PPP,
You must have gone to the same school of business as Akhilesh. First of all, how is it our responsibility to do quality control? I’m confused. Last time I checked quality control is something a manufacture or business does on its own products or services. Since when is it the customer’s responsibility to do quality control? Do customer’s quality control cars, drugs, toys, boats, etc? NO! The business does that. Let me use an analogy… It would be the equivalent of me purchasing a drug from a drug manufacture and quality controlling it by winding up dead or in the hospital… and then having them say… “Well, you should have told us sooner that you were getting sick from our drugs.”
Furthermore how are we supposed to quality control something we know nothing about? There is a reason why we hired Akhilesh to begin with; we didn’t speak, read, or have the ability to translate French, German, Portuguese, Russian, or Swedish. For all we knew the files he was sending us in German could have been in French and said “blah blah blah blah blah.”
Finally, the only thing we asked him to correct was the Russian files because those were the ones with the most problems. We already spent a lot of time correcting the other languages and were just going to write that off as lost time and money. However, as I said in my original post (which I have the feeling you didn’t read all of), we gave the Russian translation a D- or F in quality compared to a C for the other languages.
When we asked Akhilesh to do something about it this was the reply we got:
“Ok, if we have to re do the translations, this would mean we have to decline ALL new projects in Russian for a long time, which means a heavy loss of money and time...please think about my situation.”
“If I ask my translator to re do the whole work, I'll have to pay him again obviously because if I'm telling him about the errors after almost the completion of work, this is not his fault. He and all my translators kept asking me for any amendments if required throughout the project but what I can tell them if I'm not receiving any problems from the client itself!
Please let me know what to do now. I'm in deep problem, if I ask him to re do the project without money, I'll lose a regular translator(I don't think anyone will redo this much big work after such a delayed response about problems). If I pay him, I'll lose a lot of money and time.
I request you to understand this situation. You have the people in your company for QA process and if you are paying them, there should be no problems- it will take same(or may be a bit less) time than redoing the translations. No doubt my translator/s did mistakes because they had to complete the big work in less time but please understand you should have done the quality check alongwith the translations so that we could have find out and fixed errors quickly. I promise you once again that I'll take care of this in all next projects but if you don't tell me about the problems and complain in the end of project, what can I do? “
Now, this is just part of one of many emails that Akhilesh and Scott (the person in charge of the project exchanged). Most if not all of them had the tone of there is nothing I can do to correct this without losing money, but in the future I promise to start sending you quality work and not crap. In this particular email he even said, and I quote “No doubt my translator/s did mistakes because they had to complete the big work in less time.”
Mind you the QA people he is talking about in his reply are the people we hired AFTER we found the problems with the translations. When we first started the project we didn’t plan on hiring anyone in these languages.
So in the end we hired a company to do a job for us. The company didn’t do the job to the expectations they set. They didn’t cooperate in fixing the problem, and even if they did we had a minimum of 2-3 months of lost time. We incurred a minimum of $20,000 in additional expenses to fix the problems to the point where we could even launch the foreign language sites. This doesn’t include all the files we still haven’t uploaded yet that we consider to be nonessential. I’m confused PPP why we should still pay full price for this service? Oh, and please try not to call me stupid in your next reply.
On another note I’ve received PM’s from two people offering to review some of the Swedish translations we received. I’ll be forwarding those later today. Unfortunately, the Swedish translations were the best quality of what we received, but there were still errors. What I’m really hoping for is someone who can read Russian or Portuguese so we can have those files reviewed. Even someone who can read French or German as those translators graded the work as a C or C-. For what it’s worth the Swedish translator graded that work as a B. As the 2 individuals review the Swedish I will report back, or they might post here directly.
Thank you for your time.
-Mike Jackness
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