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[akhil_jks]

Originally Posted by LadyHoldem

The craziest thing I see here is doing that much work .. without payment in advance, I hope you learned from that. Secondly, whether it was substandard or not.. notice they negotiated prior to the deal, at the end of the deal, PSO decided what was fair. If the translations were done mechanically, as the IM suggests.. then PSO got screwed by some renegade translators. If the translations were done by actual people, and were just 'substandard' then firstly, that's a matter of perspective. I swear I am the best gambling writer on these forums, (contractible) .. but I betchya.. there's someone that disagrees with me. I am asked for my references 3-20 times per week. . . examples of my work, and actual people that new clients can PM for a reference.. did you check references? From the IM it sounds like he's plain shady, I didn't see where there was a denial to those allegations of automated translations... but you should have found that out earlier, when you looked at his previous work .. (of course that would have meant nothing to you.. so you should have asked a friend to look I suppose) .. Hind sight is 20/20 however.. a lot of things that should have happened on both ends didn't .. of course again that's subjective.. if you didn't use human translation.. then WOW that's some spendy translation.. an a topic that's really missing in this thread.. I think ... and I am only guessing here.. that the point is likely moot.. it doesn't really look as though PSO intends to change their decision via some public vote.. other contractors will I'm sure get their payments up front from the site.. and I'm sure translations here will be triple checked as soon as they arrive. . . Aside from that, what is there left, legal action if you cannot resolve your differences? Oh and the examples from Donk.. (nothing personal..) I wouldn't try those.. stealing a service in most places is a felony, it's a much bigger offence than just stealing something.. go shoplift, but don't screw the cab driver (especially not the cab driver, because i used to be one !) Also, if you screw a land based service provider.. the auto mechanic persay... you generally have the right to place a lien on the title of the car. Same for the contractor at your house.. just try not payin him.. see how fast he places a lien on THAT title Now, all tht in mind, that legal stuff seems to get a lot trickier when you're working online.. with people from various countries, deciding jurisdiction etc.

Hi Ladyholdem,


You said "I didn't see where there was a denial to those allegations of automated translations..."- it is the biggest lie that we translate through translation programs. Mike also said that pokerlistings doesnt care about quality, my other clients dont know better.....how many things should I clarify while chatting on MSN? Do you wanna see our translations and also wanna ask our clients about us? Feel free to mail me at or let me know if I should post here. I'll send you hundreds of files as well as a lot of our client details who are always ready to help me.


What you think I'm providing machine translations since 5 years and the clients are OK with it? Too much.

[akhil_jks]

Originally Posted by TheDonk

"Construction. You build it wrong, you fix it or get paid nothing."

You stated it yourself: the "you fix it" part. Obviously again this shows PSO is wrong. The translator offered to fix errors.

Not true. PSO told them about the translation problems. Why is it too big of a job for the translator to check over 100,000 words, but not too big of job for PSO? Again, PSO hired a translation service, not the other way around. The translator did not hire PSO to proofread the work, that was their job.

"I can go on and on."

You proved my point with the first one.

Not so, see above

"Why is it PSO's fault that the translator is so stupid as to do all this work up front with no pre-payment? If the translator doesn't ask for it, that's his problem not PSO's."

It's not. How is it the translator's fault that PSO won't send material to be corrected?

It's not PSO's job to point out every little mistake. It is however the translators job to find the problems when they proofread. When the translator was told the work was "crap" that should've clued them in to the fact that the errors were many. Yeah, for the real world PSO should've done more, but that still doesn't make it their job. $100,000 + makes it the translators job.

"It's also not PSO's responsibility to point out every imperfection, which in a translation of this size could potentially be enormous. If PSO says 'the Russian translations are screwed up, fix it', then that should be enough."

That's silly. "Hey this 100,000 word document is screwed up, fix it." C'mon, that's a million miles past unreasonable.

See above

"It's the translators job to translate, not PSO's. PSO hired the translator... to translate!"

He did.

According to PSO, poorly. I haven't read the work, so I'm just basing this comment on what PSO has stated.

