Localization Quality – Directly Proportional to Prices

As I discussed in my earlier posts about cost undercutting in the Indian localization market, the players are all in a frenzy of quoting low to grab more business. There is a huge unstructured segment too, dealing with some of the most important and voluminous projects. Add to this, the lack of and reluctance towards tools knowledge. Neither many of the agencies know how CAT tools work, nor do their translators own them. Low cost freelancers being used to save money are creating havoc to both quality, and timelines.

I had a friend working as a general manager at a popular children’s magazine. She narrated an incident which was as hilarious as it was an eye-opener. One of her Marathi projects failed on quality. She went down heavily on the contractor (a very prominent member on Proz and TranslationDirectory) and asked for an explanation about how it happened. To her surprise, the Gujarat based outsourcer said he had outsourced the task to a native Marathi linguist who had a very good hold on the language. Upon drilling down, she came to know that the ‘quality resource’ was a guard at the bank ATM next to the outsourcer’s home and was 'a good resource since he was from Maharashtra and spoke Marathi well’!! Exasperating – you may say, but this is actually the quality most of these ‘middlemen’ and companies are delivering. And obviously, it cannot be any different.

Another example was a multi language project we were doing a few days back. We outsourced 2 languages which were written using the same script. The work was probably more than the vendor could do. There were delays and we became anxious. When the files were finally delivered, we sent them to reviewers for quality check and lo! One of the reviewers came back and asked us for the correct language files! We checked and rechecked what had come from the vendor and what was sent to the reviewer, but we found that they were the correct files. When we confronted the agency, they did not admit their mistake and kept on insisting that it was a minor overlooking while copying translations, since their translators were not using the appropriate tools and they were pasting the translations into source files internally. However, when asked, they could not provide us the correct translations to be pasted in the files and we had to deal with an emergency.

One more interesting incident was with a freelancer whom we used for sundry tasks. Coordinators from my company are much friendly with the people we work with. The freelancer told one of the coordinators he wanted help with a new tool. Under curiosity, our coordinator connected his machine over Team Viewer, only to find that he was working on some task which we did not own. He asked why the agency which outsourced the task wasn’t helping him with the tool only to hear that ‘the agency said ask somebody from Webdunia since they do now know about it but Webdunia's coordinators will !’

While dealing with Indian languages, we frequently come across such stories and agencies, and shudder at the way people are handling business. The tendencies to provide incorrect information and sometimes even speak outright lies about capabilities are doing irreparable damage to the Indian localization scene and efforts of a few legitimate companies are being nullified by these. I hope, this does not usher-in the era of MLVs’ India offices.