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As for me, my opinion is unambiguous: no free (unpaid) tests. And paid tests are nothing else than another translation job. If anybody wishes check my translation skill he can visit my pages with numerous translation samples in various fields, starting here.
The whole situation is ludicrous. If you were going to contract a builder to
build you a house would you ask them to build you a garage for free as a test of
their competence? I think the answer you would receive would be far from
pleasant.
Stephen Hernandez, UK, e-mail: sjh [AT PUT HERE] translations2go.com
One usually-effective response, when asked to do a "short and
simple" test
translation, is to offer, instead, to provide the names and contact data of
satisfied previous clients and customers.
If that does not suffice for that interested agency, you're better off
without their business.
Regards from Los Angeles,
Stephen H. Franke, Arabic, Kurdish and Persian-Farsi - languages
e-mail: Mutarjm [AT PUT HERE] aol.com
I never EVER do freebies. In any case I
resent the implication that my time is not worth money....! Any serious company
should pay you for a test piece, however short. If you tell them this, and they
still won't agree to pay you, don't do it, would be my advice...
Alison Gaunt <agaunt1000 [AT PUT HERE] aol.com>
In fact, any serious translation company
would NOT ask for a sample piece. They prove absolutely nothing. We have had
this discussion before but I venture to assert from my 40 years experience as a
translator, 10 of them running my own company, that they are useless and they
are only used by agencies that know very little about translation, though French
agencies seem to use them as a matter of routine, probably the copycat syndrome.
Josephine Bacon
American Pie/ Pholiota Translations
www.americanization.com
I must say that I have spent a lot of time
doing translation tests for mainly French agencies, but I have received only one
answer (positive) to them; from that one (positive, I insist!) answerer, I have
never received a translation request. My test seems to have been forgotten in
the bottom of some drawer. All the clients I have found in France were sent by a
fellow translator to me, or found me on the Internet or elsewhere when they
desperately needed someone to do an urgent translation and came back to me as
they were happy with the first job I delivered them. So now, I doubt a lot of
the efficiency of translation tests as a way to attract new clients, and free
tests are not my priority since they yielded so little for me...
Xavier PITEL, EGUILLES - France
Translations from GB and IT into FR
http://perso.club-internet.fr/xapitel
I have to agree that in my 25 years at
this [and I am still a translator as well as an agency owner] I also cannot
remember having obtained new clients by means of tests, with the exception of
literary/publication type texts in a competition situation [best of 3].
Dee Braig
Advanced Linguistic Services - France
advling [AT PUT HERE] translate-best.com
I, too, have never gotten work through
tests, and I refuse to do tests. If an agency is still not quite sure about me,
I invite them to give me a small job (paid, of course) to see for themselves.
There are many short texts to go around, and agencies should be smart enough to
use them to "test" potential translators (and they should pay them!). There is
simply way too much abuse out there: one agency once tried to distribute a whole
document among several translators, masking the whole thing as a "test", just to
get a free translation - and there are plenty more examples like that.
Vernon George
translations [AT PUT HERE] attcanada.ca
Our less
experienced colleagues will have noticed recent postings from experienced
translators who have agreed to take tests only to find that they are never given
the results of these tests and never hear from the agency again. I had made it
my rule never to take tests and I foolishly broke it recently during a quiet
period. I never heard from the two agencies again, not even regarding the test
results. There is one large agency that routinely makes people do tests because
they want to use very young, badly-paid project managers and think that making
everyone do a test is a guarantee that they will not have any problems with
their translations. That is rubbish, of course. I have twice refused to do a
test for these people who were apparently desperate for Hebrew-English
translators. There are a million reasons for not taking a test (subject matter
usually outside one's field, badly designed test, one does not know who is doing
the marking, etc.) but the best one of all is that it is a complete waste of the
translator's time and there is no guarantee that however brilliant the result
one will ever get used. In effect, it is slave labour.
Josephine Bacon
American Pie/ Pholiota Translations
www.americanization.com
As to translation
tests, I did a few of them some years back and I did not get any jobs from the
agencies I did these tests for, even though the ones that (much) later finally
replied had said that the test was favourable.
I then decided that I would not ever again do any tests and I have only broken
that rule twice since, and both were tests made for a specific large project with
a sample text that actually matched the subject. In both those occasions I first
had a discussion on the phone with the project manager. The difference here was
that the project managers already promised me the job on the condition that I
could demonstrate that I could handle the specific type of text and format.
I did get those two projects, and more later on.
Ulf Samuelsson
From the article by Andrei Gerasimov:
...in my humble opinion, this approach - I mean
test translations - is intrinsically wrong for a number of reasons:
1) The word count of some test translations exceeds a reasonable figure, so such
tests sometimes look like a lame attempt to get a free translation.
2) No reference material normally provided to ensure consistency of terminology
is sent. A client considers the translation to be good when the translator uses
terminology this client is used to. This is especially important when the target
language is Russian since various companies/clients in this country use
different terminology.
3) There is no context. When translating a highly technical document, in many
cases it is impossible to ensure meaning-based translation when only a short
excerpt, detached from a complete document, is available.
4) The translator is not told to what audience the text is addressed. This is a
serious disadvantage since many technical terms are translated differently
depending on who the end user is. A service technician in car shop uses special
terminology different from the terminology used by a reporter of an automotive
magazine or by a car owner. This difference should be taken into account by the
translator, who should always know for whom the translation is intended.
5) A test translation tells nothing about the translator's actual qualifications
because any rookie can hire a seasoned ace to do or edit the test translation.
6) And the most important reason is an ethical problem—I would call it "who are
the judges"? Usually the evaluation is done by the unsuspecting applicant's
direct competitor! This situation undoubtedly affects the evaluation process at
a conscious or subconscious level.
Having analyzed the results of my marketing campaign, I have drawn the following
conclusion—agencies send you either forms and tests or jobs. When they send you
tests, it means that either they never have jobs in your specialty, or they do
not need new translators in your specialty, since they have enough of them in
their database. In most cases, forms and tests are a formal response meant to
bounce off the applicant whose services are not needed.
...When an agency sends you a test translation, you spend your valuable time at
your own peril. It's up to you to decide whether to do the test or to ignore it.
Only a very small percentage of tests will give you an actual workload.
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