Μεταφέρω εδώ ένα θέμα που συζητιέται στο
φόρουμ του ΣΜΕΔ.
Η
Translation Cloud LCC είναι μια μεταφραστική εταιρεία που επιδίδεται στο ευγενές σπορ του
crowdsourcing μέσω κοινωνικών δικτύων. Δεν είναι η μόνη, βέβαια, είναι ωστόσο ιδιαιτέρως επιθετική, όπως μπορεί να διαπιστώσει κανείς ρίχνοντας μια ματιά στην πολιτική πληρωμών που ακολουθεί:
* Translators are paid at the rate of between $0.01 and $0.03 per word depending on how common the language is (we pay the highest value in your language pair). You must have a valid method of payment entered in your account settings to be able to receive payments.
Note: Translators will only be compensated for correctly translated and approved segments. All payments are made in U.S. dollars.
* Here is why we pay those rates:
- We’re paying for proofreading, not translation.
- You don't have to submit invoices nor bid for jobs, saving you time.
- You don't have to purchase any expensive software, saving you money.
- You work from home and all you need is a browser and internet connection.
- The work is so efficient that a regular translator can process translations at a rate of roughly $15-20/hour. That's a very competitive wage!
* When is a translation "approved" on Translation Cloud?
Once other proofreaders and an editor has approved your translation, the translation is marked as approved. The money will be added to your accumulated “Owed amount” on the main page of Translation Cloud.
* When will you NOT be paid for a translation task?
If you submit a segment with any error, even a small one such as improper spacing between characters, it is marked as an incorrect translation and you will not be paid. Additionally, your rating and Translation Rank will be negatively affected.
Note: You can review your rejected segments and learn from your mistakes, but you cannot appeal them.
* Your Rating and Cheating - TranslationRank™
We take our work seriously. Work through Facebook or any other web application is no excuse for doing poor quality work or cheating.
Although we give you the freedom to translate at your own pace and do not yet enforce any qualification tests, our dedicated team of professionals screens every translator in real time as they work. Thus, if you attempt to cheat and/or use system in an inappropriate way, you will be banned from the system. No pending payments will be made to you.
If you translate without errors, your rating will go up. If you make mistakes, your rating will go down and you risk being removed from the system.
Μόλις συνάδελφος μας γνωστοποίησε, πριν από μερικές εβδομάδες, την ύπαρξη και τη δράση της εταιρείας, αποφασίσαμε να της στείλουμε επισήμως ένα μήνυμα διαμαρτυρίας, το οποίο κοινοποιήσαμε επίσης σε συλλόγους του εξωτερικού, στη Διεύθυνση Μεταφράσεων της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης, σε ελληνικά υπουργεία, καθώς και στην αμερικανική Εφορία.
Παραθέτω το μήνυμα που στείλαμε:
Dear Sirs
The Greek Association of Translators, Editors, and Proofreaders feels the need to urge you to reconsider your practices regarding your collaboration with translators as well as the process of translation you follow.
After reading the Getting started section of your website, we wish to stress the following points:
• You ask for volunteer translators, although there are qualified schools all around the world that offer the required knowledge and skills to someone who wants to be a professional translator. You obviously use other people’s work for free in order to maximize your company’s profits by selling their product to your clients.
• You tell translators that they will be proofreading machine translations, while we all know that machine translation has not yet reached an acceptable level to be merely proofread and finished.
• You claim that you give translators the freedom to translate at their own pace, perhaps forgetting that a few clicks earlier your instructions clearly state that a translator has to proofread a phrase in up to ten minutes.
• You treat translators as if they are dogs under training. You throw them a line or two, when it comes to large projects, for …security reasons! You degrade the translator’s craft, you undermine the process of translation, and you do not ensure quality to your client; a text does not consist of mere fragments, but conveys a meaning and a form as a whole.
• You demand perfection, otherwise translators are not paid. People work to earn a living, not to gamble. Working hard does not mean that the result will be perfect, otherwise proofreaders and editors -two highly respected professions that link authors to their readers for centuries now by taking care of the slightest detail of the text, as to both context and form– would have never been needed.
• You demand perfection, yet your rates are as low as they can get. You simply underrate the translator’s work in order to achieve the highest profit margins possible, without taking under consideration that translators are humans who need to live respectably nor that your clients are paying for professional translators who respect their craft, not hobbyists or desperate people who happen to know a couple of languages and want to try their luck at another "clever" company that tries to utilize a world wide range market without adequate restrictions which would protect workers and professionals’ rights. Therefore, an income of $15–20 per hour, as you state, is definitely not assured.
• Your application requires wide access to Facebook accounts. In other words, you ask for full access to your collaborator’s social, personal, and professional networks; it's only fair to assume that you want to fully monitor them and also use their data.
• Last but not least, you advertise that your rates are competitive by stating that no invoice is needed. Well, isn’t this …illegal?
Thank you for your time and we hope that you will reconsider your practices and start appreciating translators as human beings, workers, and professionals.
Ιδού τέλος τι μας απάντησε χωρίς χρονοτριβή ο ιθύνων νους της εταιρείας:
Hello,
First of all, it is a big honor to hear from your organization. I am humbled by the fact that our invention has touched so many existing translation organizations and professionals. It shows the real power of its industry disruption potential, the outcome we aimed to produce.
Second, I've read all your arguments, and they are reasonable. However, they apply to "professional translators" which like you said have chose this field as the profession. They most likely went to school to study language and acquired several industry certificates. But those are not the people we've built this tool for. It's built primarily for merely bi-lingual people who are not doing it for a living, but rather as an occasional hobby while they are on facebook. That's why the strict rules, timers and all sorts of checks and balances come into place as we'are dealing with increased orders of magnitudes unheard of previously. I believe that you have a shallow understanding of the platform, because you only read the online power point presentation which covers only 10% of what we are doing. I'd recommend first to register as a full user and the PDF instruction manual will be emailed to you. It will help to answer all your subsequent questions and give you a richer understanding.
So, to keep matters short, our tool is not for professionals and we are not going to devalue professional's work. We only do it for a complimentary purposes and yes, if we can earn a living by doing it, that would be the intended outcome. After all, the sustainability of any organization is directly proportionate to its ability to generate revenue whether from direct clients or donors. I think you'd agree on that.
Thank you for voicing your opinion.
I wish you all the best.
--
Best Regards,
Alex Buran
Father of the Modern Assembly Line for Language Translation and Localization.
WEB: http://www.TranslationCloud.net
APP: http://apps.facebook.com/translationcloud/
FAQ: https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dd5pkvn9_10cw3mdmgr
Ως Σύλλογος, θεωρούμε σημαντικό να ενημερωθούν όσο το δυνατόν περισσότεροι επαγγελματίες, νέοι ή απλώς επίδοξοι συνάδελφοι για το θέμα. Θεωρούμε επίσης σημαντικό να εμποδιστεί η δράση επιτήδειων που, είτε το αντιλαμβάνονται είτε όχι, κερδοσκοπούν σε βάρος μας, καταστρατηγώντας κάθε έννοια δεοντολογίας και θέτοντας τις νέες τεχνολογίες ενάντια στη νομική και ουσιαστική κατοχύρωση της δουλειάς μας.
Επιφυλάσσομαι να επανέλθω σύντομα με νεότερα...
