In some respects I was hoping that Akhilesh wouldn’t post here because I was hoping to put this horrible experience behind us, but in other respects I was hoping he would post here so others wouldn’t fall in the same trap as we did. After you read over my post the only reason you will have less respect for me is because I was stupid enough to work with someone I met over the Internet from India. What’s even more ironic is that Akhilesh doesn’t know that most of you on this board either know me personally, or know of me or the websites we run.
One of the things I’m proudest of is our reputation; in let’s face it, a not so scrupulous industry. We’ve managed to make it this whole time without “screwing” a single customer, partner, or vender. Even when it meant we were getting screwed ourselves, we still followed through with our obligations. Even during the first few months of operation when things were the hardest and we were facing certain bankruptcy we still followed though with ALL our obligations. So why now? Why in this point of time “screw” this guy? Why risk having you name plastered all over the Internet in a negative way over a measly $15,000? Well, here is the complete story…
On Thursday May 4th I received the email below (I’ve placed the email at the end of this post) from Akhilesh at the exact time we were evaluating hiring an internal translation staff. Even though the email was written in poor English, it was quite compelling considering he offered to do the work first and then pay him afterwards. His client list also piqued my interest further. We were also keen to get Poker Source Online translated as quickly as possible and we knew that by outsourcing to a firm that had the personal in place already we would be able to accomplish our speed to market goals. Furthermore, it gave us the opportunity to evaluate the work and hopefully use it for all our sites moving forward. After all, we have well over 1,000,000 words to translate amongst all our websites. It also gave us the opportunity to place a dozen people outside our already crowed office. With all this in mind I made my first contact with Akhilesh on Saturday May 6th via MSN Messenger…
Since our conversation was almost one and a half hours long I’m just going to post key parts of that conversation here. Before I do, I should note, I had three main areas of concern before talking to him. 1) price 2) quality 3) speed.
Price: After haggling for about 45 minutes, we finally agreed to .08 per source word.
Quality: One of my biggest concerns was the quality of the translations.
As most of you know, everything we do we like to do with the highest quality. We don’t want someone to come to our site and think “This was obviously translated”. We want people to come to our site and feel like they are reading something written by someone in their native language. We don’t want to put a crappy page up just to get search engine results. We want to put up a quality page so we get search engine results, people can read and understand the pages, and want to click on our links and bookmark our page. This is even more important in the signup process for our free gifts since it’s quite complicated for a first time user. Here some of the things Akhilesh said about quality. In fact, that is one thing he went on and on about.
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: as u have seen, we have translated 13+ websites
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: onine gambling related
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: i assure u high quality
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: i know brother, but quality matters
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: if u go for any other company at such low rates, i just cant understand how can they offer so much less for translation+proof reading
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: we do not use software for our translations
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: it done by hand
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: i assure u high quality
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: and on time deliveries
Speed: Due to the size of the project, Poker Source Online being 350,000 words and then having about 750,000 words amongst our other websites we were promised that we would be the only people he would work for during that time.
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: the size of project is no doubt big
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: but this also means it would involve a lot effort
akhil_jks@hotmail.com: and we have to work exclusively for you
I think it’s important to note that we found out later that our project was being delayed because he was working on another large project at the same time as ours. This pushed our project timeline out and diluted the value of paying a premium to an outside organization to do our translation.
Wow, this is already turning into a novel. Well, now that we had that out of the way, Akhilesh started working for us. We put one person in charge here to coordinate the whole effort and off we went. We sent large amounts of files to Akhilesh each day and after a while we started getting files back. I was quite pleased with the speed of his work and since we are quite busy around here I didn’t give it much other thought. The person I put in charge of this project sent Akhilesh files and he sent them back. Now, were I will take some blame is here because we should have checked at a very early stage what the quality of these documents we were receiving were. However, we had no one in house that spoke any of the languages and since Akhilesh raved about his quality and we were in the middle of two large deals I didn’t pay it the attention I should have.
On June 5 we received our first invoice in the amount of $86,817. Since this was quite a large number it got my attention and I then sent a couple of files to a friend in the industry that speaks both French and German. Unfortunately, she was out of the country on vacation so I didn’t hear back from her for 12 days. In the mean time Akhilesh was IMing me everyday asking if we had sent payment. Rather than waiting to hear back from my friend I just sent him the money blindly on trust.
I would say the preverbal poop hit the fan when I got a reply from my friend when she returned from her vacation. “There seems to be some problems with these translations. In fact, I don’t even understand some parts. Can you please send me the original files so I can see what’s going on?” At this point we hit the panic button and decided to hire one or two of our own translators to get a second opinion and start forming a backup plan if necessary. On June 28th we hired our first translator (French) and naturally, the first thing we did was have him check over the work we were getting from Akhilesh. His impression of the work was to grade it a C or C- because there were a lot of inconsistencies and it was obvious that it was something that was translated. Since we had already made an offer to a Russian translator we waited for her to start on July 9th before confronting Akhilesh. Her opinion of the Russian translation was a D- or F. None of it made any sense and in fact the translation was done word for word in the exact same order as the English translation.
At this point we had enough ammunition to contact Akhilesh and let him know our displeasure and what was going on. After several back and forth communications discussing quality we put together some sample documents for Akhilesh to review. Again, he replied back “Our work is of good quality.” This is after sending him sample documents where there would be an average of 20 spelling, grammatical, or other errors in a 600 word document. I don’t know what the word quality means to Akhilesh, but to us there should be maybe one error in every 3 or 4 documents. NOT 20 ERROS IN ONE DOCUMENT.
