Creative Destruction Engulfs the Translation Industry: Move Upmarket Now or Risk Becoming Obsolete
April 29, 2017
Heartfelt, Urgent Advice for Colleagues Stuck in the Downward Pricing Vortex of the Bulk Market
Imagine for a moment that you were in the business of manufacturing digital cameras. In fact, let’s take it a step further and say you invented digital photography. These cameras were a bit pricey at first, and the initial images were terrible, but their innovation was that they eliminated film and film processing; the pictures were immediately visible, could be stored, shared and posted almost anywhere, and the picture quality eventually became startlingly good.
Then along came the smartphone. They were unusually expensive five years ago, but the white-hot smartphone market is synonymous with brutal competition between innovative companies like Apple and Samsung, and pricing, features, longevity and physical resiliency have grown dramatically.
So today such innovation has resulted in a smartphone market where progress is rapid and picture resolution, pixel storage capacity and sharing capabilities have grown by leaps and bounds. Smartphone cameras today are more compact than digital cameras, are easier to use, faster in transporting and storing images, and sit in nearly everybody’s pocket.
So Why Would Anybody Buy a Digital Camera Today?
The answer is: Very, very few people do. Forbes called the collapse of the digital camera market one of the fastest and most startling devastations of a modern commercial market. The smartphone market has been on a tear not just to take market share, but to destroy the entire digital camera market, a process that began in 2010, eventually resulting in the bankruptcy of the company that invented digital photography: Kodak.
Steve Sasson, the Kodak engineer who invented digital photography in 1975, was told by Kodak executives to “keep it quiet,” because it endangered the sale of film, their principal revenue driver.
The “keep it quiet” strategy is a terrible defense against destructive innovation. The pile of rubble and aged patents that constitute what is left of Kodak are a strong testimony to that reality.
Google Translate as Destructive Innovation
The analogy to the translation market is clear. Google Translate (GT), which has been on an inexorable climb toward better quality over the last fifteen years, contains billions of words in paired language strings in its enormous corpora, which of course are human-produced translations courtesy of our colleagues in such international organizations as the U.N., the E.U, the European Patent Office, and the Canadian Government, as well as multiple other organizations.
These are good, human-produced translations, and don’t even require statistical machine translation.
It’s beyond ironic that calls for translators to collaborate to produce higher quality – calls that are usually ignored – is what GT is actually doing. It is leveraging the work of all your colleagues on a massive global scale, and giving it away for free, as a bundled product.
GT has become the modern translation equivalent of the smartphone. Translators in the bulk market are still trying to sell digital cameras, and are frantically watching prices continue to drop where “good enough quality” is sold. This is the same market where customers recognize that GT is often wrong, but it’s instant, free and “good enough quality.” Now is GT perfect? Of course not. But neither is a smartphone. The lighting is often off, or people feel that they are not flattered, so they take several pictures and pick the one they like best. Snapchat and other platforms provide filters to make people look good, or thinner, or to adjust the color of their face or even to turn them into various cute creatures. All for free.
Shift in Expectations
People accept these imperfections in smartphones vs. what an exceptionally good high-end digital camera can produce – much as they accept translation imperfections with a shrug – because there has been a major shift in expectations.
Instant, free, convenient and “good enough” have changed what people expect. Which is why GT famously translates millions of more words every day than all human translators do in a year. Here’s an intriguing question. As a translator with a smartphone, would you spend several hundred dollars to buy a digital camera to take the same pictures you do today with your smartphone?
I think we can safely say that the answer to that question is “no.”
Yet that is what translators in the bulk “good enough to understand” market are asking their clients to do every day. Pay them to translate texts that GT may actually produce better (remember that GT is often simply leveraging the existing translations of your very skilled colleagues).
Clients Awake to the New Reality
And now we are witnessing clients in the bulk market – agencies, small businesses, even major corporations – waking up to this reality. Clients who “just need to know what the document says” are beginning to push back even on the idea that a human needs to take the lead. They often question what a translator produces if they’ve seen a different translation on GT. They demand low, single-digit rates that almost require the use of GT, which turns translators into unwilling post-editors.