""Quality" in this case means that someone properly educated in the language, someone who understands proper sentence structure and grammar, is the translator. Then, that person must take the time to execute the translation properly. If these things cannot be accomplished by the translator who's agreed to the terms, he's the one at fault for that."

The quality level is not objective, but again it is important to point out it is not at all relevant to the issue, which is that PSO did not allow corrections to be made, then charged the contractor for corrections they did themselves (with a so far mysterious way of coming up with that number).

I own a couple of businesses myself, and I've owned several in my lifetime. First, I make certain things are done right the first time. If someone misses something I don't ask the client to tell me every detail. I find what's wrong, and fix it - simple as that. Oh yeah, maybe that's why I never run into these issues.

TheDonk

"Not true. PSO told them about the translation problems. Why is it too big of a job for the translator to check over 100,000 words, but not too big of job for PSO? Again, PSO hired a translation service, not the other way around. The translator did not hire PSO to proofread the work, that was their job...." - Yes, it was our job and that's why I asked them again and again to send me the docs. But when they didnt sent any docs, whose fault is this? And on which base the deducted the amount then? Do you have any answer to that?

Why are you saying something again n again TheDonk when you know very well that I asked them for corrections so many times? Don';t you think it's so "weird" that a company tells the vendor to "fix" the things and when the vendors agrees, the company doesnt sent anything and instead deducted the money!

[akhil_jks]

Originally Posted by TheDonk

I wasn't suggesting anything. It's just a fact that if a contractor hires a concrete sub to lay a foundation, but he lays the wrong floorplan - he won't get paid. It's just a fact, not telling anyone what to do.

If Ford contracts a company to build them a million side door panels, gives proper specs to the manufacturer, and receives something different, Ford will not accept or pay for the parts. Again, not a suggestion, just a fact.

I didn't and would never suggest anyone try to get something for nothing. In fact, people like that make me sick. I must have written something that gave you a different impression of what I was saying. My bad.

TheDonk

Dear TheDonk,


We are talking about translations here, not "side door panels". Translations are something different, there is always a scope of change in translations, whether good or bad. Every translator has its own way of thinking and methodology so it's very rare that you find 2 translators who could agree at one translated text, especially those related to poker. If you don't agree to me, ask any translation company and they will tell you the same thing.

[akhil_jks]

Originally Posted by TheDonk

As far as how much less should you be payed, that's not something anyone here can help you with. You think a fair figure is -$4,000. PSO thinks a fair figure is -$15,000. That's something you guys need to work out on your own, but the fact is you didn't provide what you promised.

Please understand, this is just my opinion - it doesn't mean I'm right. I can understand why people are on your side as well, this is just the way I personally feel.

TheDonk

'As far as how much less should you be payed, that's not something anyone here can help you with. You think a fair figure is -$4,000. PSO thinks a fair figure is -$15,000. ".....As you might have seen my emails, I have clearly written that I'm offering this discount only for the sake of a business relationship. I used to respect Mike, I respect all my clients who have given my group so much success.


But at last, you might have seen that I clearly told them that I shouldnt have offered them any discount because what they done is totally unprofessional. They didnt told me initially that they require a 15000 USD discount- See the emails please, they only asked for a discount, not mentioned the amount of 15k$. Only after I offered them 3000 USD which I thought I can give for an ongoing relation, they started demanding 15k$!!!


Infact, when pso didnt sent me any docs to be corrected even after my repeated emails, they are at fault and I was stupid that I offered them a 3k and then 4k discount to keep the business relation alive. But they did what they wanted to- total dictatorship. This has prompted me to post this incident here.

[akhil_jks]

Dear members,

I would like to thank you all for your comments, PPP, TheDonk- everyone who has spoken in my favour or against me- I welcome each and every comment. I wanted to post this in front of all of you to tell how badly I was treated by this company. 15000 USD deduction without any solid reason takes a lot out of you when you have worked day and night for it. I was feeling totaly helpless until some of my clients told me to post here and I'm thankful to all who have understood this injustice with me.

