Preventing the “Race to the Bottom” in Localization
How is Zingword planning to help freelance translators out of the price-dumping loop?
At Zingword, we’ll be combining several different methods to provide a reliable pricing floor that encourages professional translation buyers and translators to develop relationships. Hopefully we’ll be delivering you some great translation clients and relationships soon.
Our goal is to serve professional translators and help them land some really great clients, while also preventing people from undercutting professional translation rates or racing to the bottom.
For starters, Zingword has a handful of core missions that are relevant to this discussion.
- Promote higher prices for translators that more adequately reflects the value of localization
- Court translators who are truly professional, and set the tone and rules of Zingword to make them happy
- Court businesses that place a high value on translations
- Promote long-term relationships between translators and buyers
Translators and Zingword have a mutual interest in the existence of a pricing floor and the promotion of quality, even high-priced translation services, but somehow, the industry keeps producing race-to-the-bottom conditions. So how can we get out of that loop in Zingword?
Step #1: End the job board
Job boards create race-to-the-bottom scenarios and multiple inefficiencies.
These include:
- Translators are encouraged to apply at lower prices to win gigs
- Buyers are easily able to focus on price rather than quality
- Buyers have to sift through a bunch of translators
- The work of applying is shifted to translators, creating a tremendous redundancy (!)
- Combination of stupidly redundant application work and race-for-the-bottom conditions causes justifiably bad vibes
So the first thing you have to do is NOT make a job board. Which is why Zingword is not a job board.
Step #2: End bargaining and solve differentness
Indeed — there is sometimes a palpable sensation of stinginess in the translation industry.
Your prices are your prices, and you should be proud of those prices. As your career advances, ideally your prices keep going up. This is supposed to be the way of the world, yet someone is always asking you for a discount.
The problem with bargaining is really three-fold:
- It sucks for translators and often amounts to a slap in the face
- It sucks for clients, because it’s more work and leads to delays in kickoffs
- Where does it end? I’ve had clients ask me to remove their company name from the word count. The time it takes to write that email and respond to it is worth more than the reduction in word count itself. Indeed — there is sometimes a palpable sensation of stinginess in the translation industry.
But you can’t just end bargaining by snapping your fingers. Translators want to offer different prices to different customers depending on a variety of different factors. The overall differentness from one job to the next must be accounted for, somehow.
Step #3: Create a floor or minimum
The interesting thing about Zingword is that you can either create a hard-floor (a true minimum price), or a virtual-floor (there can be prices below the minimum price, but nobody will see them because the platform only promotes quality translations).
At Zingword, we’ll be combining several different methods to provide a reliable pricing floor that encourages professional translation buyers and translators to develop relationships.
As we near our launch date, we’ll provide additional information about how we promote higher prices.
Step #4: Carefully onboard translators
One way to keep things professional is to only have the most talented translators being promoted to clients.
Which is why we’re focusing on:
- Validating each and every translator who signs up
- Verifying translator identities and preventing scams
- Adding more and more mechanisms to identify quality translators as resources become available.
This is something that requires ongoing efforts as resources accumulate.
Step #5: Feature colloquially known as “flag a*#holes”
There’s nothing worse than the dude who is trying to swindle you out of a dime. And it’s a big problem, which is why we have the naming and shaming groups for translation agencies, blacklists of crappy agencies… there is a plethora of resources aimed at solving the problem of jerks in translation.
So besides being a no-bargaining board, we’re adding what we are internally calling the “flag a*#holes” feature. Is the person who is trying to get you to do a job a total asshole?
Just click “flag a*#hole” and we’ll try to prevent this person or company from using Zingword ever again.
If you have alternative, possibly more professional names for this feature, let us know. 😛
Step #6: Improve the industry
The result is that money in the translation industry is sort of spread around thinly and there never seems to be enough of it for anyone.
Stinginess is kind of a thing in translations. It’s a parsimonious industry.
It’s a strange world where the localization industry is valued somewhere between 40b$ and 50b$, which is the same or larger than these other industries:
- Music recording industry ( $17.3bn)
- Musical instruments industry ($18bn)
- Global Wi-Fi market including hardware and internet service ($15bn)
Of course, the difference is that the music industry employs not that many people and makes huge profits for the very rich. The US music industry employs something like 28,000 people, whereas the number of translators and interpreters in the UK alone is estimated at 28,000, and who knows how many there really are. Some estimates say there are 800,000 translators working globally, which isn’t surprising because the thing everyone is selling is basically work. It’s not the type of industry where you can make an LP and then collect a bunch of money year-after-year as people rock out.
It’s also worth noting that much of manufacturing is moved to Asia, whereas the localization industry has opportunities and employment worldwide and cannot simply be outsourced anywhere corporations want, which is a good thing for distributing this income.
But the result is that money in the translation industry is sort of spread around thinly and there never seems to be enough of it for anyone, especially translators.
If you want to increase the amount of money translators earn on a massive scale, it will have to come from one of two places:
- End-buyers get better analytics about the true value of localization and realize it’s worth paying more money for
- Find a way to get rid of some of that downward price pressure.
Anyway, that’s our industry. Even though it’s much larger than the musical instruments industry, and we may never have an event with an expected attendance of 110,000 people, it is a great industry with great people in it.
And hopefully, Zingword can improve conditions for translators.
Step #?: Establish a ROI per localized word metric
Life would be so much easier if you could say, “localizing your internal training videos has an average return of .24 cents per word with a 10% margin of error.”
Prices are a psychological construct of the hive mind. Localization is a tight industry where all the players are trying to lower someone else’s prices (except translators, who are basically at the bottom of this unfortunate chain of events), and this is largely because nobody knows the value of a localized word.
For example, what is the return on investment, per word, of:
- Localizing a user guide?
- Translating a user interface?
- Localizing your product packaging?
- Localizing a video that you made?
Each of these has a content type, target market, target language, and success variables, and it’s a big project to put together this research. Surely, there are grey areas that will be difficult to define. But it’s research we need.
Life would be so much easier if you could say, “localizing your internal training videos has an average return of .24 cents per word annually with a 10% margin of error.”
