Translation Service from English to

[gina_riley2]

Update 2:

So my French translator read the forum and got back to me. I went from being hopeful to ecstatic! Now that’s one guy who knows the value of good customer service.

He put my mind at ease & I am really, really happy with his professionalism. 😀

[miiila]

Hi Gina,

Since I offer translation gigs here, allow me to hop in.

So, how to evaluate whether the person has done a decent job or not…

that is tricky. I’ve seen people complain about terrible “native/bilingual translators” here before,

I’ve seen those gigs myself, and I feel bad for those buyers who bought and

are still buying from those fake sellers.

A while ago a buyer contacted me telling me that he had this document translated by another

seller, and wanted me to proofread the whole thing. Turned out that the translation was a disaster and I ended up redoing the whole thing. The question here is how can he trust what I’ve told him?

I could have been lying. The original seller might have done a perfect job, and I created this

HUGE lie just so I can get the job and money!!!

Translation is scary since there is no way to check whether the person did a good job unless

you know someone around you can personally trust, and that person really knows the language.

I think that is the best step to take is to buy a basic gig, let them translate something, then take that and show it to someone you can trust or another seller.

Sad thing is just because the seller has a lot of good reviews it does NOT mean he/she can be

trusted especially when it comes to translation. You might want to order from several different

sellers. Or maybe take that translation, post it here at the forum and ask people to critique the work?

Turned out that the translation was a disaster and I ended up redoing the whole thing.

That really is a problem. Sometimes as translators we get customers with translations they somehow found out are bad, and they expect we can ‘proofread’ the thing and that it will be cheaper than translating. The thought isn´t so far-fetched of course for someone who ‘isn´t a pro’ on the matter, but in such cases I can only tell the customer “depends, I´ll have to see the text”. Often it actually would take me not only not less, but even more time to ‘proofread’ a badly translated text than to translate the source file.

It´s really a bit of a predicament and a trust thing for a customer, if they don´t know someone to ‘cross-check’ for them. Then some translators are or work like agencies or ‘resellers’, picking up orders and passing them on for less money, to different people, so you can´t be sure that if you got one or a number of good results, it will stay that way. With those again, some will be conscientious or at least troubled enough about their own reputation, that they check that they pass the jobs only to good translators, some won´t check, some aren´t even translators themselves, and don´t have any means to really know if the translations they will pass back to a customer are good or not.

What I find weird is that even gigs with such obvious red flags as ‘I translate any language in 24h 1000 words 5$’ (without any indication like 'we´re an agency of xxx people, who are native speakers of (insert number of all languages) languages working in shifts ;)) with lots of reviews=orders. If the price is the only criterion, ok, only how can one think one would get anything else than a google translation out of that, and then…honestly, just putting one´s own text into the google box will be faster than logging into fiverr and posting a BR or finding and booking a gig.

Good to hear you seem to get lucky, Gina - or more experienced with picking out the right people, whatever of the two it is, though I think luck, maybe not that much for translations for an Amazon product, but very much so for a book author, still much more for fiction, still is an important factor too, so the ‘Good luck!’ wish probably isn´t as strange as it may seem, though I assume it´s a bit like that with a lot of trust things, not just translations, but other things as well on fiverr as well as off-line when handing the car keys to the mechanic. 😉