Client “machinations” in translation
The other day, an agency called me and asked me to edit a translation for an end client. Supposedly, one of the client's (Japanese) engineers had translated a manual, and now they needed a native speaker to "check" it (a euphemism in the Japanese translation industry for "rescue it to the extent possible").
They know I don't like to do so-called "native checks," and they said that the English looked pretty bad, but they asked me to just look at it anyway.
I agreed (can't hurt to look, right?), and immediately spotted that the "translation" was quite clearly a machine translation, probably with a few halfhearted corrections by someone (the purported engineer?) with a dubious grasp of English. Of course if they had a better grasp of English, they wouldn't have thought they could get away with passing off machine-translation dreck as human translation.
I told the agency that the document was going to need a full translation at my normal rates, and that the end client could save themselves some time and get a better translation by providing a useful glossary rather than machine-translation garbage. I'm sure that message got watered down on the way to the end client, though.
You were too gentle on them. Trying to pass off a machine translation as needing only “native checks” is fraud plain and simple. They should have to pay a higher rate after trying to pull that kind of crap.
@Chris
I don’t think it would have done any good to come down hard on the agency — I think it was an honest mistake on the coordinator’s part, who really has only a bare grasp of English (they actually have good in-house QA people though).
It looks like the end client was trying something fishy, because they never contacted the agency again when we told them what the deal was. They probably kept fishing until they found some poor schmucks to do a translation at “native check” rates (they had helpfully provided the Japanese alongside the English…). What’s funny was that the client was a fairly large and well known company.
Yes in that case not the agency, the end client. A large and well-known company… great. I guess we can only expect this kind of thing to increase in the future.