It is well known that our site is bilingual and that the content must be managed in the WordPress CMS. I’ve been using Polylang for this since 2019 and Polylang Pro since 2020, which significantly simplifies the implementation and management of multilingualism. Many things are also first translated by machine and later still manually post-processed, which significantly saves time. It is precisely for this intermediate step that Lingotek also came into play in 2019 as a plugin and API. Lingotek is, or was, a cloud-based translation platform (TMS) that handles both automated translation with appropriate AI interfaces (for us, it’s Deepl) and offers manual, human translation on demand as a service.
New Zealand-based language service provider (LSP) Straker Translations announced its acquisition of Lingotek, a Utah-based translation management system (TMS) and LSP provider, back in 2021, after which it began to massively increase monetization and continue the whole thing as Ray Enterprise. There are things you grudgingly accept (I won’t write blackmail here) out of sheer habit and, of course, to ensure business operations anyway, but if you have to. Well, you just play along.
The plugin itself was free until now and you only had to pay for the translation services. Months ago (!) I was offered a business plan, which offers me as an old customer a “preferential price” of 600 USD per year (only if I pay for the whole year), just so that I can still use the plugin at all. Let’s politely call this a subscription model, because all the translations have to be paid extra, so it’s a kind of pay-to-win for morons, no matter if AI or human. The very one-sided correspondence (if you can even call the ignoring of mails on the part of the LSP) about a final contract I’ve been conducting for weeks now and have several times insistently asked to finally implement the new contract. Since I am polite, I do not quote publicly from it.
However, I have at this point also urged that the necessary API including plugin should then also finally work error-free (which is unfortunately not the case until today). Also support requests and error messages are ignored with a noble gesture of nonchalance. As a customer, you pay for half-finished things, which can steal your time and cause costs from case to case. And to put that in perspective: In times of ever-improving AI solutions, an LSP should rather take care of its customers than scare them away completely through arrogant ignorance.
Today, despite several requests for continuation and my communicated willingness to pay, my account was simply shut down without notice. Of course, the whole thing is more than annoying, but there is of course a plan B for everything in the end. If you don’t have a plan B, it’s your own fault if you have to surrender to such business partners without mercy. Since I am an old customer of Deepl and have had a corresponding API key for a long time, in the end it was only necessary to manage this interface myself and simply shoot Lingotek aka Ray Enterprise aka Straker digitally to the moon.
In the end this cost me half of Sunday and 59 Euro for a kind of hull plugin, but necessity is the mother of invention and creativity. As a former programmer, you can also customize the PHP code of a Deepl WordPress interface and in the end I even have a solution that works more stable than the dreadful Lingotek plugin. In the end I can handle manual translations the same way as before, so what? I can only advise everyone not to take such service providers as Ray Enterprise or Straker seriously, because there are now much cheaper and probably also more customer-friendly alternatives. As a representative, I can mention the Deepl team, because there the costs and benefits are still in an honest relationship. Especially since the support still deserves its name.
Today’s sunday is a kind of virtual apprenticeship money, because I have to adapt or create the still planned, pending contents for next week and put the family and news on the back burner for that. But seriously: 600 Euro for nothing I can spend elsewhere much more sensible. That as a word to the Sunday, although I would have rather written a news. Unfortunately, this time has been lost. By the way, nothing changes for you. My benefit is saved money and one plugin less, which slows down my CMS and has caused errors several times. So seen: Thanks for the thought-provoking impulse and the LSP still good success!
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