Forum for Translators: Job assignment from Tomedes. real or not, scam ot not, confusion.
Hello All Again,
I am subscribed to Tomedes and received in my e-mail a job notification. I made a bid and I received another e-mail telling me that someone else had got the job. A few minutes later I receive an e-mail from Tomedes , with the source file. I sent them an e-mail asking them for clarifications , but I did not receive an answer.
Best regards,
Sandy Mouriki.
Tomedes? I have done the job 2 months ago and asked when they will pay me, but did not receive any answer too. Today (2012!!!) I've received the next e-mail:
Subject: Free 2010 calendar from Tomedes
I would like to personally thank you for joining the Tomedes family in 2009.
We have prepared a calendar for 2010 with all holidays and important days of major countries and religions.
We received great feedback for our 2009 version. People found it very useful for maintaining and expanding their global connections.
We will send a printed copy for free to the first 100 translators who reply to this email. Just send an email to support@tomedes.com with your postal mail address to get one.
We keep paying translators for referring clients to Tomedes or outsourcing some of their work through Tomedes. Contact us for more details.
We wish you, your family and your business great happiness and achievements and look forward to working together in 2010.
Tomedes does pay. This is for sure. I have been paid twice, each time some 2-3 months after the delivery, though. I have accumulated again a smart sum over the past months, and now I'm thinking of taking another job only after the payment. The "overbidder trick" does not bother me too much. Everybody has his/her business principles (tongue in cheek). The fee is not attractive anyway, still less when you are overbidden.
Hi, our translators actually mean a lot to us and we put a lot of effort in making sure they are satisfied, our Proz Blue Board is a great testimony of that.
In any way, I'm sorry to hear your Tomedes experience wasn't so great and invite you to give us another try, it is 2013 by now and I promise the "Free 2010 calendar" mail is out of the system :)
I did only one job for Tomedes, a couple years ago. The word count was about 100 words, I don't remember the rate but it must have been very low. The minute I submitted the file, the very minute, I got an e-mail from them cancelling the translation. It seemed like a scam to me at the time.
I recently signed up to work with Tomedes and must say I am incredibly disappointed with their services. They sent me an email with a job offer, which I bid on, and a few minutes later my bid was accepted and I was expected to begin working on the job immediately, given a 6-hour window. Had I known ahead of time this was how it worked I would have saved bidding for when I had a bit more free time.
On to the translation. The word document the translation came in did not render properly in my version of word for some reason, so I translated the text only and provided it in both PDF and TXT form. I also added a comment in the user's native language with a few tips on resume conventions in the US (translated doc was a resume) and explaining why the formatting was off.
Now the trouble begins. The documents uploaded worked perfectly fine on my computer, but once uploaded showed the format of DOC (for the PDF file) and PDF (for the TXT file). Wtf??? I tried downloading and couldn't open either of them. In addition, my comments were truncated halfway. There was no re-upload option. I contacted Tomedes support immediately about this over live chat and was told to email the corrected files and comments to support@tomedes.com. I did so, and tried again to reach them via live chat to confirm receipt of the files, but was unable to connect to a live operator. I tried again to reach them the next two days but again was unable to connect.
Fast forward a few days, I suddenly get a message from Tomedes logging a complaint from the customer that the files were of the wrong format, not properly formatted, and my comments were in Wingdings symbols and not displayable (wtf?!). I wrote back telling them that I contacted support and that the correct files were sent a few days prior. The Tomedes staff found my old email, then requested the files in doc format, saying "it's urgent!!" I explained to them that my computer was not displaying the original file correctly, and now they are asking for a resend of the PDF as the one in the email seems to be corrupted (my bad).
I have resent the files this morning but needless to say I am incredibly disappointed with Tomedes. First you ignore me when I try to contact you about the translation, then when I give up because I can't find anybody you come pestering me for files YOU ALREADY HAVE, panicking and emailing me in the middle of the night because it's "urgent". This just seems like terrible customer service to me, and I don't think I'll be translating for Tomedes again, as I don't want this to affect my professional reputation. I would warn customers to stay away from the site also. They could easily have resolved the situation within hours of my translation had they taken the steps to resolve everything when I first contacted live chat, instead of brushing me off and telling me to send an email, which apparently they didn't even check until they panicked about it later on. Just awful.
Hello,
We are sorry for any misunderstanding or inconvenience.
However, The translator has not been able to provide a translation with a similar format / layout as the source document as expected.
He should have notified us as soon as he found out he will not be able to meet the translation's requirements.
The translator was informed of the required delivery time in advance and due to the formatting issues, we have asked him to make the required revisions urgently.
In addition, there was a temporary technical issue which has been solved right after the completion of this translation and we apologize for that.
Best regards,
Tomedes Support
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