u/shinigami__0

I am in the US and the particular vendor I am dealing with now in Nantong,China.

I've been at my new job with a small company for about 1 years and my boss expects me to negotiate every price increase.based on my experience if its a trading company, i wouldn't push too hard because they are not the manufacturer and they will fuck with the quality to reach my price,and when we find the problem they will blame the manufacturer. emmmm..

asked acciowork, it's said:don't start with price. start with relationship. first conversation should be about their capabilities, minimums, lead times. let them talk. If you can, visit the factory.

I’m flying to China next friday,If anyone has good experiences with negotiating price increases, I'd appreciate any advice.thank all!

Had a supplier call last month that made me realize how bad most “live translation” setups still are in real conversations.

It was about 45 minutes, neither of us was speaking in our first language, and by the end I felt more tired from trying to understand the call than from the call itself.

Half the time I was squinting at auto-captions. The other half I was copying lines into another tab just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding something important.

Which obviously doesn’t work when you’re supposed to be having an actual back-and-forth conversation.

So I went down a rabbit hole on this and the main thing I realized is that most people lump very different use cases together.

A presentation and a conversation are not the same problem.

If one person is speaking and everyone else is listening, subtitles are usually enough. You can share a caption feed, people follow along, done.

But once it turns into a real two-way meeting, subtitles alone start slowing everything down. You’re reading, processing, replying, and the timing gets awkward fast. It’s manageable, but it doesn’t feel natural.

That’s the part I don’t think most product pages explain clearly.

For an actual conversation, translated voice output matters way more than I expected. Hearing the other person in your own language is just a very different experience from trying to keep up through captions.

The problem is that most built-in meeting tools seem to stop at captions.

Teams, Meet, Zoom, etc. all have something in this category now, but once I started looking closer, a lot of the default options felt more useful for:

• major language pairs
• one-way meetings
• bigger enterprise setups

…not really for a small supplier call where two people just need to speak normally without getting stuck in caption-reading mode.

That’s where I kept running into the same gap:
some tools are good at subtitles,
some are good at event-style interpretation,
but not many seem designed for a normal small meeting where you want both:

• translated subtitles
• and translated voice at the same time

While digging around, one of the tools I came across was TransGull, and what caught my attention was that it seemed closer to that exact use case — small online meetings where you want subtitles on screen and translated voice through headphones, without rebuilding the whole meeting workflow around a conference-style setup.

That felt more relevant to what I was actually trying to solve than a lot of the bigger “enterprise interpretation” tools.

My takeaway at this point is basically:

• subtitles are fine for presentations
• two-way meetings are a different technical problem
• and most tools are better at one than the other

Curious what other people here are using, especially for less common language pairs.

And for anyone who’s used translated voice in live calls: did it actually make the conversation feel more natural, or did you still end up leaning on subtitles most of the time?