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[fandv]

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

[Darko]

If something you ordered is crap and not what you ordered - you shouldn't have to pay for it !

If he ordered a High quality translation written by natives and it comes back not as advertised - then should you pay - no you shouldn't, you should send it back and ask for the high quality translation as ordered or its no deal.

If I order a professional coder to hand code a website in the correct coding way as per w3.org guidlines and it comes back as a table heaven FrontPage code junk or something like that - I wouldn't pay for it and im sure no one else would either

It is NOT the customers problem that the seller will lose money to **Correct** the bad product sold I.e Any bad translation should be corrected for free - That is 100% certain

You should always pay any debts you have to anyone, even if the relationship turns sour - but if you dont get what you ordered then its either corrected or no deal, as you didnt get whats ordered


Edit: Just like PartyPoker - if you send them junk players - they dont pay you !

[akhil_jks]

Alright, I have just read the discussions here....now let me post something which will clear 100% what Mr. Micheal Jackness has done with me.

[3jokers]

Originally Posted by akhil_jks

Alright, I have just read the discussions here....now let me post something which will clear 100% what Mr. Micheal Jackness has done with me.

It's done to me, not with me...

[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?"

You contracted for these translations from this company. Period. You are responsible for your actions. Suppose you had paid in advance... would you break into their office and steal the money back?

And more to the point it is entirely ridiculous to come here and say you contracted for $100k+ work and didn't have the sense to check $2k of that work before getting any more.

"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?"

You sound like you are in your first day of business. You contracted for a product... translation services with this company... that is what you got. End of story. It's like you ordered 100 cars, and only looked to see if they had wheels after all 100 rolled off the line.

You are violating your contract. Pay what you owe.

"I’m confused PPP why we should still pay full price for this service?"

Because you said you would (whether you should have or not).

I hope you pay for articles you contract for that you don't like.
I hope you pay for photos ypou contract for that you don't like.
I hope you pay for curtains you contract for but don't like.
I hope you are more careful in dealing with businesses for six figures worth of payment that you have not dealt with before!

[PokerProp]

I read the whole thing and it don't make sense to me. Usually when hiring a translator you would also hire a native speaking that language to monitor the work - Not doing so as the files are coming in its not really fair.

Hopefully akhil_jks in the future you'll do something to protect yourself from this. An idea might be to do something like have clients fax a contract that says they have 7 days to review work and send payment for each batch of work sent. This way your getting confirmation the work is satisfactory and payment for it much sooner.

After reading this whole thread I see plenty of reason for both sides to feel they were screwed. I think PSO has more share of blame though in how this transaction went bad because like I already mentioned I don't know how a company spends this much on translations without having a native speaker of that language assigned to monitor work as it comes through. If there is a problem with the work stop it right away.

Hope you guys get this straightened out though in some way or another. I'm sure neither will make the same mistake again, to bad it was such a big one that got posted on a public forum where people might chose sides.

[pokermac]

I like the sound of with me better...sassy!

[fandv]

Akhilesh,

While I eagerly wait for you to report what I have “done with you” I’ll go ahead and post the feedback that I’ve gotten from 2 of the 3 members of this board that I sent sample files to. While one of them hasn’t given me permission to publicly discuss this yet, the other one has.

“Bahh” – a “senior member” of these boards was kind enough to review some sample Swedish content that Akhilesh sent us. Bahh is a resident of Sweden and native Swedish speaker, so I’m guessing that his opinion on the translations is qualified. Again, Bahh has given me permission to report his findings and quote him in this post.
Here is what he had to say:

“Mike,

I have read though the sample and here are a couple of comments;

*There are lots of grammatical errors for example the punctuation are
done in the wrong way. The main issue are the commas "comma signs" - these are repeatedly placed in the wrong places.

*The language is very stiff, especially regarding the review section. Generally, reviews should be written in a interesting and attention grabbing way. The main problem with this review is that its translated word by word and not in regards to the meaning of the words.

*Some words are not words a Swedish person would use or understand. A lot of words are very old are used anymore. Other words are incomprehensible.

*There are many spelling errors. This document should be going through a simple spell-check in Word.

*Poker definitions are translated incorrectly. I don’t think the translator has experience within the poker/gambling field.

*BTW: The chapter describing how to deposit money does not make any sense. Since its vital that the reader understands this part, I would redo the entire section.

To be honest with you, I would not publish this material. The content is not comprehensive and you have to concentrate to understand the meaning of some sentences. Additionally, the language is not geared towards your target group. If I were you I would ask your translator to redo this entirely. If you need any further help with reviewing sample translations or if you need any gambling translations done, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Best regards”

Additionally, I have gotten a reply from a member who is a native German speaker. However, I have not received permission from this individual yet to reveal his name. If / once I do I will post that here. However, I will post his comments below:

“i ve had a quick look. Most parts of the translation are crap, i have even seen worse but still...

The person who translated the English into German most likely wasnt a native german speaker... grammar (sentence structure) is really awful... i mean i would even be able to do some changes with the corrected version... ;-)

Generally speaking i have to agree with you, noone could charge that much money for such a translation...”

[PPP]

The most bizarre thing here really is you paid EIGHT cents a word. the translators I use the most, Wordexpress.net, charge TWENTY-EIGHT cents for most languages.

Whether the tranlsations or not are weak (a C- as you say) is entirely irrelevant, and frankly strange to even mention. Regardless of the quality, you went for very very very very low price work. And now you won't pay. because you say the work is weak. I don't know the quality of it all, but a starting point to consider is "you get what you pay for". You paid way below market price for this work.

[fandv]

Thank you for your constructive comments PokerProp, but I have to disagree with you about having someone to monitor the work. If we hired someone to monitor the work - they could be doing the work. That was the whole point of hiring their firm to begin with. We made an educated decision not to hire a handful of fulltime employees to complete this work. Akhilesh knew this and I believe took advantage of the situation.

While we didn’t report the problems with the translations in the 7 day period you suggested, we did report them as soon as we found out. At this point Akhilesh still didn’t correct the problem and continued translating the rest of the project with the same low quality and then sent us another invoice for over $40,000.

I do have to agree with you wholeheartedly on one comment you made though… You are 100% correct in the fact that we will not make the same mistake again. We’ve now hired a fulltime translation staff consisting of 12 people (2 for each language) and we will never outsource our translation projects again.