Selling termbases and translation memories to clients? Thread poster: pgschreier
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pgschreier 
Switzerland
Local time: 04:56
German to English
Hi,
Do any of you sell the termbases and translation memories you develop to your clients? It seems like it might be an additional source of income; you can tell them that if they work with other translators they can leverage the work already done.
Or is this counterproductive -- throwing away the intellectual property that keeps them coming back to you and that boosts your productivity?
| | | | | Then you are selling your weapons that keep you servive | Sep 16, 2011 |
These are your tools (weapons), they are invaluable. If you sell them then you play against yourself. If you sell these tools, the client will use them for example at a low fuzzy level in Trados (or any other CAT tools) say about 50% fuzzy in a project, then they will come back to you just to check that translation. So, at the best levels, you will get paid half or less. While you could get paid for a translation not just checking, I will not say proofreading.
Mohamed
| | | | Steven Capsuto
United States
Local time: 22:56
Member (2004)
Spanish to English
+ ...
pgschreier wrote:
Or is this counterproductive -- throwing away the intellectual property that keeps them coming back to you and that boosts your productivity?
Yes, it's shooting yourself in the foot. Also your TMs surely contain text from other clients, and sharing that material violates professional ethics and client confidentiality.
| | | | | Your main asset is yourself | Sep 17, 2011 |
I don't really believe the memories themselves are that valuable. After all, the customer can take all their materials and do an alignment or ask an expert aligner to make a memory for them, at a reasonable cost. What is valuable in your business is yourself, your know-how and expertise. The memory is only a storage of things you have translated and eventually could translate again.
Having said that, I would not be particularly keen on selling memories, unless you were close to your... See more I don't really believe the memories themselves are that valuable. After all, the customer can take all their materials and do an alignment or ask an expert aligner to make a memory for them, at a reasonable cost. What is valuable in your business is yourself, your know-how and expertise. The memory is only a storage of things you have translated and eventually could translate again.
Having said that, I would not be particularly keen on selling memories, unless you were close to your retirement age. If you are not close to retirement, a customer could feel tempted to take your summarised expertise and give it to a cheaper translator, with the unfounded hope that a good memory will magically turn a bad or inexperience translator into a good translator. Some customers do not always understand that what makes good translations is not a memory, but a person.
On the other hand, if you use one memory for several customers, you simply cannot sell it to any of them since you would be selling a company the materials entrusted to you by their competitors. While this could sound terrific to the buyer, to me it is against sound ethics.
On another hand, if you are managing your retirement in a near future, you have another possibility: sell the memories to a fellow translator in your same areas of expertise, with an adequate approval by the affected customer. Maybe one additional task in your retirement preparations could be to search and test a translator in that area of expertise and suggest that the customer transitions from you to this person, thus creating the ideal setting for a sale of your memory to the new translator. ▲ Collapse
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Roy OConnor (X)
Local time: 04:56
German to English
If a customer is interested in the TM compiled during the translation of his contracts, then I would supply it for a token charge. After all, if he knows how to, he can do an alignment himself. Obviously, if a TM contains translations for other customers, then for reasons of confidentiality you would have to filter out the segments relating to their jobs.
With termbases the situation is entirely different. I use Trados and Multiterm. To speed up work I also enter words and phrases i... See more If a customer is interested in the TM compiled during the translation of his contracts, then I would supply it for a token charge. After all, if he knows how to, he can do an alignment himself. Obviously, if a TM contains translations for other customers, then for reasons of confidentiality you would have to filter out the segments relating to their jobs.
With termbases the situation is entirely different. I use Trados and Multiterm. To speed up work I also enter words and phrases in MT which I already know, but which I can enter into Trados just with a couple of keystrokes. It speeds up the work no end, but I doubt whether a customer would want to pay for such obvious terms, so they would have to be filtered out.
On the other hand a termbase may represent hours of research and looking up the terms. So these terms might be very valuable. The problem is a customer might not appreciate how valuable the termbase is. One of my customers requested the termbase used when translating their documents. They were most disappointed when I quoted what I thought was a modest price. So they didn't buy it in the end.
