What Do I Do if the Client Always Pays Me Late? (Adapt!)

I'll give you a straight answer: adapt.

It's not worth fighting over.

Or stressing over.

Just adapt.

Shrug it off and adapt your business model.

Your business model is far more adaptable than your clients' habits.

You get more and better rewards from adapting your conduct than from trying to adapt your clients' conduct.

Payment leniency is like any other need you can identify in the market — once you identify it, respond to it and profit.

There's really no point insisting on feeling offended/cheated/breached against etc. etc. when you can simply adapt and profit. And with a smile.

Challenges bring opportunities. Outplay life by taking the disadvantages it throws at you and converting them into advantages, coming out on top and profiting.

***

That said, here's some analysis:

What do you stand to gain if you press the matter?

Off the top of my head, I would expect a blend of conflict, guilt, apology and risk avoidance. In effect, probably:

• slightly faster payments but not always on time, and at a great energy/stress cost for the client that could be better spent
• a more strained relationship, with less goodwill capital than you could amass by being 'reasonable' and lenient
• a client less inclined to be forgiving when it's your turn to get late or otherwise slip (anything from stern to vindictive… or actually lenient and forgiving, putting you to shame)

So what if I don't? 

Off the top of my head, things don't change, which can be either good or bad but is more or less the whole point. Old facts, new approach.

Make the choice — given their payment delays, would you drop them or keep them, supposing you can't change the way they act (and possibly they can't either)?

If you choose to part ways, there's no reason to make the split any more hostile or awkward than it has to be.

If you'd rather keep them, it's counterproductive to keep complaining and putting a strain on the relationship. In fact, they could even just start to avoid hiring you and think they're doing you a favour.

So take a new approach. Stop feeling offended, cheated, ignored or whatever is the case. Shrug it off, let it go, stop allowing negative emotions to hold you hostage.

Instead, make it your own policy to extend an unspoken grace period that isn't the client's right but makes your client's life easier, and yours too.

Integrate those delays in your business model. Client payment punctuality is unreliable? Stop relying on clients to pay punctually — as long as they pay at all and don't take too long.

Just keep some floating cash. Don't spend or invest everything. Invest in liquidity and thus security. Your comfort and quality of life will increase dramatically as a result. Ridding yourself of liquidity anxiety will make it so much easier for you to project the calm confidence that wins your clients over as a professional. It will also make you friendlier, and a little relaxed and forgiving attitude (or at least reasonable, at a minimum) will not go unnoticed.

… It enhances your reputation, your goodwill. And that is a great asset and a great benefit to you. It may be intangible, but it has a great effect on your life and can make or unmake your success. Or at least have a very tangible effect on your income.

***

It's easier to get yourself a 'pillow' — a month's, then quarter's, then semester's, and then perhaps a year's worth of income retained as a reserve — than to challenge your client's habits. Besides, as a service provider it's generally a good idea to challenge your own habits and expectations before your client's. And that's not just a chore — like I said, it can make or unmake a successful practice.

And be positive. Don't be too hard on yourself. Perhaps you're already making more than some people you know who are less flexible than you are. Make that flexibility your strength and your policy.

… Doesn't mean it has to be your stated policy. In fact, as you've probably guessed by now, the whole point is that it shouldn't be! If you extend the deadlines, a lot of your clients will still be one or two weeks (or months, or days) late whether the deadline is two or four weeks (or months, or days). Give them a deadline, but don't expect them to keep it — and don't tell them you aren't expecting them to keep it. Just base your own internal calculations on official deadline + grace period.

If you choose to provide an official grace period, which may well be a good move in some situations, still provide an unofficial one after that and base your calculations on it rather than on the official one.

There, you solved your liquidity problem! You removed the anxiety and lack of security resulting from late payments from your clients, without even talking to them, much less straining your relationships.

***

Bonus tip: Consider (and I only say consider) a 3% discount for expedited payment, for example 3 days where the deadline is 30. Perhaps also consider a 1% deadline for not exceeding the 30.

The goal of the 3% discount is not to reward your clients for not being late (for not failing to do what they are already obligated to do). And, as you can see, neither is it the effect. The goal is simply to see the money in your account as soon as possible. Once in, it can't be taken out — unlike when it's still in your client's account/reserve/provision for outgoing payments, let alone the client's general account. You have the money, you no longer have to worry, and that's it.

More elaborate theory is that early, as opposed to timely, payment is a legitimate novel benefit for you. Reciprocally, you provide a legitimate benefit, a small financial concession. However named or classified, it's simply a small financial benefit, and getting emotional about the reason or classification makes very little practical sense.

The 1% discount for not exceeding the deadline obviously does reward your client for not breaching, but the reward is smaller, and the benefit is real. And you don't care about all that, remember? What you care about is that the money is already safely in your account, so the risk of non-payment is no longer there.

The 1% discount is reverse-interest. People feel bad about being penalized, or even confronted about doing something wrong, let alone when they see themselves as not being at fault — and agencies will typically not see themselves as being at fault when they haven't been paid by their own clients yet (get used to that, as you can't change it, at least not you alone and not overnight). Applying late interest or some other form of late fees or penalties will be an antagonizing move and will damage the relationship. By contrast, nobody can complain about not receiving a benefit one, through fault or no fault, just simply didn't qualify for. There are no accusations, no implications of wrongdoing, there's just simply a missed benefit.

Don't want to give up 1% or 3% of your current earnings? Up your pre-discount rates, problem solved. Suppose you charge 100. So now it would be 97, and you don't like that, which is fair. So you need to charge 103.09.

Naturally, changing your rates and payment conditions in tandem would be a bit too obvious and defeat the point of applying incentives instead of penalties, so perhaps wait till your next increase and rather than 105 make it 108. Or make it 105 but earlier. Or only with new clients, or new projects for occasional clients. How to give yourself a smooth raise is a whole different topic.

---

Recap: As a freelancer, one of your biggest competitive advantages is the adaptability of your small, lean, flexible structure (or even sometimes almost total lack thereof). You can adapt more easily than your clients. And you can also adapt more easily than some of your competitors (including freelancers who don't want to adapt). Use that adaptability and profit. If your clients fail to meet their obligations, try to see beyond the breach and see the need that you can respond to — and profit. This can include the need to adapt your business model to a longer payment cycle. Instead of trying to to turn the tide, you can invest your energy and creativity in using it to your advantage — and there are various ways of doing that. At the end of the day your need is liquidity and security, and that can be achieved in more than one way, and some ways are smarter than others. Be guided by pragmatism, creativity and… empathy. Think outside the box. You're allowed to! You don't have a boss to say you can't. Sometimes you can have your way in the big picture by agreeing to not have your way in small things that are ultimately inconsequential.

