If you’re a language serviced provider this spectrum provides a model for you to think about the advantages and disadvantages of how transparent (about technology savings) you are when quoting. For example giving your client all the savings you make when applying translation technology is simple and, some would argue, honest. However this approach can make it difficult for you claw back the cost of your technology investment.
The other extreme of this spectrum would be to not mention technology when quoting even if you use it, and perhaps not even passing on any savings to the client. Sounds great, but if a competitor discovers this they can soon make inroads into the account by claiming a technology advantage and possibly a more honest approach.
I hope this spectrum, which is used in some of the Selling Translations® training courses, is useful to you and welcome any feedback.
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There’s even more to transparency than this, Doug. On more than one occasion I have been able to retain a customer threatening to depart for a cheaper per word option by using ranslation technology to keep down the cost of translation for my customer. One customer was asking for a 10 percent cut in the cost of translation had a demonstration in STAR Transit as to how he could save 15 percent by only having one source text variant of a sentence. Think of the cost of a comma here and there knocking a perfect match back to a fuzzy.
On the other hand, I have to say the German spelling reform made me a lot of easy money because customers did not think to update the spelling of the the reference material.