These clients’ view is reflected in a famous quote by the photographer Ken Rockwell: “The best camera you can use is the one you have on you.” Increasingly in the translation world, that is GT – and translators who have not honed their skills to move upmarket are feeling the undertow. And it’s getting worse, with rates continuing to edge downward, and translators feeling like commodities, where every human translator is considered indistinguishable from every other.
Markets Where Smartphones Fall Short
To continue our analogy to smartphones, let’s recognize that there will always be markets where smartphones are simply not going to work as cameras. These are domains where quality really does matter and where the added expertise of the photographer is critical and well-compensated. For example:
- Professional photo shoots of a wide range of products, from cars to food, for high-end professional use by companies;
- Head-shots for professional portfolios;
- Photojournalism where the impact of an image requires exceptional talent to capture;
- Wedding and special-event photography;
- Live-event coverage for media, sports, and entertainment for commercial purposes;
- Studio settings for lighting, high-end equipment and the skills to use them.
In translation, those same markets also exist, but they lie several miles above the “good enough to understand” bulk market. These markets are referred to as the ”value-added market” and the “premium market” (distinction discussed below) and typical products include:
- Annual reports and formal financial disclosure statements required by law that are issued by multinational corporations, where translators must master regulatory issues and complex financial rules;
- High-profile advertising by Fortune 500 companies, investment banks, high-end consumer goods companies, etc. in high-prestige venues;
- Professionally published journals, articles and documentation in the sciences and engineering, requiring advanced technical training on the part of the translators;
- Diplomatic and intelligence data in a wide array of fields critical to national security, both classified and unclassified, where translation often blends into analysis, requiring special expertise;
- Translations adapted across cultures in ways where the two products end up as completely different works of art.
In the same way that an exceptionally talented photographer can “make magic come alive” in the photographs taken in the examples above, an exceptionally talented translator can also “make the message come alive” in the translation examples.
Note I did not say make “text” or “words” come alive. Those are often translators’ worst enemies, as they are trapped into translating words rather than ideas – what those words express. As I’ve long argued: “Translation is not about words. It’s about what the words are about.”
The photographer Ken Rockwell also famously noted: “The camera’s only job is getting out of the way of making photographs.” This suggests what we have known all along – it’s the talent, expertise, experience and collaborative flair of both the photographer and the translator that makes it possible for these artists to create art: To be able to work in both the value-added market and at the very pinnacle of the industry: the premium market.
Soon these will be the only sectors of the industry that even exist for professional photographers or translators.
Moving Upmarket: Two Pathways out of the Bulk Market
Bulk Market. The market where GT poses a singular threat and is already having an immensely harmful impact on rates is in what we call the “bulk market” – the estimated 60% of commercial translation done “for informational purposes,” or to “convey basic information” where “good enough” is the standard and price is the primary basis of selection, because GT (free) is considered a serious option.
Uneducated clients are also increasingly using GT for “outbound” translations: Into the languages of their clients, for purposes of selling their products to their own customers in broad, general consumer markets, or for software and web content localization, in languages the uneducated clients don’t understand. The pitfalls of such an approach are obvious, as the client cannot judge the results, but the brand power of Google and the mindshare grip that GT has on their view of translation has shoved the “for information” translators out of the picture.
Translation Fail: United Airlines
For example, United Airlines recently used GT and a tiny bit of post editing to translate their apology letter relating to the passenger violently dragged off a flight, resulting in a translation that, while understandable, was very far from polished or persuasive in the target languages. Count this as yet another PR blunder by United Airlines in their attempt to enhance their image. One would think such a sensitive and delicate communication would intuitively compel management to demand the best, but we are seeing the immense Google branding power behave like water on a flat surface – it finds the cracks and flows into them all.
The Value-Added Market
The “value-added market” is a higher-end sector that requires special expertise, experience and sensitivity. While not yet the premium market, it’s a solid step above the bulk market, and often where translators work for years as they hone their talents and expertise before moving into the premium market.
