In Pursuit of the Cheapest Translation Cost : Is translation still a service or has it become a commodity?
The Translation Journal, (2000)Abstract
In the annals of management science, it is well understood that making the best choice at each stage of a process may not yield the best global solution. This principle is aptly illustrated by Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future (New York: HarperBusiness, 1997), where Dilbert reports to his pointy-haired boss: 'You saved one million dollars by having programmers in Elbonia write software for us. But we wasted four million dollars trying to debug the software.' Replace 'programming' with 'translating,' 'debugging' with 'editing,' and we get the big picture. There is nothing wrong with rational cost-saving measures, but saving translation costs mindlessly often means paying extra for hidden editing costs eventually.