Translation Payment Reputation

Your one stop location where you can find out everything you need to know about getting paid for translation work(2).

 
Explanation of the above links:

Translation Payments Link Exchange

It is unfortunate when one does not get paid for their hard translation work. This has happened to me several times, to one point when I got so angry that I decided to make such a searchable database freely available on the internet. Sometimes I took on a very large translation project and ended up spending about a year, drawing profits from other translation projects, so that I could pay off the translators. Because of this I developed a very good translation payment reputation with my translators, and I was able to lay my head down at night with a clear conscience, which is very important to me. But I rather burned with anger at the thought that some companies have no qualms about not paying for translation work they tendered. Since these translation customers were located in different parts of the world, it was impossible to forcibly extract payment from them, as I learned while communicating with some international lawyers about getting paid for translation work. Other times most companies refuse to offer an advance payment for a translation project, or pay in full prior to delivery. Translations is a very competitive industry, so us freelance translators or small agencies (when I started out) simply have to take the chance when taking on new clients. On the lawyer page (link just above) I go into the best strategy I’ve realized over the years how to get paid for one’s hard work as a translation provider. If you are a first time translator I hope these pages will help you start out your new career. Make sure to check out my translation tips page to help you get set up properly. If you are an experienced translator, I would love to hear your comments about the translation agencies you have worked for and which you can input through this easy translation payments reputation input form. Mostly I’m interested in your negative experiences, but if you have the time to input your positive experiences as well, that would be great. Because this would most help other translators to decide whether they want to take on work from new clients, or at least how carefully they want to proceed with them.

Of course, sometimes a translation agency might ask its existing translators, or even employees or personal friends, to bombard such translation payment reputation forum with positive comments, in the hopes of flooding the negative comments and “bend the statistics” in this dishonest way. For this reason I intend to carefully moderate this database to filter out such cases. Which can inevitably be a difficult task, but with careful analysis and investigation I believe this is possible. Actually, this too has happened to me, which is why I also set up the Brotherhood of Translators, whereby the brotherhood can be occasionally called upon to overcome such dishonest tactics by translation agencies. For example, if one translator has a horrible experience with payment, posts a negative comment on a third party payment reputation site and soon finds that his truthful comments are buried beneath a pile of candy lies. The translator might complain to me, I’d research it, and consider calling on the brotherhood to overbombard the candy lies on that third party translation payment reputation site. But obviously great care must be taken before making such a serious decision. I would definitely approach the translation company and do some serious investigative work beforehand. Some may consider such tactics as terrorist. We could then get into a long discussion of what is a freedom fighter and what is a rebel, and what news sources you draw your perceptions from. In any case, this is just another tool that might be used to force these bad apples into payment. In such cases it is simply better for them to pay than to have a seriously scarred reputation on the internet. I’ve worked for one translation company for several years and our correspondence was always exceedingly irritating. But I bit my tongue because I needed the work. Eventually though I could no longer tolerate the owner’s treatment of myself and my staff and kindly divulged my thoughts about him. Which he warranted as grounds for nonpayment of the last month’s work. Not an immensely large sum, but it is the principle of the matter. He certainly had no justification for nonpayment, no matter what vocabulary I chose to use. But if eventually he crumbles under the pressure and pays me (with due interest of course, and perhaps some penalty), then I’d be glad to remove my negative comments about his agency. And I’d like to extend this help to others who might be in the same situation. There is no justification for such unethical behaviour and such people should be made to pay, one way or another.

Unlike many other payment practices sites on the net, I never intend to charge translators for this service. At most I might put some google ads on the various pages, or the high web traffic generated from such a free service could help the web rankings of my other pages, but I plan to never charge for this service. In fact, as you will find through the translation payment reputation page, I am freely disclosing links to all other such services that I know of. If you know of any, feel free to inform me so that I can research them and consider adding their link to these pages. What is most important is that translators are well aware of the options available to them. The less translators willing to work for such bad apples, the harder it will be for them to run a profitable business. If under the pressure they reluctantly pay all the translators they have accrued debt to over time, then their reputation can be justifiably cleaned. I’ve paid my translators when I wasn’t paid, so I’m sure others can do the same.
On the other hand, there are cases (as can be expected) when a translation company changes its business name, so that it can start all over with a clean state. But in the forums translators have caught onto this, determining it through the trade registry in their country or by some other means, in which case I have linked the new company to the old one in my database. It is a simple tactic and they will not get away with such practices in my database.

Well, you may wonder how I can endlessly ramble on. But the search engines like a lot of text, and these are standard search engine optimization procedures to help a webpage get to the top of google etc. in some keyword search. Such as for example “payment practices”, or “translation payment reputation”. Which is why I also listed on these pages the names of all the companies commented on in this database, and find that these pages are often at the top of google for searches like “company X payment reputation”. It is important that these pages are at the top of google so that translators, especially first time freelancers who are not aware of all the services available on the net, can easily find them to help them learn how to accept work from new customers. For which reason there is due cause for these endless rambling words. I learned how to type fast after translating for some ten years, so it’s no skin off my fingertips, heh heh.

Hope you enjoyed the reading and that, together, we can build a good translation payment reputation database, freely available to all, to help make the translation industry an honourable one and where freelancers can work from the comfort of their home, translating for translation companies all over the world, and feel secure that they will be paid for their hard and honest work.

Further changes still to be made:

- add link to application form concerning payment practices
- add list of translation agencies commented on, mention how many comments and how many commented on, last updated etc. (database details section)
- add text talking about
- who it was put together by, and why
- who foto by
- give big pump to 001, sponsored by etc., reliable payer...
- add original approach letter to pp forums on an adjoining page…

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List of translation agencies commented on in this database: