Wrong.

Take law firms. OK, maybe they are easy to pick on.  I put myself through university working as a paralegal; it’s a context I know fairly well.

At some point, most individuals and businesses need to seek counsel. With your physician, an attorney is the professional with whom you will have the closest – and possibly most dependent! – relationship. Trust, confidentiality, responsibility, reliability – maybe even caring – are as essential as subject-matter expertise.

Referrals and notoriety remain the top ways to gain new clients. Yet, in recent years, law firms have realized it is not enough to ensure durable growth in a highly competitive (not to say cut-throat) climate. They have invested in their Web presence, and some even have business development and/or marketing departments.

Lead generation is the primary reason for investing in a Web site. Web content aims to inform, educate, entertain. Web copy seeks to influence and persuade the reader. Professional services firms’ websites need an appropriate balance of both.

A Web site’s landing page is key to visitor retention. In other words, to get the prospect to click and discover the content of your website.

Are major legal practices’ Web sites speaking with their potential clients or at them?

To answer the question, I picked the top 10 American firms by revenue from the most recent survey available on the Internet (2007 figures) out of a listing on the world’s 100 largest law firms and captured their landing pages. You can see them all here if you like.

Call it a coincidence, if you must, but the No.1 American firm on the list is also the ONLY one to use you or your on its landing page.

The Flash object in the middle of the page presents Baker & McKenzie’s four core values by speaking with the client or prospect. (The only criticism is that this is in Flash, which is not optimal for Web referencing).

The first item in the navigation menu on the top right corner of the page is “Supporting Your Business”. The rest of the global Web site does not disappoint. They’ve made it a point to frame interesting and catchy copy into a conversation with the visitor.*

None of the other sites on the top 10 list speak with the visitor, even if most of them are generally well-designed.

Compare this, if you will, with the landing page of a well-known, prestigious, New York City law firm, which is not on the top 100 list. Correction: it is not even the landing page. The visitor first has to choose whether he wants general information or career information. The entire site is in Flash, leading to clear SEO and accessibility issues.

The copy is mind-numbing.

Passive voice, overwriting and not a single reach out to the reader.  Compelling copy?

What do you think?

*I have neither worked for nor hired Baker & McKenzie and have no relationship of any sort with the firm.

Some time last year, a client – we’ll name him Monsieur M. to protect his good name – asked me to translate a press release from French into US English.  This communiqué announced a major event for his young company and was written in a very ‘markety’, trendy and catchy style.

As is often the case, a close-to-the-source-text translation would fall flat. Also, and readers, you know this: a press release for the US market is structured quite differently from a French communiqué.

So I revamped the document to make it fit-for-purpose. Adapted the style and mode of communication (French is a high context language and culture, American a low context one). Rreplaced French popular culture references with American ones. Polished up the text and sent it off to Monsieur M.

An hour later, the phone rings.

Monsieur M.: Patricia, you’ve sent me the wrong file. This is not the translation I asked for.

Me: Pardon? [panic attack sets in] Hang on; let me look into this …. [Double-check sent email and attached file]. Si, si! It’s the right file [provide file name], are you sure you opened the right document?

Monsieur M.: I am sure you sent me the wrong file. My communiqué had 4 paragraphs and 24 lines. This file has 5 paragraphs, but only 17 lines. And everyone knows a good translation respects the source file’s layout and appearance. This thing does not look anything like my communiqué.

Yesterday’s post brought a wonderful surprise: the Bel Group sent each member of the project team a lovely album illustrating the two years of work invested to launch the Maison de La Vache qui rit.

An elegant and thoughtful gesture to thank everyone and celebrate the team spirit that made this project a success.

That made my day!

Don’t get me wrong, I am strongly in favor of independent professionals charging professional rates commensurate with the level and quality of service rendered to clients.

The New Year “cost of living adjustment” rate increase reflex is perplexing for several reasons:

1. It’s predictable and, as Simon Turner underscored in his presentation at the SFT’s Journée mondiale de la traduction in December 2009, it is counter-intuitive from a marketing standpoint. Building client loyalty is even more important than getting a rate increase from January 1. It’s a smarter move to announce a rate increase, but tell your clients that ,*for them*, it will only be applicable say from June 1. He has a few other tactics up his sleeve that make this (small) discount pay off even more.

2.  2009 inflation rates in the US, Euro zone and Japan, for example, were modest or negative: 0.5 % in the Euro area, 1.8% in the US,  and - 1.9% in Japan.  A cost of living rate increase per word three digits after the decimal point hardly seems worth bothering clients about.  Say you charge 0,20 cents per word and increase your rate by 1.8%, your rate adjustment is 0,0036 cent.

3. Also, if you use inflation to legitimize rate increases to clients, then clients should also expect rate cuts in line with negative inflation.

Two suggestions:

As a buyer of professional services, I’d be annoyed if my suppliers took up my time to announce absurdly small rate increases. Also, this would tell me these professionals:

a) Take a unit cost approach, rather than an added value approach, and

b) Are not making the best use of *their* time.

Rate increases are worth discussing with clients when they represent a measurable shift. Moving from 0,20 to 0, 2036 is not worth the stamp, phone call, e-mail, time. Moving from 0,20 to 0, 22 or more is.