As a Freelancer, I Want to Step It up a Bit and Improve My Agency Base. What do I do? (Pt 1)

Hi, guys. If you used to follow this blog, doubtless you must have noticed I've been writing less lately, lately meaning the last couple of months if not years. Today I thought about the original reason why I set up a blog — to prevent the long, meaningful posts that I sometimes make in translators' groups and forums from disappearing into the abyss of oblivion that is anything older than two weeks on Facebook and in forums. Later on, most of the posts here, almost all in fact, were written specifically for this blog and only a few actually served the original purpose — meaning a lot of potentially useful bits of advice or voices in discussion continued to be lost, partly because I don't even always remember I have a blog (apparently, adjusting to the thought and learning some new habits takes some time).

So today I want to do what this blog was supposed to do, and preserve a potentially useful post from a Facebook group about what to do if, as a freelance translator (as was the case), you want to expand or improve a bit without making the drastic step of dropping agencies altogether and plunging into the world of exclusively direct clients.

And why would you choose that?

• A 100% direct end client mix is not always viable to achieve.
• Nor is it necessarily optimal.
• Between costs and gains, keeping at least some agencies in the mix may be the best choice.

For example staying in touch with an agency that always has some work to do is a good insurance strategy for when you need a stop-gap measure to help liquidity in the short term, avoid losing the momentum when you hit the flow but there aren't enough client jobs to eat through all of your capacity, keep gaining experience in a particular field (e.g. medical, legal) in which you don't have too many direct clients, and so on and so forth; this certainly isn't an exhaustive list.

Am I suggesting you should make a point of retaining some agencies in your mix when you might as well skip them entirely and still fill your calendar? Nope. Not unless some of the above applies to you. This is all conditional, situational, wholly governed by your circumstances and your unique personal preference. Not in all, but in a lot of cases at least some of the above considerations will apply, meaning you'll either have to or want to keep some agencies in the mix.

One thought about keeping some agencies in the mix is that you may still want to 'upgrade'.

And by upgrading, I don't mean dropping old, tried and true sources of reliable, somewhat comfortable and somewhat gainful work to embark on a goose chase or stake all you currently have on a slim hope that perhaps a new agency with a new approach will be a little more profitable to work with because it seems to pay marginally better rates. Nope.

But, a lot of freelancers work with agencies they don't quite like, where there are no warm feelings of friendship and loyalty, no long history of good old times to create a lasting bond, but just business the way it is with agencies, where the translator is getting the work because he or she is currently the best option in comparison to the alternatives and switching costs (i.e. it's better working with you than spending the time and effort, and incurring the risks, that replacing you would require).

… And some of those agencies can in fact be quite toxic, taxing your reserves more than is worth it. When talking about 'toxicity', I am focusing primarily on the result rather than the cause. This means I'm concentrating on the effect the behaviour has on you, rather than allocating the blame. Toxic behaviours include, for example:

• always nibbling away at your rates
• always nibbling at service scope or added value, trying to squeeze something extra out of you
• dumping secretarial/technical/client-service tasks on you because they promise full service but don't have the staff to actually pull it off, or just want to save staff time
• trying to go back on confirmed arrangements
• requesting bookings for potential jobs that have a statistical 30% probability of materializing
• only coming to you with stuff nobody else can or will do
• being rude to you when talking or mailing
• hardball, manipulation and all sorts of dodgy tactics

Those are probably agencies you'd like to no longer have to work with, agencies you only work with because you have to. And why do you have to work with them? Because you don't have alternatives. So that's what we'll be talking about in Pt 2.

Or perhaps there isn't that much toxicity going on but neither is there anything to keep you other than that you need work from somewhere, anywhere. Those are agencies you don't have to dump but have no special reason to regret to move on from. And that will be the focus of Pt 2.

And, for the record, a lot of Part 2 will be applicable to direct end clients as well, just not framed with them in mind.

We May All Need Fancy Marketing Soon, a.k.a. Distinguish or Perish (in the Battle of Quotes)

They say 'diversify or die'. Today I want to say 'distinguish or perish'.


Clients, even consumers, already mail 20 providers in BCC, asking for a quote, then pick the cheapest or the best blend, according to them. Which is usually very different from what a choice based on professionally relevant criteria would be.

The cheapest is something you can't help, unless you want that to be you. And you don't, because someone's always going to work for exposure or experience if it comes to it. Or for fun. You can't possibly be the cheapest unless you pay them.

But you can help the best blend. The blend is a sweet spot. The sweet spot where supply best meets demand, or so the client thinks. The best fit.

By saying more about yourself, accurately and in an encouraging way if you can help it, you can't convince mass askers. Not often at least. But you can persuade people away from masking. Or you can convince them before they mass ask.

You can make them think that you're the only option, or the best, or just good enough so there's no need to look further.

My personal take is that the less ambitious, more modest target of 'just good enough so there's no need to look further' is a good, solid base to cover before you fiddle with the fancy stuff. First the basics, then the extras — if at all.

We may all need this if the trend for getting multiple quotes, even on small jobs and even by consumers, continues to rise.

That, and, of course, we need to stop gambling our precious time with the 20 other people in the BCC field. Doesn't mean we should give them exactly zero time, though. Nope. There is a war to wage, so there are battles to fight.

It is good to have a canned response in which you state just what your rates would be for the same job in normal circumstances, while refusing to enter the battle of quotes. This is the least you can do to help unteach them the bad thinking habits, such as that they can get a special (i.e. reduced) offer for just asking and for just being them. Y'know, everybody is special, but so is everybody else. And his dog.

Still, show them you considered their inquiry/requirement/need individually, but the size of your fee is based on standard applicable rates.

Else, if they keep only getting responses from people who are prepared to play their game, they'll end up with a distorted view of the market, thinking everybody else is unavailable or uninterested and those who do respond represent the industry opinion as a whole. Which is not the case (or so I hope).

Dear Client,

Thank you for your interest. It is my policy not to participate in competitive quotes. This e-mail is emphatically not a bid.

For reference, my standard applicable fee for your particular request (as specified in your mail) would be XXX.

Always feel free to contact me for a specific quotation or booking. Please, however, keep in mind my policy not to participate in competitive bidding.

