thebigword Reviews 55

This business pockets £95 out of every £100 charged to their customer; the interpreter gets hardly ££12 per hour; since the customer pays around £280 per hour, you can see that the interpreter acts as a SLAVE to the business, no more, no less. Disgusting business model, helping the modern/contractual slavery to grow.No spine here, at all. Avoid!

Awful company to deal with. They have cancelled my interpreter 24h before my theory exam. I now have to wait another month before I can retake the exam and all they can say is sorry we can give you the money back. They should be accountable for causing inconvenience to people and offer discounts if they cancel their interpreter service at short notice.

The Big Word try not to pay for the jobs done at all cost.
They take over 2 months to pay the first invoice.
They take 2 months to pay any invoice including the transportation costs if the interpreter had to paid for it in advance to go to completed the job.
They have low rates.
Their "call centre" is based in India and it is a nightmare to talk to these people in English over the phone.
There is not a direct number for HR nor the invoice dept., the only communication is via email, which they take many days to answer one email.
The Big Word should be investigated for their labour malpractice and mistreatment to their freelancers.
This company should not have contracts with the minister of justice, NHS and any other company that is subsidised by the taxpayers.
To cut it short, they are the worst company ever and avoid to work for The Big Word.

They outsource and pay £10.00 per 1000 words to some translators who do not live in the UK. They should be investigated for not employing interpreters and translators in the UK but instead outsourcing to make more profit.

DO NOT WORK FOR THIS AGENCY. This is the worst agency I have worked with. Reasons not to work for them:
They won't pay you unless you invoice them within 60 days - if not, your jobs will be zero valued.
If Service provider don't attend the booking, YOU need to ring them every 20min or so check if there has been any update on the other side.
Their customer service is terrible.
Their invoicing system is terrible.
The onboarding process was a nightmare
They force you to do 3 hours training on Ministry of Justice but won't smoothly take you through to the on boarding step by step - you need to keep chasing them.
You won't get a response unless you chase and chase or send a formal complain.
I have not been paid for 3 jobs I did because it went over 60 days but I was not aware of this at all as no one has has a policy like this. I have now left this agency and will never work for them again!

Hello,

I wish I could give them no star, I am writing this with great regrets for those who are currently working with the Big word or thinking of becoming free lance interpreter, Translator or transcriber.

Please read my short journey with the Bigword so far.

I have recently started to transcribe calls and successfully completed 29 projects and then raised invoices 20 days ago but I haven’t been paid, I have also sent emails to invoicing team no reply, I have complained to recruiter and had no answer and on top of that I have sent numerous emails to their “so called” Project Managers, who have no clue whatsoever, how their own system works.

Please note all their language titles are incorrect and which is kind of a deception. I happen to know few Asian languages which wasn’t difficult for me identify the language and transcribe.

The Big Word National operational manager admitted that they don’t have the language identifier, so the calls are titled on the basis of one’s ethnicity or the sound of it.

The interpreter/transcriber pick up the project if it is not relevant to their specialised language they notify the project manager and receive no reply, system then automatically start sending you deadlines for the project you informed the project managers.

I have so far received awful customer service from IT department to Peoject managers and also invoicing team. So if you are thinking of doing this part time or full time you better of working for language line solutions, or online freelance platforms where you can raise the invoice yourselves to the organisation to take the middle man out.

I strongly recommend not to waste your time and energy into the bigword false promises and do not waste your time sending them emails, which seems to be not monitored.

Lastly, I do not recommend the Big word, please refrain, if you care about your time.

After all we all invest our time into something like this to earn money to support our families, which the Bigword doesn’t seem to understand or the people that are working for them because they get paid monthly.

Those are not paid for months should contact ombudsman.

This company is awful! They never paid me when they said they would pay me, now I’m waiting on payment for over three months work of work. Nobody responds to emails asking where my pay is. I’d avoid them at all costs.

Customer service has improved recently. They respond quickly and now there is an improvement. The leadership must look after their employees well. Interpreters are working for them. In return, they must look after them.

The bad reviews are fully justified BUT since the last of the reviews, about May 2023, all the UK based co-ordinators were sacked and all the admin was transferred to India. Making things A LOT WORSE.
For over a decade interpreters had to tolerate ZERO increase in pay scales, then Covid gave them the pretext of a 15% REDUCTION !

