ViaLanguage
Unethical, Dishonest

This company claims to follow industry standard best practices. It does not. It excels, however, at self-promotion. Claims on its website of accuracy rates of 99% are clearly exaggerated. Such statistics are difficult to determine in any industry; they are less reliable in matters of interpersonal communication, because the task of translation has an inherent number of gray areas. Yet viaLanguage has the audacity to claim not only 99% accuracy, but that the remaining 1% of errors are due to differences of opinion over things like style or formatting.in other words, their accuracy is 100%, and any mistakes are the fault of the customer.

This attitude of "blame the customer" is the real face of viaLanguage. Their primary motivation is not one of customer service, but of merely getting paid. If they were being honest, their slogan "say what you mean, " would really be: "show me the money, " since that is their primary, their only concern.

For example: viaLanguage talks about their 'teams of translators who use the best tools, the most up-to-date software, and who are all experts in the target languages.' In reality, when an order arrives, the job is farmed out to the lowest bidder, among any number of independent freelance translators that the company uses. Many translation companies employ no translators on-site, and in many if not most cases, no one at the company has ever met or even seen the people who do the actual work.

Their method for proofreading is spectacularly bad.in many cases, their proofreaders do not even speak the language that they are checking! Since they cannot understand the words they are reading, they can only look for formatting or numerical errors, such as whether or not the page numbers on a document are sequential.

How can they get away with this? The answer is simple: Most buyers of translation services are not the final consumers. Often, translation buyers do not speak the target languages, and have no idea what they're getting. They have to rely on others (in this case, their contact at viaLanguage) to tell them that the other language is accurate. They must have confidence that their translators can be trusted.

ViaLanguage's approach is to wring every possible dollar out of every transaction, both on the client side, by appearing to promise far more service than is actually completed, to the translators, by pitting freelance independents against one another in a bidding war. They rip off everyone and really only care about themselves.

William
Truro, Nova Scotia
Canada

Company: ViaLanguage
Country: USA
State: Oregon
City: Portland
Address: 309 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1200
Phone: 5032432007

  <     >