didn't spell out your hourly rate). Given that this job was to be billed at a flat rate, neither of those two methods would automatically apply, so they would have no way of knowing how you'd even go about assessing how much extra to charge. That makes for a lot of unknowns regarding this extra charge don't you think?
| | | | Kaspars Melkis
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:55
English to Latvian
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| I personally think it did | Nov 11, 2019 |
Kay Denney wrote:
If you only asked for more time and didn't mention that you would have to bill more for that time, the agency was not acting in bad faith at all.
The extra time and rate could be better communicated but do we honestly believe that the translator offered to provide extra work for free? If something wasn't clear, then the agency in good faith would have asked, what's your rate or how much more do you want?
I am a professional and I provide rare expertise in my field. I am not very skilled in business negotiations and I expect the agency to facilitate my work by simplifying my paperwork. It is an agency with several members of staff whose task is to deal with those aspects. If I don't like working for an agency due to their procedures, that's their loss, not mine.
Equally I don't try to compete with agencies as an equal business partner. It doesn't make sense as our work and scale is so much different.
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Tony Keily
Local time: 03:55
Italian to English
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| Depends on what they said about the word count | Nov 12, 2019 |
If the agency told you the job had 6K words and it actually had 8K, you would have case regardless because they would have misrepresented the amount of work involved.
Normally when agencies are short on their word counts, I at least point this out to them as it is at best an unfair business practice and at worst fraud.
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Anthony Keily wrote:
If the agency told you the job had 6K words and it actually had 8K, you would have case regardless because they would have misrepresented the amount of work involved.
Right, but did his message to them say "Hey, this job has an extra 2000 words so I'll need more time and money" or did it say "I need a few more hours to turn this around?" Miscounts happen all the time, especially if the extra text is in an image.
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