Poll: As a freelance translator/interpreter, do you have liability insurance? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "As a freelance translator/interpreter, do you have liability insurance?".
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I've been working as a translator for over 40 years, and I never had an issue that could be a claim for an insurance policy. I have a good relationship with all my customers and my strategy has been that every time there’s some kind of an issue, I deal with it promptly.
Every time this question is asked, and it has been asked several times, I wonder if anyone has been sued or knows of any cases where a translator was sued. From this you could rightly infer that I do not have prof... See more I've been working as a translator for over 40 years, and I never had an issue that could be a claim for an insurance policy. I have a good relationship with all my customers and my strategy has been that every time there’s some kind of an issue, I deal with it promptly.
Every time this question is asked, and it has been asked several times, I wonder if anyone has been sued or knows of any cases where a translator was sued. From this you could rightly infer that I do not have professional liability insurance… ▲ Collapse
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Only a lazy, incompetent fool would need insurance.
Translators always seem to overestimate both customers' expectations and their own abilities. To err is human. All translations are flawed. That's life. They'd have to be catastophically and negligently poor to require insurance.
| | | | Ana Vozone 
Local time: 18:10
Member (2010)
English to Portuguese
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| I did have for many years | Mar 25 |
with a British insurance company, but they no longer offer services outside the UK (since Brexit). And I am in Portugal...
[Edited at 2024-03-25 12:25 GMT]
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Ana Vozone
Local time: 18:10
Member (2010)
English to Portuguese
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Christopher Schröder wrote:
Only a lazy, incompetent fool would need insurance.
Translators always seem to overestimate both customers' expectations and their own abilities. To err is human. All translations are flawed. That's life. They'd have to be catastophically and negligently poor to require insurance.
I disagree, but you are so assertive in your comment that I do not feel there is any point really in trying to prove otherwise...
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Ana Vozone wrote:
I disagree, but you are so assertive in your comment that I do not feel there is any point really in trying to prove otherwise...
I'm being deliberatively provocative in the hope that one day maybe someone will come up with that elusive case of someone being sued.
You'd have to be massively negligent to end up being sued, which I am sure none of us here would ever be.
| | | | | Never heard of a translator being sued by a client but will not say it never happened. | Mar 25 |
Maria Teresa Borges de Almeida wrote:
I've been working as a translator for over 40 years, and I never had an issue that could be a claim for an insurance policy. I have a good relationship with all my customers and my strategy has been that every time there’s some kind of an issue, I deal with it promptly.
Every time this question is asked, and it has been asked several times, I wonder if anyone has been sued or knows of any cases where a translator was sued. From this you could rightly infer that I do not have professional liability insurance…
| | | | Lingua 5B
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Local time: 19:10
Member (2009)
English to Croatian
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You never heard of it because translators sued are obliged and asked to keep their mouth shut, by the company’s lawyers. If it were public, no other translators would ever work for them.
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| Gagging has its limits | Mar 25 |
Lingua 5B wrote:
You never heard of it because translators sued are obliged and asked to keep their mouth shut, by the company’s lawyers. If it were public, no other translators would ever work for them.
Not all countries allow gag orders of such breadth, and even if allowed, such orders are very unlikely to be perpetual.
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Lingua 5B wrote:
You never heard of it because translators sued are obliged and asked to keep their mouth shut, by the company’s lawyers. If it were public, no other translators would ever work for them.
Do you know that to be true or are you just surmising?
The idea of translators collectively turning down work from anyone seems unlikely too.
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Christopher Schröder wrote:
You'd have to be massively negligent to end up being sued, which I am sure none of us here would ever be.
I agree with you deep inside and I wish you were right, but I know some people on ProZ whose answers in KudoZ betray massive negligence.
I've also been offered to edit or review a fair number of dangerously negligent translations. Here is an assessment I was forced to give a few weeks ago:
The translation as it currently stands is completely unusable for its intended purpose as an emergency response manual, suffering from numerous terminological, syntactic, stylistic and pragmatic shortcomings. It is too close to the source text and is little more than a word-for-word translation. The attached error log lists only the most glaring and easy-to-describe errors; besides these, there are numerous stylistic and lexical issues that can only be corrected by rewriting entire phrases.
The translator does not seem to have any background in the subject field, lacks understanding of the most basic concepts, is totally unfamiliar with the terminology, and has not even bothered to read an official manual on the subject, which was explicitly referenced in the source file.
The translation is verbose, stilted, too close to the source, occasionally too simplistic (descriptive translations when a specialized term is available). The translator has serious vocabulary problems, confusing such words as "resumption" and "renewal", "state" and "condition", "cart" and "dolly", etc. The pragmatic aspects of the source document (an emergency response manual) are completely disregarded. The translator is obviously not a native English speaker and is unable to produce a well-readable text in English.
I think this person had better take out liability insurance.
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It was requested by one German agency, to start collaboration with at all but declined by me because I had the feeling they only wanted avoid to take out a liability insurance on their behalf to protect themselves against any possible claims. And by this way they wanted avoid to employ a reviewer / proofreader too, to save their costs.
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Daryo
United Kingdom
Local time: 18:10
Serbian to English
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| Or to put it in a different way | Mar 27 |
Christopher Schröder wrote:
Only a lazy, incompetent fool would need insurance.
Translators always seem to overestimate both customers' expectations and their own abilities. To err is human. All translations are flawed. That's life. They'd have to be catastophically and negligently poor to require insurance.
If I needed a translation I wouldn't touch with a barge-pole any individual or company proudly and prominently boasting about "being fully insured".
I would automatically translate it as "I/we don't care if we make mistakes, insurance's lawyers are going to do their best to get us off the hook, hush up the whole debacle and even if they can't we are not going to be the ones paying for the damage".
Nothing better to assure you that you will get a good / fit for purpose translation?
I would rather have some solid proofs of quality work being consistently delivered.
Compare it with: no matter of being "fully insured" would make me stay in a taxi with a drunken or incompetent driver. Personally I find this UK obsession with "being insured" for everything imaginable bordering to ridiculous.
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