Several problems. What happened?

[massimofavero]

About a week ago I received an order for a translation: I managed to complete it about 2:30 hours after I received the order itself, but my costumer immediately replied telling me that some sentences made no sense. I had already checked the document before the delivery, so I checked it again and found nothing wrong in it. I asked him if he could tell me what the presumably wrong sentences were but he didn’t give me a specific answer, he just replied with “mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Once again, I re-checked the document, modified a few words and just a sentence in the very last paragraph, then re-sent him the document and told me that I was willing to do another revision ONLY if he told me what the non-sense parts of the document were.

I received no reply: the next day the order was completed and he gave me a 3.7 stars review saying “Thank you for your help”

Have I done something wrong?
I’m also having a few problems with Fiverr in general as now my Orders Completion is stuck at 86% despite I delivered all my orders in time, and my Response Rate is 75% (I have deleted a spam message from another person).

Along with that, my personal balance shows to be less than what I should have right now, but it is correct on the Fiverr App for cellular phone.

Things haven’t gone way too well 😬

[miiila]

About a week ago I received an order for a translation: I managed to complete it about 2:30 hours after I received the order itself, but my costumer immediately replied telling me that some sentences made no sense. I had already checked the document before the delivery, so I checked it again and found nothing wrong in it. I asked him if he could tell me what the presumably wrong sentences were but he didn’t give me a specific answer, he just replied with “mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Once again, I re-checked the document, modified a few words and just a sentence in the very last paragraph, then re-sent him the document and told me that I was willing to do another revision ONLY if he told me what the non-sense parts of the document were.

I received no reply: the next day the order was completed and he gave me a 3.7 stars review saying “Thank you for your help”

Have I done something wrong?

I’m also having a few problems with Fiverr in general as now my Orders Completion is stuck at 86% despite I delivered all my orders in time, and my Response Rate is 75% (I have deleted a spam message from another person).

Along with that, my personal balance shows to be less than what I should have right now, but it is correct on the Fiverr App for cellular phone.

Things haven’t gone way too well 😬

“mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Could be that it was a reseller whose buyer wasn´t happy with the document and only provided vague info so he couldn´t tell you anything concrete. This is one of the reasons many people don´t like to work with resellers.

Could also be that it was a scammer who was hoping you´d offer a refund, as some sellers who are afraid of a bad review do, so he´d have the well-done work and also his money back.

Hard to tell, but it doesn´t sound as if you did anything wrong, since if he´d have provided more useful info, like showing you those sentences allegedly not making sense, you´d have corrected them and if you were sure your translation was good, it was right to stand up for it and to ask for examples of whatever supposedly made no sense.

Order completion rate ≠ Delivered on time rate, the former is about cancelled orders, the second about delivered on time, you can read about how they are made up in the Seller Help Center.

ETA: By the way, I´ve looked at your profile and both your translation gigs say “I will translate from English to Italian” but the gig images show both English to Italian as well as Italian to English, you may want to adjust that.

[jonbaas]

About a week ago I received an order for a translation: I managed to complete it about 2:30 hours after I received the order itself, but my costumer immediately replied telling me that some sentences made no sense. I had already checked the document before the delivery, so I checked it again and found nothing wrong in it. I asked him if he could tell me what the presumably wrong sentences were but he didn’t give me a specific answer, he just replied with “mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Once again, I re-checked the document, modified a few words and just a sentence in the very last paragraph, then re-sent him the document and told me that I was willing to do another revision ONLY if he told me what the non-sense parts of the document were.

I received no reply: the next day the order was completed and he gave me a 3.7 stars review saying “Thank you for your help”

Have I done something wrong?

I’m also having a few problems with Fiverr in general as now my Orders Completion is stuck at 86% despite I delivered all my orders in time, and my Response Rate is 75% (I have deleted a spam message from another person).

Along with that, my personal balance shows to be less than what I should have right now, but it is correct on the Fiverr App for cellular phone.

Things haven’t gone way too well 😬

but my costumer immediately replied telling me that some sentences made no sense.

