Clare Bakota

I find that going over the very technical information over the phone can often be rather fruitless as the person you are speaking with does not know anything about website development and are usually more on the marketing or management side of things. I have the best luck calling them and explaining that they will need to contact their webdevelopers (and I explain why this is) Then i send them a DETAILED email that they can show to their technical people.
Then I call and email to see how that process is coming along.

The problem with quoting websites is you dont have alot of control or say in how fast you will get the files., because even if you convince your contact, the third person down the road that needs to send you the information may be slow moving. And you will have a hard time contacting that person.

Anyways, I have had the best luck with a friendly phone call, explaining the nature of the project and some advanatges to having the source files (price, accuracy) and then I send them a good email template that is very clear and that they can send to their tech team. Because, really, the email is the only thing that you will send that will get to the tech team.

hope that helps!

Neoyorkina

I had the experience recently where a client just wanted us to translate small paragraphs on about 120 pages of a website. What is difficult here is that there is no efficient way of accurately counting the words that need to be translated without having access to the source files. Simply downloading the htlm pages and sending through a word counting program yields grossly inflated results. In the end, to guarantee that only the words she wants translated will be considered in the quote, she is spending precious hours of her day copying and pasting the text into a word doc because she doesn't have access to the source files and doesn't know how to get them, and without them, the project gets slowed down significantly for reasons like this.

gentle

Clare is right when speaking about a back up email with valuable info that the prospect could forward to the techies.
A couple of times I have been succesful on convincing the prospect to have a conference call with their web developer. This allows them to participate in the exchange of information and be more confident on the outcome of the quote or project. Usually they take part of one or two phone calls, and once you reached a good communication level with the web developer and parameters have been drawn, they let you go ahead with the web developer without their need to "interfere". Of course, confidence matters! Once they realize everything is going smooth, they let you work freely with their developer.

sergio

My personla experience is that whenever the cleint is not too savy about websites they are generally happy to put you in contact with the webdeveloper who certainly can provide you with all source files that involve the site. I have received rather curt responses from clients when i ask for access to their content manager on the site. However, if the cleint wants you to publish the translation i believe that there is no other way.

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