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[quote]Dan Lucas wrote:
Before anybody comes rampaging in here claiming that the above is hopelessly unrealistic and that such-and-such a sector is DOOMED, DOOMED I TELL YOU, please let m
[quote]Lieven Malaise wrote:
You can get in trouble if you refuse to deliver an ongoing order because of a late or non-payment. If you accepted the job under the agreed conditions, you ha
[quote]Charlie wrote:
If I were a careers advisor
[/quote]
Good list! Perhaps we should all add some more. I propose:
Saintly patience in the face of extreme idiocy. Part 1: Client
[quote]Oriol VIP wrote:
You can say which company you've worked for in any CV, now and always[/quote]
You haven't been employed by them. There's a difference.
I would never ask
I've been thinking overnight about transferable skills and decided that, even as a writer, I actually have little to offer.
After 30 years of rewriting what other people have already
[quote]Charlie Bavington wrote:
... but if you're genuinely indispensable, it's poor practice by the organisations concerned.
[/quote]
Good point. Not literally indispensable, obviously
[quote]Charlie Bavington wrote:
Otherwise, I have already given examples of actual people who have got jobs in fields about which they previously translated (medical & international d
[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
Could you list sectors within the translation industry where translators possess significant bargaining power due to their irreplaceability, especially i
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
Most of them think that the end-client pays 30% up or so. They don't know. One former PM posted in another thread recently that in her agency they would
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
What's very useful, is to inform translators about how much the end-client pays. It's weird that translators don't know. [/quote]
What makes you think
[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
However, it still stands that there is an imbalance in these dynamics, and one of the core reasons there has been a race to the bottom. [/quote]
Are you
[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
Statistically, at least half of this forum's members fall into the average category. But there's a common tendency to perceive oneself as unique or super
Surely the problem is the chickenshit translators who accept big-agency prices and practices, MTPE and the rest?
They got themselves into this mess and are now making life harder for
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
[quote]Christopher Schröder wrote: My aim was to challenge Lefteris' claims and give an example of what can still be achieved today. [/quote]
I
[quote]Lingua 5B wrote:
You opened a public topic, you received an opinion. Is there anything else I could help you with? [/quote]
A little courtesy?🤷♂️
[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
However, my purpose here is not to boast about myself.
Rather, my focus is on the collective bargaining power of translators.
The crux of the
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
I'm not the only one. I'm just the only one expressing it.
If someone screams from a window "fire, fire", do not assume the rest of the building is empt
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
I refused an ambulance, I had deadlines to catch. [/quote]
Two years ago I was hospitalised when my spine collapsed. After a couple of weeks spaced out
[quote]Carlos A R de Souza wrote:
But the point is, if everyone says their life is peachy when it isn't, it actually prevents people from actually fighting for fairer prices.[/quote]
But
[quote]Baran Keki wrote:
So, you wouldn't mind turning down a job from a regular client and risk losing them?
Shame man.. if you worked like Lefteris, you'd have owned half of Swansea,<
[quote]Baran Keki wrote:
Say you're working on a 30k word project (at 14 cents per word) to be delivered in 3 weeks, and you're offered a 10k word project from another regular client at 1
[quote]Lieven Malaise wrote:
You are probably an exception, because I can't imagine that a lot of translators can do financially what you have done and still are doing while working only
[quote]Lieven Malaise wrote:
[quote]Christel Zipfel wrote:
Is a translator that works in a concentrated manner 5 or 6 hours a day or even less, making a living from his work, without any
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
Translators in cheaper countries and Part Timers have little incentive to negotiate prices upwards. There are exceptions, but most just accept whatever c
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
And from what I've seen in these forums, the "full time translator" will become a very rare species, at least in the more expensive countries. I per
If you’re an average translator applying for average work from an average agency, 9 cents for French sounds a bit on the high side to me.
It all depends on what you’re offering, an
[quote]Dan Lucas wrote:
Speaking as somebody who worked in a variety of investment banks and knew many people in hedge funds, you don't have to be employed by either to have a decent stab
[quote]Charlie Bavington wrote:
I have to beg to differ a little. I've given actual examples were precisely that has happened.
Absolutely not the case for everyone, ofc.
Perhaps when y
[quote]Jane Martin wrote:
I was just discussing this with a friend (also a translator) yesterday and out of interest we compared our income from last November and December to our income f
[quote]Charlie Bavington wrote:
Subject matter expertise also. For example, I know a specialised medical translator now working for a medical firm, and another who used to do internationa
[quote]Dan Lucas wrote:
If you still have the emotional and financial wherewithal to be able to say "I don't want to do X, or Y, or Z" then I would argue that you must be in pretty comfor
One thing I noticed when looking into getting more copywriting work was that everyone wants you to write for SEO, which basically means blathering on in an irritatingly verbose and repetit
The only agencies I work with that require a CAT tool provide online access to Phrase/Memsource, MemoQ or their own CAT tool anyway, and if you can use one you can use them all.
So I wo
[quote]Rachel Waddington wrote:
[quote]Baran Keki wrote:
I really wonder what else one can do after having killed their 'people skills' by staying at home for 11 years. I guess they
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
. I noticed that the previous translator had translated "debentures" as the exact opposite product. I asked the PM and she told me to fix it throughout.<
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
...is that translators are trying to prove it wrong, by entering better translations. The MT then takes this better translation and enriches its database
I had a meltdown last autumn after a couple of quiet months, decided AI was taking over and started looking at alternative jobs/careers.
From what I could see, the obvious alternat
[quote]Lingua 5B wrote:
I'm saying that since you'll get tired through intense work (the alleged big volume) that factor should be incorporated into the price (no discount). [/quote]
I k
[quote]Lingua 5B wrote:
Will you also save your neck, hands, eyes? You do realize that you will get very tired on a big volume, most likely resulting in drowsiness and turning down other<
[quote]Lorenzo Meloni wrote:
Honestly, after many years, I still don't understand why volume discounts should even be a thing in translation.
Sure, they make sense if you have a mach
[quote]Lefteris Kritikakis wrote:
Travel back in time 20 years and tell to anyone in the translation business about this system, they'll tell you nobody would ever accept it.[/quote]
[quote]Tanya Quintieri wrote:
Really? So when you wrote the following, three days ago, you weren't talking about me (or my peers)?
[/quote]
Here we go again. Now you’re suggesting I
[quote]Tanya Quintieri wrote:
Why don't you just ask?! Then you wouldn't have to make assumptions... "When you assume, you make an a$$ out of you and me." comes to mind...
…
Turns out the ProZ forum is no longer moderated by Andrew Morris and membership of Translation Mastermind is now free. I stand corrected. My original point about this forum not being the o
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