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tranfree issue 47 - 25 April 2002
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch?By Alex Eames Here's the scenario...
This scenario fits quite a few translators lists and sites to greater or lesser degrees. They become victims of their own success. I've seen some unbelievable comments/accusations about both ProZ and TCR on public translator lists and forums in the last few weeks.
Of course, you won't find this kind of hatred on the translatortips forums. Or if you do it will be removed very quickly and the perpetrator blocked out - with no discussion! http://www.translatortips.net/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi
The above profile even fits (more or less) free email providers like hotmail and yahoo! who are struggling to find new revenue streams now that there's a lot less online advertising money around. Aquarius - aquarius.netIf you look at Aquarius, the pioneer online "find a translator" site, they took a serious bashing 18 months ago when they went commercial. ProZ was poised to take advantage of that situation, and has grown enormously quickly. (I'd hate to have to pay their bandwidth costs). Now Aquarius has repositioned itself more or less as an online translation agency (with a fee to be on their books, whether you get work or not). Aquarius has cut down to ~11,000 translators, having pruned out a lot of inactive and out-of-date data. According to their own data, they out-sourced nearly 9 million words in March 2002, which at a working rate of 2000 words per day would be 4,500 translator days. That's pretty impressive. But who's getting all these jobs? If you're getting loads of work from Aquarius, please send us an email to aquarius@tranfree.com They have also remodelled the site in response to a lot of technical problems that were ocurring with the users. I have yet to look at the new site in great detail, but the forums could certainly do with a resizeable browser window. How arrogant of the designer to assume that everyone uses 800 * 600 screen resolution and is willing to scroll horizontally? By all means open an 800 * 600 window, but why on earth disable the resize function, which by default is enabled? I could also see no intuitively obvious way of accessing any but the last four threads in each discussion. I hope the rest of the site works better. ProZ - proz.comProZ now has around 30,000+ members, but I don't know when they last had a cleanout. A year or so after they launched premium and platinum memberships, we're starting to hear some comments about the value of this site. There's a lot of chat on their own forums. So much that it must
be nearly impossible to stay on top of it. They redesigned their
site a couple of month ago, and in so doing broke the
functionality of translatortips workplace. The latest job offer to bid that I received from ProZ was number 21993 - so they're definitely getting a flow of jobs in now. There has been a lot of discussion about...
...but this misses a lot of the value of sites like ProZ. I think the value in this site is in...
...and, like the Yellow Pages, if you want more prominence, you pay for it. Fair enough, in my view. In a multi-billion dollar market, I find it a complete joke that people think bidding on ProZ forces general market rates down. There are millions of customers out there who have never heard of ProZ. It's the global economy which increases price competition. OK. I hear you say... "but ProZ facilitates the global economy" ...and OK, for the people who post jobs on ProZ, maybe there is an element of truth in it. But why would you want to bid and compete on price, when the lowest bid is often not the one selected, except by the kind of clients you should be avoiding anyway? I've never bid for a job on ProZ, and I don't think I will. But when we are asked to quote for translation work, we do not get all of the jobs we quote for. If we did, we'd raise our rates. Who wants to do a load of work at low profit, when you can make the same money for less effort by charging more? We actually get work we quote for in roughly one third of cases. The problem is that people think they can pay their $120 per year and be fully employed for life. If you could, do you think that would be a fair price? Of course not, it'd be much higher. If you get leads which amount to more than $120 of work, you've made a financial profit. Otherwise you have to assess whether to change your profile to a more punchy and effective one. If you could easily get $20,000-$100,000 worth of work a year for an outlay of $120, everyone would be doing it wouldn't they? There may be people who do have such success stories.
Payment Practiceshttp://www.trwenterprises.com/payment_practices.htm This list fits the above scenario very well. It has gone from free service in 1998 through the paid model and because the founder got too busy with translation work, she passed it on to others to run. Payment Practices was just about the first place where you could query translation clients. Set up by Karin Adamczyk in 1998 (I think) it was a fantastic idea. Then it got too big to manage and needed to be moved to a paid-for provider in 1999. translatortips.com sponsored some of the cost and some was provided by sales of the RTA database and subscriber donations. But in 2000/1 there were problems of fraudulent postings, so Karin started authenticating user's identities using a small credit card transaction.
The rest is history, Karin got too busy and passed it on to Ted
Wozniak and David Orpin and I believe it is now free again.
Some time in 2000/1 TCR Translation Client Review was launched as
a more free-form way of finding out about translation client
payment and other habits.
Laura Hastings (founder) provided a great free service, but
suffered many of the same problems as Payment Practices.
So the use of free email accounts was banned, which caused a big
stink from some of the members. But it was necessary to do this
kill off fraudulent postings.
You may not realize this, but it's hard work to maintain a list
with hundreds or thousands of people. Think about all the
arguments when you reject somebody's message. All the time taken
to hold people's hands when they can't be bothered to read the
instructions how to subscribe/unsubscribe.
It's also a thankless task, and you find out just how thankless
when you realize you've hit the point where you have to decide...
* charge a fee, or
* stop providing the service
...and then you get hit with a mountain of abuse from people who
think you're trying to get rich off them? For $12, I don't think
Laura's going to retire on the profits just yet.
We don't have to judge these people. We can vote with our feet.
We pay, or we don't pay - simple. And there's usually a choice.
Just starting on this joyful journey into translator tribulation
is Peter Erfurt's list called TransPayment. They are averaging 11
messages per day with 657 subscribers a few weeks after launch.
Good luck. I look forward to seeing how it works out. So this covers the (r)evolution of some of the most significant
sites/lists for translators over the last few years. What about
translatortips.com?
The good news is that tranfree, in its email distribution, is
still free. The cost of reading tranfree is that, if you like
what you read, you may decide to buy one of our products...
http://www.translatortips.net/ht50.html
http://www.translatortips.net/tranmail.html
...or you may be exposed to the occasional advertisement relevant
to translation business professionals.
We will be launching some premium content in the not too distant
future. More on that when it happens.
Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com, |
This was a co-
branded site run for us by ProZ. But Henry's an honourable guy.