ELSEVIER TRANSLATION SERVICES in their WEBSHOP

Elsevier, part of the Reed Elsevier Group,  is one of the largest publishers in the medical and scientific journals sector. It publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals, and its archives contain seven million publications. 

Elsevier is now offering an online translation service for scientists who wish to get their work published in English language peer reviewed journals.

Specifically it offers:

• Translations into American or British English, by native speakers only 
• Translations by PhD or PhD candidates selected according to field of study 
• Double-checking of translations by successful academic authors
• Return of all manuscripts within 11 business days

No publication guarantees are of course provided for any potential clients, but two points of their marketing strategy stand out above all:

PRICING STRATEGY

The pricing strategy is extremely non linear. One normally expects a “bulk discount” on translation work, but Elsevier’s model seems to take this concept to an unusual new length. Small papers are comparatively much more expensive to translate than larger papers.  It is also not clear whether the word numbers would include reference lists (which of course should never be translated).  According to their scale, for small paper of 500 words (i.e. long abstracts or letters) the word rate would work out at almost 44 Euro cent per word (or even higher for shorter jobs). For a mid-sized paper of 5000 words the word rate would be 10 cent per word, while for a large review of 12000 words this drops to just 6.7 cent per word.    

This is an interesting pricing structure which arguably reflects the priorities that scientists entertain  when creating scientific or medical literature. Short communications are necessarily brief and concise, and take much more care to write than larger papers which often contain standard methodological descriptions and long reference lists. The impact of an abstract or short communication is often as great as that of a longer paper, which is often produced to “set in stone” results published in abstract form prior to a conference.  When translated into English, shorter papers often also have to conform to word number restraints.    

  

MONEY BACK GUARANTEE

Although Elsevier offers no guarantees for publication, it does offer a money back guarantee for rejection on the basis of the quality of the language employed. No translator can be entrusted to providing a translation that will be accepted by an expert reviewer, it is the author and the reviewer who are experts and who can discuss the scientific validity or relevance of a particular manuscript. The translator can and should have no liability in this process, even if, as a translator with an additional scientific qualification, he may also be able to provide feedback of a scientific or technical nature. Anyone who understands the review process for peer reviewed journals also knows that there is still a residual risk that a perfectly well written paper may be rejected on the basis of “poor language”. The review process is only as good as the reviewer, and the reviewers are often delegated junior scientists whose strengths do not always lie in their use of the English language.  In my time as a scientist I often saw papers rejected on the basis of language from reviewers who themselves did not have the best command of the English language.

Presumably Elsevier has factored this into their calculations, and they can afford to provide such a guarantee even where rejections on the basis of language are unjustified upon closer inspection.

 
Currently, Elsevier only offers this service for Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese, but it will be interesting to see if it expands the service and model to other language combinations.  

Dr. Julian P. Keogh
http://www.pharmacad-services.eu
http://www.dr-julian-keogh.de  

Beware : translation scammers on the net

We are all aware of the scams that plague the internet, particularly the infamous 419 nigerian scams. How many times have we been solicited by those countless rich nigerians who seem to have enormous amounts of money in their frozen bank accounts. If only they could get your bank details to help them move the money. 

The bad news for translators is that the translation industry is rich picking for scammers. It can be anonymous, operates completely over the internet, and money can easily get lost when transferred between countries. To add to that quality control can be a problem, and victims often don't realise they have been scammed until long after any translations have been used.      

The current economic climate means that many people are now trying their hands at translation, whether they are capable of exercising such a career or not. The availability of translation engines such as google translate has also meant that many have seen this as an opportunity to provide "translation services" without even looking at the quality of the translations that such engines produce. Fertile ground indeed for scammers.   

There are several types of scam the translation industry can come across.

Lets have a look at each of them. 

THE FAKE AGENCY

 We have all heard of bad or slow payers. Although these are a problem, they are not what we would call scammers. Sometimes they are once reputable companies who have just fallen upon hard times. The translation market is getting more and more competitive, and a fair number of the victims have been agencies tryig to keep their head above water.   

What I am talking about is the solicitation of freelance translators by individuals who just want to get a "free lunch". Scammers can set up fake websites with domains or agency names that are similar to more reputable agencies. They get inquiries from potential customers, and farm out the work to unsuspecting freelancers. They then pocket all the money, and leave the freelancer wondering whether he will ever get his money. 

Consider how easy it is to set up websites and email addresses on Google. No identification is provided or needed when setting up a gmail account. If the agency only provides a gmail, hotmail or yahoo address, that might be one sign you are dealing with a potential scammer (although many translators and agencies do have legitimate reasons to have such addresses).

There are a number of simple checks you can carry out to see whether an agency has a solid presence on the internet:

• Run a whois check on their domain
• Run an alexa check on their domain (only for midsized and bigger companies)
• Give them a call (sometimes online scammers are cowards and get freaked by real interpersonal contact)
• Make sure they have a landline contact to an office, somewhere (some legitimate translation companies are little more than sole traderships, and one of the attractions of working in translations is that you can travel around on the job, and people often do)     

Be aware that there is always a risk of dealing with agencies or clients where there are no intergovernmental financial agreements between your country and the country where the agency is located. Even a contract may be rendered useless if the mechanisms do not exist to recoup your money, or if it is just too expensive to do so. You could try an escrow service where nobody gets the money unless everyone is happy, I found one for translators at Bewords.com. Reputable small sized agencies, however, are always scared of bad publicity, so even if the mechanisms may not exist in full it is still in their interests to do the honorable thing. There is the Blue Board on proZ for example, which many refer to, and which can be quite damaging if there are any bad entries (and there are plenty for slow payers). 