Here we go with the costumers, again… telling you what to do. They should stick to costumes, and let the customers be the ones that give you gig input. 😉

It’s amazing how much a misspelled word can change the context of something. 😉

[massimofavero]

“mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Could be that it was a reseller whose buyer wasn´t happy with the document and only provided vague info so he couldn´t tell you anything concrete. This is one of the reasons many people don´t like to work with resellers.

Could also be that it was a scammer who was hoping you´d offer a refund, as some sellers who are afraid of a bad review do, so he´d have the well-done work and also his money back.

Hard to tell, but it doesn´t sound as if you did anything wrong, since if he´d have provided more useful info, like showing you those sentences allegedly not making sense, you´d have corrected them and if you were sure your translation was good, it was right to stand up for it and to ask for examples of whatever supposedly made no sense.

Order completion rate ≠ Delivered on time rate, the former is about cancelled orders, the second about delivered on time, you can read about how they are made up in the Seller Help Center.

ETA: By the way, I´ve looked at your profile and both your translation gigs say “I will translate from English to Italian” but the gig images show both English to Italian as well as Italian to English, you may want to adjust that.

Thank you for the Gig titles tip, I indeed offered Italian to English translations aswell so I’ve modified them to be clearer.

About the Completion Rate, I suppose it makes sense as I had to cancel an order with another costumer because he ended up not needing the translations anymore.

Thanks again!

[pacquo]

Ciao Massimo,

I think that your story may be read in another way.

So far, on Fiverr I have translated from English to Italian and vice versa just two documents.

I am however an avid reader of the “Buyer Request” section, where I can read and analyse the samples provided by the buyers.

There I have almost immediately noticed a problem that comes from something that I could define “translations of translations”.

I’ve read samples that showed the distinctive traits of a raw machine translation from another language.
I am speaking of e-commerce listings, instruction manuals, website pages and the like.

In those cases, it happens that the automated translator cuts a significant part of the original meaning, the one that comes from contextualization.
It’s an unrecoverable loss of information, unless the translator has access to the original source.

When a translator does not have enough information about the original context, he may end to translate something that could be correct from the point of view of grammar, but that could have no actual meaning.

I think that your case may be slightly different since I have just discovered to have received a translation request from that very person, a few days ago.

The buyer, that is based in England, requested the translation from English to Italian of a financial article, about 1000 words long.

I may guess that he needed to forward it to an Italian peer, and I imagine that the Italian peer, after reading your translation, may have answered “It does not make quite sense”.

Chances are that you have missed some nuances of the financial language or some idiomatic expression.
Something that is not so easy to translate in just two hours and half.

Here we come to the core of the issue.

You are currently offering the translation of 1000 words with three revisions, with a delivery time of two days. Given these conditions it seems unreasonable to deliver in a such short time.

Unless the buyer has explicitly asked to you to deliver in a couple of hours, in his eyes you don’t look like a fast translator, rather someone that want to end the job as soon as possible.

[trooviez9]

“mostly the second part of the document”, which was a rather useless reply.

Could be that it was a reseller whose buyer wasn´t happy with the document and only provided vague info so he couldn´t tell you anything concrete. This is one of the reasons many people don´t like to work with resellers.

Could also be that it was a scammer who was hoping you´d offer a refund, as some sellers who are afraid of a bad review do, so he´d have the well-done work and also his money back.

Hard to tell, but it doesn´t sound as if you did anything wrong, since if he´d have provided more useful info, like showing you those sentences allegedly not making sense, you´d have corrected them and if you were sure your translation was good, it was right to stand up for it and to ask for examples of whatever supposedly made no sense.

Order completion rate ≠ Delivered on time rate, the former is about cancelled orders, the second about delivered on time, you can read about how they are made up in the Seller Help Center.

ETA: By the way, I´ve looked at your profile and both your translation gigs say “I will translate from English to Italian” but the gig images show both English to Italian as well as Italian to English, you may want to adjust that.

it was a reseller whose buyer wasn´t happy with the document and only provided vague info so he couldn´t tell you anything concrete

I too think he was dealing with a reseller. I dislike working with such people. They give you lots of work but pay peanuts and keep all the money. I once had a reseller who had her client give her $40 for a piece of work but she was only willing to give me $5 yet I am the one doing all the donkey work. Talk of greed.

