I've submitted some jobs which had 240h to be approved. It is already over 12 days. They are still waiting in reviewable jobs and pending second pass status. I didn't get any feedback to re-check my jobs during this time period. I sent an e-mail about this, but no response yet. Does anyone know why it happens and when are these kind of jobs approved?
support
114 comments
@Busra - Thanks for bringing this up. I will check with the team to ensure your jobs are processed.
@lpan278 - Deadlines do apply to Gengo and customers as well, but it seems like there has been some system issues with the approval of some jobs, and hence why it's taking a while to sort through these. Please do note that this is not a regular event.
@Lara Fernandez
Hi Lara. This is my first time working with Gengo and ALL of my jobs didn't get approved within the stipulated time. They are still under review process up to this very minute. Could you help me escalate?
To be honest, my first experience with Gengo isn't what I expected at all. Kind of disappointing. The approval hours are explicitly stated there, I wonder why they are still under review process. Submitted a support ticket and they said I had to wait for 13 days. Well, 13 days have long passed too! I'm getting more and more frustrated. I could've withdrawn my money days ago, but now I'm still waiting for I-don't-know-why reason. Please resolve this issue soon, so we won't have to feel like "deadlines are only applied to translator".
Thanks. :)
@Hui Joy Ooi — it’s really unfortunate that this ha been your first experience with Gengo :( I actually received a similar email from someone else yesterday as checked with the team again. It seems like this situation is affecting jobs belonging to one specific customer/project across several language pairs. I checked with the team again and requested they speed up the process, so I hope that this can be solved within the coming week. Please do know that I understand your frustration and I find it concerning that this is happening, and I’ll be following up with the team again. Thank you very much for your patience in the meanwhile.
@Lara Fernandez
Thanks Lara for your action.
While I understand you can't decide the deadlines, I really hope the client can be faster. :)
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that the client has every right to check every string, even every word and letter, but what stated there is what stated. The review hours have long passed, really.
I adhere to the guidelines and dates, it's only fair that the other parties also follow them. But alas, still this is what happened.
As Ipan278 mentioned above, this client team expects to finish the approval by the end of this week, so I hope it's true.
But your comment indicates that they might make it to another week. Well, well, well.
If they decide to make it to the coming week, it's fine too. :)
Hopefully it won't be extended again as this is really unacceptable.
I just want to get my rewards on time and cash them out before 18th.
This is unusual, I get it.
But it does say something about the whole process. Some improvements should be made.
Thanks again for your help.
Let's wish the client does what she/he/they need(s) to do and we all get our money.
Shouldn't there be some kind of intermediate layer between translators and client, e.g. a project manager? From my POV, the most logical thing to do would be automatically count these jobs as approved and still allow the end client to request amendments that they might have to pay an extra for - or not (!). It should be a matter of the business relation between Gengo and the client, not between the client and the translators. I understand that Gengo may need to be flexible with the conditions offered to clients, but for the translators the rules should be clear-cut: 240 hours are 240 hours... alternatively, you could set the review time to infinite, so that at least translators know about this upfront, and everyone can decide if he or he is willing to accept that!
I am here for the same reason, I worked for that customer too, and my jobs are still under the editing, and those, which I edited that day after other translators, are being "reviewable". A support staff member has answered me today that jobs will be approved "as soon as possible". More than two weeks have passed since I completed the work, I should notice. Well, let's make it clear: even if the collections are finally approved today, all reasonable terms have already expired, and it does not look like the strict deadlines for translators at all! So, yes, the deadlines are only for translators, we get it right.
Hello. I'm here to tell you the same thing happened with me for my pair (EN > PT-BR), both for Standard and Edit jobs, all of them completed either on 20th or 21st (240h approval,, so I'd expect they would all be accepted by 31st). But, since then, no clue of what is happening.
So some translators submitted machine translations? Anyone else like me having difficulties imagining why anybody would use machine translation for this kind of job? Must be one hell of a lot of copying and pasting ...
Still faster than typing, I guess (assuming the assessment is correct).
I gave one of these collections a try (it was a large volume after all) and quickly realized that as they consisted of single short strings and sentences ripped from a wide variety of contexts and sometimes quite long texts of various difficulties, these collections weren't worth my time at standard level. While the context was provided (which is commendable), you more or less had to check it for each job/sentence and as the topics varied, it was easy to stumble over one or several strings that required even further research.
