It certainly does, and the language used by agencies and even freelance translators discussing selling language services to agencies tells a story of deception or surrender, depending upon which side of the inappropriate terminology in that brokering relationship you’re on.
Collaboration?
Well, hardly ever does this term make sense when a translator sells translation services to an agency. This is particularly the case with the large agencies that control most of the translation-consuming clients and sell most of the language services that are paid for by clients.
Translators don’t collaborate with an agency any more than a chicken laying eggs is collaborating with a poultry farmer who cannot lay eggs themselves, but sells the eggs laid by chickens to egg consumers or to other egg sellers.
It’s actually worse with translation agencies, because, whereas most poultry farmers can probably at least themselves judge the quality of eggs laid by their chickens, many translation-brokering agencies need to enlist and pay yet other people who are not their employees for confirmation of the quality of, and correction of errors in the translations they purchase, because the agencies generally don’t have that ability themselves and need to purchase and resell that ability, again from people who are also not “collaborating” with the agencies, but rather selling them services.
People who think collaboration is an appropriate term in these cases should think about the etymology of that word.
Onboarding?
I don’t mind this term when used to describe what can happen when an employee is hired by a company, but that’s not what goes on when an agency gets a freelancer to agree to a rate and to sign an NDA. Agencies are very seldom hirers of translators, but rather are purchasers of translation services from freelance translators for resale of those services, often with post-purchase processing, which they most often need to outsource as well.
The terms collaboration and onboarding are feel-good terms that agencies hope will compensate at least in part for not treating as professionals the professionals that enable their continuing business.
These terms are also widely adopted by freelancers themselves, perhaps in the hope that they feel good if they reflect reality. They rarely do.
In decades of selling translation and interpreting to consumers and purchaers of those services, I cannot think of a single instance that I could fairly claim to have collaborated with a client. And, of course, I’ve never been onboarded by a client.
