When clients are a nightmare...

By Valérie Marzac

 Last week I was contacted by a company who needed me to proofread over 1000 Excel cells from English to French and French to English for the following day with a standard payment per cell. The pay was a bit poor but I accepted the project. And so the nightmare soon began. 

First surprise,  I soon discovered that many of the cells had long and sometimes huge paragraphs to be double-checked. So the deadline was going to be so tight that I would have to work all day, all night and the following day to send back the work on time. 

Second surprise: The source text was from very poor to gibberish in both languages. I found myself having to try and make sense out of nonsense in order to check the translations which weren't very good and often quite bad because of grammar, semantics and punctuation as well as because the poor translators who worked on this file must have had a nightmare trying to make sense of the source texts.

I warned the PM about this. At first I decided to amend the source text whenever possible but after about 175 cells, I realised that I wasn't going to make it on time this way. But, since I wanted to do my best for the client, I decided to include notes with any change I had to make, which was basically almost every cell. This took a lot of extra time but I take my job seriously and genuinely try to help.

I sent back the work on time and didn't hear from the PM for a few days despite a couple of messages I had sent.

Third surprise: the PM finally got back to me asking me to double-check quite a few cells that her client didn't like and had amended himself. When I opened the changes, everything was full of mistakes. The client had marked my proofreading as wrong although it wasn't and had made countless grammatical and other mistakes in both languages. I told the PM and replied with notes while explaining why those changes were no good. This was of course done free of charge on my end.

Fourth surprise: One day later, the PM tells me that the entire file must be double-checked again as the client is not happy with it and when can I proceed so that I can send it back a couple of days later.

STOP! Yes, something finally clicked at that point. I started getting very annoyed. I explained to the PM that the client is obviously not an English or French Native and that he should trust what I did and I also mentioned that if they paid me extra, I could try to fix the source texts, though they would have to provide context for some cells. Guess what the PM replied? She stated that from her viewpoint, as long as the client isn't happy, I must review the entire file again or otherwise she will have to ask someone else to check it out (I pity the other translator, really) and will pay me less!

And this is currently ongoing. I sent a message to the company through which I got the job, explained the situation with screenshots and asked for the opinion of a bilingual translator. I told the PM about this and sent her the message from the translator. Utter silence.

Enough is enough. You don't treat qualified and experienced translators this way. The client is at fault. Some clients are a nightmare because they believe they speak the language when they are not good enough. Maybe they try to get a discount this way and simply pretend. No matter, we have to stand-up for ourselves. I may need the money as everyone does, but I cannot do the impossible and produce perfection with gibberish. 

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