The Curse of Promised Work
Oct. 27th, 2015 10:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpOnce you've been freelancing as a translator long enough, you notice certain principles that govern the translator's life.
My friend Feht identified one, which may be stated as "The more data a prospective client asks you to provide regarding your background, capabilities, rates, subject areas, etc., the less likely you are to ever be assigned any work by said client." It's easy enough to understand why this might be so. The only reason you'd want to collect such information is to put it in a database, with the ostensible goal of being able to query the database and find the most qualified translator to perform a pending assignment.
In real life, however, translation companies tend to assign a particularly heavy weight to price, meaning that if you have to choose between a subject matter expert who charges more than what some other reasonably competent, but non-expert translator charges, the job will go to the latter. As a secondary effect, project managers who work at translation companies tend to assign work to tried-and-true translators they've worked with before. So unless there is something that makes you utterly unique (such as an esoteric language combination), or you work at a rock-bottom rate, Feht's Law will hold.
My own observation has been that whenever a client tells me of an upcoming huge slug of work, said work pretty consistently does not show up. I recall one client in particular who used to send me heads-up emails that all but asked me to commit my availability, and precisely zero of the heralded jobs came through.
And as yet, I have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation of why that might be so.
Cheers...
My friend Feht identified one, which may be stated as "The more data a prospective client asks you to provide regarding your background, capabilities, rates, subject areas, etc., the less likely you are to ever be assigned any work by said client." It's easy enough to understand why this might be so. The only reason you'd want to collect such information is to put it in a database, with the ostensible goal of being able to query the database and find the most qualified translator to perform a pending assignment.
In real life, however, translation companies tend to assign a particularly heavy weight to price, meaning that if you have to choose between a subject matter expert who charges more than what some other reasonably competent, but non-expert translator charges, the job will go to the latter. As a secondary effect, project managers who work at translation companies tend to assign work to tried-and-true translators they've worked with before. So unless there is something that makes you utterly unique (such as an esoteric language combination), or you work at a rock-bottom rate, Feht's Law will hold.
My own observation has been that whenever a client tells me of an upcoming huge slug of work, said work pretty consistently does not show up. I recall one client in particular who used to send me heads-up emails that all but asked me to commit my availability, and precisely zero of the heralded jobs came through.
And as yet, I have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation of why that might be so.
Cheers...