I never had any personal problems with Mike, I kept patience until they sent the less amount as you members can see in page 3 of this post- from the emails I posted here.

I didn't hesitated even a single time before posting this incident here because I know what I have posted here is 100% true- even people who are speaking in favour of Mike will also agree to this. I have cleared each and everything here because if I'm truthful and honest, if I haven't done anything wrong, I do not need to fear about anything.


I asked for corrections again and again(as this company told me to do it), got no files and instead got the money deducted- this is what I said many a times in this post and anyone who is reading this for the first time please check the entire post- with all my emails and evidences on page 3.

Must leave now, it's night here. Will check the post tomorrow and reply to any comments/questions accordingly.

Thanks to all.

[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.

[7Devil7]

How can the guy say that what PSO did is "unprofessional"? What you did is 20x more unprofessional.

[offyourface]

I would imagine it's a tough decision for pso to invest so much money in proofing an order, then being asked to send the work back for corrections to a company that has already delivered subpar work, then spend the money yet again to reproof the work.

So the question is really even if pso did allow this company to fix the problem, how much money would have been invested to proof it not only once but twice to make sure the work of a high enough quality to post online. I have never done a major translation project so I don't know the time or money involved, but I would think the prudent choice for PSO would be to correct the mistakes as you find them with your proofer instead of going through a million words, highlighting all the errors, sending them back to be fixed, then reproofing yet again and possibly once more after that. We are not talking about just a few grammar errors here, as I understand it the translations were not even in the game.

My gut tells me the person the company hired to do the russian translations was not a trusted and reliable source they have used before or the work would have been much better, and knowing this they really should have been on their game and made sure he was delivering quality work. by protecting the order and investing a few bucks in an outside company to ascertain that they are in fact delivering quality work. It's not really fair when someone pays you for quality translations, especially with a company where their name precedes them, then ask them to go through every single page translated, spend all that time and money highlighting all the errors, then send all the errors back, then spend all that money reproofing the new work. And then ask them to pay full boat.

In most circumstances I probably would have thought pso was to blame, I mean under normal circumstances if a company fails to deliver, you have to give them an opportunity to make it right. But after looking at it as I did above, I don't really think paying 11% less than the final bill is unreasonable.

Some good lessons learned here for a lot of people.

[PPP]

"so I'm just basing this comment on what PSO has stated"

Which explains why your comments don't really make much sense here, since they are based on the opinion of someone who didn't know what they were doing instead of the factual statements that are not so much in dispute.

The fact of the matter is the translators work has been used by many people in this industry who, to be charitable, know a lot more about working with translations than PSO. Whoever mentioned machine translations is just being a jerk. They've done work for a billion dollar company and several multi-million dollar ones, who not surprisingly had the sense to independently check a portion of the translators work before doing tens or hundreds of thousands of more work.

PSO didn't have a priority on accuracy, rather they wanted fast and very very very very very cheap -- while bizarrely refering to this extremely cut rate they paid as a "premium". That "premium" comment really seems to imply the lesson still has not been learned.

I've used about a dozen translators. Some have been great, some nearly useless. These guys were not the best but not the worst either. They are fine for what they offer, low cost, quick turnaround, straightforward prose (in other words, they aren't expert poker players). But anyone who pays less than 1/3 of the industry norm rate is cracked if they expect to get that level of work. If you buy a Volkswagen, don't expect a Mazarati.

[PPP]

Originally Posted by offyourface

I don't really think paying 11% less than the final bill is unreasonable.

If they want to draw a line in the sand about the Russian work, that's almost reasonable (though still not). The number in question here should be a precise one: the amount that was contracted for for the Russian pages.

It would be inexcusable to refuse to pay more than the Russian was supposed to cost, or set a figure created by hiring more expensive people to do the work rather than the low-price contractor they first hired.

Last thing, a lot of people here hire writers to do articles, and some folks seem to think it would be a reasonable thing to just put up that article without reviewing it! If you have that opinion, you should avoid doing translations, even with the best companies in the industry.