[fandv]

I'm sure there are some other things that will be posted in this thread that I will really want to respond to, but this will be the last time I post in this thread. I lost the whole day to this mess yesterday and I can’t afford to lose more time and have more aggravation. The fact of the matter is that I feel the way I feel about what we got. I feel like we did the right thing in the end, over and above what the average person would. I would say the average person, or possibly most people would have never paid the final invoice. I feel further vindication since all but A lonely one member in these forums agrees with us. (When I say agrees with us I mean you may or may not think we are partially to blame, but in the end you think we shouldn't have to pay the additional 15k at this point) I also have 12 translators in this office who tell me that the work we received is substandard and I have 3 members from this forum telling me the exact same thing.

Are we partially to blame? Sure, I feel like we could have read the files and complained sooner. However, I don’t think this is something we should have been required to do. In my world when I tell someone I’m going to do something, that is what I do, not the least amount I can do to get by or get away with. I trust someone until I have a reason not to.

Someone used an example of a contractor planting 3 trees when you paid / asked for 5. You would walk out your front door immediately and say “There are only 3 trees – fix it.” Well, things are a bit different here since we had no one to review the files. I grew up in the United States and people there speak English. Now I live in Costa Rica and people here speak Spanish. It’s not like I can walk around the office or call a friend and ask them to read over this German file for me. I know one person that I feel comfortable asking a favor from that speaks both French and German. I contacted her when I contacted her and she got back to me when she got back to me. Could I have contacted her sooner? Sure. Could I have contacted her later? Sure.

Akhilesh’s email string starts with my email to him where I blew up at him. For those of you who know me, you know it takes some pretty extraordinary circumstances for me to get to the point. What is missing there is WEEKS of emails going back and forth between Akhilesh and Scott where Akhilesh was doing nothing but blaming us and was refusing to do ANYTHING about it. He kept saying over and over again that he couldn’t fix the work because he would lose money and to please understand his situation. After weeks of reading “I’m sorry but there is nothing we can do” I got a little upset… seeing as we just spent over $85,000! In fact I’m looking at an email right now dated July 17th were we sent Akhilesh a bunch of examples of the problems we were having. When I say we sent examples, I mean we attached files in German, French, and Russian outlining exactly what the problems were. I don’t know why Akhilesh maintains that we didn’t send examples, but we did. From July 17th till August 4th no less than 20 emails went back and forth with Akhilesh maintaining he did nothing wrong and wasn’t going to correct a thing. That is why I decided to send an email to him, and that is where he chooses to start his story. It should also be noted that we sent a second round of examples on August 28th with even more problems, this time in Russian. Again, we got a reply of I’m sorry there is nothing I can do now. At that point I told Scott to just take 15k off the invoice and send that to him and be done with it.

I’m posting the August 28th email here with the parts that Akhilesh conveniently left out just so everyone can see the breath of the problems. He also keeps saying that we didn’t send him any files, but the exact email he is posting about here had several files attached. This was one of a few emails that we sent him with attached examples of problems.

Full email sent Aug 28th
Hello Akhilesh,

Attached are some files that that needed to be redone entirely as well as over all issues that were pervasive throughout all files.

Here is what a few of our translators said of the work (in blue)

From our French Translator:
“Part of the work was much better than the others. I also think that the translator should have done some research about Poker before translating to avoid most of the errors related to terminology. There were verb errors throughout most files”

In general the translation was coherent, however, as I said before there were an excessive amount of typos, misused words, and verb tense errors in all files that were more than a few sentences long. As a result, all files had to be reviewed carefully to correct the mistakes. This took about 6 weeks of fulltime dedicated work to get these documents ready to be published online. That is six more weeks than we were counting on. If your translator were to review the files again I’m and sure that he would realizes all the mistakes.


From our German Translator:
“A common problem was that even if the beginning of a file was good, it could be that he/she had struggles with difficult sentences and then got lost on the overall concept of the content. In other cases the translation is grammatically correct, but sounds horrible in German (several times especially in the reviews), so I had to rewrite all these parts. Typos are also found very often. Don´t know why but the Word “werden” (will) is extremely often misspelled with “warden” (which makes no sense). I know that I had to rewrite something in every document, except maybe 3 which went online unchanged. As said above, in some cases it´s grammatically correct, but every native speakers know that it´s a (bad) translation..”

The German appeared to be a bit worse than the French. Again too many typos, misspelled words, and very direct translation that often lost the true meaning.

Swedish:
“The swedish files are directly translated and so not correct according to the correct grammatical way of building sentences in swedish, and many of them are also incorrectly translated.”
Attached is a quick overview on the general quality of the Swedish translation. Please read through it. There are many comments in English that will give you an idea of over all quality. Our Swedish translator is in Sweden and well be back at the end of the week. She does not have access to all the original files as she is away. When she returns I can send you those files.

Portuguese:
We just started that language and have begun with the smaller file sizes of a few words to a few sentences. I will send bad files as we come across them.

Russian:
We have talked about this at length. The first half of the files were very very rushed with far too many mistakes of every shape, manner and form. Our native Russian speaker on several files had to read the English version of text in order to understand what the content was because she could not understand your Russian translation. The second half appears to be much better. Attached are some very poorly translated files.


Again, the bottom line is we did not get what we were promised or paid for. We’ve withheld what works out to 11.6% of the payment and will NOT be paying the rest. That is unless Akhilesh delivers what we were promised. By my estimation we are using less than 60% of what we received and 80% of that 60% we’ve had to spend additional time reworking. So we are using 60% of what we received and we paid for 89%. Akhilesh has made it clear to us that he is not going to spend the time or the money correcting his mistakes and at this point we’ve made it clear that we aren’t paying until he does.

And that’s all I have to say about that….

Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Morning, and Goodnight.