From time to time, I see translators complaining about the decrease in jobs, and I always see the same response that Gengo is based on who picks up the job first, or something related to Internet connections or having better equipment, and so on. But I've been here since 2016, and for the past year, I feel in my pocket that job projects have been decreasing. I used to have Gengo as my main source of income, and because of Gengo I invested in better internet connection and in a powerful notebook, so it wasn't a problem for me to get jobs. Another thing I've noticed is that the time at which jobs are or were posted is not suitable for the Brazilian time zone. The last weekly update I received (last year!) showed that jobs were released very early in the morning (Japanese or European time zone maybe?), which is not fair to Brazilian translators. I'm sorry to vent all these things, but I'm very discouraged with Gengo these days... we can no longer count on Gengo as a source of income. Fortunately, I have other clients to work with, but I'd like to see more opportunities here...
support
19 comments
Hi @Luciana!
Thank you for sharing your concern here in the forum. :)
The team is aware of the concerns of translators regarding the low volume issue. We will work on how we can improve this on our end.
However, regarding the time when the jobs are posted, it's out of our control. It's the customer's discretion when they order the jobs. I understand your sentiment, but we can't really do anything about this aspect. We appreciate your understanding on this matter. Thank you. 💗
Hi Luciana,
Probably much more translators agree with you than the 10 shown here because there is a technical bug: I voted by clicking on the upper arrow but if I click to go to the previous page and see other posts, then it shows only 9 and it remains on 9 even if I come back to this page. Then, I need to vote again...but I guess that many didn't notice this. For me, the huge decrease in the volume of jobs began last summer (summer 2022). I've already reported it thrice and I know that I am not alone. Luckily, I have other clients but my Gengo income has been divided by 4. Some individuals or agencies have most probably found a way to hack the system and siphon jobs. I hope that the Gengo team is checking if an agency or an individual suddenly took a much bigger volume of jobs than before.
I don't think Gengo cares at all if someone is siphoning jobs as long as they keep getting paid. I also think that's what's happening, because I'm getting jobs "rejected" by other translators that didn't even appear in the feed. Something fishy is going on and it's affecting all of us. For quite some time now, only jobs for a few cents have been showing up, and the higher priced ones are the ones that those mysterious translators have accepted and rejected in a matter of seconds.
Perfectly explained! Except that Gengo (or rather LionBridge) should be concerned about these unethical practices as they also affect customer satisfaction. After reading your article, I checked the jobs I was able to accept recently: except for one particular client who chose me as his preferred translator, all other jobs were rejected or marked as "translator exceeded the allotted time limit". They use several fake accounts (it's very easy for dishonest people...but no need to explain it here unless I have to...), and that's the explanation for overrunning the time limit even for very easy and short jobs. They hold them...and then the clients get their translations delivered later, by people who are only there to make more money. These unethical practices therefore have an impact on the quality of the Gengo service and the quality of the translations. And you are right: these vultures only leave jobs worth a few cents!
Hi @Mae and @logos! 😊
We understand your sentiment about this concern. Gengo cares about this issue. We've already raised this with the tech team, who are looking into it. Whenever you encounter something similar, please report this to the support team along with their translator ID so they can pass it to the tech team to investigate. We are grateful for your support and understanding on this matter.
Rica, you're saying this line again : "the team are looking into it", whatever the problem is, and that must be lies at some point (isn't community management basically being polite and lying to people?). Even sending reports about fraudulous activities with circumstances leads to no action on the matter and some more "we'll look into it" from your colleagues. Been there, done that.
Listen to Mae RP and logos_sarada's complaints : the job siphoning issue is coming back every month now. The RSS gate was just a smoke screen. Is Lionbridge really agreeing to let beefy translations get stolen from their workers' mouths by unethical practices?
See you on the next bi-annual survey.
Hi Claudius.
I understand this situation is frustrating for translators. However, we in the community management team raised this concern specifically to the dev team, who assured us they would look into it. For now, it is the resolution we can give on our end, as they are the only ones who can tackle and resolve this matter.
We are doing our best to address the concerns or issues raised in the forum. We are always grateful for everyone's support and understanding.