I also took a look at some of the edit jobs and (somewhat understandably) quite a few seemed to ignore the context. To say it with Mister T: I pity the fools who picked those up for proofreading as they, too, would have to check the context or do research for a lot of strings for an even lower rate. If Gengo sticks to its policy that full ownership of collections passes to the proofreaders, those might be in for a world of pain.
Depending on how many of the translations need to be revised, it probably would make sense to take a good look at the initially submitted translations as well to make things a bit fairer.
Then there's the question of how the customer determines if MT was used and who is responsible for that. E. g. in my opinion it makes no sense to reject a translation that reads naturally but happens to be identical to machine translation unless that's the case for nearly every single string. And it certainly can't be the responsibility of the proofreader to catch that.
Yes, I know what you mean Chris. I did quite a few of the original jobs and avoided proofreading altogether for exactly the reasons you mentioned. As we were specifically instructed not to use machine translation I even checked sometimes what Google Translate had to say, compared to my translation.
It's sad, really: these cheaters are grabbing most of the jobs and leaving it to the Editors to fix the mistakes... for less money.
It's best to avoid editing I guess. I doubt that system works as intended in any case.
I'm still having my doubts, though, if people really used machine translation. Even before I started working on these collections, I somehow expected this kind of situation to come up. I also noticed that at least in my language pair, which is English to German, people were extremely slow to pick up these jobs, as opposed to normally, when all collections are gone in the blink of an eye.
The point is that, even though these jobs are difficult, or at least quite labour-intensive, they are treated like something that you don't need especially strong skills for and that you could do quite quickly (Standard level). On top of that, the whole project is for training an MT algorithm to make translation even cheaper. But I really doubt that this will work, because the contexts are so diverse. Some are only explained in video, others require thorough Googling... Current MT algorithms even struggle with incomplete sentences and sloppy punctuation, which are both frequent in these collections. Therefore, IMO an algorithm that could translate all this stuff would be about 2 or 3 generations ahead. We'll see if I'm wrong or not - because if it worked, it would be a revolution we'd surely hear about...
About MT, I can say some of the Edit jobs I received are totally machine translated (same typos from source text, words that are polysemic translated wrongly, words that are miswritten not translated - because machine can't detect that word, for sure - etc.) although it's, obviously, forbidden to do that. So I wonder what measures would Gengo take to these jobs, since further than not getting some jobs (I rarely can get docx or xlsx jobs, they're instantly taken) and not even translating decently.
All my - NOT machine translated - collections still pending. Even if some other translators actually used machine translation, why aren't just their collections pending?
I submitted the first one on 21 August and the last one on 23 August. As I didn't do any editing, I don't get any requests for revision. Is there any progress at all?
Hi Heike — as the email explained, we are aware that not everybody submitted MT. However, also as explained in the email, because some did, this has triggered a more thorough investigation that goes well beyond the random scope of GoChecks. There are 800+ translators involved in this project, across several language pairs, and we’re in the process of reviewing the translations to ensure they meet the quality requirements *before* delivering to the customer. It’s certainly not ideal and we hate to have to keep you waiting, but due to the issues aforementioned, this is being done in order to ensure the continuity of the project.
I will sync with the team in charge tomorrow to see if there’s any update or new estImated day for resolution of this problem. I appreciate your patience in the meanwhile.
Hi Lara, thank you for your reply. Well, I guess I just hope that this thorough investigation has the result that any cheaters will not be allowed to work for Gengo in the future, so there will be no generalized distrust any more next time and that the result will be an improved work culture. Otherwise I can imagine that nobody will accept this kind of task any more, or maybe only translators that are new at Gengo. I already noticed that they were taken only hesitantly as opposed to normally. Not only is this sort of task difficult, with low quality language to be translated and a lot of reading or listening up on context involved and then not very well paid, but also we are all under suspicion now. That bothers me even more than the delay in getting paid.
I'm 100% with Heike. We are not too worried about the money right now, we are fed up with cheaters getting paid, and getting most of the jobs, it seems. And by the way, translating 400- word jobs in 9 minutes - when other PRO translators needed over 30 minutes for the same kind of jobs - should raise a big red flag, I believe, unless we are dealing with a genius.
@Heike and @carla -- I hear you, and I agree 100% with both of you. I am hoping that this unfortunate situation that we're finding ourselves in right now will at least have a positive outcome in addressing the issues you bring up regarding those who don't follow the rules. Thank you so very much for your patience!