When you sense a potential buyer is a reseller, RUN!

[Guest offlinehelpers]

it was a reseller whose buyer wasn´t happy with the document and only provided vague info so he couldn´t tell you anything concrete

I too think he was dealing with a reseller. I dislike working with such people. They give you lots of work but pay peanuts and keep all the money. I once had a reseller who had her client give her $40 for a piece of work but she was only willing to give me $5 yet I am the one doing all the donkey work. Talk of greed.

When you sense a potential buyer is a reseller, RUN!

Talk of greed.

That’s how supermarkets etc. make money - buy cheap, sell high. It’s what our economies are based on. ☀️

Without resellers, there would be far fewer buyer on Fiverr.

[trooviez9]

Talk of greed.

That’s how supermarkets etc. make money - buy cheap, sell high. It’s what our economies are based on. ☀️

Without resellers, there would be far fewer buyer on Fiverr.

I agree but Supermarkets and chain stores share profits with producers or suppliers in a much more fair model than what most buyers (resellers) do here on Fiverr. That’s why I call it greed.

[miiila]

I wouldn´t generally say run, but it´s a source of potential problems like OP had, when you can´t directly talk to the “end buyer”, especially if problems happen. If someone is okay with what a reseller pays, well, that´s their decision.

[massimofavero]

Ciao Massimo,

I think that your story may be read in another way.

So far, on Fiverr I have translated from English to Italian and vice versa just two documents.

I am however an avid reader of the “Buyer Request” section, where I can read and analyse the samples provided by the buyers.

There I have almost immediately noticed a problem that comes from something that I could define “translations of translations”.

I’ve read samples that showed the distinctive traits of a raw machine translation from another language.

I am speaking of e-commerce listings, instruction manuals, website pages and the like.

In those cases, it happens that the automated translator cuts a significant part of the original meaning, the one that comes from contextualization.

It’s an unrecoverable loss of information, unless the translator has access to the original source.

When a translator does not have enough information about the original context, he may end to translate something that could be correct from the point of view of grammar, but that could have no actual meaning.

I think that your case may be slightly different since I have just discovered to have received a translation request from that very person, a few days ago.

The buyer, that is based in England, requested the translation from English to Italian of a financial article, about 1000 words long.

I may guess that he needed to forward it to an Italian peer, and I imagine that the Italian peer, after reading your translation, may have answered “It does not make quite sense”.

Chances are that you have missed some nuances of the financial language or some idiomatic expression.

Something that is not so easy to translate in just two hours and half.

Here we come to the core of the issue.

You are currently offering the translation of 1000 words with three revisions, with a delivery time of two days. Given these conditions it seems unreasonable to deliver in a such short time.

Unless the buyer has explicitly asked to you to deliver in a couple of hours, in his eyes you don’t look like a fast translator, rather someone that want to end the job as soon as possible.

Hello, and thank you very much for your reply.

What you say is absolutely correct and makes sense: I imagined how the Italian translation was probably supposed to be sent to an Italian, therefor I tried to imagine myself as the one reading the final translation itself. I have to admit that I am not really an expert in the financial sector, but I did make some research about the things I wasn’t sure about.

For example, that one sentence that I’ve said I changed was indeed about a specific topic which is only related to England, so I made some research on Google and in the end realised how I should have changed that to make more sense. However, the rest of the document itself was not too difficult or strictly related to a specific language sector.

Sure, I might have made some other mistake that I may not have noticed, no one is perfect; but that doesn’t cover how he should have told me what the eventual mistakes were: he specifically told me how the problematic sentences were “in the second part of the document”, therefore hinting that he knew what they were, but despite I asked him twice to signal them to me, he did not reply at all.

About the amount of time it took me, his order was the only one I had, and as it was early in the morning I didn’t have anything else to do since I’m not having classes at the moment. I didn’t take much because I wanted to offer a fast service, and the text itself was rather short so I didn’t need to take a break after having translated a piece of it.

My gigs might be a little bit too… Generous, maybe? I realise how they could give that impression, but I am a new seller so I tried to make them look more appealing in order to have more chances of being chosen by eventual buyers: I am also forced to set the delivery time to two days because I often spend 13 hours in University: it’s a way to make sure that I wouldn’t have to rush the translation in order to avoid being late with the delivery.

