Email example sharings in handling customer complaints part 2

Client Email 3

Hi Cecilia

I understand your concerns about the payment deduction, as this is a measure that I also don’t wish to take. I have run a Compare Document on the translation you originally gave me and the final translation, and I’ve attached them here for your reference. As you can see, there were extensive changes made. Not all of these changes were errors (for instance, we deleted a slide at the end); however, quite a few changes were related to objective errors, and many more also had to do with consistency with the reference material.

When I gave you the files in the beginning, I attached a set of reference materials. A lot of the specific terminology and phrasing in the translation was to be taken from the reference documents. However, later in the project, when we were editing the translation, we found that much of the reference material had been ignored. This is a fairly substantial oversight.

To preserve objectivity, we usually have a third linguist go over the FT and the BT, and that is why we didn’t contact you to make these changes yourself. Thus, when I first emailed you about the corrective action, the translations were already finalized. I apologize for not making this clear earlier on.

Again, I want to emphasize that this corrective action does not affect my opinion of your team as translators, and indeed, deadline was probably the issue here. However, in the future, it is completely acceptable to come to us with any concerns you may have over deadline or other matters. Quality is our top priority, and we are always more than happy to accommodate your concerns to the best of our ability.

Reply 3

Dear XXX

Sorry for the late reply. Here are comments from our linguists and I’m compiling their comments and giving our opinion as below:.

1. Seems that your linguist used the translated files to do the QA instead of the edited files (2 versions delivered) in which we had some errors revised by the editor.

2. Translation can be subjective at times. For example, In the reference files provided, “XXX”, “XXX” were translated as “XXX”, “XXX”, while they were revised afterwards as “XXX” and “XXX”. This is just an example to show how subjective it can be in translating and sometimes each has his/her own idea on how to translate a sentence with different words/phrases (esp. in Chinese).

3. It is true that the quality of target files would be better after several times of attentive revision, but in order to meet the tight deadline our linguists might tend to only guarantee it is correctly translated and were lack of time to make it perfect. Apart from the mistakes you listed before, actually we didn’t find many crucial errors. Also we found some of the revisions were made to let the text reads more fluently, not all of them are correcting errors.

4. As stated above, translation could be very subjective, one sentence can be translated into this way or another, so is the case for those terms. Due to the nature of translation it cannot be made really ‘perfect’ but only to infinitely close to a perfect one. The correction texts, however, still have some mistakes, which were listed below for your reference:

In file “XXX” , the first “XXX” was revised to “XXX”, while the whole project it was translated as “XXX”.
And “XXX” is still “XXX”.

5. I believe if we could have 1 more day for editing & proofreading, the quality would be much better. Since we believe our basic translation is acceptable. We sincerely appreciate your understanding on this situation and your trust on us as translator. In the future in order to better ensure the quality of translation we will assess more carefully the due time needed and make sufficient communication with you about the deadline and schedule before starting the mission and at the meantime reinforce the editing & proofreading management to reach our best.

For the reasons above, originally, we are willing to take a discount of the editing (half of translating) part of the job, which is 1/3 out of the total.

However, due to the inconvenience we’ve brought and in order to show our sincerity in working together with you in the future, finally we are willing to accept 40% discount of the total amount of the job.

Thanks again for your kind understanding and the time spent on writing the emails, we also appreciate very much your feedback and investigation of quality of this job, as it is also a chance for us to learn more and do better in editing and proofreading, and we will strive to reinforce QA before delivery and make more proper use of the reference materials provided in our future jobs.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind Regards

Client email 4

Hi Cecilia

Thank you for your detailed response. I appreciate how thorough your team has been in addressing the matter.

I do agree that this project had a lot of demands, and that the timeline was quite tight, so we will accept the 40% discount.

Reply 4

Dear XXX

Well noted with thanks, will forward this updated PO to our accountant to reflect the discount.

As Christmas approaches hereby we would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for your continued cooperation, and we look forward to working with you in the coming year and hope our business relationship continues for many years to come.

Merry Christmas and have a fruitful 2012.

With Best Regards

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