Not Considering

This is more of a commercial question, rather than product. I have passed on the feedback internally, but not much we can do from a product perspective here.

Make pricing publicly available

If I'm interested in a product, I don't want to have to enter loads of personal details and have to ask for a price in a written message. I want to know the price even before getting into deeper research, because it legitimately annoys me if I spend half a day researching product functions just to find out it is way to expensive for the way I'd apply it.

Eva Repolusk-Stoppel

  • Thank you for weighing in on that! Much appreciated, although at the time I didn't have the time to acknowledge it. But now I finally got around to trying the chat option you mentioned, and was very happy with it. So thank you for a) providing the service and b) pointing me to it. It won't be the last time they have heard from me ;-)

    All the best,

    Eva

  • Hi , I would like to contribute a bit to this conversation and also answer some of your questions. You are right about Paul - he is great and helps our customers a lot, they all love him :). Your question about prices is not as simple as it sounds. We sell our products world-wide to a very wide range of customers. SDL GroupShare prices vary based on a number of factors: continent, country, customer profile and needs, quantity, time of year, proximity to a release, what other products are sold in the bundle and others that only our Sales team fully understand.

    We do show prices up front though for some of the products:

    http://www.sdl.com/store/

    I am sorry to hear about your experience when asking for a price and that you had to wait for so long. On the page I gave you above, on the left, you have a Live Chat option. That team works UK hours, so during normal work hours, you can talk to someone Live, no need to wait! If you do decide to contact them after hours, they will get an email and normally respond the second day.

    I am part of the Support team and I support our GroupShare products and also SDL Trados Studio. GroupShare Cloud seems like it would be what you need in terms of sharing translation work, TMs, termbases. However, as of now, the terminology functionality that you are looking for does not exist. One can add/edit terms and they will be available in real time for all users, but there is no process in place for accepting terms a translator suggests. This would be a great idea though, so if you don't mind, please submit one that asks specifically for that. Our GroupShare Cloud offering comes with Support, so you will have direct access to the support team for any questions you may have - we answer very quickly to cases. Plus, once you have that, you will also have access to the Support phone line so you can call us.

    We always encourage our customers to communicate with us and give us feedback as we are constantly trying to improve and we will make everything we can to help, so please do that in the future too. Here is the link to our user community forum.

    community.sdl.com/.../

    Thank you,

    Adrian

  • I have one client that I proofread German original texts for. Based on  my beautiful German proofread originals, they have an agency supplying simply awful translations into English. They are so terrible that I consider breaking with a 17 year old strict rule and starting to offer boutique agency services just for that one client. That means they would drop their translation stuff on my desk and I would organize GE-EN translation with trusted native English-speaking colleagues. (Preferably only with one, but I might need up to three, because one might not always be available.)

    That would also have the added value that I could send smaller parts for translation while I'm still proofreading. I'd field most of the translator's questions about the text and the terminology; problems I can't solve would be escalated to the end client.

    We have a project for terminology management going on, too, which is extremely important for that one client. So agile changes in and additions to MultiTerm will play a major role. I'd also like to be shown every new term added by the translator for vetting purposes, preferably more or less in real time.

    About my customer experience with this product: Ten days ago on Friday, I entered all my details in order to by able to download a brochure for GroupShare. Then one minute later, I had to enter them all again in order to ask about the price, in the process selecting one from four non-applicable subject matters that were so weird I can't even remember them. Early last Friday morning, one week after I my original request, I complained on FB about nobody getting back to me. Within half a day I got an answer on FB, saying Petra Dutz would get back to me.

    You see, as a translator, I have to get back to a client within hours, preferably minutes, and within ten days, I have to do huge amounts of work for them. That's why it strikes me as ridiculously unprofessional if a huge company like yours is unable to answer a very simple question within ten days. How am I supposed to trust them helping me with a critical problem?

    You, Paul, seriously are the only reason for many of us to stick with SDL, and I hope you stay there forever. If they doubled your salary, they still wouldn't pay you enough. (But don't do anything about this matter – let's just see how long it takes them to get back to me. It was urgent, but it is not urgent anymore. My offer to the client has long been sent out with no mention of GroupShare ...)

    One more question: If I ever got it, would you be able to support me using it? That clearly would be a selling point. Or would I have to rely on those people?

    All the best and have a good week!

    Eva

  • As it stands GroupShare is "probably" not applicable for one person working as a Freelance Translator.  But once it becomes a full cloud product and is made available for single translators or small teams then I think you'll get your wish.  So at the moment the price will depend on knowing more about what your needs are as an organisation... so all interest is qualified and then a quote provided.

    Incidentally... how do you want to apply it?