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> You don’t sound like a translation agency to me ;>)
What's happening out in translationland can be pretty jaw-dropping.
Another department outsources most of our translations (with little input from me), and the results we get back are insanely varied, based on what I see in the PDF metadata.
We give them FM source with all imports re-archived to a single subdir. They rarely use FM, so it's not clear if doing the prep work is worth it.
One supposed Frame house asked why we supplied the document as Book files. Ummm.
In at least one case, no sources were requested, so they presumably did it from our PDF, and in Word, natch.
In other cases, their "desktop publishing" app is PowerPoint, gulp.
None of them seem to be aware of the documentation requirements of the EC Machinery Directive.
We've been solicited by a firm that pretends to be in Boston, but it's just one of many country domains, and when you follow the IP crumbs, it leads back to somewhere in Greece, that apparently has no full time translators. It looks like they just outsource to a variable pool of contractors on a job by job basis.
The quotes I've seen from eastern Europe are about 1/3 of what a U.S. house would bid.
You get what you pay for ...
... which may not include translated FM source ...
... that you'd ever be able to maintain or send to anyone else ...
... and that you might not want to have translated back 
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