Sincerely,

Provider

Just an example.

If you feel like it, you can consider adding something to the tune of:

Please be aware that due to the low statistical probability of having the project assigned to me out of all of the providers asked for this quotation I am prevented from being able to spend as much time preparing a more tailored quote as is normally the standard of care I give to my clients.

And yes, not a single comma. Be confident. Transmission, not dialogue. And certainly no arguing or pleading. Just remember to turn it into generally acceptable passive-aggressive corpobabble without showing a genuine human side.

Reading Copious Briefs and Reference Materials Shouldn't Be Free of Charge!

Everybody outsources things these days. Even quite internal things. Outsourcing is good because it frees you of all the hassle of the special treatment employees get. And allows you to pay people when you actually need them, not for the entire time of just being there.

On the other hand, more and more clients yearn for the special treatment an employer traditionally gets. They want someone to get to know them, in fact quite intimately (in business terms), to become dedicated to them, to give them one's all, and so and so forth. And sometimes they want all those benefits right off the box, where they take months or years to achieve with employees or some other variety of in-house staff. And they certainly want customized, tailored services.

… But they also want to keep paying only for what's billable or tangible, or just the standard price of a standard service.

Clients sometimes need to be reminded — gently if possible — that outsourcing is for not paying people when you are not in fact using them. It's not some magic of the invisible hand of the market for getting a month's worth of attention for a week's worth of pay and save a ton on costs while reaping all the benefits.

Here's an analogy that also works for services that have rarely been done in-house and thus needed to be outsources but have traditionally been purchased from the market:


If you're buying a single loaf of bread at the standard two or three bucks per, you don't get to mail the bakery a 20-page PDF detailing your absolutely essential, holy inviolable specs. You could get more luck with a custom order, especially  But even a custom order than normally takes them a day will get them to spend a week studying your PDFs. No chance. Nobody's going to eat that cost for you.

High time our clients appreciated this basic fact of life. High time we did.

Mercy to the Wolf Is Cruelty to the Lamb

Woah, what an attention-grabbing title. So what do I mean by 'mercy', and who is the wolf and who is the lamb?

I'll give you a straight answer, right away: mercy is cheaper (a.k.a. 'better') rates or other special concessions, the lambs are people who really need help, and the wolves are people who don't.

Now on to the titular claim. Your resources are limited. If you spend them, you won't have them. So it would be wise to keep tabs on who you spend them on.

Thus we've just covered the basic thought of this post, but if your time resources are not too limited today, how about you stay with me a while longer and we'll give it more thought? A lengthy post is coming, let me warn you.

So:

No matter what you do, you can't work more than a dozen-odd hours a day, every day, or you'll die. This is a fact of life. Your time is limited, unless you can clone yourself. You can't afford to stop working for money and go wholly pro bono, unless you've got heaps of savings or a hefty passive income. Or a generous rich spouse. Chances are 99 to one that you have none of it.

… Hence, just like almost everybody else, you have to work for a living, and work hard indeed, restricting your ability to help others free of charge. Simply put, your pro-bono resources are limited. Make sure they go to whose who really need them, not just those who want them.

And here's the obvious truth: the needy people need them; the cool people, or the loud people, or the pushy people, in most cases don't. So it's them or them that you can help; the needy or the stingy (or pushy). You choose.

Yes, there are situations in which it's appropriate to waive your fees for someone who makes more than you do. I've done that too. But those are typically noble causes — such as assisting the victim of a vicious attack or insidious smear campaign — not the causes of rich cheapskates who just can't or won't man up and pay normal rates just like everybody else, so they start inventing excuses and buttering you up or threatening you, whatever works, stick-and-carrot style, just to avoid parting with money they don't absolutely have to part with but by all rights should part with, just like everybody else who gets a service or product.

I'll give you a real-life illustration. Some people — and perhaps it has happened even to you, so don't get offended, just ponder — will haggle with the poor people selling eggs or flowers or whatever on the pavements of big cities but then proceed to leave a lavish tip in the luxurious restaurant or at least trendy bar they go to. Or they'll decide they have no money to spare on that kid who needs a transplant or the old lady who can't pay for her medicines, but they still, somehow, have enough to buy everybody a round at the local pub, full of able-bodied people with jobs and incomes.

It's the same in translation, law practice, design work or whatever else it is you do. If you feel the need to work pro bono — and of course you should — or, shall we say, semi pro bono, as in 50% off on compassionate grounds, then pick your recipients wisely

I suppose it's probably better to be generous with at least someone than no one, so showing some compassion to your B2B clients is not a bad thing. In fact it's a good thing. But are they really the best target? And among them, not the ones with noble causes and friendly policies and strong sense of social responsibility but simply the ones who'll harangue or cajole you about rebates they don't need?

If you keep pleasing them or caving in to them, you won't have the resources to help those who really need it.

Here, allow me to reiterate and emphasize that I don't mean denying your help when they need it. By which I mean objectively need it and need it more than your other paying clients or prospective pro-bono clients. And allow me to reiterate and emphasize that the decision is yours to make.

… What I want to say is that it should be a decision, not an excuse for just giving in when they ask.

And for the record, granting them the discount on condition that they will donate the difference to a charity is always an option. It's better than just giving them the discount anyway.

Oh, and don't think they'll appreciate you for the caring and giving and helpful soul that you are when you cave in to their sweet words, nope. It doesn't work like that in real life. They're trained to do that, and the objective is to save money for their company by reducing the spend, not to establish good interpersonal relations based on reciprocity (although you'll inevitably meet some exceptions). And for the umpteenth time, if they're much richer than you, then they don't need you to charge in on a white horse and save them from their financial predicaments, nope.

… But enough's been written today, so — lest I start writing in circles — let's just stop here. Hope I've managed to give you some useful perspective, and naturally better still if we were in agreement right from the start.

Your Someday Terms

My eyes played a trick on me several days ago (EDIT: I wrote this post in January). I received an e-mail titled 'Your "someday" items', coming from Ed Gandia's website, which I'd subscribed some time back in the ice age, but for some reason what I saw was 'Your "someday" terms'.

Ironically, this little hallucination perhaps relates to something to something I read in a book Gandia co-penned ages ago with Steve Slaunwhite and Pete Savage (The Wealthy Freelancer, which you should read if you haven't yet), though I'm not sure my subconscious process was as complex as that. I probably thought simply of contract terms.

In any case, the old something was a very sensible piece of advice, reflecting the law of growth: even if you can't be too fussy about what projects you take right now, you should still have a target list of standards you want to be your bottom line one day.