I find that the customer service from the staff who work here is great - extremely positive and have been satisfied with the communication I have received.

I felt like a fool working for them for a short period but never got paid. We should have a joint claim and take them to court.

I asked thebigword for an increase of my telephone interpreting and they refused. After having insisted, they added 3 pence and deactivated my profile. Clients and customers complain to me about the lack of interpreters, yet presumably 3 pence is more important to thebigword than the customers who are kept on hold.

No face to face interpreting available the last five times I've tried to book one.
Today, no telephone interpreter available at the time I needed one.

So what's the point of advertising an interpreting service when you don't have interpreters available when required?

I have been an interpreter with the Bigword and have dyslexia and I need extra assistance on some occasions with the invoices and updating my details. The Bigword does not care about the disabled employees.
Secondly there is so much disorganisation the I contact them for a simple query and no one knows how to deal with it. They do trial and error, which makes it ten times worse. To make it worse for the duration of weeks I am not allowed to work and earn any money. The Bigword is only concerned with the money, doesn't care about the employees.
AVOID USING THE BIGWORD, BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT AN ETHICAL COMPANY

The Bigword refuse to pay interpreters even after invoicing clients for interpreting services👇🏿 they refuse to pay me for 3 years. Leaders aren’t responsive. Nobody responds to emails and no customer services phone calls either. I’ve been truly trying to get paid for services I offered to UK border agencies in Somali, Swahili and Oromo but they don’t want to pay me. Their log in system is intentionally disabled for several reasons to ensure interpreters miss narrow deadlines to invoice in order for the company to collect funds from clients like Bolton Practices for language services and keep funds for the company

The worst company I have ever worked for. Currently in a large automation push and outsourcing roles to India - this means making a lot of current UK staff redundant (I was not one of them) but I can see there is a lot more to come and the loyal and hard working employees are let go without a second thought. In my experience the board of directors and senior management are thoughtless and selfish and only care about one thing. Ofcourse they have to prioritise the commercial direction of the company but the work environment and employee experience should be equally as important - for them it’s not and they do not care. This company has become so badly morally and ethically compromised I would advise to stay far away. They do not care about the customers and just have a main focus on meeting pointless targets and don’t evaluate the actual service delivery they are providing. I am not a linguist but they treat all linguists very badly. There is a lot of pay discrepancies for people in the same role. If you are a current employee I would advise you to leave as soon as possible. If you are a prospective customer or employee look else where, do not go for the big word. You will be disappointed. The one good thing is that I had a good and supportive manager at one point, but apart from that everything else has been terrible.

The worst organization exploiting interpreter. Their is below the minimum, they havent paid me for two months of salary they promise you then they tell you it is too late you are allowed to claim it with in 60 days it is expired that is what they told me. You will never speak to a managment you will be only speaking to customer service in India they will tell you some body will call you back then no body will call u, you email them they dont replay. Never ever work for this inhuman agency. If you care about people dont use them they care only about profit. The government should ban this organization I dont know why the DWP uses uses them funds them. Zak

I got hired for the Dutch Police Coordinator role on a night shift work from home base.
Instead I had to chase HR/Recruitment/Management for the start date (December 2022).
Eventually, I ended up working for the UK police for 4 months, after chasing up again.

Too much happened at this company, but in a nutshell:

* They couldn't even spelled my name right: it took many emails, a formal complaint ánd 5 months for them to correct it
* Incapable of dealing with work-related issues in a timely manner, when the proper solution was suggested by myself
* Management and HR are non-existing
* Management and HR are very unprofessional and lying
* HR don't respond to emails, only when they feels like it
* Manager of Dutch market doesn't want you to express any opinion about anything
* You have to make upfront costs and chase them for months to get reimbursed
* They supply you with an used laptop; from day 1 I have had problems with logging into it and other systems
* When you want to get reimbursed for additional equipment like a laptop stand, wireless keyboard and wireless mouse, you have to fill in a form that's longer than a mortgage application, with irrelevant questions
* Company doesn't recognises you during the Christmas Holidays at all, even though working through the pandemic
* Very poor and inedequate action taken after formal complaint

If you're in the market for a long, rewarding career, at a company where you aren't just a number, don't sign up for this company at all!
If I could give no stars at all, I would. This is by far the worst company to work for and I worked literally on every continent!!!

