How we treat our partners

"Ethical people are those who recognize the difference between right and wrong and consistently strive to set an example of good conduct. In a business setting, being ethical means applying principles of honesty and fairness to relationships with coworkers and customers. Ethical individuals make an effort to treat everyone with whom they come in contact as they would want to be treated themselves." Brian Hill, Demand Media

In this very rapidly growing and evolving translation industry, ethics may be disregarded when the focus of the business is merely on the money. This is what we have thought so far about ethics. The seduction to get greater impact and income is always a business priority and unfair behavior or even harmful behavior is often shown to get there. What is more, such a harmful deed can easily be made possible in this digital era. The only thing that remains on us is whether we conduct our business ethically and with integrity.

We may have seen a lot of things against our ethical practice; cheating partners, persuading the partners' clients to make agreement with us, offering our partners' clients low rate, thus all projects are assigned to us. Our partners will never know if we do that as the other party won't tell others on what they do. In addition, this is now a digital era that enables everything to happen in a very fast way.

Again, our integrity is tested. Our honesty is risky and we, the business owners, have to take the wisest measure to maintain the relationship we have built with our partners and even to make it stronger. In ProBahasa, we upload this ethical behavior. We promise and are committed to fully serving our fellow translation agency partners by not trespassing their clients.

We would like to share with you our experience on the related issues and you may believe or disbelieve it. It sounds impossible, but we make it possible. As you know that we are not a big company nor do we have long presence in this industry, but since the establishment of ProBahasa Translation, we had carved 'business with integrity' on our company name tag. It means that we uphold and conduct ethical and fair behavior.

If we talk about collaboration offers from our fellow translation companies, we noted that we got them every single month. However, we do not directly accept them due to some reasons we believe we have to upload them and keep them. Recently, we were offered a big deal from a translation company that we know they also work with our translation company partner. Mathematically, the rate offered should be higher than that given by our partner in addition to faster payment. We know that this offer is seducing and we are sure that every translation company owner has strong option to accept this kind of offer.

We treat our business partner with respect and integrity and this is what makes us bigger over the time. A translation company recently offered us translation collaboration. We were happy of course, but when we learnt that this translation company is also our partner's client, we then decide to reject the offer. You may be wondering how we know that the translation company also works with our partner. For us, it is simple. We really trust and care about our partner, thus we pay attention to every single detail they have. In normal practice, we can identify with which translation company our partner works. We usually identify it from the translation memory they provided. Often, we can find it out from the file they sent. The name is usually clear and we can detect and read them.

Although we know the translation company's name, we never offer them collaboration. Our partner will never know it. We DO NOT DO this for our business as this is unethical and unfair behaviour. This will lead our partner to bankruptcy and it means that we will suffer from loss as well. We consider that our partner is also our business. That is how we treat our partner. We will always reject any offer coming from our partner's client. We will not say to them we work with the same translation company you are working with now, but we will say that we are now overloaded or we are unable to handle the project due to some other urgent projects we have to prioritize.

For people in general, this practice will surely be unacceptable as no significant income will be obtained. We think differently. We grow up because of our partners no matter what and treating them with respect and integrity is a must. For young Indonesian translation company like us, this is always an interesting thing to accept any collaboration offer. What is more, this is coming from a very big translation company we heard a lot from the online media. We never benefit from this event. On the contrary, we benefit from strong and loyal relationship between our existing partners and us. We are always open to any translation collaboration, but we reject any unethical and unfair practice as one we explained above.

Want to know more about us? Contact us at info@probahasa.com and we will be happy to share.