When I saw 'your someday terms', I thought not so much about essential terms, such as rates and deadlines, but about more terms-y terms, such as copyrights, moral rights (including credit), payment deadlines, acceptance and rejection, corrections, liability and so on.

You may be in the fortunate position of already having exactly the terms you want. Most people are not.

I invite you to see that, in terms of progress, rates aren't the only thing that should or could go up. So are your reputation, your professional standing and your work comfort and satisfaction, not to mention liquidity and stability. All of these are affected by the terms of the contracts you sign and POs, specs, instructions and other rules you accept as binding. Hence it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on rates.

The easiest example I could give you is difficulty. Chances are difficulty raises the bar so high that few people can compete, so there is less price pressure. Normally, however, it's much more likely that a text that pays 20% better will also consume 80% more time, because it's so much more difficult. Thus, it's certainly possible to give yourself a nominal raise and seemingly defend it but start making less money in the end result. The same is true about other things than the difficulty of things you do or the time it takes you to do them. We'll visit some of them in a separate post soon.

Knowing what terms you want is the first step to getting there — sooner or later, eventually, and if not exactly there, then at least a little closer. Remember not to deny yourself the small steps just because you can't make the big leap right now.

There is a reason I didn't say 'ideally' — this is a long-term project that might well never see its target fully achieved, but don't fret. The easiest way not to move anywhere is to stop walking. Any step you do make makes your life at least a little easier.

Please see my next post about non-financial terms and meanwhile let me just introduce the suggestion that clients who are not in a position to make your life easier budget-wise could still make your life easier in other ways, so just because you can't get better rates doesn't mean you can't help some other things.

Don't Immediately Concede a Discount Just Because the Client Complains (and Seems to Expect One)

Sorry for the lousy title, but I need to focus on the contents.

In better times this is perhaps a rare oddity, if not unheard of, but these days whimsical and borderline incompetent checking and correcting of translations by clients and agencies is something we keep hearing about all the time. I've come to the conclusion it can't be just the coincidental subjective experience of a couple of people, there must be more of it, as in a trend, hence this post.

This is going to be a controversial statement, but in my opinion there is a general decline in competence, morality and manner (as in class act) worldwide, so no wonder professional ethics and courtesy also are slackening and people don't seen an ethical problem in biased adversarial examination of and complaints about goods and services they procure, in the hope of saving some money.

In our so-called translation industry (how I hate the term!), this is compounded by how agencies end up with cheap proofreaders due to all their cost-cutting, which means that senior external translators end up having their work checked and graded by junior inhouse staff. The same happens in corporations when, out of the same desire to cut costs, someone decides to DYI it. If not the translation, then the checking.

In either case it may be compounded by how the choice of expression is largely subjective, as are outlooks on equivalence, as are skill levels and judgements thereof. Egos are involved. Face-saving is involved, sometimes real cover-ups and damage control after someone botches the job, the project, notably by already having procedured translation on the cheap before, which not only backfired but also drained the budget.

Or, like in the old Indian tale of two wolves, there's not only good and evil in every single one of us but also intelligence and stupidity, controlled behaviour and freaking out, class act and poor manner. The one wolf that wins is the one we feed. Our clients and their staff, and brokers, also have wolves to feed and make their choices. Translation procurement tends to be inexplicably conducive to making just the wrong, stupid choices. And let's not forget about people who just don't know how bad they are, or at least not as highly qualified as they think, especially for work they haven't studied and trained for, or at least learned the language.

(This notably includes a great deal of native speakers of the target language in translation, retained by clients and brokers often for little merit beyond their native origin, who so often just don't know all the rules or just plain can't write. But it also includes a great deal of 'proficient' non-natives who think they're good enough to doubtless be the innocent party in a dispute with a qualified native writer or translator. And then loads of people who aren't particularly familiar with the field but go ahead and edit other people's writing anyway.)

The point? Stop overthinking. You won't likely find out which is the case, let alone find the comfort of certainty. What you need to realize is that shit happens — every day. Yes, it happens. Today, a fellow translator wrote about how an agency explicitly asked her to look for errors, find some, grade it down, help them save some buck. When confronted with this reality, you need to avoid compulsively looking for fault within yourself and taking the blame just to avoid having to acknowledge that the world is a bad place and people can be jerks.

Fend it off, cast off the fog, keep your mind clear. Check twice if you they don't have a point, but if you can't find legit errors, and serious enough, then you need to confront the reality that no, the client is not always right in general, and that your client is not right, right here and now, in particular.

If you still grant a discount, for example to avoid non-payment because you realistically need the money and have no other way to see at least some of it, or you just won't the client to go away without going out of his way to damage your reputation (you already damage it by making it look like you're admitting errors that just aren't there!), then I won't judge you, but it should be your decision, not an automatism.

Automatic discounts on every complaint — which is nb. sometimes the way things work with translation agencies — only encourage frivolous complaints. Remember, a lot of people are amoral in some degree in business. They just see numbers, cash flows, equations, impersonal operations to manage, they don't really think or feel much beyond that it makes sense to save money where you can. Which includes where a weaker 'vendor' will let you. So don't.

This said, I certainly don't encourage dismissing legitimate complaints, especially not as a matter of policy. And yes, this too is a policy companies have long discovered and tested in practice by now. Just consider how clients and brokers use the broken-record strategy to deflect your overdue payment requests, piling on outlandish excuses one after one, avoiding you or outright stalling. I certainly am not saying this is what we should do to our clients when they have cause to worry or outright complain or even demand a discount, a deserved one.

But simply wanting a discount covers exactly zero distance toward deserving it or proving that they do. Again, I'm not saying the burden of proof should by sky-high, but a nude demand or some sort of faux proofreading doesn't rise to the level. It doesn't rise much above floor level, and it rather goes quite lower than that. It's quite low indeed, and has no place from respected companies — as soon as you can establish it wasn't just an accident at work (you need to probe gently before they get defensive and start opposing you on principle), you need to let them know it won't fly and in fact it's quite bad of them to even have tried.

We need to send the message that changing times have not made the practice acceptable.

Why It Is OK to Limit Liability (12 Pointers)

Wait? What? Limited liability? Isn't that avoiding responsibility for your own actions?