Looking forward to your input in the bi-annual survey, and thank you in advance for participating in it. 😊😊
Thanks for your answer, Rica. I know I can sound agressive, and I know the job-siphoning bots problem (or similar unethical practice) is something that has been in the air for a decade (translators that have been working for a longer time with Gengo can testify about your efforts to eradicate it). Personally, I can still make a decent side-income, although I feel like I have to fight for every cent and stick around the computer for much longer than before, but it makes me sad/irritated to read more and more people complaining about how their income had been literally divided, these months.
Working with Gengo is not just a question of money, also, as you can get your hands on materials from industries you would never work on otherwise. And I miss those, as the flux of big jobs gets slower. But let's keep on fightin'.
Any news on this problem? Is the tech team really working on it or is it just an excuse? It would be great if you could keep us up to date on the progress, just as you did with the RSS problem. We would be more reassured if we knew that you are really trying to solve the hack because, honestly, many of us make a living out of this and this problem affects us deeply.
It's sad that although the weekly stats show some volume of work last week, almost none of it reached our dashboards or the feeder. I'm only getting cents worth of work. My last payment barely reached $100. It's very frustrating. Something is definitely wrong.
That's right. This afternoon, only 3 assignments showed up in my language pair, all of them for only a few cents, and none of the 3 showed up on the feeder, only on the dashboard. And of those 3, one of them appeared, once again, rejected twice in less than a minute by the usual translators. As suggested by Rica, I sent a message to support yesterday but I've not received a reply yet. Am I surprised? No. I am more and more convinced that Gengo is not affected by this situation at all and therefore they are not bothering to fix it.
A situation which, from what I've seen in the community, affects ALL languages, so I doubt this is the work of just a few people.
@Rica Tero
Could we know if, after 7 months of regular reports, the technical team is now able to provide us with an explanation for the steady dizzying drop in the volume of jobs? Why, after more than half a year, is the problem still not solved? When will it be solved? We need precise answers, not "the dev team is working on it".
And still nothing... Am I the only one who has already given up on this platform? I truly believe that Lionbridge has perfected its AI translation and we poor human translators have been left to fend for ourselves, here at Gengo, surrounded by dust and lint.
I've been with Gengo since 2012 and, as was the case for other people, it was my main source of income for many, many years. I even have my Wordsmith t-shirt and my 1-million-words-translated hoodie. Over my years at Gengo, I became a preferred translator for about 50 customer accounts, from which I received the bulk of my jobs. Though I was never a fan of having to scramble in order to secure a job, I was always thankful for having the possibility of working here: the time limit allowed me to deliver jobs comfortably, the pay was fine (or very good in the case of Pro jobs), and the Support Team always provided top-notch service. Last year I upgraded my internet connection and got the paid subscription to Feeder Pro as an investment. I was even getting more work after the acquisition by Lionbridge because I was getting to work in some e-sports tournaments, and I also completed almost all of the courses at the Lionbridge website—which took quite a few days— hoping to land a job there.
Then whatever happened, happened; the volume of jobs started decreasing, some regular customers who used to send lots of jobs were never seen again (by me, at least) or they started using the platform less regularly, and I agree that there are probably bots siphoning jobs away, since the weekly overview emails always show there's a high volume of jobs but so many of us don't even see them (in my case, my PC is on about 18 hours a day). The e-sports tournaments ended, too, and getting jobs there was also very challenging to begin with, since you had to be as lightning-fast as in Gengo, if not faster. And my idea of working with Lionbridge went nowhere. The 5-minute RSS intervals were the final nail in the coffin for me. I would go days without hearing the feed notifications ring even once, unless it was for some .pdf file that had been rejected by 20 other translators. It felt as if someone had taken Gengo out the back and put two in its head: crippling and sudden.
