Low Quotation - Four Questions to Ask

Have you figured out how to add value, even when you don't get the job?

A client asked us to look into quotations on taking some marketing materials in MS Word and Adobe InDesign into Traditional Chinese. Our preliminary word count was around 15,000 total, and we spent time educating the client on how to deal with all of the graphics that had embedded text. Since they were marketing materials for an upcoming trade show, we put on our best neckties and helped the client think through the project as far as possible.

As we were preparing to analyze the files for a proper quotation and statement of work, I received this message:

"I wanted to let you know our Taiwan office has located a local translator that has quoted us $1800 for this job. Do you think your quote will be a lot higher? If so, there's no need for you to proceed. Just didn't want you to spin your wheels."

We suspected our quotation would be 3-4 times higher than that. What would you do? Would you:

1. Doggedly pursue the business, refusing as a matter of principle to be low-balled?
2. Upbraid the prospect for falling for such a low price?
3. Do nothing, considering it beneath your dignity to reply?

You'd have good reasons for any of these responses, I suppose. I gave it a good, long think over last weekend and replied Monday:

"That is quite low. If price is your paramount criterion, then you'd better go with that quote. In any event, you should make sure it includes:

• second set of eyes (besides those of your in-country reviewer)
• translation memory
• glossary (terminology list)
• desktop publishing + PDFs

Let me know how it goes."

We in the industry stand to gain nothing by scaring prospects, but since power in the Web 2.0 age seems to come from a delicate balance between giving everything away and keeping your families fed, perhaps our real value-add lies in helping prospects ask the right questions.

Your thoughts?

If you've enjoyed this article, you might like another one I wrote called "Why Are You Charging Me For That?"

Localization - Investment or Expense?

Would you rather expend or invest? Would your company rather expend or invest?

You walk into a pastry shop, buy a slice of cake and eat it. That's an expense because it doesn't last long and you can't use it to make anything else. You walk into a bank, buy a certificate of deposit and reap interest a few months later. That's an investment because it has some durability and you use it to make something else (more money).

A new client is testing the waters in Europe and Japan. To appear serious to prospects there, they asked me for a proposal on some multimedia projects they've hosted from their Web site. It took lots of phone calls and e-mail to ascertain exactly what they expected back, then lots of phone calls and e-mail to ensure that they had sent us everything we needed to estimate costs for a full, end-to-end solution.

They're a small company with solid domestic revenues and negligible overseas sales to date, so they felt sticker shock at the $3-4000 per language that this was going to cost. One of their executives tried to think nimbly: "See whether they can just do the voiceovers and give them to us. We can have our in-house editors replace that layer in the media files."

I don't mind nimble thinking, and I appreciate her attempts to save money, so I won't go into the many technical and quality-related concerns that this approach violates, but when I sent an adjusted quote, I wrote, "I understand that you had $1500/language in mind, but the original English media probably cost a good deal more than that, and you've likely forgotten what you spent on them because of how many prospects have clicked on them. I encourage my first-time clients to regard this is an investment, not an expense. If you choose your overseas markets and partners carefully, and handle translation and localization correctly from the start, your ROI will not be long in coming."

Do you agree? Have you spent time trying to convince your company's executives that good localization practices are an investment, not an expense? What's your favorite argument?

If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy another one called "Why Localize at All?"

We all [heart] PDFs!

Any good localization manager (vendor- or client-side) knows that there's very little you can do with a PDF as a source file. Yet time and again, we confront the best intentions of our customers and co-workers who say, "It's not a very large file, so it shouldn't cost much to translate. I'll send it to you." They send us a PDF.

This has happened to me with two new clients this week. We'd all like more translation business, and it's convenient that it exists as a lingua-franca format for us, but PDF is something of a double-edged sword.

PDFs contain everything we need to view a file, but not everything we need to extract the text, formatting, callouts, frames, tags, etc. from it. Creating a localization estimate on a PDF is asking for trouble, because it smooths over a multitude of different issues that we'll encounter once we have the source files, most of which concern text that we know requires translation, but which is not "live" in the PDF and may not be live in the source file from which the PDF came. It's the equivalent of hard-coded strings in software, or localizing a binary without the .properties or resource files.

There are, of course, utilities for converting PDF to RTF to capture the live text and formatting, and that's better than nothing, but it's probably still a far cry from the Quark or InDesign or even MS Word file from which you started. I've sent one of my new clients back to the drawing board several times this week already:

1. He gave me a PDF and I asked for the source file.
2. He found the source file (Quark) and I asked for the Photoshop files from which the text-bearing graphics had originated.
3. There were tables in the Quark file that were Illustrator objects, because these looked much better than Quark's native tables.
4. Another PDF of a Word document contains eight graphs created by engineers all over the building. He said he'd try to obtain the original artwork (probably PowerPoint, every engineer's favorite Etch-a-Sketch), but I'll be surprised if he can find it.

So, folks, we love to localize your pieces, but try to keep tabs on all the bits that you drop into them. We can do things so much better-cheaper-faster when you do.