Every once in a while, I’ll be invited to fill out a questionnaire for a translation agency. Said questionnaire usually asks for all sorts of information, often at an exhaustive level of detail (for example, just in the phone number section, asking for work phone, home phone, cell phone, secondary cell phone, fax number, as well as a contact number to call if none of the aforementioned respond!).
Other requested data typically include a marked set of check boxes to indicate subject areas of expertise, which mostly amuses me, because all too often, the subject breakdown is either overly granular or not granular enough to be really useful (but that may be just my opinion).
One questionnaire I received a few years ago wanted to know everything about my office setup, from whether I owned a laser printer down to the clock rate of my computer’s CPU and how much memory was installed on my system – though to be frank, I couldn’t imagine how useful such data might be in selecting me over anyone else for a job, and anyway, I own more than one computer.
Back when I was starting out in the business, I used to fill out lots of such questionnaires, thinking that the more agencies knew of me, the better shot I had of landing jobs.
As time passed, a Small Truth™ smacked me in the head: those completed questionnaires never resulted in a single assignment. And my experience wasn’t unique. In fact, a good friend of mine summarized this Small Truth™ as follows:
Your chance of landing a job with an agency is inversely proportional to the length of their questionnaire.
Why might this be?
I can’t say for sure, but I think the nature of the beast is such that if the agency relies on the results of database searches more than the relationships developed by their project managers, you will have to be incredibly lucky – or you will have had to quote a rock-bottom rate – to land a job. On the other hand, if the agency relies on a database only when its “regular” freelancers are not available, well… it’s pretty much the same result, but with an even lower probability of walking away with an assignment.
What has your experience been in this area? Are agency questionnaires worth filling out?
My experience is approximately the same. The most reliable sources of translation work are agencies that rely on their personal knowledge of translators they work with. Agencies sending out questionnaires to find translators are groping in the dark and, therefore, cannot be winners in the marketplace by definition.
I would add that translation agencies relying on CAT tools (TRADOS memory and such) are also losers in the long run.
While computer memory tools may be useful to a translator at home, on the personal scale (though I never needed them in 26 years of work), they are inevitably resulting in the drastic deterioration of the quality of translation if used in collective settings. They proliferate poor translations, impede editing, and make any change for the better almost impossible.
Translation is an art. Any automation kills the art.
From my experience, such surveys are not just useless – they are misleading.
First and foremost, there’s no way to verify respondent’s answers regarding his/her software, skills, etc.
Second, the fact that a translator has most advanced computer and whole bunch of software says nothing about his/her ability to properly operate it, save for quality and consistency of his/her translations.
A couple of times I faced it myself – for example, asking a subcontractor if he has any experience in translating MS Access databases. Based on his assurances (“Yeah, no problem!”), I assigned a huge project to him. Needless to say that after a week I checked if there are any problems and – surprise, surprise – he could not even open the design template!
Third, in many cases such surveys are conducted as a formal step to get ISO certification. This means that such efforts are of purely bureaucratic nature and their substance is of no interest to the agency.
Fourth, in most cases it is the agency that designs the questionnaires, not a survey specialist who knows what relevance, pertinence and validity criteria are. Hence, garbage in – garbage out.
Fifth, I’ve never seen an agency that publishes the results of such survey on their website or otherwise makes it public. Frankly, I highly doubt if any results of these surveys have ever been statistically processed (probably, due to a small – and, therefore, non-representative – sample) and analyzed for certainty.
Sixth – and, probably, most important – is that the very same information can be obtained from an agency’s subcontractors database, provided, however, that it is properly designed.
Dixi.