Translations.com Reviews

Pros

-Work with big name clients from many different industries.
-Allowed to work independently very quickly and use own ingenuity to succeed.
-Talented people are hired so you have great colleagues.

Cons

-No career advancement.
-Management in Client Services is incompetent; always negative but rarely prepared or skilled enough to offer options for resolution or improvement.
-No work/life balance.
-Technology is sub-par and rushed out to Sales before complete QA is performed to verify viability.
-Sales-driven organization in which Account Managers, Project Managers, and other Production folks are underpaid but expected to provide stellar services and deliverables.

Advice to Senior Management

Formulate definitive career paths and give ALL employees a chance to better themselves. Only Sales ever has seminars for career advancement. What about CS AMs that retain your clients even though quality of services and deliverables aren't even good? We say as an organization that growth is mostly impacted by client retention yet you give very little incentive to CS AMs to stay.

Pros

Young, smart, amiable coworkers. A degree of independence for which to conduct your client relationships. get to interact with coworkers and clients from across the globe.

Cons

Overworked and underpaid is "de rigueur" at Translations.com The sales staff is bloated, whereas CS, Production and Engineering struggle to leave the office at a decent hour. This fosters an environment of sullen, defeated employees. "Bonus" package is wipe-your-ass money. The "work" consists of consistantly smoothing things over with clients who are increasingly upset with translation errors, quality issues, delivery issues, etc, etc. Management is dysfunctional and unsupportive, and will most likely project their own issues, instead of being a source of constructive criticism and positive feedback.

Advice to Senior Management

Invest in your CS AM's! They represent the "face" of Translations.com... and the current rention rate is NOT good for the company!

Pros

Young, smart, interesting group of people. Fast-paced and can learn a lot if you know right people to talk to. Room for growth is here and work environment can be fun and casual.

Cons

No work vs. life balance. People are generally overworked and underpaid for what they do. The company doesn't seem to have much interests in retaining talents.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop being so cheap and value your people. Put some money into testing all those "software" you are pushing toward clients--production should NOT be your beta testers for all your products. People are wasting hours trying to work with software full of bugs.

Pros

- Very interesting industry
- Fast-paced environment
- I honestly can't think of another good thing to say I just need to meet the word requirement

Cons

- Project Managers are responsible for overseeing the life of a project as it makes its way through the production cycle. If one department misses a deadline or messes something up and as a result a clients deadline is missed, the blame is put entirely on the Project Manager, even though that is impossible most of the time.
- Division management is useless as all decisions must be approved by upper management which has a do-or-die mentality.
- Employees are grossly underpaid (Project Managers averaging $37k, get real) for the amount of work they are responsible for
- Competition is encouraged instead of teamwork

Advice to Senior Management

Respect and appreciate your employees because you're loosing them all.

Pros

About all this place has going for it is location -- it has offices in many very attractive places, including most major US cities.

Cons

Completely sales-driven. Post-sales staff (Project and Account Managers) are completely at the mercy of a largely incompetent sales team, and led by a sad careerist who works his staff into the ground for remarkably poor compensation. Management is limited to range-of-the-moment wrangling designed to quickly bleed customers of as much money as possible; the concept of "partnership" is lost on this company. Company's technology is widely acknowledged as awful among internal staff, yet peddled relentlessly to customers, which then becomes the client services team's liability. Leadership has no vision, no scruples, and no regard for its employees.

Advice to Senior Management

Read the "cons" section, and understand that this is how most of your employees perceive you. Partner with your clients instead of fleecing them or hamstringing them with bad software. Take stock of your inability to manage / develop / retain employees, and rethink your philosophy.

Pros

Bonuses are quite good and proportional with the amount of success in handling the projects. You get public recognition when achieving outstanding results

Cons

You end up doing many hours of overtime in order to finish projects. Promotions are somehow slow. Salary raises are sometimes not big enough

Advice to Senior Management

Try not to exhaust the employees with too many projects and hard deadlines. Give more opportunities to advance in career.