TransPerfect Global review: Scam 17

I've dealt with this company as I was a former employee of theirs. Workerd for them for a couple of years. They have a total disregard for their employees. Their only and main concern is that the work gets done but you are not valued by the company.

I have worked with them as a translator and have gone through much abuse by this company. They have this tragedy that if they owe the linguist lots of money, then they start picking on the linguist and make up things as the QA emails you for things that you are not even aware of and start blaming you for their client's dissatisfaction and keep your money for a long time and do not pay you and hold your money hostage. This is happening to me as I write and not sure where to go in order to file a complaint against this company. They do pay very little to their linguist and treat them like they are nobody. This company is global and are highly organized to get the job done, but it takes them forever to pay the poor linguist in hope of a check for more than a month most of the time. I am so fed up with this injustice. Please help, if you know a way for me to file a complaint.

This company is a total rip-off. We advise all it's clients to find alternative suppliers, perhaps from China or India as those companies treat their staff and translators better. Moreover, the company's quality of products is a disgrace. They translated for banks in UK and I had to edit some of the translations. I think they hired high school Italians to do it for them, rejected the job and surprisingly the translation that I refused to edit was on their client's website a couple of days later. Their poor client may be does not know that and paid a fortune for it and Transperfect knew that and did not pay that high school student. Customers who are tricked by Transperfect should also voice their concerns and if any potential customer is reading this, please save yourself a life time of translation errors and a lot of money by googling some other companies. There are faithful and honest ones that compete with this corrupt agency. Surprised they are not investigated yet.

I also have been working for these guys as a translator. While they did pay me in the past, I have had a recent job docked for something that allegedly was bad quality (no specifics) in 2011. They deducted over $300 from a $450 invoice. A week later they had the audacity to offer me more of the same kind of work for an extremely small per word rate. I have been in the translation business for about 25 years and will no longer work for this company. Most of my regular customers easily pay three times as much for the same work with fewer demands and easier deadlines and never complain, because the work I do is of first rate quality. I also have my own in-house reviewer. They will charge you for things like formatting, which is absolutely unheard of in this industry. If someone is supplied in a PDF format, all you can do is stay as close as possible to the source as humanly achievable, but they claim that it has to be absolutely identical down to the last detail. Unbelievable.

I am a Panamanian translator living in Panama, Republic of Panama and was contacted by a project manager and offered to work as a freelancer. I went through two tests and I'm still waiting for the result of the second test! . Then the project manager who contacted me was no longer at the company, as I was told by a second project manager via an e-mail message. Subsequently, I was contacted by several persons offering translation jobs but when I replied requesting the purchase order before beginning a job, which is one of their policies, communication ended there. I became suspicious about them!

Wow! I finally found a place where I can voice my frustrations with this company. I haven't worked with them for years now, but it sounds like they are still the same! I did a long translation for them years ago, working on it for a week, it was a rush job and I was working like crazy, spent extra hours on it and everything. Two weeks later they came back and told me that my work was so bad that they had to pay another translator to "redo the whole translation" and that they could only pay me 10% of what I was originally supposed to receive because they had to pay the other translator. I was fuming. I looked at the corrected file, which was a very long document, mind me, and saw lots and lots of red (corrections), but when I looked at the detail, I noticed that many of the corrections were not really corrections, but only a different way of saying the same thing. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go through and argue each and every correction, spend days or another week of my time on it, just to find out that they are still not going to pay me. I did not and still do not know where I could go to complain about these people. They owe me $1000. Trying to file a claim in New York, which is clear on the other side of the country? If I have to hire a lawyer, it would cost me more than that. So, that's basically pointless. The only thing that would work here would be a class action, but I don't know if anyone will ever take this on. All I can say is "stay away from them". I know I will. I have not accepted jobs from them for years and will never accept anymore jobs from them.

I have provided work for Transperfect for four years or so. I certainly found their rates to be low, but they provided a fairly steady volume of work, and I can format documents in my sleep, so I did not mind. Recently I received an e-mail informing me that they were terminating their business relationship with me based on quality issues (none of which were detailed, and mathematically came out to an error rate of .03% based on the numbers presented). At the same time, I was asked to complete work on a large pending project, which I refused to do unless given written authorization in light of the recently received e-mail. Their last payment to me is late, and assuming they do not pay me for the last two months at all, I am out around $4500. Unfortunately, according to my attorney, this is still too low an amount for effective litigation. In fact, one attorney friend said that Transperfect probably has a matrix to calculate exactly at what amount they can deny payment with little likelihood of legal ramifications. My only advice and actions: Inform your fellow translators of your experience so they do not end up on the same boat. In addition, since Transperfect seems to actively recruit from newer and younger people in the translation field, warn off any you know currently studing foreign languages at the college or graduate level.

I have recently done a 5-weeks job for TransPerfect for about US$ 6, 000. I worked exclusively on that job because of the tight deadline, so I had no other income during that time. They got all the necessary data from me but I haven't even received their PO yet and no idea where to send my invoice to. Generally, the communication was very bad. I am quite sure now that I won't be paid.
Would it make sense to join for a class-action law suite?