Nope. Not necessarily anyway. And certainly there's more to it. We could argue the details to no end, so let's just state some general pointers. Food for thought:

• Don't presume that it's natural or obvious for malpractice liability to meet the full extent of the first quantifiable value of some sort of damages that comes to your mind or someone else brings up. Things aren't so simple. The first quantifiable value someone intuitively comes up with is not likely to coincide with what the outcome of full, objective and exhaustive analysis would be after properly gathering and processing all the information available. For example it may occur to you — or someone else — that if a translation agency loses a client because of a translator's mistake, then the responsible translator should pay damages to the value of the entire turnover with that client. However, that seems reasonable only superficially. It doesn't account for the possibility of replacing that lost client with a new one after a couple of cold calls or just having spare capacity that will soon get all used up by other existing clients. So should the agency get the compensation and get to sell the freed capacity anyway, for double the money? Or should the agency be allowed to call it a day and send the sales rep home early because the translator is paying? This is the kind of nonsense that results from coming up with and too easily accepting arbitrary values based on emotional notions, as opposed to proper analysis.
• By contrast, it's natural to expect businesses to take precautions (forward looking) and act (react) to avoid or mitigate damage. If they don't, notably because they want to save the cost, then why should the increased risk be yours and not theirs? It would be like a general partnership in which you get 0% share in the profits but only a worker's wage, plus 100% share in any hypothetical loss. Who in his right mind would agree to that? There is no rational or ethical reason for a client's recklessness, carelessness or risk appetite (gambling) to allocate gains to the client and losses to the professional service provider.
• Some risk-creating or risk-increasing choices by clients are legitimate because they respond to a reasonable need or pursue a reasonable objective. However, should the risk so created or increased — for example because of restricted access to information — be borne by someone who doesn't even know about it? Someone who doesn't even get the opportunity to reject the deal based upon the knowledge of the risks involved, which is withheld from him by the other party? Should companies be allowed to have their cake and eat it too like that? Should professional service providers be doomed to not even know the risks they assume against their will?
• The last point holds true about the value and kind of the transaction in general, but it is all the more true in respect of any special risk factors, notably ones that may lead to special or consequential damages or anything else you wouldn't normally presume or foresee or prepare against anyway. The business client should be acting to prevent them, not outsource them to someone who isn't even aware of effectively becoming the client's insurer for the client's gainful transaction with some other entity. Again, should the client have the cake and eat it too?
• Professional service providers are not insurance companies. Insurance per se is not even an explicit added value included in the transaction. It's just a convenient by-product that companies sometimes seek. And if they are allowed complete secrecy and zero disclosure, then they might as well seek professional services specifically to get free insurance, not even to get the service per se
• Insurance companies are the first to want to know about all the risks involved — type, size, probability, impact etc. They spend their precious time doing proper, mathematical calculations for all of those things. Does the though of having to do such calculations feel over the top to you? Would it feel the same if you knew $20M was at stake? Which is probably more money than you'll make or at least save in your life but which a single contract in international trade may be worth more than — just to give you perspective.
• Are you actually paid for guaranteeing the safety of your clients' transactions? This is essentially what we're talking about: the justice and the price of such a guarantee of safety being included in your fee. This is still true even if the safety would be from the consequences of your own mistakes. Why, you may ask: Because the probability and especially the impact of bad consequences of your mistakes still depends on factors that are beyond even your knowledge, whereas they are usually in your client's control, such as withholding information from you. Or are you only being paid for labour, i.e. the actual time and toil you expend on your client's behalf regardless of the value of the client's business transaction involved? If you're only paid what is essentially a labourer's wage and not an agent's commission corresponding to the value of the transaction, then you aren't being paid for being an insurer against all sorts of stuff that isn't communicated to you — precisely because you would likely refuse if you only knew.
• Remember that people who are professionals in assuming liability — insurers namely — always require full disclosure and disclaim liability, or increased liability, for anything you fail to disclose.
• They also give their clients instructions to follow. Taking more risks or more lightly, more haphazardly than your insurance policy allows voids it. You don't get any compensation if you forget to fix a broken alarm or replace your lock after losing your keys, or divulge your passwords. Ironically, some of these client-generated risks we're talking about are precisely precautions dictated by insurance companies (notably your restricted access to information about whatever you're helping them achieve).
• The premium you have to pay for an insurance policy depends on the type and size (probability and impact) of the risk covered, as well as the precautions you as the insured or beneficiary agree to take in order to avoid or reduce that risk. How much would a policy have to cost to cover all the property in your house, with no limits on value, and still allow you to not even lock your door and still claim compensation? Just simply because you have a policy? Why should such insurance effectively be provided by professional service providers and within a labourer's wage rather than an agent's commission? Should business companies get more insurance — with no restrictions or obligations — from their service providers simply because they pay for a service than they get under insurance policies when they pay so much more money to their insurers specifically for insurance coverage?
• Remember: For business clients and brokers, agencies etc. this whole issue isn't about ethics or morality as they may claim when trying to silence your objections with an inapplicable, logically flawed appeal to justice such as 'you should be resposible for your actions'. Nope. It's about changing the owner of the risk involved in the whole thing. Risk which they themselves create or increase for example to save some money or protect their secrets or otherwise benefit. Ordering the service from you conveniently places you as the new owner of the risk they want to get rid of on the cheap, i.e. without taking proper precautions themselves and without paying someone else to take them or just assume the liability in case something happens.
• Ethically, however, their argument is still fundamentally flawed: Why should you be expected to automatically and with no additional pay assume greater risks because your client elects to create or increase a risk or skip sensible precautions? Why should the client be entitled to the savings but free of the risks created by them? — So that someone who didn't create the risk gets 0% share in the gain and 100% share in the loss? How is any of the foregoing fair or ethical or reasonable?

My opinion: Yes, your mistake is yours. But the size of the damage and the probability of the damage occurring is mostly controlled by the client. Don't be a hostage. Don't be a scapegoat. Don't be set up like that. Get professional insurance. Double-check your work. But demand sufficient information about all risk factors affecting anything that your client wants you to be potentially liable for, and sufficient budget to take all the precautions you need. If the client won't give you the information or the budget, you just don't give your client free insurance against unknown risks generated and increased by the client at will without so much as notifying you so you could prepare.

You also need to take additional precautions with any intermediaries involved, as risks relating to restricted or distorted information grow exponentially the more people or companies are in the chain. So does the risk of your mistake — let's say a small mistake that's undeniable and undeniably yours — leading to huge consequences because of someone else's risk-taking attitude. And it's simply not fair for you to incur something to the tune of $20M liability because the agency wouldn't spend $200 on a proofreader or editor — of which the client may not even be aware, or, if aware of it, then not aware of the consequences.

