Dear Customer-
We value you as a customer and feel that you deserve the best from your language services provider; therefore, it is our pleasure to assure you that the interpreter G2Local sends you will be excellent.
We felt the need to send our customers this brief memo as a result of a startling downward trend we have witnessed. We want to assure you that G2Local is not a part of the horrible slide. The negative motion we are referring to involves the rates being paid out to interpreters by other companies. Rates have reached a heart-breaking low level.
You, valued customer, must understand how our industry works in order to understand that the cheapest company in your area cannot possibly be the best. There is a point at which quality suffers and most interpreting companies reached that a long time ago. This open letter is an attempt to proclaim our position and openly explain how much we value our interpreters.
When you call us for an interpreter, our interpreter will be professional, on-time, and highly trained. We KNOW you will be pleased with our interpreters because we work very hard at developing great linguists. Any interpreter we send you will be trained. How do we assure this? Well, we do our own training, at our own cost. There is a huge lack of training available to new interpreters in the entire city and the entire state. At G2Local, we finally stopped looking outside of ourselves for the answer and we just went to work.
Because we train the interpreters ourselves, we know exactly what your interpreter should and should not know, there is no “hoping” they learn on their own. However, our strategy to send you, valued customer, the best interpreters does not stop at training. Money talks!
The of the best reason we can assure you that your interpreter will be excellent is because we treat our interpreters right, starting with their wallets. We pay our interpreters well. We expect a lot but we also pay a lot. We pay higher than any other company in this area, by a long shot, because we want the experienced interpreters to drop other jobs and take ours. We want the best for our customers.
Think about this question: How much do you think a professional in any industry is worth? I doubt the answer would be $10-$15/hour. Worse still are companies paying interpreters day rates that average out to about $7/hr. These are fast food wages. Interpreters don’t even get mileage or travel time either, nor do they have taxes taken out. That $10-$15/hr is more like $8-$12/hr. Sad. Unacceptable.
At G2Local, our office staff is forever asking ourselves, “Would I take this job? Is that enough money for me to do this job?” If the answer is “no” or “heck no”, we don’t attempt to persuade a kind-hearted interpreter into taking the job.
Let’s approach the question of being a “professional” in another way: perhaps you, Mr. Customer, need an interpreter in a somewhat rare language for this area, like Cambodian. Now, we have Cambodian interpreters but there isn’t enough work in that language group for us to keep an interpreter full time. Because our interpreters are professional people, they likely have another professional job. Would anyone take a day off their regular job to interpret for a lousy $15? No way!! We have to make the job “worth it.”
Are there Cambodian interpreters who will take the job for any fee? Yes, probably. There is always someone. However, think about the caliber of person that will work for that low rate- it will be someone desperate, unemployed, uneducated. No professional will work for unprofessional rates. Not going to happen, today or ever.
I say to you then, Mr Customer, that you can go with a company that will charge you a lower rate than we do, but not by much. Our rates are competitive and as close to the margin as we can manage. That extra cost is not worth the quality you will sacrifice.
We hope this letter has given you a better understanding of how the language service industry works; we are happy to address any questions or individual concerns.
Kind regards,
The G2Local office- ww.g2local.com
Is there anything else we should add to this letter regarding interpreting rates? Your comments are appreciated…….is this downward slide a problem everywhere and how do we stop it?
GB