I understand how it might give a negative view of myself from the outside, but unfortunately that’s the way I preferred to work in order to avoid problems.

[prroducer99plus]

Hello, and thank you very much for your reply.

What you say is absolutely correct and makes sense: I imagined how the Italian translation was probably supposed to be sent to an Italian, therefor I tried to imagine myself as the one reading the final translation itself. I have to admit that I am not really an expert in the financial sector, but I did make some research about the things I wasn’t sure about.

For example, that one sentence that I’ve said I changed was indeed about a specific topic which is only related to England, so I made some research on Google and in the end realised how I should have changed that to make more sense. However, the rest of the document itself was not too difficult or strictly related to a specific language sector.

Sure, I might have made some other mistake that I may not have noticed, no one is perfect; but that doesn’t cover how he should have told me what the eventual mistakes were: he specifically told me how the problematic sentences were “in the second part of the document”, therefore hinting that he knew what they were, but despite I asked him twice to signal them to me, he did not reply at all.

About the amount of time it took me, his order was the only one I had, and as it was early in the morning I didn’t have anything else to do since I’m not having classes at the moment. I didn’t take much because I wanted to offer a fast service, and the text itself was rather short so I didn’t need to take a break after having translated a piece of it.

My gigs might be a little bit too… Generous, maybe? I realise how they could give that impression, but I am a new seller so I tried to make them look more appealing in order to have more chances of being chosen by eventual buyers: I am also forced to set the delivery time to two days because I often spend 13 hours in University: it’s a way to make sure that I wouldn’t have to rush the translation in order to avoid being late with the delivery.

I understand how it might give a negative view of myself from the outside, but unfortunately that’s the way I preferred to work in order to avoid problems.

Well those numbers are lower than what I’ve ever seen. All of us deal with unjust cancellations but 86% is not something I’ve seen before. Which can maybe be attributed to the fact that you don’t get the same volume of orders.

Either way, he was difficult and refused to be specific in what he wanted so you couldn’t help him. And in turn you had to pay for that. It’s the nature of servicing people unfortunately :roll_eyes:

[pacquo]

Hello, and thank you very much for your reply.

What you say is absolutely correct and makes sense: I imagined how the Italian translation was probably supposed to be sent to an Italian, therefor I tried to imagine myself as the one reading the final translation itself. I have to admit that I am not really an expert in the financial sector, but I did make some research about the things I wasn’t sure about.

For example, that one sentence that I’ve said I changed was indeed about a specific topic which is only related to England, so I made some research on Google and in the end realised how I should have changed that to make more sense. However, the rest of the document itself was not too difficult or strictly related to a specific language sector.

Sure, I might have made some other mistake that I may not have noticed, no one is perfect; but that doesn’t cover how he should have told me what the eventual mistakes were: he specifically told me how the problematic sentences were “in the second part of the document”, therefore hinting that he knew what they were, but despite I asked him twice to signal them to me, he did not reply at all.

About the amount of time it took me, his order was the only one I had, and as it was early in the morning I didn’t have anything else to do since I’m not having classes at the moment. I didn’t take much because I wanted to offer a fast service, and the text itself was rather short so I didn’t need to take a break after having translated a piece of it.

My gigs might be a little bit too… Generous, maybe? I realise how they could give that impression, but I am a new seller so I tried to make them look more appealing in order to have more chances of being chosen by eventual buyers: I am also forced to set the delivery time to two days because I often spend 13 hours in University: it’s a way to make sure that I wouldn’t have to rush the translation in order to avoid being late with the delivery.

I understand how it might give a negative view of myself from the outside, but unfortunately that’s the way I preferred to work in order to avoid problems.

I may suppose that the buyer, that does not appear to be a seller, is just a person to which someone asked to deliver that translation.

The actual requestor could have been his boss, a customer or a supplier: in general, someone that is not used to give immediate or detailed clarification.

Unable to tell you what was unclear, this middle man has then decided to close the matter.

As for the delivery my personal suggestion is to apply what we call “educato anticipo” (literally “politely early”) when we show up a little early, but not too early.