Backed-Up Comments Reposted

The comments to the Didiergate posts, which I had backed up in a slightly exotic format, have been reposted. Many thanks to Hacène Dramchini, a French-English translator whom I met through the AIPTI, for converting the files into a usable format.

The posts with the most comments are:

http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/personal-response-to-lionbridge-vp.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/lionbridge-ceo-rory-cowan-explains.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/it-rubs-translation-workspace-on-its.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/empire-writes-back-response-to.html


They include the long comment from "Rory C", whose recommendations are well worth reposting. Including his final advice: "But my real advice to all of you is that you are probably best served by finding new people (SLVs too) to work with, who treat you with more respect and fairness and realize that in this industry quality is accomplished through human partnerships. Working with people who recognize and acknowledge your value always makes for a better life. Right?"



Rory C wrote:

One way to possibly escalate this concern for fairness is to make more powerful stakeholders who will care what this mean for the future of the company.

Identify all the research analysts that cover LIOX and inform them in a clear and dispassionate tone how this move will very likely cause the best translators to refuse to work with LIOX and result is lower quality for many services provided by LIOX thus resulting in customers leaving and a lower stock price. Remember that these are the guys who publicly quiz the executive management about how things are going every quarter and also write reports to inform interested investors what they think about the company and its future.
Identify the Investment Officers at their largest institutional investor firms and inform them why LIOX may be a bad investment and why their stock price is likely to fall, again in a dispassionate and clear way so that they understand that there is a real risk of the stock price collapsing and staying in the gutter.

This link provides a list of all their largest Institutional Investment holders http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=LIOX+Major+Holders 
Find their addresses/emails and make sure they hear about this from you and all your best friends who disagree with this policy.

Write them all an email explaining the role of the translator in the localization supply chain making sure they understand that quality comes from good translators who are likely to work best when they feel fairly compensated. You could also explain how alienating good translators will undermine LIOX quality in the long run.  LIOX will probably have a story on how easily translators are replaceable -  it is important to explain that like in any other profession, the best translators are not so easily replaced.  Give them examples of how bad translators undermine product and services offered by LIOX.

Then attach a link to all the blogs that explain why this is unfair / bad strategy etc.. There is a good summary of the LIOX Crowdscorning with many links at http://t.co/ArVJtc7   I suggest that an even and considered tone like the one employed by Kevin Lossner will be the most effective way to make your point. Angry people are tiresome and best ignored.

Make sure that you and a 100 of your best friends send some form of this summary to anybody who is interested in investing in LIOX stock or currently owns a significant amount of LIOX stock.

Make it clear that this is likely to cause the following:
•    Loss in service and product quality
•    Increasingly lower quality translators working for Lionbridge which will be reflected in their deliverables
•    Imminent and sustained drop in LIOX stock price (i.e. it will be very hard for the stock to rise again)
•    Continued losses as some large customers realize that they have so much ill will that it is going to affect their ability to deliver services and choose to find other suppliers who have better relations with the supply chain
•    Perception of LIOX as a sweatshop which will make many blue chip  customers shy away and avoid LIOX as a supplier

If you do this, I think you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you have done everything you can to let the authorities know about this. If you are lucky this will even cause Rory and Didier to get a severe hand slapping from the investors and possibly even issue an apology to all the people who received the infamous letter. Even if there are no visible signs of remorse I suspect there will be some back room chats that will make the boys tread much more carefully in future.

But my real advice to all of you is that you are probably best served by finding new people (SLVs too) to work with, who treat you with more respect and fairness and realize that in this industry quality is accomplished through human partnerships. Working with people who recognize and acknowledge your value always makes for a better life. Right?

Good Luck.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.