I worked several days on a project with TPT. It was my first experience with them, and it will certainly be my last. Communication was awful. I was contacted by about a dozen project managers for the same project and continued receiving requests from a new person almost every day despite my constant "reminders" that I was already working on it. The PM(s) I was specifically working with ignored requests that I made. "Yes, of course!" was a reply I received several times, but later on it became very obvious they hadn't actually paid attention to the questions. The workload presented to me was misleading; I specifically stated I was not able to do technical translations, but about a quarter of the project I received was extremely technical in nature (you would need a very specific, scientific degree to understand any of it) and it all required very time consuming formating that took almost as long as the translations themselves. Some of the content was so specific that I was only able to find information on it on the client's own website--in English or the source language!

I feel bad for any clients who rely on TPT. I worked very hard to get the translations as accurate as possible with my lack of experience in scientific translations, but I can only assume that my final product was not ideal as I'm still waiting for payment months later. Even if money weren't an issue--and it is as I spent a significant amount of time on it despite the low pay--I would refuse to work with them again, and I would advice everyone else to do the same. There are a lot of shady practices with this company, little respect for contracted workers, and laughable rates.

I am looking for a witness to testify at an upcoming arbitration hearing against TransPerfect. If any one living in New York City and willing to testify on my behalf, please contact me ASAP at Garry@aals.com or call [protected].

This is an opportunity to get this crooked company!

Garry

I freelance for Transperfect, and have at this point endured enough mistreatment from over the last four years.

I have experienced major payment issues before (never on the pretext of poor quality, although this practice of theirs to claim that they cannot pay the right amount on time because of made-up quality issues is criminal), and I am experiencing another issue right now.

The dealings I have had with their Payments Department leave me feeling like I am somehow less than a human, who makes an average amount of money, who has a family, who has bills to pay, who expects to be paid according to the payment terms in her POs.

All I get in response to my repeated late payment tickets is "your payment should be processed by the end of next week", or similar. Bearing in mind that my payment is typically a few days late already, and that "processing" is a stage which happens before the 10-day Paypal payment timeframe begins. In the end, these delayed payments show up weeks late.

In the meantime, I am broke, living off a credit card, even though all I do is work, and my work is of a very high standard.

I receive no apology for these delays, and no acknowledgement that I am a human being doing an honest job, and expecting her basic rights as a service provider to be observed.

I am made to feel like a ticket that needs dealing with and tossing away, particularly when in communication with Kwabena in the payments department, who deserves to be named as she is the least empathetic person I have ever come across in a professional setting (or perhaps any setting).

Fellow professional linguists: with our hard-earned qualifications and experience, we are a valuable commodity, and we should remember this at all times. I for one am looking for new opportunities which will allow me to discontinue all work with TPT, and, in the meantime am refusing to work for any section of their dishonest and dehumanising business while my payment issue is not resolved.

Those of you who stopped all work for them, permanently: you are my heroes... TPT does have a tragically large market share.

If you work for a client of TPT's, please realise that there are genuinely good agencies who can do the same work for less, without exploiting anyone, and without deceiving clients on the quality of their product. Your business could also approach freelance linguists for their needs: they charge less, and are reliable, honest and accountable (they have to be, to survive).

TPT can and should be beaten.

Have any of you experienced harassment from Transperfect if you refuse their job requests? I haven't yet but I just want to find out.

I had work for them as free lance videographer in Montreal. Now it's more than 50 day and I'm still waiting for my payment.

I went through the entire process to get hired, and it took 3 months from begin to finish...fingerprint, background check, credit check, employment check, residential check, and family members check... all checked out... then these 3 pukes, Oleksandra Lezhwiuk, Christina Rincon, and Jordkyn Moncayo, keep on giving me the run around about the login to start taking the calls...NOTHING WORKS. I called, emailed, them all, may times, they do email back, but 1 or two weeks later, and all have the same response sorry excuse, "I am going to be out of the office until so and so date, please email this person to help you"...and then the next person does the same...Luckily I saved all their emails, and everytime I emailed them I CCed that email back to me just for the purpose to use against them... I really think this is a scamm, and I am going to the police department tomorrow, for I have a brother who is a policie office, that will help me investigate, and will go with me to the "office" they have here in Phoenix AZ. I just hate these women...very incompentend, inbecilic, not professional, and not responsible. Should not be in HR Department dealing with professionals. I receive a report from one of the credid bureal that this Transperfect co did go in there using the FBI to check on my id...So I was happy, I though I was going to get to work soon, but, nothing, just incompetent pukes, pretending to be something that they are not...I also called the Corporate office in New York [protected] and left them a message, but so far no call back from them either... today is 8/16/21, and I start the process back in March...and still can't long in to take calls...

Rates have been drastically decreased over the past few months and that basically means you are being asked to work almost for free. This company is just getting worse as the years go by.