I need advice on the best process for a translation company's services

Using my Dolibarr PM modules
1

Hello all,

I am setting up my first dolibarr hosted instance to help a friend. He owns a small company providing translation / transcribing services.

What I need help is on deciding what will be the best approach for his use-case:
He will receive emails from customers requesting his services, that he will then analyse, ask for an offer from his suppliers (translators), send a proposal to the customer, follow up and if accepted, assign the task to the translator and later provide the translated document to the customer.

Main services will be either translation or transcription. Variants: From one of many languages to another language, with different prices by language and translator.

For example:
Translator A, will only translate from English or French to Portuguese and it will charge 0,005 per word.
Translator A, will translate from French, German and Portuguese to either English and Portugues and it will charge 0,006 per word.
etc.

So, what is the best way to achieve this? Create a tag / category for each departure language and another for each destination language and then add the multiple options provided by each translator to the vendor profile? Or create service for example Translate from English and then variants for each destination language?

The solution should provide an easy way to search for which translator will be able to translate from language A to language B so he can quickly send them the task to get a proposal.

Should I use custom fields instead? One dropdown for the departure language and another for the destination language? Also, extra fields for each translator’s rates? They will charge by word or hour, no matter the language…

Thank you very much in advance for any guiding.
Kind regards and have a nice weekend!
Rui Duarte

2

Hi @ruimduarte, I don’t know if you are still looking at this request I came across just now. To be honest I was facing a similar case a couple of years ago and so far the best solution to manage it was through a contracts and projects. Projects as a main searching option and then inside each project assigned contracts with the actual performers. For instance:

A project for translation from English to German or Spanish contains the following:

  1. A contract with translator 1 to German only
  2. A contract with translator 2 to German and Spanish
  3. A contract with translator 3 to Spanish only, etc.
    The example is only if your friend has more than one translator that translates from English to German or Spanish.
    In my case, i have multiple contracts for one project because i have multiple subcontractors for that job. Also in the project he could create a specific item that could be used for invoicing purposes to his customers and from the selected translator. And finally, set it up that way I have a very clear picture how my profits are moving for each subcontracting services/projects.

Hope that helps you, but if you actually found a better way, I’ll be happy to hear it so i can try it from my end as well :slight_smile: