- Be wary of translation tests: agencies may use them to piece together a translation for free.
This, as far as I can find out, is one of the favorite urban legends of translation. In 24+ years of professional experience I’ve never seen any evidence that something like this ever happened. Even if it did, the agency in question would soon disappear: the quality of the resulting translation would be so bad and uneven that any customer would soon flee.
- I don’t want to do a free test: I’ll send them some sample of previous work of mine, and they can evaluate that.
You can try, but usually whomever sends out the test does it for a purpose: comparing candidate translators to one another - something that you cannot do with translation samples of different originals. Also, bear in mind that a well designed translation test does not only test the quality of the translation: it checks how well the candidates followed the instructions received.
- I don’t want to do a free test, they should pay for it!
Go for it, if you can get it. The most likely outcome is that you’ll just exclude yourself from the selection process.
I used to work as a manager in the translation department of a large software company. To evaluate candidates for staff positions (well paid staff positions), we used tests to compare the quality of the translations done by the candidates, and how well such candidates would follow the instructions received.
The first tests were unpaid. Those who refused to do them were just removing themselves from the selection. The company was not being stingy (we invited the candidates who passed the first screening to the company’s HQ, all at the company’s expense), we just were not interested in people that would not invest a couple of hours of their time to show they were interested in working for us.
Having said that, I recommend against doing free tests longer than reasonable (say, 250 to 500 words maximum). Probably an experienced translator could do away with tests, or maybe limit them to only very good prospects.
But, as I was saying, just refusing to do tests is a quick way to remove oneself from the selection process.