While I'm still here in case anything pops up, I have accepted I can no longer rely on this being an even-somewhat-steady source of income and, since the 1 minute RSS intervals make it pretty much useless, cancelled my paid subscription to Feeder Pro and started doing something which I've known for a long time I should, which is learning to code in order to move to a more stable industry (I believe if you have a background in linguistics, you have a leg-up when it comes to learning code, as it is somewhat akin to learning new languages). For now, I'm still open to doing some work at Gengo but, as soon as I'm done studying and I get a job in that field, I'll probably be completely out. In the meantime, I'm at least making some money working with other crowd-sourced translation websites (while there are no jobs available that are as large as the ones that sometimes pop up in Gengo, at least the influx of jobs is more steady, so pros-and-cons, I guess). Naturally, I don't want competition over there to get as fierce as it's gotten here, so I'm not going to name the websites (also, it would be uncool to promote other translation companies on Gengo's message board, and I'm not into being ungrateful).
And yes, I'll admit that, like many messages on this forum board, most of my message is just me sharing my frustration and coping, but I hope that the people Gengo/Lionbridge might find some use for it. At the very least, it could serve as a warning when people who have been here for years (over 10, in my case) decide to go looking for greener pastures somewhere else (though maybe it's intentional and Lionbridge actually wants to get rid of the current work model for something that incorporates AI, but that's just me thinking out loud). My advice for them, if they want to keep their translator base, would be that they look into changing the way Gengo works by reducing the translator pool to only keep the best, most consistent translators (they've had enough time to figure out whom they can trust to deliver the best work) and create a job allotment system that guarantees each of them a minimum amount of money per month (again, this is just me thinking out loud).
Or maybe they've already done that and we're just the suckers that didn't make the cut! LOL xD
Hi everyone.
Sorry for the late response.
I am grateful to everyone who has shared comments here about this issue. We will take note of the suggestions you've made here. 😊
As I mentioned previously, the management is aware of this issue. We are doing our best to get more projects and orders for our partners. We hope for your understanding about this matter, as there are several factors that can affect the volume of the jobs, like changes in customer needs or demands. What I can assure you is that the team is continuously making an effort to create more opportunities for our partners.
The same vague answer as always. But we still don't know why the jobs that have been available for months are only worth a few cents, why almost as soon as they become available they are no longer available, and all those questions that we have been asking for MONTHS and for which we have not received any answer. We already know that "the technical team is working on it", but I would say that at this point they could at least give us a concrete answer and not treat us as if we did not deserve the slightest respect.
Hi Mae.
Our respect for our partners is always here. It is the reason why we are doing our best to address the concerns shared here in the forum, as we want to help create a great working space for everyone. But we can't give concrete answers to some of the questions that keep being asked here as the engineering team is really still working on them. We apologize that it is taking a long time, but we are asking for your understanding and patience. We assure you that we are in constant communication with them.
For some of the concerns you've mentioned:
The rate of the job will depend on several things, like its type, LP, where it is ordered, etc. On the other hand, we want to emphasize that there are tens or maybe hundreds of translators competing in your LP(s) for jobs. We don't disregard the possible bot usage suspicion (the CM and dev/eng teams are both investigating), but please note that there is a chance that a translator might have a faster internet connection and a better device that gives him an edge against others in getting a job at a specific time.
We on the CM team are thinking and doing things on our end to address the issues as well. I can assure you that we started an investigation related to this case this quarter, although I couldn't share any details with everyone yet. Again, we are asking for your support, understanding, and patience on this matter. We will surely give everyone a heads-up for any updates about these concerns. Thank you. 😊
Thank you for your reply, Rica. Once again I apologize for the aggressiveness of my words, I'm aware that it's not your fault. But this is exactly what we are asking for: answers, even if they are not conclusive, even if they do not imply a solution. Simply that you keep us up to date on the progress of this matter so that we do not have the feeling that we are being completely ignored.
Thanks again for your reply.
What's going on with Gengo? In the last few months everything has gone from bad to worse. A few months ago, they managed to partially fix the RSS feed, and everything worked fine for a while. I don't know if the RSS feed is failing again (I have it set to make a request every 60 seconds) or if there are no jobs available, but seriously, in the last month I have only received 4 or 5 notifications of available jobs and most of these jobs were for a few cents. What is going on? I have been working on the Gengo platform for almost 6 years and I have never seen so many errors and such a low volume of jobs as in the last few months. Please, it is urgent that you provide a solution to this.