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It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times: How the Premium Market Offers Translators Prosperity in an Era of Collapsing Bulk-Market Rates

The skill set required to succeed at professional translation is so demanding, extensive, persistent and endlessly expanding that “being bilingual” falls several light-years short of even qualifying for consideration.

This holds true for successful translators working in every sector of the translation market.

After all, translation is, among other things, the craft of leveraging every aspect of your life-long experience, training, subject-matter expertise, writing skills and cultural sense in a way that allows you to project all that collective and hard-earned knowledge onto the page in a compelling and authoritative narrative.

So it makes sense that the more focused, targeted and specialized that expertise, the more specialized the market served.

And this is where it gets complicated.

It’s perhaps not surprising that since translation is the gateway through which all globalized commerce must pass, the translation market itself is very far from homogenous in a way that would make it easy to identify these specialty disciplines and markets.

In reality the translation market is a wildly expanding explosive galaxy of massively divergent markets, sectors, sub-sectors, specialties and requirements.

It manifests an almost unfathomable agility to expand and evolve very rapidly to serve all the global markets it supports.

Despite this chaos, there does seem to have emerged over time a general delineation that helps us make sense of this enormous explosive cloud.

Bulk vs. Premium

We have found it useful to distinguish between what is referred to as the “bulk market,” where translation is essentially a support function – where knowing what the text or webpage or software dialog generally means is good enough – and what has come to be called the “premium market,” where getting the translation exactly, precisely, elegantly, authoritatively and compelling right is necessary because of the enormous stakes involved at that level of the market.

The bulk market, perhaps not surprisingly, tends to dominate discussions of the industry. It is often treated as though it were the entire industry. This is why most surveys and studies – even those that are marketed and sold aggressively for thousands of dollars – tend to consist largely of self-reported data exclusively from large bulk-market translation companies that in turn buy these surveys, resulting in a lopsided, limited and ultimately highly distorted view.

It’s as though having first discovered the primitive optical telescope, astronomers declared the game over. What they see in the sky with their own eyes is all there is. They never expanded their reach into radio or far-infrared astronomy, or launched orbital telescopes to peer farther into space and hence deeper back into time.

The analogy is useful because it’s exceedingly hard to accurately measure the size of the translation industry or accurately identify its “quality” segments.

The Quality Continuum

The translation industry is best represented as a very long continuum that encompasses all market segments, with raw bulk free machine translation (MT) at one end and $25,000 tag line translations of three words at the other.   

And it’s far more accurate to characterize the “quality” continuum in terms of gradual and consistent gradations of shade rather than in terms of clear differentiating boundary lines.  

So to be clear, the “premium vs. bulk” dichotomy is a form of shorthand only.

Having said that, it’s still quite useful for how it illuminates markets that are not always screaming for recognition.

For example, the premium sector includes commercial segments that are fiercely guarded and often shrouded in secrecy to prevent additional competition.  Many of these are boutique translator-owned companies, marketing corporations, multimedia conglomerates, think tanks, government agencies, regulatory bodies, and even embedded subsidiaries in multinational corporations that deliberately fly under the radar of “research” companies to avoid alerting other companies to their profitable businesses. 
 
Pure translation alone in the high-end expert pharmaceutical, medical device and IP litigation as well as the premium legal, financial and marketing sectors across all languages and in all countries dwarfs the entire global IT localization industry, for example, by about two to three orders of magnitude. 

There are some years where one single IP pharmaceutical litigation case in Japanese-English alone will run into the $10 – $20 million range.

That’s one single translation project in one single language pair.

And the net profit margins in the premium market are considerably higher.

Value Proposition: Cost of Failure

While it’s true that the premium market tends to operate at higher prices, the market really operates on a completely different value proposition than does the bulk market. 

That proposition is this: The cost of failure is dramatically higher than the cost of performance. 

So in the premium market, the cost of translation errors – liability, regulatory failure, loss of life, damaging publicity or significant loss of prestige – far outweighs the often much higher cost of “getting the translation precisely right.”  

