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Two words: Tie. Rrd.
Oct. 19th, 2010 09:24 pmI woke at 4:17 am and after about a quarter of an hour, it became clear I wasn't going to fall asleep again, so I got up and despeckled a bunch of files and sent them off. Sending off work is good, because I need something to take my mind off my client for The Big Edit™, whose recent behavior is beginning to try my patience.
After sending said client an email reminding him that payment for weeks three and four were overdue and just hitting 30 days for week five, I learned that the check I deposited for the first two weeks of work invoiced actually bounced. Today, I got an email in which the client assured me that the check would be good upon redeposit and that I would be paid as soon as payment was received from the end client.
There are few sure ways for an agency to really tick off a freelancer, and the old "you'll get paid when we do" line is probably up near the top of the list. The argument is, in my opinion, the ne plus ultra of unprofessional behavior, as the translator's relationship with the agency is a thing apart from the agency's relationship with the end client.
Naturally, that doesn't prevent it from being rolled out time after time by would-be agencies. (Indeed, there was an agency called Intellex in Ekaterinburg, Russia, that owed me a significant payday before being acquired by another agency, but both the old and new management have transcended unprofessional behavior and chosen to act dishonestly by refusing to make good on my invoices, the old ones crying about how its clients had all gone bankrupt, and the new ones failing to pay even the pittance they had offered as partial payment.)
My experience with Intellex is what drove me to join the Payment Practices web site, which is where translators can find information on working with various agencies, both from the point of view of staff interaction and payment for work, and my client for The Big Edit™ ranked well there and was recommended by a colleague, so it's probably too early to spend much time on the subject... heck, this post probably represents way too much time already.
* * * I finally started to seriously read Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and find it interesting. His observation on the need to distract oneself completely from what one is doing, particularly when engaged in "creative writing," I find right on the money.
In my own limited experience there were times, during the two LI Idol competitions I took part in, when I would dwell on the subject at hand after leaving the keyboard, and that activity eased the tension and made it that much harder to pick up the thread when later I did sit down at the keyboard. On the other hand, dwelling on ideas in general - which one had to do on a weekly basis - eventually got me to the point where I was jotting down two or three one-line ideas for stories per day (a couple of which actually made it from the idea stage to the story stage).
In any event, after all the despeckling, after doing a high-level edit of a 16,000-word bilingual document ("high level" defined by my client as "fix serious discrepancies," which I am thankful for, else I would have had to devote more than six hours to the job), and after 2200 source words of "ordinary" translation, I've left about 500 words of the document to help the juices start flowing tomorrow morning when I start to work.
Meanwhile, I am ready to spend some quality time examining the interior surface of my eyelids.
Cheers...
After sending said client an email reminding him that payment for weeks three and four were overdue and just hitting 30 days for week five, I learned that the check I deposited for the first two weeks of work invoiced actually bounced. Today, I got an email in which the client assured me that the check would be good upon redeposit and that I would be paid as soon as payment was received from the end client.
There are few sure ways for an agency to really tick off a freelancer, and the old "you'll get paid when we do" line is probably up near the top of the list. The argument is, in my opinion, the ne plus ultra of unprofessional behavior, as the translator's relationship with the agency is a thing apart from the agency's relationship with the end client.
Naturally, that doesn't prevent it from being rolled out time after time by would-be agencies. (Indeed, there was an agency called Intellex in Ekaterinburg, Russia, that owed me a significant payday before being acquired by another agency, but both the old and new management have transcended unprofessional behavior and chosen to act dishonestly by refusing to make good on my invoices, the old ones crying about how its clients had all gone bankrupt, and the new ones failing to pay even the pittance they had offered as partial payment.)
My experience with Intellex is what drove me to join the Payment Practices web site, which is where translators can find information on working with various agencies, both from the point of view of staff interaction and payment for work, and my client for The Big Edit™ ranked well there and was recommended by a colleague, so it's probably too early to spend much time on the subject... heck, this post probably represents way too much time already.
In my own limited experience there were times, during the two LI Idol competitions I took part in, when I would dwell on the subject at hand after leaving the keyboard, and that activity eased the tension and made it that much harder to pick up the thread when later I did sit down at the keyboard. On the other hand, dwelling on ideas in general - which one had to do on a weekly basis - eventually got me to the point where I was jotting down two or three one-line ideas for stories per day (a couple of which actually made it from the idea stage to the story stage).
In any event, after all the despeckling, after doing a high-level edit of a 16,000-word bilingual document ("high level" defined by my client as "fix serious discrepancies," which I am thankful for, else I would have had to devote more than six hours to the job), and after 2200 source words of "ordinary" translation, I've left about 500 words of the document to help the juices start flowing tomorrow morning when I start to work.
Meanwhile, I am ready to spend some quality time examining the interior surface of my eyelids.
Cheers...
