Re: Language Direct, worldwide

I am the founder and CEO of Language Direct, and would like to respond to the allegations made in this forum by Ms. I[edited] (helena).

I did not make any allegations. I gave factual information while trying to be as accurate as possible. And I expounded my views, which, of course you may not like. However, I was very careful not to disclose any names or personal information, or give away confidential business details. I formulated my complaints in as calm a tone as possible - given the situation. I did not voice any insults nor did I try to be mean in any way. You on the contrary not only disclosed my full name but also a lot of personal information (like the amount of lessons I gave, the size of the proofreading tasks etc), which constitutes a severe infringement upon my individual rights. You are also repeating facts which I already pointed out to be wrong in our prior discussion on the DaF-Forum. I kept all my email correspondence with Language Direct and can thus easily prove my points.

before being relieved of her position with us for canceling two lessons on only a few hours' notice (due apparently to a "more important job" turning up).

I was not relieved of my position, it was me who decided to end our working relationship, thereby apparently taking your human resources manager completely by surprise - in spite of having voiced serious complaints earlier on. I layed down my work at the end of the third week of August after having asked the translation department to give me a definite answer (regarding the billing issue) in the course of that week after a long and frustrating correspondence, and having waited for an answer in vain.
While I had planned to lay down my work in an ordered fashion and with proper notice, I was informed late on Thursday night that another translation agency wanted to employ me and wanted me to start working immediately, and that we would absolutely have to finalize the paperwork the following day. Given the non-payment of the translation department and my overall financial situation, accepting this job was not a personal whim from my side, but a necessity. In my email of resignation written Friday morning I informed LD about this, and that because of this issue I unfortunately had to cancel the two lessons scheduled for the afternoon, also stating that I would not teach any further lessons.
It is LD policy to demand a fee for cancelling lessons within 24 hours of lesson time, except in case of unexpected situations such as, but not limited to illness or a serious personal problem. For me getting a new job was quite a serious issue, nevertheless, this remains open to interpretation. Language Direct however tried to fine me not only for the two lessons scheduled for the same day, but also for a lesson scheduled for the following day, and thus more than 24 hours ahead.

an hour to us means 60 minutes. Everything is made clear at the start of a teacher contract

If with 14 Euro/hour you mean that a teacher is payed 14 Euro for a 60-minute-lesson, you have to state so, as the length of teaching units changes from country to country and may even differ from school to school in one and the same country. If you had made your rates clear in our initial correpondence/conversations, I would probably never have started working for you. Furthermore, there was no such a thing as a contract with Language Direct, which also can be regarded as a sign of unprofessional behavior from the side of Language Direct and does not instill great trust in this company.

It is unclear how I[edited] arrives at her €5 per hour. This seems to imply about 2 hours preparation for every 1 hour of lesson

I was quite clear in explaining how I arrive at this calculation. You get this kind of result if you take into account preparation time and time needed to submit lesson minutes/homework after each lesson plus the expenses the teacher has to pay out of his/her pocket. Conservative calculations of preparation time for conventional (group) lessons with a fixed curriculum assume a minimum of 50% preparation time for lessons. As I have stated already, LD lessons were much more work-intensive, being individual online lessons for persons with highly individual needs. Given the lack of adequate teaching material, not being able to afford buying lots of books and being less than satisfied by my visit to my local Goethe-Institut, I ended up writing lots of the exercises myself. Nevertheless, if we assume 50% preparation time, the calculation is as follows: 45 minutes lesson time + 20-25 minutes preparation time + 5 minutes logging in (Skype, LD account, separate LD email-account), loading up documents to the whiteboard and sending the student an email with lesson material) + 10-15 minutes for lesson minutes and homework = 80-90 minutes for 10,50 Euro, which makes 7,41 Euro/working hour before deducing any of the expenses. If you take into account the need for medical and social security etc. and taxes this makes the rate drop to far below 5 Euro/hour of net wage.

If you do the numbers properly, you will see that a full course load of 30 contact hours per week pays €1680 per month.

If you do the numbers properly, you will realize that this is only the gross, not the net income, which makes real income drop to below 1000 Euro/month for full-time work by highly qualified academicians. What is far more serious however is that, at least according to German laws, spending most of your time working for one employer indicates hidden or blackmarket employment. In such a case the “freelancer” can take such a “business partner” to court, get him to employ him on a regular basis with a working contract and get him to pay his share of social insurance (retrospectively too). I am not sure about the details of regulations in other countries, but guess that many have similar laws and regulations. What you are suggesting here is therefore at least partly illegal.

A number of our teachers earn more than €1000 a month in their freelance positions with Language Direct

I think they should have this working relationship checked by a good lawyer. Working that much for a single company over a longer period may constitute hidden employment and may thus be problematic from a legal point of view.

she lives in Turkey, where the minimum wage is €336 per month

I am sure you can find countries with a still lower minimum wage or no minimum wage at all. Local minimum wages are in no ways a guarantee for ethical business terms or for acceptable living standards. Although the Turkish minimum wage is by now 356,15 Euro, this does not suffice for humane living standards, least of all in big cities like Istanbul. Even unlearned workers from the Kurdish Southeast, whose social status is lowest, will refuse to work in Istanbul for such a wage. Cleaning ladies ask for around 100 TL or 50 Euro for one normal working day, just to give you an idea about the standards against which Language Direct measures its wages.

