User manual translations market cornered. Market riddled with charlatans.

User manual translations vanish from market

The business for translating German-to-English manuals for technology companies has shrunk dramatically for "normal-priced" freelance translators. I have noted this nosedive in the manuals business because all incoming orders for this type of work have come to a complete standstill here in our office.

 
An informal benchmark/unheard of dumping price

I have asked several colleagues who agree about this trend, and we have made an educated guess - a "guess-timate" - that the combination of technology, with leveraged and reusable translation memories, and end customers sending most or all work to agencies who have reduced their prices by sourcing suppliers who oftentimes offer to do work for 3 or 4 to 6 cents (euro-cents) a word. I was asked via the proz.com platform to do 2,500 words for 5 cents a word just today - of course the deadline was before April is more than a few hours old (this year) and the rest would only be placed as an order (10,000 more words) if you agreed to the pain up front.

The aggregate effect has killed off the normal wage market for translating manuals (from German to English) in Germany.

 
The market for homeowners who vacation 3x a year, but are translators

Forget the very respectable pay of the Foreign Office or some of the major government-run banks which pay over or far more than €1.70 a line = 25 euro-cents/word, or boardroom briefings, which can be quite sensitive and call for experience and linguistic acumen, which is paid at a rate of at least 22 cents per German word - yes German words are longer, so there are sometimes "only" seven words per line in a text.

There is a market for respectable work for a fair price, but it has been pummeled to the size of a battered meatball by price-cutting procurement practices.

Good pay on a feudal see-saw

But at the same time, if the department who drove the prices down then sends an agency a total of two days of work on a Friday morning, they expect the translator to work on the weekend for no extra pay and the job delivered on Monday afternoon - after the agency had part of Monday to check your work. This means they take the liberty of not warning a trusted supplier in advance and assume that good people will be available, with no regard to time off, which translators need, no matter how late they request rush work to be completed.

Meanwhile, at the factory assembly line workers earn time-and-a-half for holiday/weekend work.

So if a Fortune 500 German conglomerate issues a news item of 650 words, an agency will (be expected to) charge anywhere from 20 to 25 cents a word or higher, or be "guilty" of ruining standard market prices. However, the agency translator is not allowed to bid to the agency; he or she is only allowed to "swallow" the predetermined pricing of 11 cents/word.

The tacit agreement is regular work for the agency translator for one set fee, no matter how hard or easy the content or the damage which could result from the delivered product not making the right impression. 'Friß oder stirb' is the German adage for this, meaning "Take it, or leave it." ... but using language reserved for animals.

 
Tarred and feathered for starting dialogue

All backtalk is squelched, and your name thrown off their supplier list if you call them out.

Been there. Done that.

This has meant fewer and fewer translators can continue to make a respectable income in a skilled profession where you have to be very good at 1) handling manuals content and all the related terminology/content management interfaces and 2) producing clear native-language subject-matter-expert level content for systems which are often highly sensitive or potentially dangerous.

A local profession of, usually, fluent emigrés who understand Germany and how it ticks is being systematically gagged and forced overseas or into the hinterland. You are a translator? No opera for you, no jazz clubs, just chickens and goats. Sorry. Yes, we do expect you to translate difficult operatic/classical music content, obviously, but you may only cultivate your abilities on TV or the Web. Hope that's okay.

Profit motive produces nameless bumblers
There are scores of agencies making 75 to 125 percent profit for checking and sending in what spotty quality they manage to get out of the very low-priced suppliers. If they check it at all. Rather than pay a fair price to the skilled self-employed contractor/translator, they remove part of that person's function and push it up the supply chain by having the missing quality tested/corrected/edited into the faulty product which is faulty because it is done by incompetent or unpredictable and (luckily?) anonymous individuals - many doing it as a housekeeper or on the side while the spouse supports them.

Cost-cutters without logic - what goes round, comes round

As part of this trend, companies like subsidiaries of major worldwide manufacturers with "cost-cutting" procurement divisions, only three years ago demanded a 4-cent and 2-cent reduction per word in agency pricing, respectively, without any explanation as to why. When our office said No Way! the work was sent elsewhere, so we are told by our agencies out in the field who try to find work for us.

Just before entering negotiations, the reason we were being approached, said our middlemen, was that there were huge quality issues from outsourcing the work to India at a cut rate over a period of several years.