Explaining that increase changes the conversation with clients and the professional’s positioning. Your years of experience, continuous professional development, investment in resources and expanded scope of services, to name a few and all of which provide noticeable added value to clients, are worth much more than just a cost of living increase.

Taking a consultant’s approach is another way to focus on service rather than price.  Incremental cost of living rate increases suggest that translators work on a fixed-rate basis, regardless of the unit count used (source words, target words, hours) – whether that fixed-rate is of a “one-sized fits all” variety or further refined to consider specialization, format, urgency, night or weekend surcharges and so on.

In my mind, this prevents the professional translator from being able to link the value of the service he/she provides with the effort (read time, expertise, tools) needed to provide that service *at a given time*, and to call on extra resources as may be required for the project’s complete success.

I can hear some of the objections as I write: “But we have set rates for various scenarios, which cover various types of projects, formats and deadlines.”

Maybe. But at some point:

• You’ll undersell yourself (not fair)
• You’ll overcharge your client (not fair either)
• Or you’ll have a set of announced rates (to increase them, they have to be announced, right?) that could lead you to fall into a full dancer’s split hard to explain to some clients.

Not having a set rate is one reason I rarely work with agencies: many (if not most large ones) expect translators to commit to a set rate for at least a year (often more) regardless of the project commissioned and regardless of foreign exchange rates. Yet each project is different, each client’s needs and goals are distinct, each project’s impact is specific – which is part of what makes this profession so interesting.

Does this mean I charge whatever my mood feels like on a given day? Of course not. I have a “drop-dead” rate under which I will not accept a project, regardless (or I take it on pro bono or in exchange of services).  But I have found over the years that it is preferable to estimate a project – once I have all the needed information – on a fee basis (even if I then convert it into the client’s desired unit, as the case may be, such as source work, target word, hour, “feuillet”…) because that proves to be most sensible and fair to all parties involved.

When translators gripe about lousy or falling per word rates, the first advice others give is look for direct clients. That is not the right reason to prefer them and there is no guarantee net income is higher as a result.

Please note that I am referring to professional rates: if a zero follows the comma or period (depending on your country), it is not a professional rate. Also, I am addressing that part of the translation markets (sic) centered on translation as adaptive copywriting (or transcreation, as it is sometimes called), my bailiwick.

A couple of my colleagues posit there should be no difference in the rates charged to direct or agency clients as long as the expertise and service provided are the same. To an extent, I agree with them: why should there be a difference based on who writes your check? But the service is rarely the same: for example, at minima, professional translators pay a proofreader to do a final check before returning work to direct clients while agencies take on that task (do they always?).

Focusing on unit rates for translating instead of the hourly income earned with all aspects of running a business included can distort reality. I’ve not found any statistics on this: based on my experience, I estimate the net income earned by an experienced translator working for agency clients is similar to that earned by a translator working only for direct clients. If anyone has statistics, let me know.

Why, then, would one prefer working for direct clients rather than agencies, given the time it takes to find them, land them, keep them and secure a credible marketing backlog?

It depends on how one is wired up. In companies, some staff prefer to carry out and some prefer to spearhead. The same is true with translators: some draw satisfaction from the security of cruise control — work comes in, you translate it, you send it back, sometimes you receive feedback, you invoice and get paid (ok, I’m simplifying slightly). Even those who prefer that matrix will complain sometimes about “the black hole”: the frustration of not knowing what the end-client thought of their translation or where it ended up.

Others need the buzz that comes from seeking opportunities that allow moving beyond *production* (for lack of a better word) to partner as consultants in a client’s project.

I, for one, need that buzz. It does not happen overnight. It takes time make your way through concentric circles. A first collaboration places you at the outskirts, where last phase production largely disconnected from an existing project takes place.

With time, smart client management, mutual trust and recognition of your added value, opportunities arise that bring you further inside those concentric circles where upstream decisions and programming occur.

It’s not just about rates. It is a personal choice between relative stability and predictability and being motivated by the risk inherent to a client expecting you to stick your neck out and the adrenaline rush that comes with it. Perhaps it boils down to what makes one’s entrepreneurial fiber tick.

For example, I’ve just spent several months working almost exclusively on one project. The instant availability it often required so far precluded my taking on other significant projects simultaneously. My net hourly income, all told, would probably have been better had I been on cruise control working with agencies.

The opportunity to integrate La Maison de La vache qui rit’s outstanding project team I had been hearing about for over a year set off my “buzz meter”. Indeed, my role exceeds being its dedicated translator to include intercultural communications and pedagogical consulting (institutional, tourism, children), adapting and copywriting all English language materials in and about the Maison (print, web, video, multimedia), editing French language materials for intercultural relevance and consistency, and so on.

The buzz comes from working on a “feel good” project (how can you not smile or recall childhood memories with The Laughing Cow staring at you every morning?), teaming with talented and convivial people, knowing your expertise made a real difference, having that added value recognized by your client, and seeing the result of the team’s work.

Sometimes, my checkbook advocates cruise control. It does not realize that, for me, absence of periodic adrenaline rushes would liposuction creative energy. Knock wood, another nifty project that has been in gestation since last December should be gelling soon.

Buzz takes time…

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At dimanche, 24 mai, 2009, Blogger mamouyal said…

Marilyn Amouyal, medical translator