You just don't get enough infomation to promise unlimited liability. You don't even know what exactly you would be liable for and what sums would be involved. You certainly don't know what risks they are taking and what else they're not telling you. You aren't told quite possibly because you would refuse the job if you knew. Or you could want a higher budget or longer deadline. Remember this.

Also, look up information asymmetry.

5 Factors Other Than Rates That Affect Your Profit on a Project

We focus on rates quite often and for good reason, as despite what some people insist on claiming rates are going downhill, and despite what others might claim (or just not care about) the current level of financial demands from agencies and business clients is not realistic or sustainable, but this doesn't mean we have an excuse to get lazy and stop at that. There is much more to how much you make than the rate you charge:

1. Difficulty. And if you've been around for a while, you probably know how it is: 80% more bother will generate 20% more pay. But what you possibly haven't seriously reflected on yet is that taking only a 20% pay increase while putting in 80% more time sets you back, actually.
   
   How?
   
   Suppose the starting position is that you have 10,000 words to do at $0.10 per, translated at about 500 words per hour. You will make 1000 dollars in 20 hours. This means you will be making $50 per hour.
   
   Are you still with me? If you take another 10,000 words at $0.12 (+20%) with 80% more time, that ain't gonna be no goldmine. You will have to commit 36 hours instead of 2 hours of your time. $1200 divided by 36 hours makes $33.33 per hour. This means you're 33% down.
   
   Eyes wide open already? I can make them even wider (make sure they don't fall out, you're going to need them unless you're unlike me and actually like interpreting :P):
   
   You would actually be better off for taking an actual pay cut but translating easier stuff. Let's hypothetically take a 20% pay cut (not that you should, in real life) but save 80% of our time: we are going to make $800 from 10,000 words at 0.08 per, but we'll have waded through them in 4 hours. Which is almost totally impossible, but we're running huge numbers here to show you, on such extremes, how far the differences could potentially go, based on time required for the task at hand. $800 in 4 hours makes $200 per hour. Compare to $33... yikes!
   
   But let's leave Pareto (a.k.a. the 80-20 rule, typically used for such theoretical illustrations) alone and take more conservative numbers, which are, however, going to be a bit more difficult to calculate (no round numbers that are easy to handle any more).
   
   So, suppose you translate 350 words per hour at 0.10 per. This means you make $35 per hour (before tax, expenses etc.). Suppose your agency or client agrees to a 10% surcharge but you need to invest 50% more time, and I can tell you this is a very realistic scenario. This means you'll need 1.5 hours to translate those 350 words now, at 0.11 per. You will only be able to complete 2/3 of the normal workload within 1 hour, which is 233 words. Rounded up, you will be making $26 per hour. Which means you're down one quarter, despite your nominal raise.
   
   By contrast, imagine taking that 10% pay cut, so that you make 0.09 per word, but your text is easier and you can translate 50% faster, which means 525 words per hour. That will mean $47 per hour. Compare that $47 to your standard $35 and especially to your 'premium' $26 per hour.
   
   If you've ever wondered how come highly qualified translators with unique skills who translate serious stuff somehow don't always seem to be making a lot of money, here is your answer. It also explain how come some rookies or less ambitious translators can be quite affluent compared to their higher-charging peers.
   
   And that is simply because translation price doesn't go up in direct proportion to time needed to translate. This cost is simply mitigated on the client's side and shouldered by the translator, the way things are right now.
   
2. Additional tasks and requirements — included in the PO or job sepcification — compared to 'just translating'. Convert some files, run through a checklist, consult with the client's huge database, verify the HTML while localizing, whatever. The principle is the same: it all soaks up your time with much more celerity than it increases your rates. And you know what that means — you're making less per hour, aren't you? Times 140, 160, 180 or 300, it also means you're making less per month. And times 1500, 2000 or 3000, it also means you're making less p.a. Bottom line: you're making less, even if you theoretically get a small raise or some form of additional payment, especially at cheaper rates than what you get for translation.
   
3. How helpful your client or agency is. Can you just call and ask or do you have to dig through 1000 pages of reference material to translate 10 pages of text? This translates directly into more unpaid time or less. I think there's a chance that the example you've seen under #1 already makes you suspect that after you do the numbers the difference is going to turn out quite surprisingly large. If so, you are correct.
   
4. QA procedures and client input. This really belongs in #2, but it's worth bringing up separately because of how much difference it can make. Processing a long list of questions or proposals is always going to take a lot of time even when they are competent. Much of the time they are not. In a lot of cases you end up explaining the rules to the client's or the agency's QA department… or the junior secretary or intern who was tasked with reviewing your super duper mega extra important translation. And this is before they start arguing… In the end result, your work time can be doubled or tripled for no raise at all, often with the expectation of getting a rebate after going through all the trouble.
   
5. CAT vs non-CAT. CAT analysis can shave several percent off of just about any business, technical or legal text. Say, 5% less in the adjusted/effective/weighted wordcount is not the same as 5% off from your usual rates, but it has the same effect on your pay. If your pay is calculated as wordcount * rate, then — just as in any multiplication — reducing either number by 5% will reduce the end result by 5% too. 1000 words at 9.5 cents per or 950 words at 10 cents per, it still  makes 95 dollars either way.
   
   Just to clarify, I'm not raising the banner against adjusted wordcounts and fuzzy grids here. I'm simply saying that just as an agency or client can say: 'We're going to be treating these 1000 words as 950 because we think that's how much work you really do for us,' so can you say: 'I'm going to be treating your 0.10 per word as 0.095 because I think that's how much you really pay me.'
   
   There is nothing unfair in this, as long as you're honest in assessing how much your income hit exceeds the usefulness of fuzzies and repetitions. This is not telling the client what to do or not to do, it simply means that you're going to see some 0.10 offers as 0.095 offers internally. Being conscious of how much you really are offered or paid is not the same as being cheeky or uncooperative.

These are all short-term factors that can apply to specific projects, even one-off projects for one-off clients, even though, naturally, you can benefit from whatever information you have about the client's habits or your relationship (such as the probability of consuming your time with inquiries and change requests). Here's a long-term factor:

• Your relationship with the PM, the agency, the client etc. For the purposes of solely its influence on your income, we can look at it from two perspectives:

1. What's in it for you other than the rate, in a long-term perspective. Apart from all of #1–5 from the previous list, part of the relationship is how much work you get, how much effort and time it costs you to get that work, how much time you lose unproductively, for any reason whatsoever, not just their feelings about the rate. There is also the non-financial factor of simply your work comfort, and that is something of which the importance cannot be underestimated. It affects your mental peace, and your health, and even your productivity, in fact. Higher rates don't always lead to more money, or more work comfort.
   
