Poll: Have you ever been rejected payment because of unsatisfactory translation/interpretation quality? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Have you ever been rejected payment because of unsatisfactory translation/interpretation quality?".
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I have offered a discount when I accepted there were some issues in my translation.
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Given the standards I see people getting away with out there, I dread to think just how bad a translation would have to be for a client to withhold payment.
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 22:15
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| Yes, absolutely | Dec 21, 2023 |
Fortunately not for very large jobs. (And, it must be said, I did not agree with the clients' assessments...)
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But I had a single case of a delayed payment due to quality issues with other translators working on the same multiple language project…
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:15
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Only a couple of times | Dec 22, 2023 |
"Have you ever been rejected payment because of unsatisfactory translation/interpretation quality?"
Not rejected, but queried a couple of times, by one of the first agencies I ever worked with, many years ago when I was just starting.
They politely expressed doubt about a couple of things in my translations.
On each occasion I provided them with a long, detailed explanation of why I had translated the texts in that particular way.
In my explanations I mentioned all the possible alternative translations I had considered but discarded and why I had discarded them. I also provided justification for the decisions I had made.
After I'd sent them a couple of these explanations, they got the picture (that I am a careful and punctilious translator) and never sent me any more queries. My explanations were intentionally longwinded and detailed and likely to give the reader a headache.
I'm still working with them, many years later. These days they accept all my translations without expressing the minimum doubt about them.
[Edited at 2023-12-22 08:49 GMT]
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:15
Member (2008)
Italian to English
| Curious English | Dec 22, 2023 |
ProZ.com Staff wrote: This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "Have you ever been rejected payment because of unsatisfactory translation/interpretation quality?". View the poll results »
"Have you ever been rejected payment ---"
Is very strange (and incorrect) sentence construction.
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 22:15
French to English
As a freelancer, never. I did once tell a client I wouldn't be billing a text because of a very stupid mistake: I didn't save the last, important corrections and sent the file with stupid placeholder terms instead of the correct terminology.
At the agency, we had several clients try not to pay, citing poor quality. It was fishy because they only mentioned the poor quality when it was time to pay the bill. Each time we asked to see the revised file and we mostly never got one. If we did ge... See more As a freelancer, never. I did once tell a client I wouldn't be billing a text because of a very stupid mistake: I didn't save the last, important corrections and sent the file with stupid placeholder terms instead of the correct terminology.
At the agency, we had several clients try not to pay, citing poor quality. It was fishy because they only mentioned the poor quality when it was time to pay the bill. Each time we asked to see the revised file and we mostly never got one. If we did get one, the only "corrections" were purely subjective changes or minor improvements that did not justify non-payment. I was tasked with responding to every single correction. I would classify each one as either the correction of an error, a big or small improvement, a subjective change or the introduction of an error, and argue my case when I felt that the change was not justified. I would always concede at least one improvement, to show that I was capable of acknowledging that my work wasn't perfect, but it was clear from my ratings that most of the corrections were either unnecessary or plain wrong. The client would pay up after that. ▲ Collapse
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