Paying whatever cost premium for translation that is necessary to prevent the cost of failure is viewed as a wise investment.

In the bulk market, the value proposition is inverted.  The cost of failure is low, so there is no corresponding push to invest in getting it right.

Rates are lower. Sometimes dramatically lower. And falling.

This can be tested by comparison to the dynamics of other industries, too.  The cost of failure for a Walmart product is very low – the consumer almost expects it to fall apart.  It’s the same with cheap online localization and “just good enough to understand it” bulk translation. 

But a fractured fuel pump on a Boeing commercial aircraft in flight has an enormous cost of failure, so several layers of review, ongoing maintenance and testing as well as regulatory enforcement are built around it in an effort to ensure that does not happen, a process which drives up fuel pump manufacturing costs dramatically.

When the failure of an IPO or the collapse of a deal due to a translation-related regulatory failure or when nuclear weapons are improperly dismantled or lost to unknown people – that’s a very, very high cost of failure.  

Budgets necessarily expand to pay a premium for translation expertise in these cases.

Of course, translators who want to play in this market must have developed Boeing-quality translation skills through narrow specialization, though, not Walmart-quality generalist abilities.

This means that they must specialize, evaluate, validate, collaborate and continuously improve.

Skill Sets

In brief, the difference between a bulk-market translator and premium-market translator can be summarized as follows.

While bulk-market translators’ heads are buried in dictionaries, premium market translators are buried inside their clients’ heads.

By that I mean that it’s an environment where your subject-matter expertise must absolutely be on a par with your customer’s subject-matter expertise. And it’s their core business, so that’s a very high bar. This requires that you specialize. Intensely.

And your writing skills in your target language must be equally compelling.

A helpful analogy to illustrate the difference between the premium market and the bulk market can be found in the health-care industry in the US.

This demonstrates the correlation in another profession between a pure laser focus on a single specialty over a career and higher remuneration.

It also clearly shows that we can appreciate the very significant training and skills required of practitioners to succeed in any sector of the translation market.

Translation vs. Health Care

The bulk market in translation is similar to the general practitioner (GP) physician market in the US health-care industry.

Yes, general practitioner physicians are exceedingly well-trained, work to a high standard and gave up most of their early adult lives to work in poverty while learning to hone their craft. They tackle a wide variety of different cases and enjoy and perhaps even thrive on that variety. They cure a lot of disease and save many lives. There’s actually a shortage of them in the US right now in rural communities, but their earning power peaks out at the floor of the medical industry’s premium market.

They refer out cases and patients that require greater expertise to the specialists.

The premium market in translation is similar the Board Certified specialist physician market in the US health-care industry.

They too are exceedingly well-trained. They share the first 5 years of training with the GPs (4 years medical school + 1 year internship) but then begin a whole new adventure, measured in yet another 5 years, depending on the specialty. They embark on this endless deep dive to develop increasingly well-honed skills in one specific area of specialization.

Their lives are more defined by the patients and cases they don’t see rather than by the ones they do. They see cases and patients the GPs refer to them. They consult constantly with their other Board-Certified specialists on the most difficult cases and conduct research to advance best practices.

Their remuneration is typically considerably higher than what is observed in the GP market.

Like any analogy, this one is imperfect.

Premium-market translators will now and then work outside their primary specialty, but it’s not very common in the US to see a Board Certified cardiovascular radiologist, for example, working as a primary care physician in a health clinic.

Part of the reason is that the medical industry in the US is tightly regulated and licensed and translation is surely at the other end of that spectrum.

So in our industry we must rely more on the honor system and appeal to best practices and professionalism when claiming competence in language directions and levels of subject-matter expertise.

Expanding Demand and Market Rates

We see that the premium sector of the industry is continuing to expand – and rates are rising – which is in stark contrast to the realities of downward rate pressures in the bulk market today.

The fact that the two markets appear to be moving in opposite directions at an accelerating pace is revealing.

