The handling of client feedback is often a challenge.
Clients will sometimes do a proofreading or other review of our work and then send it back with questions and revisions. Oftentimes, these involve unnecessary changes to the translation or questions which reflect an ignorance of Korean. Of course, I don't expect clients to know about my business; that's my job. And if they want to rephrase some stuff in the translation even if it wasn't wrong when we delivered, that's their right, too. But while I try to be flexible, I don't necessary consider this additional hand-holding to be part of our standard delivery; I feel that clients requesting additional service should recognize it as an added-value, which is billable.
The problem is that clients often expect this follow-up service to be included in the original project costt. OK, I could build a buffer into the rate to cover this. But then that's not fair to the clients who don't come to claim their "lesson in the nuances of Korean" and ultimately, it reduces my competitiveness for the very clients who require the least additional support (i.e. the kind I want to attract).
Another issue that comes to play is that there are good ways to ask for follow-up support and bad ways to do it. If the cost of the follow-up isn't borne by the client, then it gives no motivation to aim for efficiency. For example, making revisions to a Word file translation using Tracked Changes means that when we go through to review, we can see exactly what's been changed and do our review quickly. But sending back a file that's been revised and asking us to do a final review without telling us what's been changed means we have to review everything and it takes more time.
There's also the issue that when a client sends back a re-edited document for us to review, what they're really telling us to do is to take responsibility for the new version. Put this way, the added-value aspect really makes even better sense.
Here's a reply I sent to a client recently who asked us to build the review cost into our original rate so that they could send us additional work without paying extra.
"It wouldn't be fair to you if we build in the cost of review not knowing what it will take. If your reviewer has a few objective questions that are clearly marked, then they save us time and I generally wouldn't charge. It's also fine if they want to revise without sending it back to us to then take ultimate responsibility for an updated version.
But if they just go through and make lots of subjective changes (including introducing some new mistakes) and don't even mark anything and then send it to us for a blessing, then that forces a full text review and is a value-added service for sure."