After more back and forth correspondence over the next couple of weeks Akhilesh maintained that his work was of good quality. This did nothing but irate us more since we just apparently flushed 86k down the drain and Akhilesh wasn’t going to make good on it. Furthermore we lost several months on our project timeline. Over the next few weeks we continued to hire more translators for the other languages, all of whom said the same thing… the work was complete crap.
We then received a final invoice from Akhilesh on August 16th for another $41,886.72. My initial reaction was to tell him to go pound sand and tell him he wasn’t going to be getting any additional money from us. However, that isn’t our style and we wanted to end the relationship on what we thought was a fair note. So, we added up how much we are paying our new translators, which is $10,500 per month. We then added up how much time they had to spend fixing the work that Akhilesh did to make it minimally acceptable to launch our site… this was two months or a $21,000 expense. We felt like this was a fair number to subtract from his final invoice. However, Akhilesh came back with a $2,000 discount. We laughed and continued to go back and forth until he offered a $4,000 discount. Again, I think that anyone would agree that we shouldn’t be paying him any additional money due to the crappy work that he did, but my final decision was to just deduct $15,000 and send the money.
The bottom line is that I sick by my decision and I feel like we got ripped off and wasted well over 100k on this project. I feel like we did more than anyone else would have in regards to the final payment. If there is anyone on these boards that speaks French, German,
Swedish, Russian, or Portuguese, I would be happy to post a few sample documents that Akhilesh sent us so you can publicly review them for us.
Sorry for the novel, but as you can imagine I slightly irate and having someone post that I cheated them was the final straw.
PS: I will be in Barcelona from Oct 4 - Oct 7 if anyone would like to get together. Just shoot me a quick email or PM here if you would like to schedule something.
- Michael Jackness
ORIGINAL EMAIL FROM AKHILESH
Akhilesh Sharma wrote:
Subject:- Gambling translations: Collaboration proposal
Dear Sir/Madam,
I’m Akhilesh Sharma from Jammu, India. I own a Translation and Localization agency consisting of experienced native translators. We are providing our services across UK, USA and other European countries. We offer 24-hour turnaround time and can churn large volumes of work meeting tight deadlines.
I’m offering to work offshore for you. We have translated around 12 online gambling related websites(and counting!) and you can save a huge portion of your budget by outsourcing your work to us. To judge the quality of our services you can start with sending small amounts of work without any advance payment. You can pay us after the work is completed and sent to you.
Our Portfolio:
PartyGaming.com Ltd.: We have recently completed 3 big projects for PartyGaming.com Limited, Gibraltar. We have translated their 3 websites in 10 languages. These websites are:
www.partypoker.com
www.partycashier.com
www.partycasino.com
The Languages in which we translated these websites are: French, Spanish,
German, Russian, Danish, Norwegian, Chinese(Simplified), Finnish, Portuguese and
Swedish.
Everypoker.com : We are doing translations for them from English to 3
languages. More languages to be done.
Rakeback.org : We are doing translations for them from English to German, more
languages to be done.
Blackhawkcolorado.com : We are doing translations for them from English to
German, French, Spanish, Danish and
Swedish.
Online-Gambling-Insider.com : We are doing translations for them from English
to French and Spanish. We are also going to translate in some more languages for
this site.
Worldcasinodirectory.com : We are doing translations for them from English to
German and French.
Poker-Babes.com : We are doing translations for them from English to 9
languages.
WebGuidepartner.com Ltd. : We are doing translation for them from English to 10
languages.
TheGamblersedge.com : We are doing translations for them from English to
French, Spanish, German and Polish languages.
Cardschat.com : We are doing translations for them from English to about 6
languages.
Holiday-Rentals.com : We have done a big project for a company in
UK(
www.holiday-rentals.com) (part of WVR Group Limited, USA -
www.wvrgroup.com )
involving English to French and vice versa translations.
Stortford Documentation services, Hertfordshire, UK(
www.stortdoc.co.uk)We have
done an Adobe Illustrator project for Stortford, a technical documentation
company based in Hertford shire, UK. We have done 476 graphics for them with
translations in French and Spanish (238 graphics in French and 238 in Spanish).
The project was for Subaru, an automobile company. Please ask for samples if you
wish to judge them for quality.
Languages with rates:
English to French: 0.12 USD per source word
English to Spanish: 0.12 USD per source word
English to
Swedish: 0.12 USD per source word
English to Italian: 0.13 USD per source word
English to Chinese(Simplified): 0.12 USD per source word
English to Danish: 0.14 USD per source word
English to German: 0.12 USD per source word
English to Portuguese: 0.12 USD per source word
English to Russian: 0.12 USD per source word
English to Norwegian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Finnish: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Japanese: 0.13 USD per source word
English to Polish: 0.13 USD per source word
English to Estonian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Dutch: 0.13 USD per source word
English to Bulgarian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Romanian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Lithunian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Latvian: 0.14 USD per source word
English to Greek: 0.13 USD per source word
English to Turkish: 0.14 USD per source word
We do not charge VAT over the invoice amount. Also, we do proof reading free of
charge. We work in more languages and please let me know if you need quote for
any other languages. We do not ask for any advance payment and we send invoice
only after completion of work, may be in stages if the project is of long
duration. We offer discount on bulk work.
Please let me know if you would like to have the contact details/references of
our clients for the projects I mentioned above. Also, please feel free to ask
for previous work samples and I'll be glad to send you some samples alongwith
clients details.
Looking forward to the working opportunity with you.
Sincerely,
Akhilesh Sharma
Akhil_jks@yahoo.com
Cheating by a affiliate website (Pokersourceonline.com)
Linear Mode
