Treat your translators well
Corinne McKay has another good post, this time on the care and feeding of translators. Here she argues that the translators you want are already busy, so hiring them is really doing sales (selling them on the idea of working for you).
This also applies to the translators you've already got. If you have a great translator, you can be pretty sure that her other clients love her, too. Are you treating her well enough to make her keep taking work from you? Not only pay, but deadlines, feedback, responsiveness, payment terms, and plain being easy to work with?
Hiring a new translator entails a lot of risk. Even if a new translator passes your trial, has good qualifications, and even has a (worthless) "certification," the only way to truly test her worth is on an important job — one where you can't afford to mess up. Obviously you want to hold on to your translators once they've been proven.
That's why it's so strange that many of the people who hire translators want to go into "time stasis" mode — they want to freeze all the conditions from the time of the original hire, while they might be offering better conditions to new translators (at least inflation-adjusted pay). While they're busy vetting and weeding out the influx of new translators, they wonder why their existing ones gradually get "too busy" to take work from them any more…
It's pretty much accepted wisdom among the translators I speak with that in order to get better conditions, you've got to change clients. This is a huge opportunity loss for purchasers of translation. It's a reverse quality filter: the best translators leave, while a constant influx of new translators comes in, the mediocre ones staying and the best ones leaving. If you really value a translator, I'd suggest offering better terms when she starts getting "too busy" more and more often.
Times are good for good translators, and as globalization increases they're likely to only get better. In order to hire top translators, you've got to treat them like valuable assets. And this goes double for retaining the high-quality translators you've already got working for you.
Thanks so much for this great post! You’re exactly right; translation buyers need to put just as much energy into retaining their existing translators as they do into hiring new ones. As a translator, I always try to keep this in mind in my own work; I need to “impress” my longstanding clients just as much as the new ones by going the extra mile for them.
“Times are good for good translators”
Ouch.
Great post. As a translation buyer, I am reminded once in a while that if a translator I use often gets “busy” all of a sudden with other clients and isn’t taking my work, I have to make sure that I’m treating him or her right with regard to rate, payment cycle, good communication, etc.
On the flipside, we in translation agencies rarely turn down work or “fire” our clients despite having lots of other work already, and I have, on occasion, even secretly envied freelance translators who reach their capacity and say, sorry, can’t take anymore.
@Corrine
I very much agree that translators should work to delight their customers, especially the ones that they value the most. Sometimes I’ll take a tight deadline or do a job I’d rather not in order to help out my good clients.
@Adam
Of course, good is relative. A fellow translator and I were commenting that we don’t seem to be getting any better, but the translators around us seem to be getting worse
@Glenn
I have a good friend and translator who runs an agency. He says he likes the stability; I much prefer the freedom of being an independent operator.
Also, being pleasant to work with really is worth a lot, at least to me. I have one client who is really annoying to work with; the kind who’ll call you to tell you they’re about to send you an email, then call you 5 minutes later to ask if you’ve read it (i.e. high maintenance). She pays about 15% higher than my average rate — I consider it an annoyance tax
(ps if you’re reading this, no it’s not you — it’s someone else 