Dear Gengo,
Your system revoked my Pro- and Standard-level qualifications for JP>EN six hours after receiving three back-to-back reviews (0.00/10.00, 0.00/10.00, and 0.62/10.00) from a Language Specialist. For one of those jobs, the customer went out of their way to give it a 5/5 feedback score.
Before these reviews, my Translator Score for JP>EN was above 7.5, and I have worked consistently well on high-volume jobs, some exceeding 13,000 Japanese characters.
I fully welcome constructive criticism because it helps me grow as a translator. Last year, when the system revoked my Pro-level EN>JP qualification, you sent me an email warning me of poor performance and gave me two months to improve.
I received no such email this time. Instead, I received an email stating that I was no longer qualified to work on Pro- or Standard-level jobs. You have also removed records from the Dashboard of my previous JP>EN scores.
I have just sent three re-review requests for the jobs that an LS marked heavily with critical, wrong-term errors. They are suggestions and by no means critical. I go into detail in each re-review request.
I humbly ask that you return my qualifications,
Gengo Support has given me no explanation other than a forwarded message reading: "The translator's qualifications were revoked by the system. They can take the test after 30 days if the test is available." I should not have to retake the tests. Taking these tests would only deny that Gengo needs to look into this matter.
I highly enjoy translating for Gengo and have shown this enthusiasm in my work. I am qualified in Pro-level Spanish to English and Standard-level English to Japanese. Automation is one of Gengo's positive features that has brought it to an enormous scale. But some situations need human assistance, and I hope other translators do not get discouraged from demanding it.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
10件のコメント
I'm sorry to hear this sad story, and you have every right to feel upset and adrift. The way you have been treated (and left hanging) reflects poorly on Gengo and their communication (or lack thereof) with their translators, and I fear you may not get a satisfactory resolution.
The reason is this: As you may know, Gengo doesn't currently seem to have what's been called a "Community Manager."
For many years, Lara Fernandez filled that role and advocated for translators. She would always take interest in and handle issues such as yours personally. It was a difficult task, but she did it well and was an approachable, accountable face in what is otherwise a faceless corporation. Lara left Gengo in June of 2021.
Katrina Paterson assumed this crucial role following Lara's departure, and she also intervened in cases such as yours, but now Katrina too has left that position, and Gengo appears once again to be a faceless, anonymous corporation, at least at this moment. I'm hoping Gengo (or Lionbridge, actually) will see the value in such a role and find someone to step in and bring some human connection back to the corporation and also serve as a point of contact for us translators when the need arises, as it did in your case.
Sadly, I have no advice to offer. I just wanted to explain why, despite your comment's upvotes, there is yet to be any official response from Gengo here. Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for one, either.
Best wishes,
Kevan
Very sorry to hear about your situation, and I echo Kevan's sentiment about the lack of a community manager.
This is a very long shot, but less than a year ago on this forum, Ms. Gosia Gorbacz, head of Quality and Community, invited anyone to email her directly:
https://support.gengo.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/4410135726995/comments/4410622831251
No idea if she is still available, but it's worth a try? Good luck and keep us posted!
Good idea, Marco!
@jlevine: This probably won't help, but getting three reviews in a row sounds like an in depth investigation being triggered by a particularly bad score or customer review that resulted in a bad LS review as well. I'm not sure the two month warning applies in that case (if it's still in use).
@KevanSF: Thank you so much for writing! I did not know who exactly used to be Gengo's contact points. I believe I've done my part posting here, and it's best to move on. Plenty of translation work out there : )
@marcodnd: Thank you! I've just emailed this person. I'll keep this thread posted.
@Chris: If a warning period does not apply, that is a shame. I would have hoped I could at least keep a record of my previous scores before they completely disappeared from my Dashboard.
Update: I've just received two re-reviews with the same score from the same reviewer. To give an idea of how unreasonable these scores are, here is the back-and-forth for one error:
One of the segments reads「brandの存在と良さが現地の消費者に伝わり、」, which translates to "the brand communicates its presence and quality to local consumers." The reviewer marked the use of "presence" for 「存在」 as a critical error (wrong term) because she/he thinks that it should be "existence." It's a suggestion at best.
hello everyone!
