Temp agencies tend to collaborate, not compete, with professional services firm because the nature of the services and business models are totally different. Where professional services firm focus on providing expertise, temp agencies are generally focused on providing high-volume solutions for mass translation of bulk documents. In the words of a trusted friend and colleague at a Common-Sense Advisory Top 100 firm: “We don’t make a profit from small translation projects, anything below 10,000 words or so. Such projects are all loss leaders to provide convenience to the client.”
Imagine you’ve got a 9,000-word Share Purchase Agreement that you need to be translated. In the words of a very good and responsible Shenzhen-based translation company who told me about a similar project:
“This kind of project seriously worries me. First, we’re not going to make a profit off it. Second, the content is extremely difficult for anyone on our bench to handle, and it could lead to a client complaint.”
A manager from a top translation company who later went on to write about the industry cautioned clients repeatedly that good translation companies do not benefit greatly from these projects. Basically, these agencies generally don’t want you to send your complicated finance contracts to them. But if you have a big, huge finance litigation involving 3,000 pages of spreadsheets, then that is exactly the kind of thing they make a profit on.
The business model generates a lot of fixed costs in order to provide high volume. An outsourcer spends a ton of money on overhead to develop a strategic intellectual property asset: the translator sourcing list. This list must be really long, often 20,000+ names long, and contain lots of data. They must test, interview, and onboard a lot of people in order to be ready for big projects. The costs of maintaining these lists can eat up to 70% or more of the translation fees. The project managers achieve an economy of scale by being able to automatically contact dozens of translators all at the same time to involve them in projects. With automation, it might take longer to look up a single person with specialization than to batch e-mails out to 30 generalists.
According to the American Translators Association, there is a division of labor between professionals and outsourcing managers: the difficult, important documents are sent to professionals, and agencies provide a ramp up for very large projects. Thus, both translators and project managers participate in the association, each providing a different type of service to clients.
If you have ever hired a legal temp agency or worked with outsourced manufacturing issues, then you know that experts from outside the supplier’s organization need to provide both the specifications of what is being manufactured and perform independent quality inspections. You cannot simply allow an outsourced manufacturer to come up with its own specifications, or to allow them to ship products without carrying out any inspections of your own. The danger of doing so is extraordinary–a bad manufacturer can make products that pose lethal dangers. Likewise, in the legal temp arena, a lawyer cannot send reviewers to work without a protocol and cannot rely totally on their work without at least inspecting what they have done. If your contract attorney tags privileged documents for disclosure to opposing counsel, then it’s also your fault for not briefing them on privilege standards and checking to see if they are able to do it right.
Expert translators also do the same, particularly those who have training in translation quality grading offered both to university faculty and to certification exam graders. Personally, I sample translations, review issues, and tabulate data in these three categories:
| Critical Error | Any error caused by gross negligence or one that would endanger the client’s interests |
| Major Error | Omissions, additions, and substantive misstatements of the meaning of the document |
| Minor Error | Errors that would distract or hinder the reader, such as grammatical and spelling mistakes and incorrect word usage |
The supplier, which I unlike most industry insiders prefer to call a “temp agency,” will be asked to warrant that its defect levels are below a certain percentage, i.e., no more than 2% of segments contain major errors, and no segments contain critical errors. Then, I will randomly select a certain percentage of the documents, for example, 5%, to audit, and if the error rate is exceeded, the entire batch must be sent to their external editor for review and correction. Typically, offshore temp agencies can only achieve error rates below 2% when they are both supervised and working with simple documents such as spreadsheets and tables of data. On something like a business letter, expect 30% error rates unsupervised and 5% supervised. Onshore temp agencies can achieve error rates as low as about 1% supervised and 5% unsupervised on content such as business letters and reports.
Use of a triage system can be very effective with large e-discovery matters. For example, in a large matter involving 30 million words of Chinese documents, approximately 80,000 words were sophisticated legal documents, another 900,000 words were e-mails, and 29 million words were records such as spreadsheets, all produced by a team of over 300 contract attorneys and 8 attorneys from a white-shoe law firm. Thus, with a team of 3 experts to write a protocol and translate legal documents, 12 native-English translators to translate e-mails and letters, and 300 offshore contract translators to translate spreadsheet records, the entire translation project could be completed within one month with error rates below 1%.
Translation temp agencies usually approach me for advisory, audit, and training needs, and the companies that are interested in learning how to provide the best client service are the ones I would tend to trust with manpower temp needs.
Conclusion
Professional services firms and temp firms each play a unique role in translation just as they do in any other professional services industry. Where a temp firm can throw dozens or even hundreds of low-paid temps at a project, a professional services firm is committed to providing high-quality work and expertise. Therefore, they value an honest client relationship, and their clients value the higher quality of work they produce.