This makes it even more urgent to sound the alarm for all translators and encourage them to begin to make the enormous investment in time to specialize, elevate their subject-matter expertise and hone their writing skills in collaboration with their colleagues to jump upmarket as quickly as possible.

 

Why I’m Sponsoring Schwa Fire

It’s time for language experts to take over the narrative on language journalism.

Much of what’s written online about language today under the guise of journalism is driven by harried editors assigning stories on language to journalists and freelance writers based on stubborn, intractable and misinformed preconceptions about how language actually works. Common among them:

  • There exist “correct” and “incorrect” forms of language use, with “correct” defined by the rules of grammatical usage for the formal register learned at whatever arbitrary dates the peever happened to be in school, which are then expected not only to stay immutable and permanent for all time, but to be enforced with a militant rigor; 
  • Failure to comply with these “rules” is interpreted as a shocking lack of education and cultural sophistication, with a similar down-the-nose dismissal of unfamiliar or culturally suspect dialects, neologisms, creative speech and all the remaining registers of human language;
  • All foreign languages have “untranslatable” words, from which readers are subtly encouraged to come to often uncharitable conclusions about the nature of the underlying peoples and cultures, even though such stories invariably list perfectly clear and lucid English translations right next to the purportedly “untranslatable” words;
  • Translation and interpreting are trivial exercises performed by clever multilingual parrots who came to their skills solely through effortless passive osmosis resulting from geographical accidents of birth;
  • Software will soon replace writers, translators, journalists and others with “soft” language skills because language is easy and automation is already being deployed to write stories today.

Misconceptions drive choices

The central dilemma is that such misconceptions define the ground rules for how language stories are often assigned by editors. As anyone who’s worked with print reporters and writers knows very well, it’s often very nearly impossible to turn writers away from the “angle” their editors have assigned them – meaning the conclusions the editor expects to see – irrespective of facts, evidence or expertise.

Perhaps more tragically, though, is the impact such misinformed views have on stories that are never assigned at all.

Those include compelling personal human-interest narratives about the impact of language in daily life that are considered to be outside the mainstream or thought to be too challenging or obscure or linguistically sophisticated to explain clearly to an audience of readers who have been carefully shielded from informed and thoughtful stories written by experts who know precisely how language actually works.

“This American Life for Language”

Schwa Fire aims to change all this.

Billed as “This American Life, but for language,” Schwa Fire is high-quality, long-form language journalism at its finest. “We live in a time when understanding language and how it works is more crucial than ever,” says Schwa Fire founder Michael Erard. “We intend to go find people to talk to and put them at the center of the story.”

The Challenge of Online Publications Today

It’s not been easy for sophisticated long-form journalism to find its footing online, whether defined in terms of readership or financial sustainability. Legacy media outlets that were towering empires in the last century continue to struggle to find success online, decades after the Internet went mainstream.

Even well-funded online platforms like Medium and Matter have endured their own challenges to maintain readership and relevance given the persistent hegemony of click volume as the sole metric of success.

When clicks are king, Buzzfeed listicles rule the day. Quantity ruthlessly crowds out quality.

Schwa Fire will dodge the clickbait trap by building the entire enterprise on a hybrid model of subscriptions (from you, the reader) and sponsorships (from me, and others) to maintain financial viability. This approach also makes it possible to pay language-savvy, insightful writers to create the content we all want to read.

I’m fortunate that Schwa Fire sits at the nexus of my own creative interests, as clearly reflected on this blog: translation, language and linguistics.

But what truly benefits us all is what this refreshing new voice brings to the conversation. As Julie Sedivy has so eloquently noted, Schwa Fire will reflect how a deep understanding of language makes much more compelling these human dramas of connection, misunderstanding, heroism, loss, power and identity.

Find Schwa Fire here: https://schwa-fire.com/

Follow me on Twitter: @Kevin_Hendzel

Masters of the Translation Universe: 101 Things a Translator Needs to Know

“Sometimes the original is just a pale imitation of the translation.”

