"Wagner Consulting International.
Location: New York C.
I hope this finds you well. I’ve got an EN-DE project around 700 words, which needs to be done by 4PM CET today. Budget will be 25 USD.
Junior Project Manager"
Well, that is 0.035 USD/word - while it is not clear whether this means source or target words.
Presume you use a 200 word/page format, that is then 7 USD per page.
I don't know about everybody else, but to me (and I believe a large portion of the western world) this is PEANUTS.
Also I take the liberty of doubting, that anybody with a family living in New York could survive working for this slave rate.
As a company - Wagner International - should be ashamed of itself asking people to work for this rate!
Showing posts with label slave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label slave. Show all posts
1/11/2017
3/28/2014
"Big job frenzy" -> Update
The "Big job frenzy" continues! On and on and on and ...
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.
Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!
One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").
Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".
Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.
I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...
frenzy,MILLION,job,rate,RUSH,slave,peanuts,deceiving,cheating,deadline,desperate
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.
Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!
One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").
Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".
Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.
I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...
frenzy,MILLION,job,rate,RUSH,slave,peanuts,deceiving,cheating,deadline,desperate
3/16/2014
"Big job" frenzy
Probably EVERYBODY got this:
"...translating approximately 30 MILLION words of Japanese into ENGLISH for an important business matter." (since this is Jap-Eng, the proper expression would be CHARACTERS and not words!)
I got the same message from a whole series of translation agencies, some of which mention a deadline, others don't. Those that do, say something like "until the end of the month = 2-3 weeks.
Well, 30 million Japanese characters correspond to approximately 75,000 (Japanese standard pages, or 5000 pages a day. That definitely IS a big job. No wonder that one single agency cannot handle this volume and everybody, with reference to the expression "feeding frenzy", is joining into this "big job frenzy".
Naturally (??!??), everybody is asking for the so-called "best rates", which are specified by some of those frenzied companies as 0.02-0.03 USD/target word. The other companies apparenty wait for translators to voluntarily OFFER to work for peanuts. Forget for a moment, that I live in Japan, even in Europe for a common language pair like German-English, a "normal/acceptable" rate is somewhere around 0.10 USD. For a more exotic language combination like Japanese-English, rates SHOULD be higher. In particular for RUSH jobs.
One of the agencies was careless enough to mention that the material is "financial documentation" from Nomura Securities International, Inc.
Isn't that nice.
THAT corporate giant loves to steal (naturally they call it differently!) billions of dollars each year from its clients.
Another company mentioned merge between other very big (=rich) companies (I forgot the names now).
Other people mentioned the "merger of two big corporations" (also very rich companies, but I forgot the names)
Do they really NEED to be so greedy as to employ thousands of slaves that are paid in peanuts? Probably the majority of the translators working on this "job" are neither native speakers (the client officially accepts this!) nor really experts.
I think it is rather obvious, in what kind of documentation this will result ...
Some of the translator sites, where these offers are posted, also show the number of bid the poster received. If THAT is any indication of the real situation ... then they will never make it!
I would really like to have this thing past. The FLOOD of offers/questions/requests of emails swamping my mailbox is really annoying (to put it mildly).
*************************
One of my grandfather's favorite sayings was“Use the right tool for the job”
―common-sense advice that applies to a wide range of situations.
Unfortunately, as Mark Twain observed, common sense isn't very common!
"...translating approximately 30 MILLION words of Japanese into ENGLISH for an important business matter." (since this is Jap-Eng, the proper expression would be CHARACTERS and not words!)
I got the same message from a whole series of translation agencies, some of which mention a deadline, others don't. Those that do, say something like "until the end of the month = 2-3 weeks.
Well, 30 million Japanese characters correspond to approximately 75,000 (Japanese standard pages, or 5000 pages a day. That definitely IS a big job. No wonder that one single agency cannot handle this volume and everybody, with reference to the expression "feeding frenzy", is joining into this "big job frenzy".
Naturally (??!??), everybody is asking for the so-called "best rates", which are specified by some of those frenzied companies as 0.02-0.03 USD/target word. The other companies apparenty wait for translators to voluntarily OFFER to work for peanuts. Forget for a moment, that I live in Japan, even in Europe for a common language pair like German-English, a "normal/acceptable" rate is somewhere around 0.10 USD. For a more exotic language combination like Japanese-English, rates SHOULD be higher. In particular for RUSH jobs.
One of the agencies was careless enough to mention that the material is "financial documentation" from Nomura Securities International, Inc.
Isn't that nice.
THAT corporate giant loves to steal (naturally they call it differently!) billions of dollars each year from its clients.
Another company mentioned merge between other very big (=rich) companies (I forgot the names now).
Other people mentioned the "merger of two big corporations" (also very rich companies, but I forgot the names)
Do they really NEED to be so greedy as to employ thousands of slaves that are paid in peanuts? Probably the majority of the translators working on this "job" are neither native speakers (the client officially accepts this!) nor really experts.
I think it is rather obvious, in what kind of documentation this will result ...
Some of the translator sites, where these offers are posted, also show the number of bid the poster received. If THAT is any indication of the real situation ... then they will never make it!
I would really like to have this thing past. The FLOOD of offers/questions/requests of emails swamping my mailbox is really annoying (to put it mildly).
*************************
One of my grandfather's favorite sayings was“Use the right tool for the job”
―common-sense advice that applies to a wide range of situations.
Unfortunately, as Mark Twain observed, common sense isn't very common!
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