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
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Hi all – sorry to have kept you waiting the whole day. Once again, we understand your frustration and appreciate your patience throughout this entire time.
I'm happy to announce that, while the jobs for this project remain in Held status in your accounts, we've been able to issue payment for them, and you should be able to see that rewards have been credited to your account a few moments ago with the comment #fb_held_translator_payments. We will follow up with emails that include individual rewards soon.
Please note that:
We understand that the delay is unacceptable, and there's little that we can do to change the experience that you've had over the last month. We do hope, however, that the issuance of payment today, pending QA, serves as proof of good faith and can help in restoring your trust in Gengo.
Once again, thank you all for your patience, feedback, and for raising your voices so that we could take action on this issue.
Lara
Sooo?
I don't use Google translate, but I'm sure it can't be wrong 100% of the time. In the project I worked on, there were a lot of short sentences, so I'm sure that some of them would match Google's translation. Sometimes there really is only one way to translate a sentence, and if they insist that you must change something simply because it matches machine translation the quality will suffer in my opinion.
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!
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.
My congratulations to Gengo and especially to Lara for this thread!! (And of course for the preliminary solution that has finally been reached.)
It is really remarkable to see how issues like this are being treated in a public forum. I think this is very positive, because the message it sends is that Gengo doesn't have anything to hide. On other, similar platforms (or in other industries for that matter!) you would practically never see this kinds of things discussed in public - at least not in a forum owned by the company!
This is is a very modern, forward-thinking way of community management because it is a lot better to take peoples' concerns seriously, discuss them openly and try to find solutions rather than trying to silence things, because in the current digital world that's not possible anyway.
Similarly, it is very good to see that all the critical postings about GoCheck reviews are not being censored (unless certain red lines of civilized behavior are crossed). Even though not all issues are solved and some people are clearly not happy with the fairness of their quality feedback, at least Gengo is being transparent! All platforms of this kind need to solve the challenge of quality assurance in some way, although most don't really explain how they do that! I bet that all of them are (inevitably) unfair in some occasions, but as far as I know Gengo is the only one that allows us to complain about that in the platform's own forums!
@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.
Hello,
I was just wondering if there are any updates on this situation. I know you are working hard to resolve this issue, but I just thought I would ask.
Thank you in advance.
@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. :)
@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.
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?
What now? People are counting on those money, okay??!! This is so messed up!
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.
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...
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.
Gengo should of course pay the money they owe the editors in due time, then turn to the failing translators! This is unacceptable!
I already suggested this by email to Gengo Support, but let me do it again here.
Since this thing went passed two payout rounds, my proposal is to include any new approvals in the payouts for THIS round (25th sept.), or, in case no approvals come through by the 25th, to indeed squeeze in an extra round of payments (say after a week instead of two, ie the October 2 instead of 10).
This way Gengo can do some damage limitation and we, the translators, can keep our trust in the company.
Doesn't Gengo have enough money to pay the translators first, and then solve problems with the client? This is not our problem, why should we be responsible for it?
@Trustlator, that's what I remembered, more or less. And it seems like a pretty normal instruction to me, but it seems some of our dear colleagues chose to ignore it....
The instruction only says that they were going to check it and that the translations should not "resemble one of [the MT providers] too much". Of course I didn't check MT translations before providing my versions because what they needed was just a normal translation, not one that was influenced by MT in any way. Where "influenced in any way" would include using weird expressions just because you want to avoid the common one (which appears in MT and isn't always wrong).
"Not resemble" another translation too much, well, what's too much? Obviously, what I understood is that this "too much" refers to similarity across a whole bunch of sentences, not every single one. If more than a certain percentage is identical or very similar to MT, then that's suspicious - so I hope that's what we are talking about: systematic usage of MT, not a few random coincidences of single words or short sentences...!
It wouldn't make sense to write something different in every single sentence just because some MT tool happens to deliver the same. Actually that would prove that you DID use MT (although with the unusual intention to avoid what the MT says).
@Lara Thank you for working on this! In order to maintain trust between Gengo and the translators, it's crucial that payment be issued for jobs completed. At any other job, your company could not hold back wages for hours worked like this. Why continue to give our time to Gengo if we're not sure we'll be paid for it, right? Looking forward to a swift end to this.
@Yam - You are!!! :) Thank you so very much for your patience and support. I am sincerely happy that we've been able to finally issue payment.
@Daniel F. - I'm always here to listen and do whatever is in my power to help :)
But I have a big question though Lara. You said "This is a highly exceptional situation, and as jobs go through QA, we may find some need to be revised and edited. In this case, they will be returned to you with a revisions request. We will then expect you to perform the required revisions on the job as per the usual process". Who does this apply to? Is it to the first translator or the editor? or both (first pass and second pass)?
I wonder if you guys can check on who made the mistake first because I have to admit, I've done a lot of Edit jobs and I know a lot of them submit MT before I corrected them (yeah I put them through Google Translate to verify cause it's been getting on my nerves). I even made a list of the account number which submits MT in my language pair in case you guys wanted to well... you know...🧐
Okay, thank you very much for the explanation. I know I might sound rude, but I'm genuinely happy with this: "people who were systematically submitting MT have been communicated with separately".
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.
@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!
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.
Also, this should have been communicated on the 'dashboard news' section.