Translation takes a back seat to nobody in this bold and daring book, as that compelling and subtly wry observation makes abundantly clear.

As just one of 101 pithy and insightful gems, this book represents the collected wisdom of 500+ years of experience from some of the most respected and, frankly, hardest working translators in the industry.

All that hard work, though, is a labor of love and devotion and passion. And these authors – members of the WLF Think Tank, an informal gathering of like-minded colleagues – wish to share that passion and warmth and good humor with their translator colleagues around the world.

Aimed squarely at the working professional translator – while effortlessly swatting away the vacuous, specious, silly and often wrongheaded advice from “consultants’” books, webinars or newbie translator-bloggers who have barely begun translating themselves – this book draws a firm and irrevocable line in the sand against the bulk market of “good enough quality for right now.”

It dares the low-cost universe populated by mega-companies and amateurs and collapsing rates and endless battles over shrinking market share to move away from the darkness and see the light. It gently nudges them to raise the bar on their craft, to value and protect their clients, to master their subjects, to raise their prices and to become inspiring writers all.

The advice is dispensed in much the same way a Michelin 3-star restaurant presents a meal: as an elegant tasting menu with little pressure or hurry. There is white space aplenty, with quiet and amusing illustrations. Like poetry, this book’s strength lies in its brevity. Few pages contain more than 150 words. But those words – by way of illustration – pack a wallop.

There is solid practical advice on client management, pricing, setting and managing expectations, writing elegant texts, managing your data, maintaining confidentiality, the value of joining professional organizations, delivering greater value and thinking in terms of your clients’ best interests.

Where the book especially shines is in its firm devotion to holding translators to their highest personal standards of conduct, integrity, professionalism and excellence. It has no truck with lame excuses; it has no patience for the whining or complaining or bitter grumbling about the industry or colleagues or agencies, a practice that seem to have almost become a default setting for many in the industry.

Master Your Own Destiny

The strategy here is to encourage translators to take full and complete responsibility for their skill set, reputation, training, tools and ultimately their own success.

It blocks at least as many doors as it opens. Examples:

• No hiding behind translator notes. If ambiguity exists in a text, conduct the research necessary to resolve the issue or contact the client to clarify.

• No guessing about a passage you don’t understand. Originals contain errors, omissions and opaque text, too. Nobody reads a text more carefully than a translator, so this is an area where the translator can provide additional value by calling the client’s attention to potential problem areas.

• No defending a translated term on the grounds that “it was in the dictionary, so it must be right.” As every translator knows, context defines meaning, not words.

Translators working in the industry have badly needed a guidebook as clear and concise as this one. Perhaps it’s ironic that it’s taken almost 15 years to go from “Translation: Getting it Right,” a well-known client guide written by one contributor to this book, to “Translator: Getting it Right.”

I look forward to the second edition to address two quibbles I had on the book, enumerated below.

The authors’ experience profile is heavily weighted toward specific markets: business, corporate communications, law, banking, regulatory, finance, literature and politics.

Notably (and regrettably) absent are a good counterbalance of scientific and technical translators in equal representation, whose advice in many areas would very likely be quite different.

Insight beyond the visible spectrum

To cite just a few examples, the (repeated) emphasis on the crucial advantage of living in the source-language country, of inhaling that local culture, of embracing every street nuance of every utterance, and of communicating with clients in their native language (not yours), makes perfect sense in translating corporate communications, business, politics, banking and literature. Those fields require cultural immersion in a profound way.

However, this advice misses for translators working in many areas of science and technology, which is an appreciable part of the industry. It’s not that there’s no benefit; it’s that the emphasis is simply misplaced.

That’s a bit of a harsh thing to say about such a brilliant and insightful book (seriously, order this book right now) so let me explain that in greater detail.

Scientific translators who translate scientific journals that constitute the scientific record, for example, form the lifeblood connection between two (or more) scientific communities, so in conceptual terms their minds live inside the literature, the lab, the instrumentation, the methodology and the math.

