In the situation when ruble against euro and dollar can fall by 10-15 percents per day, we have to show “the wonders of balancing” to plan the work of our translation agency. And the current work often gets exhausting and inconsistent. Today, the environment of businessmen involved in the trade of foreign goods and equipment is dominated by two independent sentiments.
The first one - pessimism due to ever-increasing prices of goods, which lower the margin of companies, make risky the equipment purchases for the future (possibility of losses due to exchange differences on the day of purchase and sale of goods) and, in general, reduce the sales dynamics.
The second - boundless surprise due to purchases of clients who buy goods got twice as more expensive and over under previous earnings.
The business field of professional translations is characterized by its own specific features.
On the one hand, the translation agency renders services to equipment manufacturers and suppliers. We translate for them different manuals, operation and maintenance instructions for all kinds of devices and applications, equipment specifications and so on. The sphere of our competence involves texts on security, fire extinguishing, and video surveillance systems. They include fire safety rules, technical regulations and description of these systems. We translated manuals to electronic safe locks, system design and installation documentation, and legislation regulations on fire-fighting. Most materials at the Russian market also originated from abroad: tiles from Spain, siding from Canada, sawn timber from Finland, stone from Turkey, etc. And these companies are those, which were described above.
We see a significant reduction in a demand for such translations.
On the other hand, our translation agency cooperates with many freelance-translators living outside Russia. Payment to translators is, as a rule, related to currency of the country where a certain translator lives and works. Today, the Russian ruble is cheaper relative to almost all world currencies. And it means that the translation rate in rubles increases by percents and sometimes in several times. If the translation rate is tied to the ruble, as is common in our translation agency, then the translator real rate “to be paid in local currency” is reduced to a negligible level.
It is evident that the translation business undergoes the same problems as the trade companies. As a result, we have to switch to manual estimation of extra charges and individual rates of translators thus dramatically violating the work planning in the translation agency and making it inefficient and inconsistent.