Gengo should of course pay the money they owe the editors in due time, then turn to the failing translators! This is unacceptable!
@Uffe - That's not what it seems to be like. As far as I understand it is not the customer but Gengo who is holding back the translations, as Gengo believes to have noticed that translators used machine translation.
I assume machine translation includes translation memories like trados?
Meanwhile, another big project has arrived (from another customer I believe) requiring "100% human translation". Will be so funny if anyone dares to submit MT once again and lets the honest translators down the same way. And we don't have any protection against that case, huh
Totally uninteresting if it's MT or human T if the result is of good quality.
@Lara Fernandez
Hi Lara.
Quoting your reply dated Sunday, "I will sync with the team in charge tomorrow to see if there’s any update or new estImated day for resolution of this problem".
Could you let us know if you received any updates?
As you can see, a whole week has passed, none of the tasks were approved.
Please understand that I (I can't speak for everyone) will not wait forever, my patience is wearing thin.
If this problem persists another week again, this is a bad look for Gengo.
Yes, you need to resolve the MT problem, but why are we the ones taking the blame?
Because you need more time? Just look at how long we have waited. It's going to be a full month in 5 days. :)
It's simply not fair.
Well, I'm not an experienced "MT sniffer" in this case, but if all an established company like Gengo can do is to let all the translators, editors, etc. to wait patiently while using about (or maybe more than) 30 days to find out all these bad eggs, this is some very serious issue.
Please come up with a satisfactory solution ASAP, with specified dates indicated and the actions you are going to take against these MT users and if possible, do something to restore our confidence.
Lara, again, I know you are doing all you can for us. I really appreciate that.
But this is just a very frustrating situation, and we the linguists only want our hard-earned money and get rid of these unprofessional people.
And for me, the former goal is just equally if not more important than the latter one in my personal case.
Thanks.
How do you know Uffe. If human translation is requested, there will be a reason for it, even if we don't see it.
I'm sort of tired of all the Gengo bashing. Gengo has pros and cons, it's in the nature of this way of offering translations. Am I frustated at times, yes I am. Still I can see that it must be very hard for Gengo to do what it does, and do it properly. If the customer isn't satisfied, we all will be out of work here and won't see any money at all.
Anyway, I want to state clearly that I am grateful to Gengo for giving me the chance to translate all sorts of text and get a lot of practice.
@Heike S.
Not sure if my posts sound bashing to you.
It's not my point to bash Gengo or anything. We all agree to the terms and conditions stated by Gengo and would be more than happy to receive the rewards if we did it good, and of course get the respective punishment if we did it bad.
It's when all the "reasonable terms have already expired" (Quoted from Дарья's post) and this seems leading to nowhere, I decided to reply to this post again.
If today Gengo offered a good solution, I'm sure none of us will feel that way, and certainly nobody will write these posts.
Plus, I'm pretty sure there are still some translators who involved in this project but still have no clues why the jobs aren't approved.
I was one of them. It was only through reading the conversation you had with Chris, I got the answer that MT was the reason behind all these delays.
I wonder why a mass email wasn't sent to explain this situation to related parties? Is it some marketing strategy? I have no idea.
If my posts sound bashing, well, that's not my point.
I'm just trying to contribute my part in urging Gengo to come up with a satisfactory solution.
I want to make sure I'm heard and see if they value our opinion enough.
Lastly, I have hinted multiple times I understand how this is also a difficult time for Gengo but this is simply not the best answer.
The way this whole thing is going is unacceptable for me as well, to be honest.
I'm not sure if I can say I'm grateful to Gengo since this is my first time working with this company, but I can see you are enjoying your time here.
Perhaps that person would also be me if this did not happen.
Good for you!
Hi Yam! Actually, I did receive an email with detailed explanations and found out of MT case exactly from there. Strange that not everyone affected received that. Just pointing at this to be fair, but I'm not arguing as I obviously agree with the most part of your comments.
Hi @Heike S.
Oh, I see! So they do send out emails, but I didn't get it. :(
Thanks for letting me know about that.
Yes, I completely understand what you meant and it's always good to have different voices on the same matter.
This is an open community and we are all free to express our feelings (provided it's constructive).
It's midnight here and I'm going to sleep.
Nice to e-meet you, Heike!
Have a great day there.