2. The impact of your rates, specifically, on the relationship, in the long term. Or, more precisely, the impact of their feelings about your rates — and the resulting pressure — on their behaviour in the relationship. In plain words, this means how eager they are going to be to work with you, how far motivated to choose you despite a higher rate than someone else is charging, or to get out of their way to help you, or the opposite: to want to cash in on all sorts of available requests and call in all available favours since they're already (over-)paying you so much and flexing their business muscle so much simply, solely by just paying your rate.
   

Last but not least, in a 'macro' view, your rates affect how much work you get from all clients and agencies. I always keep insisting and reminding people how higher rates can make up for less turnover, notably far less than a full calendar of paid work. And time is important for your family, for your own mental and physical health, for CPD, for your other interests, and probably a couple of other things you could think about, including marketing. But it if you take it too far, you just might have more free time than you'd wish for. ;)

Besides, it's not like we have an ethical obligation to maximize our rates. We actually have an obligation not to overcharge — pretty much like everybody else, and it ultimately comes down to thou shalt not steal. Getting our rates back to a level where most of us can support an upper-middle-class income for a highly qualified and hard-working translator who is not a rock star and not below middle-middle for the rookies is one thing, but at the end of the day outright overcharging is fraud, especially in the context of working with clients who don't (yet) have the knowledge to make an informed decision.

Also please note I'm talking about B2B here, mostly. It's one thing to charge, for example, several hundred dollars for an hour of your time in connection with a profitable business deal, another to charge the same for a medical translation needed by someone who's already broke. Or just something for a visa. Or whatever. I'm not advocating the latter, by any means. This post should not be read as advocating a hard line in B2C with individuals who need a certificate or a CV.

A Reminder That Tenders and RFPs Are Not Good For You

Earlier today, when checking my mail, I clicked on a job notification from one of the largest translation portals, before I realized it had 'tender' in the job title.

Guess what I did?

I hit 'back'.

I just don't do tenders.

This is not to say that tenders can absolutely never be good for you, because that just wouldn't be true, at least not in that kind of extreme degree.

However, tenders are simply not designed to be profitable to you, or profitable to both parties, i.e. balanced.

Tenders were designed the way the are with the goal of maximizing the buyer's interest.

Look at what the buyer does if buying via RFPs. The buyer sits back in a fluffy armchair and sips his tea just as the sellers enter the arena and bleed their blood, sweat and tears into the sun-scorched sand. Himself, he doesn't have to lift a finger in order to get the entire benefit of negotiation, i.e. the full, maximum benefit of the bargain.

And, no part of the system usually provides for any return of costs even if you 'win'. Yes, you hear me right. Your 'prize' is the opportunity to sell your normal or slightly upgraded services for your normal or somewhat (heavily) discounted prices. There is nothing like paying you for the costs of processing the paperwork. No man-hours, no postage fees, no nothing. I'm talking about the 'winner' here, mind you, not the poor souls who 'lost'.

However, the poor souls who 'lost' may well be real winners in the end — they don't tie themselves up for months or years to come in what's a questionable deal from the beginning.

Chances are they will meet — and use — better opportunities in all that time.

Pretty much the only exception is when you are new to freelancing but not to translating, which means you don't have many clients yet and finding work is a problem but you do have the qualifications to win a tender without being the cheapest provider. Or when you have no alternatives, then it's basically a fact of life that you must reply to those RFPs and better not in vain, or you're going to starve. Or when you can benefit from price difference between the buyer's country and yours (possible if you live in a third-world country or even a second-world country like my own).

Like I said, the scope, the object of the tender is the provision of your services in the future, not the recovery of any costs you may have incurred in the past. The system is simply designed in such a way (which I might well say as a lawyer) that it doesn't give any specific thought to your cost or anything like that. It only gives thought to you not making any more profit than is absolutely inevitable.

Yes, you hear me right: The point of tenders and RFPs and all that is for you to not make any more profit than is absolutely unavoidable. The balance of the bargain is supposed to go over to the buyer, in whole.

That's the point of tenders.

Adverse Selection And Information Asymmetry

The best example of 'adverse selection' is when you get life insurance with the intention of committing suicide so that your family can get the benefits. We have laws on the books against that sort of thing, which means it must have become popular at some point, before they cracked down on it.

A less clear-cut example is when you get a policy that you know you're much more likely to cash in on than the average person. Someone looking from the insurer's perspective could be at least tempted to see it as something unethical and abusive. On the other hand, from the buyer's perspective there could be nothing more to it than taking advantage of what looked like a good bargain.

Non-insurance examples could include buffet lunches, all-you-can-eat bars, all-inclusive holiday trips. The price charged represents the average expected cost plus some margin. Some people will eat less, some will eat more, in the grand scheme of things it'll even out.

Similarly, in translation the rates tend to be more uniform than the amount of time needed by each individual translation, which is very difficult to predict up front and varies from one translator to the next to boot.

There is no question that to make your business smoother and more secure you need to learn to spot potential time suckers and learn to at least plan for contingencies, not overbook your calendar when one of your projects has that kind of potential, perhaps negotiate higher rates or switch to hourly billing.

This is something translators usually learn in the first couple of years.

However, I would like to call your attention to something more disruptive, more dangerous: problem jobs.

You don't have all of the information the client or agency has.

Perhaps you can recall, from your own experience, a situation like this:

They send you an attachment and ask you to confirm ASAP, which leaves you a short window and a lot of pressure. You mumble something, grudgingly, about them owing you one or needing to plan better, next time. Or you make it clear there isn't going to be any next time, only this once. Then you say the fateful words: 'okay, I confirm' and with the stroke of a magic wand the problem is now yours. Moments later you discover just how long the OCR or file repair is going to take — or you see the one bajilion tags surrounding every letter in the bilingual file in a CAT job. And an X-Bench/CAT QA report is required for those tags. Or the quality of the original is passably good initially, but deteriorates steadily until you no can no longer keep guessing whatever the thing was supposed to mean.

That's not the worst of it, actually. Sometimes a server is involved and that server goes down. Or someone's input is critically needed and that person suddenly becomes unavailable. Or just after you start the job they are afraid that whatever they had promised you to coax or cajole you into accepting is not actually possible. Or they unload some more reference material or client requests on you.

