Hi colleagues and CM team!
I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts about the way Translation Quality Index scores are calculated for requalified translators. Have any of you lost and regained your qualifications for any language pair? If so, what was your experience like?
A few words about my journey with Gengo to break the ice. I've been working with the company for over 10 years, translating in multiple language pairs. Around 5 years ago, my TQI for JP>EN, my weakest pair, fell below 7 and my qualifications were more than justifiably revoked. After that, I worked hard on my Japanese skills and also improved considerably as a translator overall. As a result, I passed the JP>EN test again and started working on projects for this LP once more, consistently submitting top quality translations for 4 years. Today, I received an automated message from the Community Management Team telling me that my qualifications had been revoked for a second time. After requalifying, most of my GoCheck reviews didn't contain any errors and all of them were above 7. However, because of the limited number of new GoChecks (I only got 9 of them!) and the fact that none of the reviews from before the first revocation were deleted, my TQI stubbornly remained at 6.8. And so, my JP>EN qualifications were stripped away again despite my TQI being within the 9 to 10 range when considering only the last 4 years.
From my perspective, this qualification system benefits neither Gengo nor us translators. The company stood by me during my learning curve, only to do away with my services based on a retrospective glance at data from half a decade ago. I took the time to redo two tests, at the Standard and Pro levels, and consistently improved to ensure top quality according to Gengo's specific guidelines, only to lose the opportunity to keep working on JP>EN projects at my peak.
Based on this experience, I would suggest one of the following changes:
1. More GoChecks after requalification: This would help balance out the impact of old scores, especially if more weight is given to recent performance. Remember, I only got 9 new reviews in 4 years!
2. "Clean slate" approach: Deleting old scores would ensure that the TQI reflects the current quality provided, without penalizing the translator for mistakes that could have happened a decade ago and are no longer representative.
3. Disallowing requalification: While I have made vast improvements as a translator during my career and believe this is true of most people's journeys, the current system can make it virtually impossible to maintain a good TQI score once its dipped below 7, even several years later.
I'm curious to read about other colleagues' experiences and thoughts. Maybe our collective feedback could prompt Gengo to reconsider their TQI scoring system for those of us who have requalified in a language pair.
Thanks,
Facundo
3 comments
Hello Facundo
Very strange indeed as supposedly the TQI score is calculated only on scores from the last three years.
See here:
https://support.gengo.com/hc/en-us/articles/231441287-How-Gengo-measures-quality
I would contact the quality team for an explanation. Keep us posted.
AlexF
Hi @AlexF,
Thanks for pointing this out! I wasn't aware of this new scoring method. With this in mind, the revocation seems even stranger given that I only had 9 GoChecks in the last 3 years and, as I recall, they were all above 7. I've emailed support and will try to get in touch with the quality team directly if I don't hear back from them. It's a pity that I no longer have access to my GoCheck history for JP>EN.
Will keep you posted.
Best,
Facundo
This is what someone from Support told me in their first email:
-The TQI and the translator score displayed to us aren't exactly the same metric. I asked, but was not told, how exactly the TQI is calculated.
-Only the last 3 years of GoChecks are taken into account.
This is what the same person told me after I pointed out there was no way my TQI could be even below 9 if the proper cut-off period was applied:
-In my case, there were very few GoChecks for the past 3 years, so the system took older scores into account anyway, some of which were probably a decade old.
-They were unwilling to restore my qualifications because they didn't have "enough proof that my quality had improved."
While I did work on a low volume of jobs the past 3 years, if at least a quarter of them had been reviewed there would be 10 new GoChecks. I suppose this might be due to the fact that longer jobs in file format (pretty much the only ones worth doing) are rarely, if ever, reviewed. In a nutshell, my work passed Gengo's standards as stated here: https://support.gengo.com/hc/en-us/articles/231441287-How-Gengo-measures-quality, but they decided to revoke my qualifications based on a score derived from extremely old data.
I have not contacted the Quality Team directly, but I wonder if it'd be any use, as this was likely a decision taken by them rather than the Support representative I spoke with.