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tranfree issue 45 - 28 January 2002
LionBridge - the Good and the BadBy Alex Eames
The GoodLionbridge has made available their translation memory software for free as an open source product (Like Linux). To use their own words... "Lionbridge has released ForeignDesk to the open source development community, giving developers everywhere the opportunity to use, enhance, modify and imbed a stable, proven and full-featured computer-aided translation product." What this means is that you can download their translation memory software for free. You can even modify it if you want to. They also say... "By releasing ForeignDesk source code to the developer community, Lionbridge seeks to speed up the pace at which translation memory functionality is added to a wide range of enterprise applications." ...which is fair enough. Companies like WinZip have used this approach to become industry standard applications - and it has worked. But I can't help feeling it may be a bit late for that to happen in this case. Perhaps I'm reading too much into it? If you're interested in this product, you can download it at... http://sourceforge.net/projects/foreigndesk/ If you do have a play with it, please let me know how you get on. I'd be particularly interested to hear how it compares with the likes of Trados/Deja Vu/Star/SDLX.
The BadUnfortunately, having recently asked for feedback about late/bad payers, Lionbridge is the...
The issue is late payment, not non-payment. I have not received any complaints from translators who did not get paid at all, but I have received several (and seen several more in online lists) from people who got paid several months late. The reason most often given by LionBridge for late payment is lack of cash due to buying up other companies. So, the translators are bankrolling your (over)expansion are they LionBridge? Not good, although not an uncommon practice in business. One quote from an email I received... "There is an entire mailing list of translators from all over the world who are waiting for payment from Lionbridge Boulder." If you take a look at the performance of their share price you can see that it has declined steadily over the last two years. Although it looks like it's rising again now, it's still a fifth of what it once was. Of course this has nothing directly to do with cash flow, and more to do with market sentiment.
But when the share price goes down it is harder for a company to
borrow money against its equity. So unilaterally 'borrowing' from
suppliers seems to be the way the business is funded.
My recommendation if you're owed money is to ask for it
repeatedly until they pay you. Try not to be aggressive, but they
owe you, so they should pay you. In some countries like the UK
and Germany you are entitled to charge interest on late payments.
This could be more complicated with international transactions
though.
Alex Eames is the founder of translatortips.com, |
..."most complained about" company.