Once upon a time there lived a no-longer-that-young translator whose work load had lessened to the point that she had resorted to perusing translation adverts on the appropriate professional websites. Months passed during which all she found were offers with insultingly low rates, until one day she came across something that caught her eye. She answered the offer of ganful employment without a second glance, so eager was she to rebuild a dwindling client base.
Alas! Her interlocutor had barely answered when the first questions arose in her mind. He claimed to be a representative of a well-known temping organisation with branches the world over, with offers of work for an information website – one involving trivia, but specific enough trivia to make it interesting – and it was clear from the start that he had little knowledge of the translating profession. He asked for three to four times the amount of work that could be done by a single person without a marked decrease in quality, and had not for an instant considered having the work read by a proofreader. In addition to this, the task required the purchase of a proprietary program, for which the client assured training would be provided and the translator refunded. To top it all off, the proposed method of payment – in advance, once per week – was incompatible with the umbrella company that handled the translator’s billing and taxes.
A long, protracted exchange of messages ensued. The translator took pains to make clear to her interlocutor the usual practices of her chosen profession, requesting and receiving a promise of higher pay in order to fund proofreading of her work by a trusted co-translator. She also set a limit on the amount of articles she would be able to translate to her exacting standards each week, wary of tying herself to a single client and depending on them for her entire workload, for that had proven itself an unsatisfactory arrangement in the past. As this exchange went on, hopes of reaching an agreement and commencing a working relationship were gradually rekindled.
The main sticking point was that of compensation. Time and again, the client suggested methods of payment that were incompatible with the umbrella company’s policies and payment partners, until the client suggested they eschew the company altogether, paying her directly, and other more dubious practices. She refused, of course, repeating the legal avenues of payment accepted by her billing partner. The shadow of doubt crept into our conscientious professional’s mind, and she realized all too late that she should have been more wary when this potential client asked her for photocopies of her identification and, shortly after, even more confidential information – supposedly in order to authorize an acceptable method of payment on his agency’s side. Then and only then did the translator think to dig deeper into who this person was, and soon discovered that several translation directories had flagged him as an individual of suspicious methods and that he was not to be trusted or worked with.
She had wasted a month in correspondence, in time and energy, for a scam – had pestered her billing firm’s payments division and had given another colleague false hopes of working together. The entire thing was not a complete debacle – from now on, she would be more wary in her search. And she had a tale to tell, too.
Kindly translated by Richard Hawkes