Which translation agency numbers actually earn a place in the report?

What to take away

Why most client reports are ignored

The standard report says how many words were delivered, in how many languages, on time or not. The client already knows all three. Nothing in it prompts a decision, so it goes unread, and after four months it stops being sent.

A useful report answers a question the client cannot answer alone. In language services, the client cannot see how their own content and their own process are affecting cost and speed. You can. That is the report.

The four numbers that earn their place

1. Reuse of existing material. What proportion of this period's content had already been translated, in some form, before it reached you. A rising proportion means their memory is working and their cost per unit of new content is falling. A falling one usually means content is being rewritten unnecessarily upstream.

2. Client-side elapsed time. How long their approvals, query answers, and reviews took, separated from your production time. Most clients believe delays are the vendor's. Some are. Showing the split honestly, including your own late steps, is the single most credibility-building thing in a report.

3. Query volume per unit of source. A proxy for source clarity. If it rises, something upstream changed: a new author, a new template, a rushed brief. That is actionable inside their organization.

4. Reviewer changes, split into corrections and preferences. Corrections are quality signals about your work. Preferences are terminology decisions that should be captured. If preferences are not falling over time, terminology is not being written down, and the same argument will happen next quarter.

The quarterly review that is not a check-in

Once a quarter, sit down with the four numbers and one agenda: what should change. Not a status update, and not a request for more work.

Three questions run the meeting.

The third question is the one that produces value. Repeated decisions are unwritten policy, and unwritten policy is what makes an account fragile when a person leaves.

Renewal, stated plainly

Whatever your agreement does at the end of a term, say it in language a buyer reads once and understands. Cover whether it renews automatically, what notice is required, how to cancel, and what happens to their memory and termbase if they leave.

This is not only good manners. Enforcement actions about negative option and automatic renewal practices exist. The FTC discussion of a case involving a risk free trial that was neither shows what regulators object to: hard-to-find terms, cancellation that is hard to complete, and a promise that does not match the mechanics.

Read it, then read your own renewal clause the way a new buyer would. If cancellation is harder to find than sign-up, fix it before someone else points it out.

Feedback, and what you may do with it

Collecting client feedback is normal and useful. Turning it into public marketing has rules. Ask every client the same way rather than selecting the pleased ones, disclose any material connection where a reviewer has one, and do not suppress critical feedback. The FTC guidance for marketers on soliciting and paying for online reviews covers the practices that cause problems.

Retention is mostly delivery, and partly memory

Two structural things keep language services accounts:

Accumulated linguistic assets. Memory and termbase make the work cheaper and more consistent every quarter. That is real value and it is worth naming in the review.

A named team. Clients stay with people who understand their content. Rotate a second linguist through the account so knowledge is not held by one person, and tell the client you do it.

Neither substitutes for the basics. An account with excellent reporting and late deliveries leaves.

Keep the records behind the numbers

Every number above has to be reconstructable a year later, which means project-level records of costs, hours, and correspondence kept together. The general expectation that documents support what was billed is described in the IRS guidance on records a business should keep, and the same discipline is what lets you defend a figure in a renewal conversation.

If the account also books spoken work, report it separately. Interpreting and written translation are distinct professions with different scheduling and different failure modes, as the occupational profile covering both sets out, and combining them in one line hides both.

What to do when a number moves the wrong way

A report earns trust when a bad number produces an action rather than an explanation. Three of the four have a standard response.

Reuse falls. Either the client is producing genuinely new content, which is good news for both of you, or something upstream is rewriting text that already existed. Ask which. A common cause is a new authoring template that changes wording without changing meaning, and the client's own writers usually do not know it is costing them.

Client-side elapsed time rises. Find out whether the reviewer changed, the approver changed, or the volume outgrew the person handling it. Each has a different fix and only one of them is about effort. Where a single reviewer has become a bottleneck, propose a named deputy rather than asking them to be faster.

Query volume rises. Read a sample of the queries before raising it. If they cluster around one document type or one author, say so specifically. A general complaint about source quality reads as blame; a specific observation reads as help.

The fourth, reviewer changes, is the one where the response may be yours. If corrections rise, check linguist selection and briefing first. Say that plainly in the review.

A vendor who identifies its own problem in front of the client, with what it has already done about it, is markedly harder to replace than one who reports only good news.

Write the agreed action, the owner, and the date into the review note, and open the next quarter's meeting with it. A review that never refers back to the last one is a meeting, not a process.

Where this connects

The delivery process the numbers describe is set out in onboarding and delivery. Reviewer change data feeds the pricing and profit guide through unbilled rework and the hiring and training guide through linguist selection.

What is being reported on is defined by what each service line involves. Renewals are commercial conversations covered in the sales and proposal guide, and a well-run account is the evidence behind the marketing and growth guide.

Common questions

How often should I report?

Monthly if the account is active and something changes month to month. Quarterly otherwise. A report nobody reads is worse than no report, because it teaches the client that your messages can be skipped.

Should I show numbers that make the client look bad?

Show the split honestly, including your own delays, and frame it as a shared problem. Clients respond well to being shown a bottleneck they can fix and badly to being blamed.

What if the client never reads the report?

Stop sending it and ask what would be useful instead. The answer is often one number and a sentence, delivered in the body of an email.

Does reporting actually improve retention?

Not on its own. It improves the renewal conversation, because the account's value is documented rather than asserted. Delivery keeps the client; reporting keeps the price.