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CROWD TRANSLATION |
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Not a significant trend up to now but a new practice that has been used in many contexts: crowd translation is seen as "useful in certain contexts" by 54% of the participants and a translation process that should be considered for specific projects. Unsurprisingly, quality control during this "use of the crowd" is the participants main concern.
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ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP WITH TRANSLATION AGENCIES |
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COMMENTS: |
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This result confirms one of the results of the previous survey (Translation industry survey - Translation Industry Survey - Synthesis) conducted by Trad’Online and KD’zID at the end of 2008. For 66% of translators who responded, 50% to 100% of their billings come from translation agencies. And as translation agencies are the primary customers of a great majority of translators, they focus their effort primarily towards vertical, specialized online platforms such as Proz.com.
This result could be compared to the next one: 66% of the participants consider translation agencies as clients and only 34% as partners (we could have added the term "provider"). In the numerous pieces of free text feedback from respondents, the usual comments are given, varying from "I have a very good relationship with the agencies" to "never believe an agency, they are only there to ask to reduce your prices and make a profit", as well as "in the end, we are both working for the same final client" and "Small agencies rather tend to be "partners" as they better understand the complexity of freelancers' work and consider freelancers as partners too; big agencies tend to be "clients" as they require more from freelancers who they consider as "suppliers".
The full range of translators appreciation towards agencies was therefore expressed once more in this survey, going from strong hostility towards agencies to a firm belief in the validity of the freelance translator<>translation agency "team" (and also a lot of neutral sentiments).
The authors of the survey will not attempt to solve this ongoing and recurrent “debate” about the love/hate relationship between freelance translators and translation agencies, as in our opinion there is no clear cut answer.
Translation agencies (most of them) have great added value in some projects and for some customers (for example when a lot of project management needs to be done, to do sales, to manage the quality process of having translation proofread, etc) and for some other projects/customers don’t have that much added value and can tend to become just an unnecessary intermediary (for example for some unilingual translation projects).
When probed, it also appears that negative feedback from translators towards translation agencies often originates from bad experiences with some translation agencies, who don’t respect translators, or pay late, or don’t pay at all, etc.
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THE FUTURE |
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Finally, from a prospective point of view about what professional status to keep in the future: 68% of the participants wish to stay freelancers, 18% don’t know and 15% are thinking of creating a translation agency sooner or later, with one or several translators or alone.
1 in 6 respondents therefore have the potential to become entrepreneurs in the coming years. It seems an encouraging sign that a minority, a small but not insignificant fraction, of translators believe in the future of their industry and want to take a more active part in it.
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