Unless you started a couple of months ago or you've been extremely lucky, you've probably had a couple of your own war stories like these by now. Well, now is the time to connect some dots — or at least as good as any.

I don't want you to become paranoid and see a trap in every single more-than-average complicated job you are offered by someone desperate. But I would like you to be cautious and safe. Better safe than sorry.

Here are some pointers:

• The client or agency wants you to accept quickly and really wants you to accept the job. Unless you have good reasons to think it's about your unique skills or reputation for reliability, there can be a good reason why the want the job out of their way.
• The client or agency wants you to accept before you can inspect the file(s) and any additional information. They seem to be rather secretive and — especially — deflect or ignore requests for information. That means there's a chance they don't want you to have that information — and why? A high probability is that's because that information could make you decline the offer. Or perhaps they themselves don't really know what's going on.
• Technical problems with the files and little help from the client or agency when you mention it. This is an especially high risk with agencies which make it clear in your contract that once you accept a file for translation, any and everything relating to it becomes your own responsibility.
• Any such problem should be a huge red flag with any agency whose contract or PO contains a stipulation that by accepting a job (a file) you are guaranteeing that it is doable. If the contract goes as far as saying that you 'waive' (give up) the right to 'rely on' (invoke, in your defence) any problems with the source, with the client's or agency's conduct etc. — then run away for dear life.
• The same refers to sloppy writing in the source, especially in those huge files that have multiple different authors, sometimes all of them non-native and unedited.
• Again, that sort of thing becomes several times more dangerous wherever there are the clauses in the contract about how everything becomes your responsibility and nothing is their responsibility any more after you accept. 
• You should also be very helpful if someone is imploring, pleading, practically begging — but at the same time the paperwork is adversarial, hostile, there is small print in it or some dense legalese you don't understand, anything which you already suspect might be a trap.
• Anyone who has done it once or twice and without remourse is likely to do it again. Don't judge them, but don't rely on their word for anything important, either.
• If you work with agencies and your rates are significantly above average, then the agencies probably know of at least a handful of cheaper providers. The fact that they are turning to you — and this also applies to direct clients who have found you too expensive before — may in itself be an indication of a compelling reason to do so, which is not always as simple as wanting better quality from now on or better quality for that particular text than in most other cases.

Remember that to some people deceit in negotiation is fair game — and only the final outcome counts. That means some people will manipulate you into accepting a bad deal but will still very much believe you to be — legally, ethically, morally even — bound by that deal. That's how life works for people who believe themselves to be somewhat special. To some extent, most human beings believe themselves to be somewhat special.

Some players justify their cheating to themselves while expecting others to play by the book. In their mind, legit or not what counts is that they win (and in some of those minds it's legit even if they cheated). Alternatively, whoever can't play as skillfully as they can is fair game.

You need to be prepared to encounter that sort of character flaw in people who aren't in full consciousness trying to set you up. And, among hundreds or thousands of prospective and actual clients, someone will eventually try to consciously set you up with a bad job, too.

On the extreme end of the spectrum, scammers or desperate people scrambling for damage control may be looking for someone on whom to dump a translation/localization problem that already stinks, or a problem that isn't even a translation/localization problem in itself but can be transferred to a translator if you manage to make that translator unconditionally responsible for the quality, condition, usability etc. of the target file or for the achievement of a specific, set goal.

Remember that people who want you to give them broad and far-reaching guarantees are probably doing so because they know they're going to need them. You don't obtain such things because you don't need them, that would make no sense.

A word of practical advice: In a crisis situation it's easier to stick by rules you've already made before, with a cool head, than to make up good rules on the spot, when you're hot-headed and emotionally agitated.

Hence, you may want to develop and adopt some safety rules for yourself. For example:

• Never make final decisions on the phone.
• Keep a written record of all arrangements.
• Never decide before seeing all of the source and reference files.
• Don't take a client's word on anything which affects your ability or willingness to accept the job or the pay, get a signature on paper instead.
• Don't accept any oral changes, amendments or supplementations to a written contract or PO. (Even if they are actually valid, proving that they existed is going to be a whole different challenge.)
• Don't accept tech-intense jobs with short deadlines without processing the files through your CAT tool and making sure that they load and save (import and export) without errors.
• Don't accept a job with a mandatory client glossary or TM (translation memory) before you carefully inspect the quality of that glossary or TM.
• Don't accept a CAT job on an OCR file without checking out the tags in the bilingual file first, especially if you are required to keep tags intact or report on any deviations (e.g. X-Bench reports). CATs and OCR files don't work too well together.
• If your software is not the newest available (e.g. Trados 2014 now that Trados 2015 has come out; MS Office 2010, now that 2013 has been around for a long while), don't accept a job before making sure your software is not too old to properly read and write the file (without damaging the layout, too).
• Be extra careful with clients who have been unreliable before and not quite sorry for it. Especially anyone who's known to have lied to translators before.

You may need to train yourself to be a bit more resistant to the emotional pleas of people who you can already say are not being entirely open or fair with you from the get go. This may be a challenge, but it'll be easier if you know their own tricks or common negotiation tactics and if you allow yourself time to think clearly about the requirements of the job before you make your decision.

Also, don't shy away from demanding the inclusion of express conditions in the PO. This essentially means committing them to their promises on paper, with a signature. For example you may want to include the reservation that the deadline is guaranteed and the agreed fee is sufficient only as long as their assurances are true. You may want to have their signature under a disclaimer of your responsibility for things you don't want to be responsible for. For example (just a few):

• Undisclosed expectations.
• Fitness for undisclosed purposes.
• Special or consequential damages of the likelihood of which they didn't inform you.
• Technical and formatting issues resulting from processing an OCR-ed file with a CAT tool.

On a final note, once again, be very careful with people who are itching to get rid of the responsibility for their own or their own clients' files. Be extra careful with with agencies whose contracts make a point of how you're going to be responsible for each and every kind of problem imaginable from the moment you accept the job, or how — by accepting the job — you supposedly guarantee that the files are correct and the client's instructions and requirements are achievable and professionally sound (let alone sound from a business or legal perspective) etc.

That is, unless you're prepared for that sort of game. Some translators don't mind. Apart from naïve youngsters, those are seasoned old salts who are confident in their ability to detect, avoid or fix any kind of trouble, down to fending off any unjustified complaint or lawsuit. Even so, overconfidence is a great enemy.