Hey guys,
I am not exactly sure what is going on right now but there is definitely something wrong. I keep on seeing more and more instances of jobs only showing on the dashboard but never on the feed, including jobs from customers that have me amongst their preferred translators. I reported that to Gengo three times last year but, alas, to no avail, and got no answer. During that whole RSS Feed episode, it was clearly admitted that it was a thing, even though it was supposed to be only a very small percentage of jobs, but I am honestly beginning to doubt that. As for many of you, the volume of jobs that I see is not remotely close to what we're being told in the weekly updates, and I've been working on Gengo for eight years, so I have a good number of customers that have me as a preferred translator. So what exactly is going on here? What about these recent jobs in my language pairs (EN>FR) that not even paid $0.01/word? Has this become the sweat shop of translation? Hardly any jobs these days are being paid the right rate in my language pairs because of either the TM or the MTPE tag. This, I suppose, would be understandable if said machine translation tool was good and would save us time and improve our efficiency, but it's quite the opposite as it is appallingly bad and it takes more time to edit it than to do the whole job yourself. If Gengo wants to go this way, couldn't they at least use a half-decent MT like DeepL? I'm not even gonna mention the potential job siphonning from some unscrupulous users. As Luciana said in a recent post, these issues are affecting a lot of us and, in my case, I can hardly pay my bills anymore despite making about 2K a month on Gengo before the pandemic. Sorry for the ranting and looking forward to hear your opinions and takes.
6件のコメント
You're absolutely right about everything!
My language pair (EN>SP) suffers from the same issues. I also used to make up to over a thousand dollars a month, and now I'm lucky if I make $300. This used to be my main source of income, but since Lionbridge bought the company, jobs have plummeted and are paying lower and lower.
Unfortunately, Gengo doesn't seem to care about that because the only answer they give over and over again is "the technical team is looking into it", but they never give a solution.
Some things I've been noticing so far (my pair is EN>PT-BR):
1 - Gengo itself (and by this I mean even Dashboard, Tests etc.) takes a huge time to finish loading during some periods of the day (especially at night, UTC -3 here). I'm with an extremelly high internet bandwith (1 Gb) and still suffering ith these kinds of problems.
2 - Some jobs don't appear at all in the feed, only in the dashboard (it's a well known issue here).
3 - Some jobs that do appear in both feed and dashboard, appear in the dashboard before. It seems that it takes 60 seconds to refresh the feed but (probably) it could've been loaded to other users before that given time.
4 - Jobs rejected by other translators rarely appear in the feed.
5 - File jobs (those for you to translate an Excel, Word file or PDF, are even harder to take.
6 - For these same file jobs, even if you're extremelly fast and the job page loads, as soon as you click the button to start working on it, page starts loading and *poof*! Job's gone!
7 - Since the last update/fix, it's been much harder to get anything. Right before I started writing this, I was notified of four jobs and, even clicking right when their notifications appeared, they were already taken.
To add up, I've been noticing some jobs do appear in my dashboard but not at all in my feed. You may think that my RSS was broken. But right after I came across the issue, a job do appear on the feed but not in the dashboard even though I tried hard-refreshing my browser.
Frankly speaking, I doubt that the principle of "first come, first served" still holds true. Instead, we have to rely on the luck of where exactly jobs will appear.
Edit: My LP is EN>TH.
@Rica - Thanks for the reply. I was a little bit frustrated at the time I wrote the comment. I apologize for this, too.
@Turri, no worries. I can understand your feelings and sentiments on these issues. 😊 The community management team will do its best to assist with any issues or concerns raised here. However, for technical issues, the best that we can really do is ask every now and then for an update and communicate it with you all.
I assure you that all the concerns and issues shared here are always communicated with the CM team.