| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Are translators still important in the modern translation industry? Thread poster: Jeff Whittaker
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| Don't get yourself dirty any longer | Apr 5, 2014 |
Jeff Whittaker wrote: Are translators still important in the modern translation industry? The Almost Incredibly Dysfunctional Modern Translation Industry by Steve Vitek: http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/[Edited at 2014-04-05 01:02 GMT]
The short answer is "yes."
The long answer has to to with the why - and the why has to do with end clients and not with agencies as middlemen or the "industry" or "translation industry" in general. Translators will always be important to those end clients who value quality in their business model or in their profession (academia, technology, law, marketing, literature, general business are a few of these sectors) . Those clients are aware that the quality they appreciate, support and provide in their professional fields must extend to translations otherwise they risk damage of their reputation or loss of income or waste of costs.
The point that needs to be put across again and again is that the guarantors of quality translations are first and foremost professional translators who offer their service at professional (= reasonable) rates, not any agency on the internet that promises quality work for cheap prices or, for that matter, any agency that will not reveal who actually does the translation work.
Blind trust in an agency that states on their website that they work with thousands of professional translators around the world is in no way a guarantee for their prospective customer to receive high-quality translations, on the contrary, it should set alarms off because we're talking internet company here, not your neighborhood doctor ( or translator for that matter).
As Steve points out in his article, it's all about quantity and profits for those agencies who pay translators inadequate rates in order to maximize their profits - because it's easier to gain profits that way than to run a professional buisiness albeit only in the short run.
The translators working for agencies remain unnamed and any poor quality of the translation when registered by the end client will surely be put on the shoulders of the translator who won't receive any pay - easy thing to do for agencies because they usually pay only after more than 30 days and thus are able to withhold payment from the original translators and have someone else fix it with that money or more instead.
Again, this model is flawed and can only be sustained as long as (sometimes even decent) translators work for peanuts because they either don't know any better or have a something similar to a"death wish."
Since they are competing with hundreds of thousands of other like-minded agencies, these agencies have to secure more and more clients or someone has to get paid less - and the only way to do that is by paying all these thousands of translators less and less. But who are the translators working for ever-decreasing pay?
Agencies like these don't have a professional business approach, and ethics don't figure in their business model either. The strong competition between these profit through-quantity-driven agencies will in the end mean that lots of the garbage they sell will lose them customers who thought they get a good service and, hopefully, many of these agencies will go bankrupt (by the way having the effect that many of the translators who worked for them will never see any money for what they did - but they are to blame themselves, really).
We can hope that more and more disappointing experiences by end clients who put their trust into agencies who can't deliver the quality they were looking for will tilt the scale and eventually revert the course of what is going on in our industry (the drive to the bottom).
We should also trust in the fact that there are quality-minded end clients and agencies out there and we need to put more energy into finding/keeping them.
Yet, most importantly, we need to stand up for professional standards and don't get ourselves dirty by giving in to unconscionable agency demands. We need to stay 'clean" , "clean up" or "find another job." Cause "quality for rock bottom prices" is not a successful business model.
Everyone (including prospective clients) should read the following passage from Steve's article before they decide to offer/accept/pay low fees for translation work or trust any agency they never worked with.
http://patenttranslator.wordpress.com/
I think that the inevitable result of these trends is that the modern translation industry model will be producing mostly just heaps of garbage.
I also think that the best thing that customers who need real translations for really important projects should do would be to stay away from the modern model of the translation industry altogether and work instead only with small translation agencies who still believe in the old model, or directly with translators.
Otherwise, there is a good chance that the translation that they just paid good money for was first processed by machine translation software, and then edited by a dude who says that he knows some German, or Japanese, or Korean, and who was editing the machine-translated detritus on his cell phone while sitting on a toilet.
B
[Edited at 2014-04-05 22:37 GMT]
| | | | Roy OConnor (X)
Local time: 15:11
German to English
| The sequel to the Ford story... | Apr 5, 2014 |
... is that most of the workers on the car assembly lines have been replaced by robots or other automatic machinery, i.e. we have human-assisted car making.
Robots can work in a cold, dark factory more or less 24/7 with just an electrical supply and the odd squirt of oil to keep them happy. They never strike, don't need toilets or tea breaks nor unions.
The other side of the coin is that they don't watch television in the evenings, use mobile phones nor go on holiday in... See more ... is that most of the workers on the car assembly lines have been replaced by robots or other automatic machinery, i.e. we have human-assisted car making.
Robots can work in a cold, dark factory more or less 24/7 with just an electrical supply and the odd squirt of oil to keep them happy. They never strike, don't need toilets or tea breaks nor unions.
