Oct. 2009 - Turns out thebigword is up for a couple of awards, one from the CBI and ... oh look, I'm not going to give them any more publicity. Anyway they were asked about their policy of asking people to agree to reduced rates and this is the reply. It was posted publicly by the recipient (who is not me, natch). I quote in full:
...you asked us about our policy, or logic, in writing to our translators asking them to reduce their rates and we would like to provide you with our response in this regard, as requested.
Firstly, we recognise the valuable contribution of our translator community and always endeavour to ensure that they are made to feel part of thebigword team.
This recognition is demonstrated through the continued investment we have made in developing industry-leading technology which provides vital support to our linguists as we appreciate the work they have to do to meet the challenging needs of our clients: our LanguageDirector platform allows translators to manage their jobs efficiently, limiting the time they have to spend tracking the status of projects. Our eInvoicing system has significantly enhanced the working practices of translators that used to spend hours recording jobs in separate systems, preparing invoices - manually inputting data - tasks that are no longer required because it is all accessible via a web-based platform, which is free of charge to all our linguists.
thebigword has continued to expand our Sales and Operations team across the UK, US and China, who work up to 24 hours a day in an effort to secure additional business, processing jobs and dealing with the technical enquiries both from our translators and our customers. By doing this we have experienced real growth within the customer base which in turn has enabled us to assign more exciting and challenging work to our linguists, providing stability and job security to many people which would otherwise potentially be at risk during this economic climate.
Many of our clients are looking for high quality language services at competitive prices, particularly during the economic downturn when many companies, both large and small, are having to take steps to secure their own businesses, and within the last 12 months, we have been asked to significantly reduce our client's costs and demonstrate cost savings within their business.
We've looked at a variety of ways to absorb these costs as much as possible and will continue to do so but unfortunately it's not something we can sustain on our own. Therefore we have looked to work with our community of linguists to respond to this economic challenge which we are sure puts us, and them, in a good position for the recovery.
We are aware of the feedback on translators' forums about this initiative, but equally we continue to receive daily applications from new translators who want to work with thebigword and enjoy the volumes and variety of work that we are able to offer. Indeed, those translators that agreed to the revised rates have the security of almost guaranteed work, and these are professionals with many years' experience.
We sincerely hope that you will understand the effort that we make on the behalf of our translator community and our clients. (quote ends)
Fair play to them for at least responding, and at some length. But there is nothing there that does not apply all the time under all economic situations. There are those who would argue, not without justification, that agencies of this type can meet a need for a fallback position, when higher-paying agencies have gone quiet for a day or two. Fair enough. The reply is, in my opinion, all mealy-mouthed corporate bullshit, but I doubt that will stop Larry Gould sleeping at night.