She worked on a partial proofread. Read the posts again. We only assign complete texts to translate, we do not break portions up amongst multiple translators.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with breaking down a text into multiple sections for a proofread, if it has been compiled by a single translator. A proofreader is not there to change style, they are there to correct mistakes. As long as the style is consistent, of course - which it should be, with a single translator.

Yes, I worked on a partial proofread. However, I was told so only after I discovered with some surprise that some segments containing serious mistakes had already been closed to making corrections. Although I pointed out that this was due to lead to problems with text coherence I received no reaction to that. This was highly unsatisfory for me as I pay a great deal of attention to the quality of my work, and for me this looks like a highly unprofessional attitude from the side of Language Direct.

No, we have not invented a machine-based translation device. We have Babilu, which is a workflow and monitoring system

I do not want to make any claims about the system you use and its nature. However, the translations I received from you certainly looked very much as if they had been translated by a machine or machine-like program and then partially been corrected by a real-life translator.

Regarding I[edited]'s translation claim, the proofreading job that she mentions was for a total of 975 words.

It is an industry standard to expect 2000 words per hour from a proofreader.

the stipulation of 2000 words per hour was also made clear. I[edited] agreed to take the job under these conditions.

You fail to mention that you have a very particular system of counting words, which does not mean that the sections to be proofread by me were of a total length of 975 words, but rather that your system calculated that 975 words were to be checked. Texts, in any case, do not consist of isolated words but of sentences with sentence structures and context. No translator or editor who his familiar with his work and who has the least bit of self-esteem will agree to translate or check singular words taken out of their context. I did have to rewrite and thus re-translate whole sentences.

There is furthermore no such a thing as an industry standard dictating rates for proofreading or translation. Of course there are average rates, but the determination of rates is entirely up to the contracting parties. I oriented myself on the Proz-rates, charging a low average. Rates are either determined per working hour, which is kind of unusual for translation and editing jobs, or in a certain amount of money per word, character or line, in accordance with the complexity of the text in question and the urgency of the translation/proofreading project. Most of the times, a translator or editor will have a chance to have a look at the text itself or at a sample in order to determine the nature and complexity of the text.

The stipulation of 2000 words per hour was not made clear. I was initially asked for my hourly rate without any further specifications. The answer I received was literally "25€ per hour is ok- the system calculates the rate based on 2000 words proofread per hour". Having done proofreading of rather complex academic texts for several years, I know that 2000 words is not per se unrealistic. Not being able to assess the texts in question/the quality of the translations and not familiar with the peculiarities of the system, I did not devote a great deal of thought on the 2000 words per hour stipulation. However, to work with the LD translation system is very time-intensive as it searches the text for problems and inconsistencies in an automated manner. As you do this, you have to reset each paragraph separately. You cannot move on until you confirm every single “find”, be it a correct full stop or an intranslatable, all in all a frustrating and deeply unsatisfying experience. This is very different from and much more time-consuming than proofreading where you just correct the mistakes, make your suggestions concerning unclear formulations and move on if there is nothing to object to. Never having worked with Babilu before, it should have been the duty of Language Direct to explain the particularities of their system to me before agreeing upon the jobs.

Until this day, no one has explained to me how the LD system actually calculates rates, if it is solely based upon work count or a combination of working time and work count. In any case, if the calculation is not actually based on an hourly rate, it makes no sense whatsoever to inquire my hourly rate. LD in this case should have asked for my rate/1000 words instead, as is customary within the profession. If I state I want 25 Euro/hour I want 25 Euro per hour and do not want to be paid for some hypothetical hour calculated according to unknown factors. Upon realization of the extraordinary discrepancy between our initial agreement and the actual sum LD wanted to pay me, I kindly asked them for an explanation about how this huge difference came about, stating that I had worked in a concentrated and efficient way and that I did not believe anyone could to the jobs in question much faster, especially since the electronic translation/editing system had not worked properly part of the time.

Final amount payable is therefore €12.19, which appears in our system and for which she has not yet issued an invoice.

I sent an invoice with my own calculations to the billing department as the Translation Support Desk had suggested doing so. This invoice was refused however on the grounds that LD pays only the amount calculated by the system. I did not submit LD's invoice because I regard the sum LD offered me both as both ridiculous and highly insulting. One of the jobs I did for LD had been done outside the Babilu system, and I had explicitly been asked to submit my own invoice for this. I have NOT been payed for this job until today and have NOT received any reaction.
My impression that LD translation department is not a pleasant company to work with is shared by several other professional translators/editors at www.proz.com.