That was not the reason for demanding a huge price cut - that was the reason for coming to a big city agency in Germany again, on their proverbial hands and knees. How schizophrenic. That brought collaborations which had been cultivated for half a decade to an abrupt end.

Shoptalk insights, the stench of greed

Before the arrangement ended, I would sometimes get agency work and find Hungarian and Romanian names in the translation memory, mixed in with my well-translated sentences, and found fairly bad errors in their content. This meant, to maximize profit, jobs where I had done the same product manual six times before were then sent to a slashed-price market for a couple years, where my translation results were leveraged to produce translations which could, somehow, be invoiced with the end customer. After all, their English was not really good enough to assess what they were getting. Mind you, I myself had to already give discounts for content repetition or highly similar phrasings. If a bad complaint came from the end customer, then I would have to step in to work on the company's manuals again - as the clean-up man - as they could no longer risk continuing with low-quality suppliers.

Please don't get me wrong, I have friends in these countries, be it Hungary, Romania, the Philippines or India - but I do not enter a school and try to teach Romanian or Hungarian, or Hindu or Tagalog, as a classroom teacher, which is what I consider doing demanding industry manual translations as a non-native speaker amounts to, while also even more dangerous and negligent. However, I readily train and teach my colleagues all about my language, even if I know they might "cut into" my market share, because I know I can count on those colleagues for larger projects, when we all help each other deliver translations in multiple languages. What I do insist on is complete bilingual competence and aptitude for the job.

 
Flummoxed by Benelux

Two years ago: a person who described herself as a translation industry association member bid for a Benelux job at 50% less than the normal price. The end customer, a wealth manager, said to me, hmmm: your price is far higher than the other bid, please explain. When I told him what the other bidder had done, he responded with silence, but felt named and blamed enough to place the order with me.

But he never ordered from me again.

 
Outsource yourself to the Carpathians

For four years now, a major international automotive company has actively recruited translators to work 40 hours a week at an Eastern European location through an agency located there, in a securely supervised building, on their computers, not your own, but without a permanent contract. The initial period of work would be up to six months for (3,500 euros/month four years ago) 4,000 euros a month (recently offered).

Agreeing to such an offer may seem lucrative, but there is no guarantee that the automotive placement agency in eastern Europe would keep you busy after six months, and you would be neglecting your regular business with customers - or have to work evenings to keep those clients happy, too. This is an example of how a trade in Germany has been attacked by globalization. Basically they want to "own the translator" but not offer the terms commensurate with owning their time: a full-time position, as opposed to a time contract.
 
An aside on inflation/cost of living

Notice how the pay figure in the above section has gone up, maybe because people are hard to find for that, or because of inflation?  There has been no inflation-adjusted pay raise for translators for over ten years that I have heard about. Period. Inflation-adjusted income has dropped by up to 30% in Germany since the 1980s, and my US inflation calculator says that if my line price remained unchanged since 2001 but in the same period something which cost a dollar back in 2001 now costs $1.25 to $1.30. That means across the board there has been at least a 25% price discount through creeping inflation from 2001 to 2013. Robert Conrad would say: "I dare you to raise your prices now, after over ten years, by say a modicum step of 10 percent - I dare you." Tell all your agencies who have paid 90 cents a line for 12 years the price is now: €1.15 or €1.20 and wait for your phone to ring while it gathers dust. If you misplace your smartphone, in this case it won't matter.

Upshot? Dialogue not desired

If I reported finding bad results in the "translation memory" my agency provided me with, I was essentially ignored. If I asked why I was not given work for that customer for two years, I was ignored. As an individual, we are powerless to stop practices like these unless the agency and end-customer view us professionals on the local market as partners, with respect and real dialog going in both directions. Good work attracts good clients, everything else is pearls before cutlets.

The precarious playing field
That is why I value the relationships I now have with my intermediaries and end customers. Unfair practices outlined above are not given any oxygen in the customer-supplier relationship and you can afford to live a modestly (comfortable) life, avoid working weekends about 1/3 the time, have children (imagine!), become a grandparent eventually, without wondering - like so many in Munich, Hamburg and New York City wonder, if you will have to move to a hovel when you turn 70, and occasionally take a longer break from the impossible deadlines caused by content producers unwilling/thoughtless enough to not give translators advance warning about when they will finish their work (on time) like we always have to.

If you have identified any of your practices in this blog post, I hope you will consider it free advice (to stop doing it), meant in the spirit of mutual respect.