I agree with Alain Rosenmund (his blog is Effizient Übersetzen (Lassen): don’t love your translator.
Davon abgesehen, dass sich die Aktion an die falschen Adressaten richtet, kommen die Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer als Bittsteller daher, statt als Partner, denen man auf Augenhöhe begegnet. Diese Aktion schwächt mit anderen Worten die Position der Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer. Genauer: Die Übersetzerinnen und Übersetzer, die bei dieser Aktion mitmachen, schwächen ihre eigene Position.
Rosenmund goes on to give advice on how translators should really establish a serious professional relationship.
Fortunately, it sounds as if the stickers can be removed easily:
Our stickers can be removed easily and do not leave marks. The act of sticking them to street lamps and the like will therefore not be considered vandalism in most countries. However, we know that countries like Switzerland and Singapore are very strict and we ask you to consider your country’s law and use common sense when you go out tagging.
Our stickers are vegan, made of biodegradable plastics, and don’t have any negative environmental effects.
I’ve now had an email from a company I never had anything to do with, starting:
“Hello,
I hope you are doing great :) What’s new on your end, are you still working as a translator?
On my end, I’m still the CEO of ***, the company is growing steadily and we are going to “go public” about a customer-portal later in 2015 for which we’ll be recruiting new freelance translators. We aim to be a non-discounter (contrary to Gengo.com and others) and pay translators normal prices, as we’ve always done. This will be the high-quality Gengo, so to speak. We already have active customers for this tool, for example *** and 2 other Web startups in France.”
and ends:
“We post information about the translation industry on a very regular basis. And we will be diffusing a cycle of interviews with managers from Ebay, Yahoo and other big Web companies (focusing on their translation process) starting in September, which I hope will be of interest to our translator friends and potential customers as well.
Thanks, take care,”
I assume this outfit feels threatened by the other one.