Leaving aside the fact that some of the best scientific and technical translations ever produced in English sprang from the brilliant minds of translator-scientists and translator-engineers who had never once stepped foot in the country where their source language(s) were spoken, this repeated emphasis on physical location and cultural immersion violates the very premise and underlying foundation on which the entire book is based: that above all else, translators must know their subject matter and be able to communicate those ideas elegantly and with authority.

 In science and technology, those subjects are conceptual disciplines with centuries-long traditions, rigorous and painstakingly validated principles and firm methodologies. These are precisely what scientific translators must “inhale.”

Moreover, these subjects are immutable to location, so alas there’s little wisdom to be found on the left bank of the Seine, or the Rhône River valley. This of course does NOT absolve the translator from mastering every nuance of the source language – that’s axiomatic – it’s just that those nuances are located in a decidedly different geometry.

Beginners or Experts?

My other quibble is that while the book is pitched as a guide for all translators, from beginners to experts – and it certainly delivers on that promise throughout – a better title might be: 101 Things a Translator in the Premium Direct-Client Market Needs to Know. In fact, the book is at its best when addressing the authors’ peers: translators with decades of experience working in the premium direct-client market.

For example, while the book rightly hammers home the crucial importance of building a solid client relationship by meeting clients’ true needs, requesting feedback, asking for clarification on the text and seeking out insight on the target audience, that well-meaning – as well as valid, insightful and forward-looking – advice for direct clients in the premium market could easily backfire in an unfortunate and catastrophic way for the vast majority of translators in the industry who actually work for translation companies, whose sole terse instructions are often “Just translate the text” (or my personal favorite in the Pantheon of Appallingly Awful Agency Advice: “Just do your best.”)

This is especially true in the toughest waters of the enormous bulk market where millions of words are translated every day and translators asking such persistent questions would quickly be labelled pests or annoyances or high-maintenance (or worse) by harried and desperate project managers who are juggling 50 projects simultaneously and are barely hanging on to what’s left of their sanity by the barest remnants of fingernails.

Rising to the Challenge

I’m sure in such cases the authors intend such advice (which, remember, is precisely the right advice) to be aspirational – a yellow brick road, as it were, out of the quicksand and sand-traps and madness of the bulk market – and as a beacon toward the promised land of higher-quality clients, better rates and a more satisfying professional life.

Inspiring the Next Generation of Translators

“In order to win a man to your cause, you must first reach his heart, the great high road to his reason.” (Abraham Lincoln)

One of the many accomplishments of the sainted Lillian Clementi was to breathe life into the School Outreach program under the ATA Public Relations Committee in the early 2000s, and then to build out the infrastructure, recruit volunteers and promote the effort tirelessly over the next decade.

It was the first time in ATA history that such a program to reach out and touch every student at all educational level in the U.S., from elementary schools through graduate programs, had ever been imagined, much less brilliantly implemented.

Even today there are free School Outreach downloadable materials from the ATA website: guidelines, suggestions, ideas, best practices, success stories and even presentations for all grade levels.

Please consider taking the leap and giving a presentation on your life as a translator or interpreter at your local schools. 

Just this last week I discovered yet again how the general public — and teachers especially — are enthusiastic supporters of language-related careers and how desperate they are to have accurate and interesting material for their students.

Career Days

I was volunteering on a biology field trip to a river ecosystem with my daughter’s middle school science class early last week when my daughter — who is at that age where “advanced notice” is measured in hours — asks me whether I can speak at their upcoming “Career Day.” 

That “upcoming” Career Day turned out to be 2 days away.

Despite my assurances to her that the speaker schedule surely was full, she persisted and insisted that I at least ask. On my way home after the field trip, I dropped off my business card with their guidance office and told them I would be pleased to volunteer in the unlikely event that they had any spots open.

Here’s the email I received later that day:

I got your card today. Thank you. I am so disappointed. I think you could offer something for these kiddos that we haven’t ever had before and I would love to hear what you have to say, however, I have filled all of our rooms and have run out of time. There is someone who contacted me today and said they might not be able to make it. Would that be the case, could I call you as late as tomorrow?

