Powwow Report for Vietnam - Hanoi (Sep 9 2012)


Trouble uploading your powwow report or photos? Contact support.
Report from  Tiến Anh Lê
We arranged to meet in a beautiful yet quiet and private venue. Smiles, pcmthoi, thinhnguyen, Van Hoang, and Linh Hoang came first to occupy the room followed by Loi Nguyen and ngock. Many others were interested in participating but attempted to come.

We started to break the ice immediately by presenting ourselves. Mr. Linh Hoang gave us a very good news that he had just become the Proz's Local Payment Contact in Vietnam after a tough interview with ProZ. It will make the payment in our local currency a breeze.

Then came a lady friendly called “Ma mi” (Tu Tran) as she has been providing professional translation/outsourcing service for a very long time (18 years). The last comer was Thai Thanh Nguyen.

We had time to introduce specialty, our expertise and ourselves. We agreed that Powwow is a very good opportunity for us to meet up with the local translator community.

We were seriously worried about the decrement in the average bidding rate (far below 0.01$/source word for our language pair of English - Vietnamese). As it’s quite easy to hire low quality translators with very low rates in Viet Nam to do the translation job, the price is decreasing rapidly so that the professional translators with a high expertise and who investing their time to provide a better-than-average translation job are struggling. Although ones may think of becoming an agency and outsource the job to the lower rate labors, the lower average rate of the community harm them too because once you accept a lower rate, you cannot stop doing it again and again. Nevertheless, we also need to consider the current economic crisis to be flexible in rates with our clients. We’ve seen the slave translation rates in China and India, and we really do not want to follow their footprints. A minimum rate should be calculated and agreed soon by the Vietnamese translator community. It is confirmed that we can make our living only by being linguistic freelancers and we should be respected for what we do and that should be reflected well in the payment we received from our clients.

We also discussed about how we can attract more clients on ProZ. It’s clear that the CAT tools skills, the availability, commitment are the keys to success. We should manage to say yes to the clients even in the hardest projects, and devote ourselves to provide a quality service in the end. Because if not, the clients would definitely go away after two or three attempts. But we translators are all human-beings, so how can we do that if we are just working all alone?

We decided to form “Ha Noi ProZ’s Translator Association”, a community by translators and for translators. We can exchange projects to reliable partners with CAT tool skills and high commitment to quality and availability. We can manage to provide “softer” rates for the outsourcer in exchange for a mutual future benefit. The outsourcer will have chance to keep their clients in their tough time. Moreover, the job can sometimes be placed in better hands since we have complementary expertise.

The Powwow had to end because of time. We decided to meet up frequently and exchange more. We are planning to network with all the professional Prozians in the city and then to all ProZians in Viet Nam in a near future.

Thank you very much again for your attendances and valuable sharing in this very first Powwow event in Ha Noi. Let’s keep our community a benefit environment for all of its members.

Smiles



Photos from  Tiến Anh Lê


Login to add your name to the list of people interested.Click here to login now.

Click here to register. (It is free.)


ProZ.com users and members who attended
: organizer : photos : report : host
Tiến Anh Lê
\"Reporter\"
Tiffany Le
Tu Tran
Loi Nguyen
ngock
Linh Hoang
Pham Thoi
Thinh Nguyen
VIETLANGUAGE (X)
X
 

Postings from ProZians who attended this event

No postings yet made in this powwow.