Lower Person on the Totem Pole (LPTP) promises to get back to you in a couple of days after Big Boss has approved the terms and conditions you've negotiated with them. A week passes without any sign of life from your suitors. The telephone calls and emails have dropped off abruptly, and your head is filled with the strains of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers Anymore."

You decide to take the bull by the horns and find out what's going on before too much time passes, so you pick up the telephone. You ask LPTP about the status of the negotiations. LPTP pauses uncomfortably and mumbles, "I'm sorry, but we've decided not to use your services because we've found some translation software/somebody in-house that we will use to translate our materials. A professional translator just won't fit in our budget."

How many times has this happened to you? Probably far more frequently than it should!

Due to the simple, undeniable fact that the bottom line is top priority for most companies! If they don't have an appreciation of the extremely value-added advantages of a good translator, you will be the first to be cut from the company budget. In these situations many translators aren't quite sure how to argue their way back into the budget confidently and convincingly. It is not easy to do this in terms that are perfectly understandable to a cost-conscious businessperson. Their awareness of the value of good translation services is often vague or nonexistent. To provide my fellow translators with the ammunition they need, here are some tried-and-true strategies to use when confronted with the two top excuses that companies use to cut translators from their budget: translation software, and finding an in-house employee to do the work.

1) "We've decided to use translation software because there's just too much to translate, and it would be too expensive to hire a translator to do it."

Find out whether they've already bought the software. If they haven't, and you already own translation software yourself (which is becoming increasingly useful anyway!) point this out and say that you will be more than willing to pass the work through your software and proofread behind it. If they've already bought the software, again extend the offer to proofread. Either way, you must strongly press the proofreading angle. Explain to them that the translation software industry is still in its infancy, so the programs floating around out there are still relatively primitive. Therefore, even when working with the best of these programs, it is vital to include at *absolute minimum* a proofreader in the process. This will catch the laughably awful results that inevitably come up with certain words and phrases. With this approach, you should at least be able to convince your potential client to let you proofread, even if they refuse to let you translate.

If your potential client is in a culturally sensitive field such as tourism, marketing, public relations, human resources, or politics, you have more leverage. When working with the culturally sensitive materials that these and similar fields are known for, a good translation from scratch, not just proofreading, becomes the absolute minimum requirement. A computer program will never, ever be as sensitive to cultural nuances as a real, live translator. If the potential client is a human resources department writing an employee handbook, emphasise the point that employee handbooks are filled with intricacies. These are extremely difficult to write even in one's native language, let alone to translate into another language. Employee handbooks are some of the most vital documents a company has. Taking chances with a primitive translation could cause enormous legal problems for the company. And your potential client will definitely start listening when you start talking about liabilities.

If your potential client hasn't already bought software, and doesn't need to translate non-culturally sensitive materials in bulk, emphasize that the company will save far more money in the long run by hiring a good translator from the beginning. Whether the translator uses software or not, this will be cheaper than buying software and paying a proofreader to clean up after it. If the client buys software and hires a proofreader for cleanup, it will essentially be paying twice for something that should only be a one-time process. Good translators edit and proofread as they go, which is far more efficient and cost-effective.

2) "We've decided to use an in-house employee who speaks X to do the Y-into-X translations for us; after all, they do 'know the language', and it will be cheaper for us."

Many a business has regretted the day it made that decision. Entire books have been written about the hilarious, embarrassing, and potentially explosive mistranslations that have occurred when someone with no translation experience and a couple of years' worth of study of the target language is hired for even the smallest and simplest of jobs. Persons who 'know the language', but who do not have a *native* knowledge of the target language, are easily tripped up by 'false friends', unfamiliarity with the target language and culture, and other stealthy traps. The results can be...

... screamingly funny, as in the American ads for the Swedish vacuum cleaner maker Electrolux: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux." But they can also cause ruffled feathers, a spoiled business deal, political chaos, or worse - especially if the company wants to translate culturally sensitive materials, as discussed earlier.