Remember when translation projects were great fun and easy to manage? When clients sent you 34,000 words to translate and they didn't ask questions for 2 weeks because everything was great?
Yeah, well, ...
The days of big translation packages are pretty much gone. Forever!
"Welcome to the real world, Neo" or what was that cool line in The Matrix movie when our beloved Neo first realizes he was living in a dream, but now he's in a shitload of trouble.
That's how You must have felt when you were first introduced to the new way of doing translation projects.
The chunks, small chunks, heck, smaller and smaller chunks of translation material is hitting Your inbox, and you are pulling your hair because you're not sure what to do. Wether you should just fire your customer, tell them to get real, or swallow your pride and do the translation.
How to make small chunks of projects in #t9n #l10n profitable, easy to accept and manage? #minitpms
3 words by tomorrow morning
Seriously? THREE words? I mean why not one?
OK, I get it, sometimes the only thing that was changed on a big website is the date it launches. Until yesterday it was June. Now it's August. And they need that damn August word pretty much translated to perfection.
To make the things worse, you are still obliged to use the preferred CAT, because that's how your customer rolls.
And to think of it, it takes you at least 30 minutes to organize it, put the data into your favorite Excel sheet, send it to your translator, get it back, pack it or repack it, god forbid have it edited because, you know, lot's can happen with one word between now and then, and send it back to your customer...
Then you are presented with the fact that later in this month, you'll have to invoice these 3 words. Unless you do it for free.
And we all know that everybody loves free, but free sometimes just cannot cut it. Won't cut it. No way, no how.
So you take your invoicing program, or your Excel invoicing report and put the whole thing in again with 3 words in it, and if you are lucky, you get paid 0,5 hours of work, but in most cases, it's 3 words, because that is how your customer rolls.
So you are paid this:
Yup, a bowl of peanuts. If you're lucky.
Did you just seriously spent 1-1,5 hours of your own time, just in administering a 3 word translation that will, in better case pay you $0,30 that is Thirty Cents? Even that broke rapper ¢50 has a bigger value in his name than this.
So you're slightly going mad, you sit and stare at your monitor and you cry like a baby, I mean literally you burst into tears. Or you want to fire your customer and get on with your life. Or you laugh like Joker from Batman because that's the most hysterical laugher out there, and you go to a bar to meet your friends and tell them your story how you make ¢20 an hour as a Translation Agency owner (or manager) and you are so thrilled, you'll buy everyone a round.
Waking up from a nightmare? You think? More like, this is the reality my friend.
But if you have miniTPMS with you, it just doesn't have to be that bitter.
Because miniTPMS can do this for you:
- Automatically put this project into the list of active jobs
- Send it to your translator, or at least inform the right person about it
- Mark it completed once your translator is done
- Put it into your invoice automatically
- Send e-mails to all the right people
- All you need to do is to sit and watch it work!
And then, instead of 1,5 hours you spent 10 minutes. It's still not that good, but there are things to remember:
- You probably made your customer happy because you didn't whine and cry, you did the "small shitty work" because you're cool and you value your customer (that being said, if this is a first time customer, I'd have a different approach)
- You didn't lose your cool
- And even if you did spend more and took a loss with this one (paying your translator 0,5 hours and you being paid 3 words is not a sustainable business model), your next project might really be the 33,000 words like in the good old days.
Accountability, Reliability, and more important, Flexibility. Those are your values if you are using miniTPMS.
And it stands for 3 words, or 333 words, and you and I both know those kind of project really do come quickly and if you work for a software localization company it comes often, sometimes several times a day.
Don't lose your future jobs because of time-overhead that you might have. Do it like a pro.
Click to find out more, read more, and get some discount possibilities! (subject to some also very serious cowboy and sheriff criteria matters, like sheriffness, and cowboyship. And many other non existent words)
