Value for money

The Common Law of Business Balance generally attributed to John Ruskin (1819-1900) puts it in a nutshell:

There is hardly anything in the world that someone cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper, and the people who consider price alone are that person’s lawful prey.

It’s unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money – that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.

The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot – it can’t be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.

Of course, no one wants to pay too much for a service. Yet, what is "too much"?

A translation is no staple article like a washing powder where the quality is always the same. With such commodities, the price can be a clear orientation for your buying decision.

But even with a staple article like washing powder, things are not always that simple. If two shops offer exactly the same washing powder at different prices, you will pay more if you buy it in the shop where it is more expensive. But whether or not that is too much also depends on other factors. For instance, you may be going to that shop anyway because another product is cheaper there. So going to the other shop where the washing powder is on sale would be an additional effort – also spending money on petrol or parking if you are driving – that may be greater than the savings on the washing powder sale.

Yet translation services are much too complex to allow a comparison by a simple yardstick such as the price per line.

While the consumer knows that the quality of the washing powder is always the same, a client ordering a translation may not be able to judge the quality of the related work. After all, translations are requested because the client feels that he or she does not have a sufficient command of the target language. So the client often cannot know whether the translation is good or bad. Clients simply have to trust their translator in just the same way as they trust the structural engineer calculating the load-bearing structure of their new office building or the legal counsels who safeguard their interests.

Such a relationship needs time to develop. It grows with the experience that the translator is reliable and delivers translations that make sense for the client or the client's own customers.

But such a trust cannot grow if a company continuously commissions different translators simply based on who is cheaper today.

Consider this: In the European Union, machinery must be accompanied by operating instructions in the local language. For many manufacturers, this means nothing but a nuisance and unnecessary expense that they want to reduce to a minimum. Quality does not matter as long as the translation adds as little as possible to the cost of the product.

Yet if a manufacturer commissions an agency to prepare the translation simply because the website of that agency offered the cheapest rates, there is a big risk that the translation contains errors – after all, the translator working for that agency may have never seen the equipment (and strange as it may seem, these translators apparently never ask any questions).

Many manufacturers are unaware of the risk they take. If a person gets injured in an accident that has occurred because of an error in the translation, the manufacturer will not only have to face substantial claims for damages but, and that is worse, suffer a significant loss of reputation.

While the damages may perhaps be covered by insurance, the loss of reputation is usually not and the loss suffered will be a multiple of the mark-up the manufacturer would have to pay for a proper translation.