Cooperated with them for a long time. It was good for a time before mid 2000s. They had a regular flow and a quite nice, on time processing/invoicing flow. Work was smooth, projects interesting. Many project managers/teams were really good.
However since mid 2000s, I had several unilateral rate reductions over the years, as of 2008. Initially, with the excuse that the company was undergoing difficulties due to crises etc., You'd get a dramatic email from a project manager/marketing guy, promising higher workflows for a rate reduction. The negotiation was of course rhetorical, as rate was reduced anyways or you "could lose workflow", then workflow went down anyways. Although obviously mildly exploitative, cooperation was still doable if you had different income sources from other activities and were on the look for an easy inflow of work. The flows were stable and relatively easy. Relationships were overall cordial, with occasional improvements in time. Many project managers really good.

But since late 2021-early 2022 operations seem to have been taken over by a whole different type of entities, literally overnight in my case. It started with new managers from what seems to be an Indian branch that overtook jobs for accounts i had been following for decades without any issue. After the shift to the new team, upon delivery most jobs magically started to have "issues", some "serious issues" or require extra attention. Aside from one job with issues and a few jobs for which clear instructions had not been clarified, the rest of the jobs had no major issues or no issues at all, with most of them being false positives due to wrong QA settings on their side. Jobs that had compatibility issues, previously fixed by their internal tech staff, became "undeliverable". So, a job translated and delivered several times was canceled and left unpaid after i explained they had to sort the technical issue at the source, with the PM seemingly unable or unwilling to understand and persistently asking me to deliver a job i had translated and redelivered multiple times already. They also took on sending post translation QA checks on a regular basis. Rate adjustments never mentioned, seemingly expecting execution at no extra cost. Many of these jobs are sent for QA with wrong settings, so that false positives are in the dozens or higher, with sole issues being the occasional spelling issue or a missing term. All of a sudden, minor delivery delays resulted in instant rate reductions.
They also don't seem to have any awareness of time zones. Whereas in the past the branches in Leeds, NY and Tokyo were aware of time zones, now demands extend beyond working hours, with pressing requests made late at night despite the working hours being stated clearly. You can be having dinner, be in bed, having a hike, be at a hospital. They seem unaware of time zones. They send mails and in case of no answer in a few minutes they push more mails to press you on menial yet time consuming, unpaid tasks.
Whereas jobs before were allocated automatically and picked by me the day after and translated, now you have to rush and reply to their constant requests for confirmations.
The perception is that of a sweatshop with people waiting at a PC all day till a job comes in, rather than simply have a workload assigned so it can be executed and planned with other events of life.
Rates got worse, too. Pre agreed min charges that had been honored for years got ignored. Requests to adjust rates ignored. Since the same period some jobs on their portal didn't get approval for payment. Working has become a constant exercise in emails back and forth with constant problems. Which is clearly not a good sign.

Finally, recently, maybe given the growing frequency of confrontational communications that had never occurred in the past, they took on sending "translator satisfaction surveys" (Your opinion is very important for us). Normally I wouldn't care, but just to see what happened I filled the survey twice at a few weeks' distance and what happened after, for whatever reason, is a workflow drop.

For a time I honestly wondered if i was dealing with the same company or if they had been hacked by some group of fake operators. It's only after that i realized they had handed over my workflow to an entirely different group that, i am told, has taken over, with a style that is, how to say, quite different.
It makes for a quite unpalatable experience. (
And, please, no more translator surveys either)

Never hire the agency for sign language interpreters – they have a bad reputation in the Deaf community.

I am Deaf and DWP used the Big Word to arrange a BSL interpreter for me but he was not adequate and I’m not 100% sure if he was fully qualified.

I felt uncomfortable, I couldn’t communicate with the advisor and I felt the interpreter was almost making fun of BSL as a language.

If you want to use an agency to hire a sign language interpreter, please use a Deaf-owned agency.