Thank you for your active participation in this thread and for expressing your thoughts and concerns. I have just discussed the issue with Jordan separately via email and I do hope this is a satisfying solution that we've offered. I'll let Jordan express his opinion himself given that he promised an update to you. :)
I would also like to thank everybody here for stressing how important a Community Manager role is in a service like this. I'd like to assure you that we at Lionbridge understand this need too and are currently looking for Katrina's replacement. Unfortunately, this process is not as smooth and quick as we expected it to be, but please bear with us! In the meantime, the Community Forum might look a bit neglected and I do apologize for that. We'll be back up and running with a lot of new ideas very very soon!
Many thanks,
Gosia
Hi everybody!
Fantastic news! Ms. Gorbacz has restored my JP>EN qualifications, and I am once again doing what I enjoy most.
Also, a third party will take another look at the three reviews. I cannot thank the Gengo Community and Ms. Gorbacz enough for your support.
As Ms. Gorbacz explained, I understand now that an automatic revocation from the system does not come with a warning email. You only get a warning when the quality team manually revokes your qualifications. That's unfortunate, and I hope it changes.
Jordan
Hi Jordan,
I'm delighted to hear this has been resolved in a satisfactory manner for you!
I'm equally enheartened by Gosia's message, and I look forward to welcoming a new Community Manager to the Gengo translator team.
Best wishes and happy translating!
Kevan
Happy for you, @jlevine. Consider yourself lucky as some of the translators who had their license revoked couldn't get them back right away. I can't help but feel that this whole "stick ONLY with the term I prefer/approve of, or else" routine by the LSs is getting more and more frustrating.
Despite a support article mentioning that "We are aware that different translators have different writing styles, and could translate the same text with different stylistic or phrasing choices, both resulting in translations that sound equally natural to a native speaker. These differences in style or phrasing are not deemed mistakes, as we cannot quantify these aspects objectively or support them a specific grammatical rule.", but in reality, nowadays LSs will give you an error if the term you're using aren't of their liking. Now it's virtually impossible to get a perfect score on a review thanks to the way they treat translations as an exact science like Math.
I'm on EN-IND pair. The last review I got, an LS gave me an error because I translated "go back to tickets" as "kembalilah ke laman tiket" (I used -lah suffix to indicate that this is a request/command phrase, as per original texts), and according to them the "correct" one should be simply "kembali ke laman tiket" (literally means "back to tickets"). I sent a re-review request stating the above and of course, they wont budge.
Which got me thinking, are they behaving this way now because Gengo told them so, or is there something else going on here? I know for a fact that things aren't always like this, in the past the review were done in a much more reasonable manner. As a head of Quality and Community, maybe Ms. Gosia Gorbacz can help enlighten us on this matter?
Hi @Ryan,
It's good to know that these problems are prevalent. I was equally surprised when my first re-review request received the same score as if the LS was committed to sticking to the same figure. Perhaps there are negative consequences if the LS decides to revise her/his score.
Hi @Ryan,
First of all, my apologies for the late response to your comment and thank you for sharing feedback and raising your concerns.
As you might be aware from my other comments on the forum and from our last month's satisfaction survey, we're working on revising the re-review and GoCheck feedback sharing processes to make their more effective for our community. I do hope that you used the opportunity to share your feedback via the survey as well.
I'd like to assure you that the team is doing their best to ensure objectivity in this process. Unfortunately, given the scale of this program, we do see some occasional cases when the resolution might not meet your expectations or it might be simply wrong. We appreciate your feedback in all such cases as it helps the team improve and guide Language Specialists in the right direction as well. If you're not satisfied with the re-review results or haven't received the team's response on time, please always contact GengoQualityTeam@lionbridge.com.
Many thanks,
Gosia / Lionbridge Community Management Director