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Mathieu Marechal, Bewords CEO,  talks about his experience as a Founder and the early stage of development of a platform like Bewords.com

Dear Readers, please fell free to react and discuss/comment on this article (here on the blog)

Genesis.

It is always difficult to identify the very beginning of an idea or innovation. Thinking back to the time when we first started talking and brainstorming about BeWords, I believe that two main observations came to us: the first was the value chain of the translation business. The second was our experience as language service providers (as a translation agency in other words) and the difficulties we had to face everyday for every scattered quotation request, one-shot customers (with limited budgets, etc.).

Let me come back to the first observation: typically, the value chain is organised as follows: Customer  translation agencies independent translators. 

Translation agencies have the capacity, experience and tools to manage multilingual translation projects, deal with multi-format files or data, and to insure the final quality of the translation (by basically providing proofreading carried out by a second translator). Basically it’s a “unique provider” which is capable to help customers in “great need”. 

And they also have the power, tools and processes to market/sell their services and find customers. 

But, and this "but" is according to me the key, two trends that can be observed are: 1 – crowd translation, which is the translation by the fans or the community 2 – Internet and the capacity of a single translator (or any expert), based "where ever he/she likes" to be visible and to be reachable by any prospect (anyone can contact/work with anyone else). 

So an observable tendency can be summarize as follow: Customer  independent translators (translation agencies)  

PS: Of course, not all types of companies or customers are willing to be in direct contact with the translators. The life of LSP's (Linguistic Service Providers) is not endangered (or not yet at least…).

Let me describe now the second observation: for a common LSP, to handle small requests, with limited budgets, no-name and scattered prospects and individuals is a real pain, to talk plainly and straightforwardly. One page or less, multiple requests of quotations for a single project and for less than 50 Euros (this is not the margin of the project, but the turnover/amount of the sale …), is a loss of time for a LSP, because LSPs are more in search of recurring business, multilingual projects and basically large volume of source words. 

And we observed the same thing for TradOnline (www.tradonline.fr) my translation agency. When we first created this company, we made sure to answer any incoming request and did everything we could to get the project. Then, a bit further along, we announced a "minimum fee" for any project (representing a minimum of 500 words, then later 1000 words…) and we ended up by declining some requests, for which it was just not profitable to spend time handling the project.  What a shame, right? Declining incoming business…this is not acceptable…And so we created www.Bewords.com: our solution to 1 – surf on a new trend in our business and 2 – capture the scattered business, the thousands and more (probably millions) of small business and individual translation needs/projects and 3 – please our community of translators (that we wish to cherish). 

Discover Mathieu Marechal's profile.