{"id":846,"date":"2010-10-31T21:59:08","date_gmt":"2010-10-31T21:59:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/?p=846"},"modified":"2010-10-31T21:59:08","modified_gmt":"2010-10-31T21:59:08","slug":"lionbridge-upsets-translators-with-5-discount-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/lionbridge-upsets-translators-with-5-discount-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"LionBridge upsets translators with 5% discount demand."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of last week, LionBridge sent out an email to their &#8220;vendors&#8221; (freelance translators) demanding a 5% discount because of the economic climate and currency problems. It hasn&#8217;t taken long for people to comment in the blogosphere. Translators are understandably annoyed about this behaviour.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ve never been on the books of LionBridge as a vendor, but have received this kind of email from other large translation agencies in the past. What seems to have got on people&#8217;s goats about this particular email is&#8230;<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>blatant inaccuracies in the claimed reasons for the demand<\/li>\n<li>the fact that LionBridge has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lionbridge.com\/lionbridge\/en-US\/company\/news\/lionbridge-reports-highest-quarterly-profit-in-its-history-2010Q2-earnings.htm\">recently reported record quarterly profits<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Oops. Not very diplomatic corporate communications there.   :no: <\/p>\n<p>So, if the economic situation is still going down the tubes, why is there growth being reported in Europe and the US? If the dollar has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oanda.com\/currency\/converter\/\">depreciated by about 3%<\/a> against the Euro in October, why does the email say it has gone down by 5%? (You could argue that profit is retrospective and they are projecting forwards, but it doesn&#8217;t really wash &#8211; I&#8217;m just playing attorney-at-law-to-the-fallen-angel :devil:  here).<\/p>\n<p>But even disregarding these inaccuracies, the point remains that, as a client, you can <strong>request <\/strong>a discount, but vendors are <a href=\"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/understanding-the-free-in-freelance-tranfree-69\/\">free to say NO<\/a>. And in this case, I hope they do. Just say no to thugs! <\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/workingathometranslatormum.wordpress.com\/2010\/10\/29\/discounts-required\/\">Reference blog link 1<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/koti.kapsi.fi\/~watchman\/journal\/?p=810\">Reference blog link 2<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/traductor-financiero.com\/blog1\/2010\/10\/31\/a-personal-response-to-lionbridge-vp-didier-helin%E2%80%99s-unilateral-demand-of-a-5-discount\/\">Reference blog link 3 (includes full text of email)<\/a><\/p>\n<p>If you haven&#8217;t seen this video yet, you&#8217;ve got to watch it. It&#8217;s really funny&#8230;<br \/>\n[stream provider=youtube flv=http%3A\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch%3Fv%3DLeF7ykpRRc4%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded%23 img=x:\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/LeF7ykpRRc4\/0.jpg embed=false share=false width=550 height=310 dock=true controlbar=over bandwidth=high autostart=false \/] <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>At the end of last week, LionBridge sent out an email to their &#8220;vendors&#8221; (freelance translators) demanding a 5% discount because of the economic climate and currency problems. It hasn&#8217;t taken long for people to comment in the blogosphere. Translators are understandably annoyed about this behaviour. We&#8217;ve never been on the books of LionBridge as <a href='http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/lionbridge-upsets-translators-with-5-discount-demand\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,7,8],"tags":[13,68],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/alexeames.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}