The other side of the coin is that they don't watch television in the evenings, use mobile phones nor go on holiday in aeroplanes. Our car-making robots don't even need to drive home or anywhere else in the cars they are making. In fact apart from the oil and electricity, they don't consume anything at all. Taking robot propagation to the limit they will be making cars which no-one drives because the newly unemployed have no money to buy them.
In a way we are all guilty. When I first started translating, I used to read the paper source document, type the target text into an 8-bit computer and print out the translation on a daisy-wheel printer that shook the dining-room table. Now with my turbo CAT tool with autosuggest and linked-in terminology database, online dictionaries and the world at my fingertips through the Internet I am many times more efficient than in the (good) old days. We have all been eager to take technology on board, we shouldn't complain when it starts to take control.
It's all down to increasing entropy or disorder in the world. But that's another can of worms best left for another day. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | we create entire texts, we don't just translate the same words over and over again | Apr 5, 2014 |
Roy OConnor wrote:
... is that most of the workers on the car assembly lines have been replaced by robots or other automatic machinery, i.e. we have human-assisted car making.
Robots can work in a cold, dark factory more or less 24/7 with just an electrical supply and the odd squirt of oil to keep them happy. They never strike, don't need toilets or tea breaks nor unions.
...
It's all down to increasing entropy or disorder in the world. But that's another can of worms best left for another day.
Just want to point to the fact that these robots repeat the same movements over and over again, producing the same car over and over again.
That's not what a professional translator does, no matter how much assistance he has from technology that he/she needs to be able to use efficiently (which is true for many other professions - surgeons for example). In a way our work is closer to that of a surgeon and not at all like that of a robot on an assembly line - we deal with individual texts and not one text is like the other. Every translation is a completely different task (although we are helped sometimes but you know what I mean). And we put a completely different car together so to speak every time we do a translation, and it's the entire car, not just the installation of the same (type) of steering wheel over and over again.
[Edited at 2014-04-05 19:37 GMT]
| | | | DLyons 
Ireland
Local time: 14:11
Spanish to English
+ ...
| Which two do you want to provide? | Apr 6, 2014 |
As they say in Project management, you can:
1. Translate something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
2. Translate something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a relatively long time.
3. Translate something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
The bulk of the industry (>95% of the word count), has opted overwhelmingly for Option 3 - it's good enough. That's the reality, there's no point fig... See more As they say in Project management, you can:
1. Translate something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
2. Translate something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a relatively long time.
3. Translate something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
The bulk of the industry (>95% of the word count), has opted overwhelmingly for Option 3 - it's good enough. That's the reality, there's no point fighting or complaining about it. Trados, for example, are giving seminars on how to achieve 10K+ words/day and even at $0.03 per word that gives a reasonable income. If you say, "It's not very satisfying work", then try serving burgers as an alternative.
If you want to work in the other 5% or less of the market, you need to offer a very special skill set and to market that to your target clients. Forget completely about agencies. ▲ Collapse
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| The problem... | Apr 6, 2014 |
Most end clients don't know the languages they having their texts translated into...
Having said that, some clients have offices in many countries and quality problems will surface, eventually...
So, what's the solution? There isn't one... I was having a conversation on FB just today about the big players like Taus or Smartling that are trying to sell translation as a commodity. This is a real threat, but I'm not convinced they will succeed. A bit like MT post-editing. ... See more Most end clients don't know the languages they having their texts translated into...
Having said that, some clients have offices in many countries and quality problems will surface, eventually...
So, what's the solution? There isn't one... I was having a conversation on FB just today about the big players like Taus or Smartling that are trying to sell translation as a commodity. This is a real threat, but I'm not convinced they will succeed. A bit like MT post-editing. According to the many prophets in this field, we should all be doing it now. But it's not working... because many of us are saying NO. Why would you take part in something that is going to put you out of work? And the business model is flawed, because is based on the assumption that machines will reach a certain level of maturity, eventually. That was 5 years ago... I haven't seen much of an improvement.
So, as Bernhard says, clean up your act. Although to me this is a partial solution, it's something...
I apologise for the ramblings... I realise they are just scattered reflections without much of a theme...  ▲ Collapse
| | | | | About the article | Apr 6, 2014 |
I can't quite relate to what the author is describing. He talks of a type of agency as being gone, yet I work with several, and then describes a type of relationship and agency that I don't encounter.
Not to mention that the "modern translation industry" includes end clients. And if they are not asking translations from translators, whom would they be asking?
[Edited at 2014-04-06 22:30 GMT]
| | | | Jeff Whittaker
United States
Local time: 09:11
Member (2002)
Spanish to English
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER | I'm happy for you. | Apr 7, 2014 |
Maxi Schwarz wrote:
I can't quite relate to what the author is describing.
[Edited at 2014-04-07 14:32 GMT]
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