It turned out that they didn’t need me after all, so I asked my daughter how the Career Day went and who were the presenters?

  • Two cardiothoracic surgeons showed a film about a surgery they performed.
  • A team of FBI agents showed up and talked about counter-terrorism.
  • A psychologist who worked with the criminally insane talked about her job.

With this kind of high-level panel, which you’ve got to admit, would be pretty cool to middle-school students, why in the world would the guidance counselor get so excited about a presentation on translation and language?

Can you come in to talk to our students in June?

I was quite sure that she told all volunteers how exciting their jobs would be to the students — that’s one way to get people to volunteer — but yesterday she emailed me to let me know that the guidance counselors had met and agreed to hold a Career Day session for all the students in the foreign languages department, English, writing and sciences courses who were to advance to high school next year if I would come in and speak to them about the translation industry and how to become a translator.

Many of the volunteers on the ATA School Outreach have reported similar levels of enthusiasm over the years — the hunger for information on how students at any grade level can actually use language in their careers seems to be as strong as ever.

It’s helpful to remind our often cynical selves that our sophisticated use of language is central to our identity as a species. Recent research suggests that self-awareness, the ability to project ideas into the future and to create alternative realities and assess them through the use of language are profound and uniquely human capabilities.

New paths and opportunities

Translation is intrinsically interesting to the public. If we play our cards right, we can perhaps be one of those seemingly minor but ultimately seminal events in children’s lives that can perhaps nudge them in a way that takes them in exciting directions that they otherwise would never have been aware of at all.

 

Bad Advice for Novice Skydivers: “Learn As You Go.”

 

Why the First, Best Lesson I Learned about Translation Was a Healthy Fear

I was a poor, scrawny white kid with crooked teeth who grew up in the barren hills of central Arizona.

The year before my birth, the Soviets launched Sputnik, shocking the world, and causing a frantic U.S. Congress to allocate funding for fast-track training of the next generation in science and the Russian language. These were dollars that flowed downhill and into the deserts and chaparral country and back woods to us public school kids who played in dirt schoolyards and chased lizards and lived in makeshift trailer parks carved awkwardly into the hills.

Just a few short years later, I found myself working as an intern, holed up in a tiny library with sunshine pouring through ornate windows in the Smithsonian Castle building on the Mall in downtown Washington, D.C. I was hunched over Lenin’s majestic speeches and Trotsky’s galloping histories and Chekhov’s heartbreaking stories all printed on the high-acid paper and stained covers that smelled like pungent sour milk.

A tall man with striking full head of hair stuck his head in the door.

“Kevin, come upstairs with me. We’re having lunch.” He smiled.

I smiled back, but a little flame of terror flickered in my heart. I knew that lunch would be attended by brilliant visiting Soviet scholars who spoke no English, and that new Smithsonian staff had been invited to welcome them.

They spoke no Russian.

The smiling man in the doorway inviting me to join them – James Billington, the renowned Princeton scholar of Russian history, who was later to become the Librarian of Congress – needed me to help him interpret those meetings.

I was 19 years old.

In professional settings where Americans revel in the promise of youth – and I was half the age of every other person in that room – Russians are inherently suspicious and dismissive of it.

I confess that back then I agreed with the Russians. I was desperately counting on my youth to excuse my upcoming performance. I felt in every fiber of my being that I had no right to be in that room.

It turned out that I made it out of those lunches alive, perhaps a bit worse for the wear.

Certainly sweatier.

But looking back, that terror of desperation and self-doubt is a key reason I was later to succeed at professional translation – an activity where I was actually paid for my work.

And yet a bit of that nagging fear has really never left me.

The audacity of translation

Translation is an audacious act.

It requires not only that you know what you know – easy enough, for sure – but it also requires you to know everything the writer knows, too.