Finally, both Timothy at our Teacher Support Desk and Ashley at our Translation Support Desk have spent countless emails / Skype chats over the last 2-3 weeks trying to explain these situations to I[edited],

The person sending email upon email was me, as I was trying to get my payment for the jobs done. Language Direct sometimes did not react at all, sometimes made promises of clarification and keept me waiting, sometimes wrote back but not did not address the issues in question or asked for the same information repeatedly. This way I came to regard their behavior as maneuvers meant to tire me out and make me give up.

No Skype chats or telephone calls took place, nor were any such offered to me with regard to my trouble with the translation department. The only call that was scheduled and did not take place because of my resignation was a video chat with the person responsible for human resources at the teaching department, and that conversation, having been scheduled weeks ago, was not meant to be related to the issues in question. Language Direct all in all did not display any interest in and commitment to clarifying the issue and finding a solution/compromise.

there is nothing more that one can really do than offer a fair, transparent offer to potential employees, pay them as agreed and on time, and to address grievances directly and promptly when when they occur

There was nothing transparent in LD's dealings with me as a freelancer, and certainly no direct and prompt addressing of grievances. The first and only time I heard from the company's head was upon posting my complaints in this and another internet forum.

Of course the final proof of everything lies in a satisfied customer - I'm sure you will agree that a teacher who is abused or unhappy with conditions will not result in good customer feedback.

I received only positive feedback from my students and even upon my resignation was told by the person responsible for quality control: "I thought you were a very good teacher, and I was happy to work with you while I did. I for my part was and am totally unhappy and dissatisfied with the whole of my experience with LD." The above statement sounds like LD is now mocking me for trying to be energetic and positive in spite of my bad working and living conditions and for not making my students feel these conditions.

We are pursuing this further through our lawyers.

more than 50% of our costs are taken by such functions, leaving a very different picture of what we are "left with" than I[edited] suggests.

I am by no ways naïve and quite aware of the fact that you spend lots of money for building up a so-called “image” and brand, but this is exactly my point. Investing into quality and professionalism make these speak for themselves. I am also quite aware of the fact that you will have good and expensive lawyers, the like of which freelancers working for you or similar companies probably cannot afford, thus running the danger of being on the weaker side. However, giving things a legal appearance is one thing, and actually doing legal and ethical business is quite another.

Language Direct, worldwide

Please avoid Language Direct!

Language Direct is a Switzerland-based company offering language lessons via internet and phone for a large range of languages. Momentarily they are recruiting English and German teachers by posting on craigslist. According to their own website they are only employing native speakers with university degree, at least 2 years' teaching experience and they want their teachers to be multilingual too. That is, their demands in terms of qualification are rather high, while their pay is not.

They offered me "14 Euro/hour" as a starting wage for teaching my native language German as a freelancer, which sounded just acceptable. However, they failed to specify that this was the recompensation for a hypothetical 60-minute lesson. Normal lessons of a duration of 30 or 45 minutes will earn you 7 Euro/ 10,50 respectively. And you have to teach lessons as bookings come in, sometimes with less than a day's notice before lessons take place.

As lessons have to be individually designed according to the varying needs of businesspeople and higher level employees of bigger companies, and as Language Direct does not provide any teaching materials (at least for German), lessons demand much more preparation than for a normal language class. You also have to write and hand in lesson minutes within 24 hours after each lesson, otherwise you are "fined".

If you take into account time spent on preparation, lesson minutes, student assessment, homework etc), and costs such as teaching material, technical equipment (computer, headset), workspace, internet and phone connection, this makes your recompensation drop to less than 5 Euro/hour spent working for Language Direct, if you take into account medical and social insurance (if you are lucky enough to have these, and not even speaking of taxes) this makes the rate drop to almost nothing. Therefore, what sounds somehow acceptable at the first glance, after a bit of calculation does not really seem worth the effort. I worked with Language Direct for 4 months and large part of the money I earned went into paying my internet bills, headset, teaching materials ... . After I quit the job, they even charged me a fine for the remaining bookings.

According to my opinion, Language Direct is worse than conventional (non-internet based) language schools offering low wages,
1. because they specifically target managers and people in higher positions with a comfortable income and pride themselves with their international business deals with big companies such as a major airline,
2. because they are an internet company with almost no running costs (compared to conventional schools which have to provide teaching space, teaching materials ...), and receive 33-39 Euro/60-min-lesson, which leaves them with more than 50% of what the teachers get,
3. because they are situated in Switzerland but pay rates that would not in any way allow a decent subsistence in that country or any other country in Western Europe even if one were to teach full time.

The company also has a translation department, which proved itself to be even more greedy. Having agreed with them on a moderate hourly rate for a couple of proofreading/translation jobs, they afterwards refused to pay me for the time I actually spent on these jobs, coming up with an automated calculation of words per hour, arriving at roughly 3,50 Euro/hour of concentrated, time-effective work. They first feigned interest in putting things right, but then basically fooled me for weeks, promising to look into the issue, demanding the same information over again ..., promising to write back but not doing so ... . Therefore my conclusion: this company just is not interested in serious business practices, but is exploiting its employees, pardon, "freelancers".