Client's unilateral decision to pay less

fabiomcaldas

How do you deal with client's unilateral decision to pay less for whatever reason they might give?

Claiming 1. Poor translation quality; 2. Other translators were faster; 3. Any other reason you might have heard?

Dmitry

fabiomcaldas Well, I'd politely explain that unfortunately I can't lower my rates. After all we've already negotiated them before we started working, so trying to lower them would be a breach of a contract.

My current clients never really question my rates and accept them without hesitation. However 3-4 years ago when I was working with the agencies there were a few situations when they tried to put a price pressure on their translators (in the form of impersonal mass email).

In this situation the only thing to say is:
too bad so sad bye-bye

fabiomcaldas

Dmitry

Actually, what I meant was for after delivering a job.

Consider a recurrent client/agency setting your PO to 100 USD (through their automatic PO system) when it should be 150 USD. Prior to job acceptance, the PM agrees with your hourly rate of 50 USD and with your estimation of job completion of 4 hours. Having the job taken only 3 hours to be concluded one would expect to be paid 150 USD. You get in contact with the PM and he says that you took way too longer to finish the job compared with other translators working in different target languages.

What is your take?

eleonorang

Hi Fabio, I think that the situation you describe is simply unjust and any translator facing it would have every right to claim those 150 USD.
Tell the PM they could and should have said from the start that they had a 100 USD budget, or that with your rate they could afford to pay only two hours of work. Then it would have been up to you to accept or decline or complete the job in 2 hours instead of 4.
I think that honesty is always the basis for good cooperation and, if this happened to me, such a behaviour would undermine my trust in the PM and the agency.

Dmitry

I agree with @eleonorang take on this situation and I'm really sorry that you're dealing with this, @fabiomcaldas! I'd recommend to resolve it amicably between you and the manager. If that doesn't work you might try and reach out to their superior. If that doesn't work you might warn them that you'd seek legal advice (because they're in a breach of contract). Of course by that point you'd probably loose them as a client. If it was me, I'd probably never work with them again.