And those writers are nuclear physicists, biochemists, patent litigators, financial analysts, neurophysiologists, auditors, mechanical engineers, oil field riggers and a thousand other experts in every field imaginable.

That reality makes fear and doubt your ally in commercial translation. You are, after all, charging real money to convey those complex ideas with authority. In that environment, doubt is useful and essential. It drives you to drill 100 miles deeper into your subject-matter expertise every single year, to seek out feedback and guidance and training, to collaborate and consult with your expert translator colleagues, and to revise and rethink and rewrite, and then to tear it all up and start all over again.

Doubt is what taps you on the shoulder and politely suggests that if you can’t even remember where you left your car keys on Tuesday, what else has unknowingly slipped out of your cognitive grasp?

Even after a lifetime of experience, confidence is just a seduction.

But when you’re just starting out, confidence is deadly.

Seduced by Confidence

Into this mix comes the oft-repeated and puzzling advice that beginning translators can “learn as they go.” “Pick a subject that is ‘not too technical,’ they are told, “and learn on your own.”

This is terrible advice for newbie translators, just like it’s rather catastrophic advice for novice skydivers.

(Skydivers just fall to earth faster.)

Where novice translators get into trouble is that they are seduced by confidence. Without the underlying experience that comes from making and learning from a mountain of mistakes, they conclude that they are in fact excellent translators because they’ve decided – with absolutely no other experienced translators around to review them or correct them or shake them out of their foolish complacency and rampant confirmation bias – that the first rendition of a translation they produce is just perfectly fine.

If you are a translation customer in the commercial market who has seen the results of this philosophy – as I have been for over two decades – this stratospheric overconfidence can be deeply troubling. But I learned a long time ago – the hard way by spending many hundreds of hours re-writing translations produced by some very well-known translators – that translators who had

1) Formal university-level training in their subject-matter areas;

2) Practical training in that discipline; and then

3) Extensive practice and supervision under the keen eye of other working professional translators for, oh, say six additional years correcting all their mistakes before they begin working for clients;

pretty much guaranteed that their product would be unlike all the other translation products out there – and it would show.

And it does show. It shows now.

The worse-kept secret in the translation industry

Translation buyers in the quality sector of the market actually talk about who is good and who is not, and who produces at the top of the field and who does not, as well as why that is so.

It’s almost always the presence or absence of very strong subject-matter expertise and writing skills, but also the benefit of massive collaboration with colleagues.

And the phenomenon is not just restricted to the high-level expert technical fields. I would argue based on my own experience that this overconfidence extends deep into general and non-specialized translation, and infects even the simplest legal contracts or agreements or balance sheets or even personal letters.

Contempt for Clients

What’s even more disconcerting is how the “learn as you go” philosophy is damaging to translation clients. It implicitly treats clients with what borders on outright contempt.

In no other commercial field – medicine or plumbing or electrical contracting come to mind – are novices encouraged to charge market prices while “learning as they go.” Each has an apprentice period, usually measured in years, where practitioners are on a firm leash before being let loose on the public.

The problem is magnified in our industry because – unlike kitchen contractors or plumbers or even trash collectors – our customers are often in no position to judge the quality of the results.

I find it distressing that translation in this highly complex technical age is still stuck in a training and apprentice time warp, much like physicians were in the 17th century – not yet scientific, not yet rigorous, still part of colleges of barbers and surgeons. Learn as you go!

This is terrible for our clients, just like 17th century physicians were terrible for patients, usually doing more harm than good.

The way forward

“Learn as you go” is foolish and terrible advice for newbie translators in the commercial market. It condones errors as professionally acceptable, gives novices permission to charge unwitting clients for all those mistakes and, worst of all, traps them in an echo chamber from which – without training, collaboration and constant review by expert colleagues – they can never escape.

The industry urgently needs a feedback mechanism, a hard one, for beginning translators and it must be in place for a long period of time – if we are to have a new generation of expert translators out there – in all fields of translation, down to the simplest texts – who can actually beat Google Translate rather than spend the rest of their careers making minor corrections to it.

 

 
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