| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | Low rates - Acting as a community Thread poster: Elena Robles Sanjuan
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| Product vs. service | May 28, 2008 |
This is my reaction to the interesting debate between Andrew, Tatty and Samuel.
In my book, the difference between a service and a product is that, while the first can take any number of work units to produce, the second invariably takes the same number of work units. Some words take a second to translate, some words take hours. Also, some files can be translated much faster (simple Word files) than others (FrameMaker with heavy tagging). Therefore, translation is a service. Besides... See more This is my reaction to the interesting debate between Andrew, Tatty and Samuel.
In my book, the difference between a service and a product is that, while the first can take any number of work units to produce, the second invariably takes the same number of work units. Some words take a second to translate, some words take hours. Also, some files can be translated much faster (simple Word files) than others (FrameMaker with heavy tagging). Therefore, translation is a service. Besides, if words were a penny a dozen, I don't think so many agencies would be such big fans of CAT rate schemes as they are...
An increasing number of agencies is commoditizing translation, but then again, an increasing proportion of agencies are kitchen table agencies (a freelancer acting alone and outsourcing his/her work for profit). The problem, as described by some of you, is that even though there are many factors involved in translation (file formats, degree of difficulty, document types, subject matter, native language, and I could go on and on), the only factor that really seems to matter is price. But price is determined using all the other factors. If we viewed translation as a product, then it would have to be a highly customized product. Come to think of it: a customized car, hand-made shoes, tailor-made clothes - those are all services, really, and not products.
This is why I am against displaying a rate in my profile (I don't have just one standard rate - that makes no business sense), why I don't reply with rates to e-mail from potential clients asking for my rate but rather ask them for more detail on the job and a sample, and this is why I find it ridiculous that people base their own rates on the average on this site. If English to French translation is paid USD 0.11 per word in average, that doesn't mean that part of those who have posted rates don't charge over USD 0.20 per word, and for specific reasons that are all based on factors other than price. Even two people who translate car manuals in the same language pair can charge two totally different rates - one translates Word files, the other translates FrameMaker files, and that makes a big difference in productivity, hence on the rate they charge.
If each and every word I translate took consistently the same amount of time, I wouldn't mind calling it a product. But that is very far from being the case. And let's not forget that there is more to translation than translation per se. I believe that when I create a termbase for a client, when I stay available so that the reviewer can send me back his file and so I can take a look at it before it is published, when I highlight errors in a source file to help the client avoid typos in the print document, etc., I am offering a service. I can't think of any other angle to look at this.
P.S.: I almost forgot... Do you have an inventory? If not, then you are selling a service. If you want to call it a product, you'd have to have an inventory.
[Edited at 2008-05-29 01:07] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray 
Netherlands
Local time: 18:13
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
+ ...
| My measure is, what gets delivered? | May 29, 2008 |
Viktoria Gimbe wrote:
In my book, the difference between a service and a product is that, while the first can take any number of work units to produce, the second invariably takes the same number of work units.
This is a novel approach, but in my book, the question is "what gets delivered?".
If I hire someone to mow my lawn, it would be silly to say that "a mowed lawn" gets delivered. The lawn has already been there, and something is simply done to it. I can't go into business as a middle man, create mowed lawns and sell it. Clearly this is a service, not a product. The same goes for getting a hair cut, or getting your plumbing fixed, or getting a medical make-over.
But if I hire someone to design my house, the thing I end up with after the client-provider relationship has ended, is a design. I can take the design and sell it. The buyer of the design will not get the benefit of personal contact with the architect and interaction with the various design consultants etc, but he will get a design. A thing, a product, in other words. The design as-is may not be entirely suitable for him, but if the buyer is happy, then so am I.
Sure, the translator may have contact and interaction etc with his immediate client, but in the end what matters to that client is the product itself -- the translation, which he will probably resell (if he's an agency), and in today's world it is not uncommon for a translation to be outsourced several times, so even your client's client is likely not the end-client. As the translation passes back to the original requester, all contact with the translator is lost, and what is being passed on, is a thing, a custom designed product that is measured not according to the translator's qualifications but in terms of various industrial procedural checks.
Do you have an inventory? If not, then you are selling a service. If you want to call it a product, you'd have to have an inventory.
Don't be fooled into thinking you have no inventory. Much of what we would normally have in our inventory, are computerised these days.
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