THE FAKE CLIENT  

THE "CAN I WORK FOR YOU SCAMMING SPAMSTER"

Recently I suspected that I have beome the victim of a peculiar scam artists who sends out fake CVs and applications.

I am not an actively recruiting translation agency (indeed I have stopped promoting myself as such and instead promote myself as a freelancer), so I was wondering why there was an explosive interest in people who wanted to work for me.  

The emails had the following common characteristics.

1: The vast majority were from gmail addresses.  

2: The application letters were somewhat nebulous, not to the point, and full of vacuous claims about reliability and punctuality,  annoying and amateurish  for anyone who has to vet them. Many contained glaring spelling mistakes.

3: There were disproportionally more applications for the language combination Arabic to English

4: Not a single application included any information about where they got information about my one man company. This is a simple courtesy which always creates a good impression, especially at a time when many of us have to invest considerable resources in marketing.

I was generally surprised about the naivety of the applications, and how they were prepared.

I then went about archiving the emails so I could write a mass response to about 150 of the 800 or so applications I have received.

Curiously, many of the senders emails had been disabled, especially the gmail addresses.

I also never received a single response addressing my letter from anyone I mailed to…..not a single response.

Researching into the issue a little further, I discovered that a growing problem in the translation industry is this particular type of translation scamming.

This is the practice of phishing CVs from translator portals such as translatorcafe or proz.com, and sending fake CVs and application letters to prospective clients. Often the CVs are real but the names have been changed, or simply the contact email address has been changed. These fake translators then run a translation through google translate and bill the clients while pretending to be someone else. Not only are these fraudsters defrauding clients, they are also causing untold damage to the real translators they are purporting to be.

I wonder whether I have been the victim of such an identity theft.

I am also particularly alarmed that the fast majority of prospective applications seem to come from such individuals. 

Tips when applying for translator jobs

Running a small translation office I am bombarded with requests from would be translators looking for work. It is perhaps a sad reflection of the times that I get ten times as many such requests as I have jobs coming in, and often these people find me  through advertising channels which I end up having  to pay for (e.g. Google AdWords, linkedIn etc.).

So here i have compiled a list of tips for those applying for work based on my experience looking at such prospective applications.

1: Make sure the application is in good English. You are a translator offering language services, and even if  English is not your mother tongue, it tends to leave a bad impression if it has errors strewn all over it. Also take care of punctuation and presentation, part of your work involves presenting a document in an acceptable format and if you get this wrong.....well...

2. Don’t make overhyped and overambitious claims. Nobody is perfect, I certainly am not, and when I looked at one translator who claimed to offer “perfection” it was hilarious to see how many errors he made in his pitch letter. Bidirectional translators do exist but my experience is that people are best at translating into their mother tongue. So even if  you are bidirectional, I would play this down at first. And don’t try to claim you can take any amount of work on at any notice, this is also completely unrealistic and leads to mistrust from the off.       

3: Don’t forget to mention your language combination, preferably in the subject of the email. . This is THE most important information when filing applications, and you would be amazed at how invisible this information is in many translator’s applications.   

4: Differentiate yourself. Don’t try and say you do everything under the sun at a low price in the hope of catching as much work as possible. I want to be safe with someone who I hire and I would rather have someone who knows a lot about comparatively little. Once you establish a working relationship you might be asked to go beyond those limits and do other work, but offer yourself as a specialist first.

5: Don’t send paper CVs in. It takes time (and therefore money) to file this information, and if a company has a mask on a website for entering your details into a database, use it. You will be more respected for it too. If you have to send an electronic  CV in, make sure its easy to copy and paste information from it. Don’t send references or certificates unless asked.  

6: Be straight to the point. There are a lot of people looking for work. The information people need is what is your language combination? what is your specialty? What is your education and experience background? What translation tools do you use? And How much do you cost? Remember, no claims of unerring reliability or total perfection which merely distract and annoy whoever is trying to assess your application.

7: Tell the office how you heard of them. This is very well respected because it provides information about what marketing measures used by the translation company are successful. If you got to the company’s website by clicking on a Google ad, you already cost that company advertising costs, so a little feedback in the way of information helps to soothe those pains. As I said, ten times as many people click on those ads looking for work rather than looking for a service, so the costs do mount up.

8: Don’t expect an immediate response. Many applications are filed away for a rainy day...i.e. when someone looks for work to be done in a certain language combination. Sometimes people will only get back to you after years.   

9: Try to remember that when you are a freelancer, the company you apply to will see you as a service provider, even if you do not see yourself that way. You have to pitch yourself to people that way. You won’t be seeing people 8 hours a day, so a CV need not include information about clubs, organisations and activities. Stick to the information that is important. You are expected to be reliable, punctual  and offer material of sufficient quality (95-98% and not 100% perfection), so there really is no point even mentioning whether you have any of these qualities.

Dr. Julian P. Keogh
http://www.pharmacad-services.eu
info@pharmacad-services.eu