Hi,
You’ll sell more translations if you offer your clients three service tiers: full-human translation, MTPE, and raw MT.
You’ll also be more competitive offering these services through your current freelance translators, experts you already know and trust.
But veteran translators are tired of MTPE being used as a one-way ramrod to cut rates.
Just last week I was offered a post-editing job at 3 cents per word. Fine… But there was no quality control before it reached me from scanned PDF-converted Word files. You can imagine what that looked like in a CAT tool: broken segmenting, tag soup, inconsistent and incorrect translations everywhere….
And instructions to deliver “near human quality”.
Right.
If the LSP doesn’t take the work seriously, nobody else will either. Cheap post-editors just pretend to improve it; they move a few words and tags around and call it a day. That’s all they really can do under the circumstances.
I’m sure the end client got it cheap, but I doubt they got much value. In fact, that workflow is virtually indistinguishable from raw MT. It just gives MTPE a bad name.
On the other hand, most veteran translators are willing to meet halfway when invited to a responsible workflow. We all see what’s happening in the market. It’s just that nobody wants to be stuck holding the short end of the stick in trust-destroying processes.
Clearly, the status quo isn’t working well for any of us. That’s why it’s time for a new approach.
What if you could give your best translators a better baseline? Let them work in their preferred tool, with their preferred workflow? Give them coaching and training that actually connects to value?
If you show your translators this respect, some will be willing to give it a try and really try hard, especially when you tell them what the client actually wants, not just what the ISO gobbledygook says.
With a better baseline, they can focus on improvements, not clean up.
And now your client gets a job that’s demonstrably better than free MT.
My GAIT-Augmented MT & MTPE workflow delivers the best baseline anywhere through:
