• Freelancer never knows when work may come his/her way
• Freelancer is often left unpaid or receives payment greatly delayed. There is no one to appeal to complain while legal actions are useless and too expensive
• To get paid is a responsibility of the freelancer himself, no one will do it for him
• The freelancer is more than a translator, he is also an accountant, salesperson, computer technician and a lot more. This does not let him focus on thing clients are paying for – translation.
• The freelancer shall evaluate and pay his tax on his own. With this his Social Security and Medicare taxes are twice as much as those for his colleague on payroll.
• The freelancer should take care of his medical insurance. Most US enterprises pay at least a part of such insurance, but it does not include free-lance contractors.
• The freelancer should take care of his pension fund, his employees have nothing to do with it.

All this explains such frequent phenomena as a freelancer taking a job in the office.
However, time is changing and we are changing with the time. The concept of “secure job” has become an illusion and self-cheating. о времена меняются, и мы меняемся вместе с ними. Понятие “надежная работа” стало. Companies’ lifespan dropped. Translators, software developers, copywriters, and lots of other specialists are hired as contractual employees, i.e. it is known beforehand that in a few months, a year or so (depending on the project they are hired for) they will have to leave. But even so-called “steady job” in the office is perceived as such merely by inertia. Market economy does not leave a room for altruism. No client – no jobs. You may not bother to come at work tomorrow. Thank you for your help.
This prompts that both the nature of freelance work and the attitude towards it should change. In the USA there are types of work where almost 100% employees work on a contractual basis, e.g. engineering and construction projects. Engineers in these fields all their lives float from one contract to another. To a large degree same must be true for translation since transltion projects are usually shorter than construction ones. In fact, each translation order is a new project. Translators just has to get used to that.
And not only mentally. One should kept in mind that a contractual employee earns more than that on payroll due to the intermittent nature of his work, higher taxes, and other costs. The higher pay is fair from the employee standpoint since he does not pay for the computer and its servicing, he does not maintain the workplace or buy health insurance for the freelancer. For these reasons companies in the USA like to hire freelancer either directly or through placement agencies, even if they have known that person dozens of years and he is, in fact, a permanent member of their team.
Of course, in certain cases office work fits better to the nature of the enterprise. Besides, not everyone is fit for freelance work: some people cannot work at home, other like to be in a team, many do not want to get involved in technical issues. Still, I believe that in the near future we will observe steep increase in the number of freelance translators.

Small people make small errors. Small errors cause small consequences. Other small people are killed by those small consequences. “Do not touch the wires with the tool”. The missing “not” word in the translation leaves behind a widow and two orphans. “Production casing” is translated as “industrial box” (cute, is not it? The translator thought that casing comes form the word “case”). An engineer takes 2 Tylenol pills to get it. Two hours of his precious time lost.

By all means translators are small people. They are not supposed to be noticed. Do you pay much attention to a telephone on your desk? Even when it rings? The ring and the call attract your attention, not the phone. So do the translators. When you don’t need them they do not exist. When you do need them, they are supposed to be there in great quantities. All ready to jump as high as you want them.

So they jump. Often not high enough, though. The thing is that the small people can make you get fired for a critical error you made with the help of a small guy who did not bother to look in the dictionary. And notably the small guy (the one who made the mistake in the first place) will not be blamed or punished exactly because he is so small that such actions do not make sense.
In 1941 when Pearl Harbor was attacked, a radar operator saw lots of dots on his screen. The dots were moving towards the US navy base. Officers he reported to thought it was an approaching group of American planes due to arrive that morning. Small people were those officers. Japanese warplanes killed 2402 and injured 1282 Americans.

It has taken the mankind a few thousand years to start thinking that Small people are not really so small. They may be worth noticing. At least every now and then.

• Required quality of translation
• Completion time
• Confidentiality
• Cost
• Dependability of the service provider

The ratio between these factors is driven by your goals. Here are the potential options, starting with least critical:

• The translation is just a formality, most likely no one will read it, you only have to provide some kind of translated materials.
• The translation is important but intended for discussions with your foreign colleagues. Even if something is wrong there they will understand and would not blame you for that.
• The translation is of critical importance. It is a contract, a bidding proposal, a feasibility study, etc. Here each word is important.

With the first option you may order your translation anywhere or even do it using automatic translation tools (machine translation). The main criterion in selection of the language service provider (LSP) is low cost and some qualification of the LSP.

With the second option it is necessary to understand what would be the cost of lost time if translation errors cause misunderstanding. Example: a meeting with three foreign colleagues or partners coming from abroad. A one day delay due to poor communications and, as a result, inability to reach an agreement will cause additional costs for hotel expenses and plain ticket exchange. This cost can easily reach a few thousand dollars. So, in this option it is important to find the optimal ratio translation cost/quality. Imperfect but generally correct and clear translation can suffice. Here when selecting an LSP its reputation, expertise and due-date dependability should be verified and weighed against the cost.

The third option calls for the highest quality of translation, it should be error-free, clear and unambiguous. Here the selection of an LSP is critically important. We highly recommend selecting specialized companies dealing with one-two language pairs versus those who claim they can translate across any languages.
Such firms delegate the job to randomly selected translators thus losing the advantage of knowledge continuity and dependability of people with proven track record. That is why Language Interface deals only with Russian-English and English-Russian translations. This enabled us to build a team of most experienced translators in this field, develop a vast lexical base LexSite , and create a unique knowledge base SIMBA. As a result, we can guaranty that our clients receive flawless translations.

With the second and third option special attention should be paid to confidentiality. Accidental translators or middleman agencies cannot guaranty non-disclosure of information that your materials contain. At Language Interface we make an emphasis on non-disclosure assurance, as required by US law and maintain strict confidentiality with respect to our clients.

Parameters to be taken into account when selecting a service provider:

• Volume of the document. Is a single translator capable of completing the job by the deadline? If he/she is then you can give your document to a freelancer although it imposes a risk to get a translation that was never edited or proofread.
• Subjects covered in the document. Does it deal with legal issues, special technology, medical research, advertisement and marketing? Does your LSP have the required expertise in these areas? Keep in mind that good translation cannot be produced without clearly understanding your text.
• Deadline. How critical is it? If it is important then giving the job to freelancers or unreliable agency is a risky business. Quite often freelancers and agencies take the job relying on a poorly planned process or even knowing beforehand that they are unable to meed the deadline. In such a case the client becomes their hostage: when on the last day he learns that the translation is far from completion he has no time to reorder the translation elsewhere and he has to accept the conditions of the LSP.

You can obtain additional recommendations on selection of your LSP and translation project planning in Language Interface at alpha@langint.com.

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