What our clients say...
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Our customers...
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Our specialization...
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Virtually No Competitors...
From the outset, our goal has been to be the only French localization provider for customers seeking the most specialized services at the best price. Over the past few years, many prominent localization providers went bankrupt (for lack of specialization) or were acquired by the "Big Three". Today, only three types of localization vendors remain:
- Small SLVs (Single-Language Vendors), with similar rates to ours, but no specialization (most are happy to win new customers, even if they can only provide a mediocre service). We do not treat such companies as competitors, as the services they provide are in no way comparable to ours. We would go so far as to say that they are not even in the same business as Lucyol.
- Medium-sized MLVs (Multi-Language Vendors), which tend not to be specialized, and merely sub-contract their work to SLVs for the numerous languages they offer. Generally, a brief look at the foreign-language versions of their Web site is enough to show that most of them do not live up to their claims. Moreover, their rates are significantly higher than ours.
- Large MLVs (the largest international globalization providers), which charge prohibitive rates, because they subcontract all work to their in-country partners (SLVs). Lucyol is the preferred French partner of many of them. However, to cut costs, they do not hesitate to split the same project between multiple vendors, with disastrous consequences in terms of consistency. Indeed, we consider that top quality can only be achieved if the same team handles all projects. By eliminating one intermediary and choosing Lucyol as your provider for French, you will enjoy consistently high quality at the best price (our rates include only production and project management - no additional costs).
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Taking all this into account, we consider we have no competitors in our market segment (i.e. IT specialization and French) and we clearly offer the best quality/price ratio.
However, please note that we do not offer "cut-price" services. Indeed, you will find many service providers on the Internet offering excessively low rates. Someone even told us recently about finding an agency offering a rate of EUR 0.09 per source word. This price is absolutely ridiculous. In the interests of transparency and to allow you to make a genuine comparison between service providers, here is a breakdown of what a translation costs:
- Translation: EUR 0.10 per source word, the average rate for a specialized, hand-picked freelance translator (2,500 words/day on average) - a rate that can be easily checked on the Internet (we even recently noticed an increase of this average rate, due to the high demand).
- Technical-linguistic proofing: EUR 0.04 per word on average (6,000 words/day on average, including harmonization between translators).
- Preparation of files, quality control, project management, setting up the team and tools, linguistic coordination, query management, operating costs, etc.: between 15 and 30% of the overall total, based on various criteria.
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This gives an average total rate of EUR 0.16, which corresponds to an average hourly rate of EUR 30 for the translators and reviewers involved. Clearly, offers well below this rate cannot possibly come with the same quality guarantees. A rate that is lower by half suggests that the translators are not specialists and probably not resident in the target language country, or even worse, that they are not translating into their native language. And at this price level, customers would not reasonably expect either editing or quality control of any kind.
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