TMs for customer's jobs OK, but treat the termbases as your own property. I wouldn't sell mine unless I needed the money very badly!
Roy ▲ Collapse
| | | | | From translator to translator | Feb 21, 2015 |
Selling your TM to a client is a totally counterproductivity idea, not to say you might be violating an NDA or something similar, but selling to other translators fellows sounds a useful and even profitable procedure. I would buy a TM or, even better, a Termbase especific for an area of expertise, like Law or Marketing.
| | | | 564354352 (X)
Denmark
Local time: 04:56
Danish to English
+ ...
| Not in my world | Feb 22, 2015 |
Termbases:
I wouldn't dream of selling my termbases to anyone. They represent many hours of work, are based completely on my personal way of working, and therefore not in any way suitable for others to use.
Translation memories:
I wouldn't dream of selling my translation memories to anyone. Most importantly, that would violate client confidentiality. And again the amount of time that has gone into creating them could never be matched by the price anyone would pay for the... See more Termbases:
I wouldn't dream of selling my termbases to anyone. They represent many hours of work, are based completely on my personal way of working, and therefore not in any way suitable for others to use.
Translation memories:
I wouldn't dream of selling my translation memories to anyone. Most importantly, that would violate client confidentiality. And again the amount of time that has gone into creating them could never be matched by the price anyone would pay for them.
I work in Studio 2014, and if any client wants to have the 'uncleaned' sdlxliff files that I produce during translation, I send these to them for free. As others have said, CAT savvy clients could simply choose to align source and target files, and I just see it as a small additional service to save them the hassle. It also means that if at some stage I am unable to take on jobs for a particular client for whom I have done numerous jobs, they can send a TM extract or a pre-translated file to another translator who can draw on my translation work and hopefully produce a translation that is in line with work I have previously completed for my client's end client. I have no problem with that. Everybody is happy, but I guess this only works if you have a decent working relationship with your client and are not paranoid that they will abuse your flexibility. ▲ Collapse
| | | | jyuan_us
United States
Local time: 22:56
Member (2005)
English to Chinese
+ ...
| Your TM is usually useless for a different client. | Feb 22, 2015 |
So, no translation company will ever be interested in buying it.
This is simple: texts from different clients, even doing the same business, will be very different. Your TM would have very little to leverage on, if any.
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| I wouldn't buy a TM like mine | Feb 22, 2015 |
... And I certainly would not sell them!
While I do try to keep my translation memories up to date, I do not do it systematically, so there is absolutely no guarantee. I check what comes out, and delete or correct errors when I find them.
Apart from that, as others have mentioned, they contain confidential material which I have received from agencies. In the days of Workbench, when Trados could never cope with more than two TMs at a time, client TMs were all mixed in wi... See more ... And I certainly would not sell them!
While I do try to keep my translation memories up to date, I do not do it systematically, so there is absolutely no guarantee. I check what comes out, and delete or correct errors when I find them.
Apart from that, as others have mentioned, they contain confidential material which I have received from agencies. In the days of Workbench, when Trados could never cope with more than two TMs at a time, client TMs were all mixed in with my own subject termbases. There is no viable way of sorting them, so when I no longer need them myself, they will be deleted completely.
Termbases are another matter.
My main termbase is also a ragbag, It is so easy to add terms as you go, and now with Studio 2014 they can even be deleted or updated on the spot, so my advice would be to go and make your own.
I have had agreements with clients about building up specific databases for their subject areas. I charged by the hour for setting up the largest, with about 250 terms. Otherwise I simply send an Excel file with additions as they arise, and the PM coordinates them with the German terms from another translator.
I have another termbase that I have considered selling, but it was originally based on a small printed one which was not mine, and I have not checked on intellectual property rights. It is now partly out of date. A lot more work is needed to bring the current version up to saleable standard, so that one is not on the market either...
Theoretically, termbases might be a source of income, but they require an enormous amount of work, so they might be of very limited value if they are not complete, accurate and reliable. We all know how irritating dictionaries and glossaries are that only include the 'easy' terms that you know already, and few of the ones you actually need to look up!
Otherwise they tend to be very costly unless you can sell them to a wide user group. ▲ Collapse
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