A legal translation client that turns to the translation industry will pay the full costs of a vast outsourcing machine while getting none of the added value, left in the end with simply high-price, low-quality translations. A typical translation company will not disclose this to clients, and in fact may be unaware that their translations are being re-outsourced so many times. The outsourcers at the top level usually don’t know what happens to the files once they arrive in China. They assume that because the project has been outsourced to a company in China, that it will not be outsourced further, but the reality is that these projects can and will sink even further. Translation providers are famous for misleading clients about the nature of their services, greatly exaggerating their capabilities in order to win clients. To avoid falling into this kind of trap, you need to be able to identify the three major translation provider business models: (1) outsourcer; (2) temp agency; and (3) professional services firm.
Outsourcers
Someone who is highly receptive to sales pitches will most likely go straight to a large outsourcer; these are companies that outsource to other companies and do not get involved with the work themselves, nor do they even know who performs the work. Like Walmart, they specialize in identifying and buying from suppliers. You can identify these as outsourcers by searching their websites to see if they are working with “vendors,” “suppliers,” and sometimes “partners.” For example, consider how translation giant TransPerfect touts its Vendor Portal right on its website:
As you can see, TransPerfect, one of the biggest translation companies, lists working with “vendors” on their website. (Some companies refer to “partners”).
On Capita’s website, the companies they buy from are called “suppliers.” They are called “suppliers or “vendors” because they are other companies, not individual contractors. Furthermore, the goal of the company is not to provide a professional service, but to buy and sell units of virtual merchandise, whether counted in words or in pages. Outsourcers buy translations from companies operating a temp agency and resell them to clients. This model allows a translation company to act as a full-service firm without having those competencies. While all companies experiment with a wide variety of methods by which to fulfill client orders, any company that purports to hire vendors or suppliers can be expected to simply outsource your project, even if they promise to do otherwise. To meet a lawyer’s ethical obligations to supervise work which you are purchasing for a client or employer, at a minimum you need to go to the company’s website and determine whether or not they say they are outsourcing translation work.
Despite that translation is a professional service, the industry language looks a lot like a manufacturing supply chain where manufacturers send product to a distributor who sends it to a retailer who sells you the product:
The only real way to ensure a company that outsources other vendors to you is providing good-quality translators, you need to have an expert translator aggressively audit their work until they go to their list of premium translators, whose rates for service are often ten times that of the company’s rank-and-file translators. In this case, they switch to a temp agency model for this particular client.
Temp agencies
In consideration of the actual needs of law firm matters, a number of project managers left outsourcers and formed temp agencies to provide a better standard of service to clients. A temp agency, on the other hand, does not hire other companies but you can see on their website that they hire only “linguists”—real people—to do the work. Here is an example from New York City:
The people employed by the temp agency are temporary employees who do not have a permanent employment relationship with the company. In general, you should get your Contract Language Professionals from the temp agency actually hiring them–a temp agency–and ensure that they actually know who their contractors are. In principle, this is little different from how legal temp agencies provide contract attorneys: armies of less skilled and relatively inexpensive professionals handle large volumes at reasonable prices. The temp agency should impose quality requirements on its contractors and personally see to it that you are getting the best people they can find (that fit within your budget after a 200% markup), and like an outsourcer, they should have personal knowledge of the contractors’ skills. The takeaway from this section is that you can identify a temp agency by looking to see if they actually hire real people to do work, and they know who those people are.
Temp agencies often develop good client lists and unfortunately are bought out by outsourcers, who slowly transition from the temp agency model to the outsourcing model without clients noticing any abrupt change, thus improving revenues. Many lawyers who are used to predicting future success based on past performance are easily fooled by such sleight of hand.
Professional services firms
If you need expertise in any professional services field, you turn to a professional services firm that has certified professionals and a track record of industry accomplishments. Examples of professional services firms include Deloitte, McKinsey, or Skadden. They list professionals and evidence of their expertise directly on their website. A professional services firm’s partners have a permanent relationship with that firm and their own book of business. This is how I look on my own website:
As you can see, the information conveyed on this page is the exact same as any competent professional services firm worldwide: the page tells you who provides the service, and what in their background demonstrates we are qualified to provide the service. Like in accounting and law, professional services firms often assist their clients in hiring temp agencies to complete extremely high volume, low-complexity work, managing that the work product of temporary employees to prevent possible professional disasters. Where businesses encounter confusion, and even outright fraud is when they hire a company using a Wal-Mart style supply chain to resell translations but lie to clients that they are providing “human translation expert service.”.
Providers will be much more forthright and honest when acting in their own name, such as lawyers in a partnership, as opposed to when selling work to retailers who guarantee the provider’s anonymity. Thus, virtually all great services firms serve clients directly. A translation firm parallels law firms, providing expertise and high-quality work to clients, and often supervising the work of contractors. What I hope you learn from this section is that you can identify a professional service firm by seeing the biographies of the translators actually providing services listed on the website. If no biographies are shown, it means the company is promising to provide you with anonymized Contract Language Professionals, the equivalent of Contract Attorneys, even if you are told that you will be getting expertise. You wouldn’t trust a TransPerfect Legal Solutions contract attorney to review and interpret an English-language Merger Agreement for you, so why would you have TransPerfect Translations linguist who’s never even studied the law interprets a Chinese-language Merger Agreement into English for you?
Conclusion
The key reason why you want to learn to identify each provider type is because that is the only way to tell how good the service will be. In general, for legal translation purposes, a company that is outsourcing your project to a subcontractor is essentially lighting your money on fire. Generally, it’s best to work with a combination of professionals and temporary contract language professionals as needed for larger projects. Letting amateur translators take charge is never a good idea, even if they are internal company staff such as lawyers who specialize in a different field.
