Is the churn rate for PMs absolutely wild? Or do companies shuffle languages to prevent favoritism? Thread poster: Adieu
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Adieu 
Ukrainian to English
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I keep seeing new PM names on jobs from familiar clients and watching my favored PMs drop off. It's like a whole new roster every 3-4 months.
There's no decrease in job offers or any indication that I am falling out of favor with the old ones. They just kind of disappear.
Is there an industry practice to shuffle PMs between languages to prevent favoritism and cronyism? Or are they all literally leaving these companies every few months?
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From my experience, the fluctuation in the PM sector is quite high in general. However, I don't believe that there is such a difference in the situation now compared with the one a few years ago.
It's more likely that PMs are assigned new clients (e.g., long-term PMs getting assigned "bigger" or "more difficult" clients and new PMs starting with clients that are "easier to handle").
It's unlikely that agencies assign PMs to different languages (maybe apart from QA checks or some spec... See more From my experience, the fluctuation in the PM sector is quite high in general. However, I don't believe that there is such a difference in the situation now compared with the one a few years ago.
It's more likely that PMs are assigned new clients (e.g., long-term PMs getting assigned "bigger" or "more difficult" clients and new PMs starting with clients that are "easier to handle").
It's unlikely that agencies assign PMs to different languages (maybe apart from QA checks or some special projects), I've never seen it in the three agencies I worked so far. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Not my experience | Nov 23, 2021 |
That’s not my experience at all. I have been working with the same PMs for a long time. This probably happens with large or very large translation agencies and I made a choice long time ago of only working with medium to small agencies…
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Well I imagine these agencies treat their PMs even worse than they seem to treat you, so churn is the most likely reason.
Why would they want to prevent their PMs having favourites, aka using the most reliable translators?
While my looks and personality are undoubtedly irresistible, I suspect the return custom is more often down to the quality of my work.
The deliverables, not the desirables, one might say.
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Adieu
Ukrainian to English
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TOPIC STARTER
To avoid kickback schemes or a PM essentially running a subcontracting agency that gives itself jobs, extracts most of an inflated price through assignments to dummy translators with seemingly respectable resumes, and then farms out the lot of it to the absolute bottom end of the market for the actual work
[Edited at 2021-11-24 07:32 GMT]
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Adieu wrote:
To avoid kickback schemes or a PM essentially running a subcontracting agency that gives itself jobs, extracts most of an inflated price through assignments to dummy translators with seemingly respectable resumes, and then farms out the lot of it to the absolute bottom end of the market for the actual work
[Edited at 2021-11-24 07:32 GMT]
Do you have an unusually fertile and devious imagination, or does that kind of thing really happen in the murky underbelly of the translation world?
| | | | Kay Denney
France
Local time: 11:11
French to English
Robert Schünemann wrote:
It's unlikely that agencies assign PMs to different languages (maybe apart from QA checks or some special projects), I've never seen it in the three agencies I worked so far.
I dunno, that was how we split up the work at the agency where I acted as PM.
I was the only native English speaker most of the time, so I dealt with everything that had to be translated into English. If I had time and it was in my comfort zone, I translated it myself, if not, I outsourced it then proofread it.
My colleague sitting opposite handled everything from English into French, then another colleague, a polyglot, was known as AOL which stood for Any Other Languages.
| | | | Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 12:11
Member
English to Turkish
| I knew a PM like that once | Nov 24, 2021 |
Adieu wrote:
PM essentially running a subcontracting agency that gives itself jobs, extracts most of an inflated price through assignments to dummy translators with seemingly respectable resumes, and then farms out the lot of it to the absolute bottom end of the market for the actual work
[Edited at 2021-11-24 07:32 GMT]
I had the misfortune to make the acquaintance of a young American kid (both parents American, but grew up in Turkey due to his father's job in Turkey), who was working as a PM at a US translation agency (with good BB record here), when I first started freelancing.
This kid would search for and hire bottom feeders on Upwork, paying them an absolute pittance while pocketing a sizeable per word budget for himself. He wasn't running a translation agency back then, but eventually he did (with a terrible BB record, with a lot of payment issues). He got caught in the end, and the agency sued him naturally. I don't know what happened to him afterwards.
I'm sure growing up in Turkey had a lot to do with the development of his deviously (oriental) cunning mind.
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Adieu
Ukrainian to English
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TOPIC STARTER | Of course it does | Nov 24, 2021 |
It's an essential ingredient of the formula where first-world clients buy verrry pricey translation services from big name translation brands, yet end up with a translation by someone who got paid 0.015 USD / word.
Everyone signs stacks of NDAs and yet some stuff is subcontracted and re-subcontracted anyway.
Obviously, a large chunk of this occurs with the bought and paid for cooperation of bent PMs who side-hustle, because an honest PM would catch such BS pretty damn q... See more It's an essential ingredient of the formula where first-world clients buy verrry pricey translation services from big name translation brands, yet end up with a translation by someone who got paid 0.015 USD / word.
Everyone signs stacks of NDAs and yet some stuff is subcontracted and re-subcontracted anyway.
Obviously, a large chunk of this occurs with the bought and paid for cooperation of bent PMs who side-hustle, because an honest PM would catch such BS pretty damn quick even without wanting to. Revision stages need to get assigned to equally bent middlemen, else someone will quickly raise a stink, etc.
Ice Scream wrote: Adieu wrote:
To avoid kickback schemes or a PM essentially running a subcontracting agency that gives itself jobs, extracts most of an inflated price through assignments to dummy translators with seemingly respectable resumes, and then farms out the lot of it to the absolute bottom end of the market for the actual work
[Edited at 2021-11-24 07:32 GMT] Do you have an unusually fertile and devious imagination, or does that kind of thing really happen in the murky underbelly of the translation world? ▲ Collapse
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Adieu wrote:
It's an essential ingredient of the formula where first-world clients buy verrry pricey translation services from big name translation brands, yet end up with a translation by someone who got paid 0.015 USD / word.
Everyone signs stacks of NDAs and yet some stuff is subcontracted and re-subcontracted anyway.
Obviously, a large chunk of this occurs with the bought and paid for cooperation of bent PMs who side-hustle, because an honest PM would catch such BS pretty damn quick even without wanting to. Revision stages need to get assigned to equally bent middlemen, else someone will quickly raise a stink, etc.
I find it hard to see how there can be enough money in it to provide sufficient reward to all the different parties involved in your scheme.
Or how it could be anything but a very short-term scheme. I suspect the world has to some extent become inured to translations of low quality, but translations of appalling quality will always be problematic.
Either way, why don't you work for different clients if you suspect this is what is happening?
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