The value-added market is where the translations are typically in a specialized subject-area that is sensitive enough for clients to pause at the thought of using GT or any machine translation at all. The complexity of the subject is enough to sow doubt in clients’ minds. The risk of a translation error can be significant. Translators who work in these markets (typical rates in the USD $0.15 – $0.20 range) have completed specialty training in the subject-matter at the university level, are exceptional writers, and have largely completed the switch to direct clients and the best boutique agencies while terminating their relationships with low-end bulk-market agencies and ceased to consider random agency inquiries.
Examples of subject areas include:
- The entire range of medical, pharmaceutical, and health-care translation, including clinical trials, medical devices and instruments, patient records and charts, physician notes; physician rater training, regulatory and compliance and other health-care specialties;
- IT and telecom, with principal focus on innovation and next-generation technology solutions;
- Accounting and auditing on the corporate, institutional and legal levels;
- Environmental sciences, petroleum and industrial engineering;
- Entertainment: subtitling, voice-over and A/V at the national network and media level.
While this is obviously a representative list, it is hardly exhaustive, and in several sectors overlaps with the list provided above to contrast with the bulk market. But this value-added market is not the province of generalists or bulk-market translators – those who market themselves in these areas without the true expertise to succeed will certainly fail. A ticket to success in this market is hard-won, and success takes talent, commitment, a thorough knowledge of the subject matter and an excellent record of performance.
The Premium Market
The ironclad way around becoming an unwilling post-editor or being stuck at low single-digit rates is to become an expert translator. A specialist. A true artist. This requires exceptional subject-area knowledge, exquisite writing skills, and a lifetime of collaboration with your most talented colleagues.
Here are some tough-love truths about the bulk vs. the premium market. This will help translators dodge the bulk-market trap of perpetual downward pricing competition.
One can tell the difference between an expert premium market translator’s work and the work of an average bulk-market non-specialist at a glance.
It’s a Picasso vs. a 5th-generation photocopy of a grainy black-and-white mess.
Now, obviously, we all started out as novices producing those grainy photocopies and took a lifetime of work, study, collaboration and the development of subject-matter expertise to get into the Picasso range — it’s important to make this clear.
These “side-by-side” translations have been done going back about a decade. Some come from “mystery shopper” experiments, and others from translation workshops which most of us in the premium market have taught for at least a decade, so we actually SEE the huge discrepancies in quality right there in the room! This is not a mystery or unknown in the industry at large.
Even some raw GT finishes ahead of many translators who are still young, inexperienced, cannot write, or have no idea what they are translating.
Putting Your Translations “At Risk” For All Your Colleagues to See
Translators who engage in translation slams or other competitions where they take the same text and then publicly compare their translations, with hundreds of other translators witnessing that process, and a tough judge in the middle, discussing alternate translations, shades of meaning, the finer points of, say, legal and financial interpretation, etc. show the dramatic differences you see when translators confident in their work — and both highly specialized and also revised by colleagues on a regular basis — are willing to put their translations out there for all their colleagues to see.
For the most part, these competitions occur in the premium market at such events as the “Translate in the…” series, which deals with Fr<->Eng exclusively, and some competitions sponsored by the SFT in France, as well as most recently at the ITI Conference.
Here’s an ironclad rule: If your translations are not out there “at risk” for evaluation by your colleagues, you are not doing it right. You need hands-on, hard-skills collaborative workshops; translation slams; and shared portfolios of your work for everybody to see.
The way to break into these markets is not to just keep translating in isolation, without subject-matter training or collaboration, because the clients paying serious rates (above USD $0.50 per word) are deeply engaged in work in law and banking and industry and technology and are not usually out there in Translatorland talking to translators.
Bemoaning the Lack of Serious Translation Talent
I can’t tell you how many lawyers — just to pick one profession at random — I know who became translators because they were disgusted and fed up with the “quality” they were getting on a regular basis over years from a huge number of different translators who had translated one contract and then marketed themselves as a “legal translator.”
So the way to higher rates starts with subject-matter expertise. You have to know the finer points of the law to offer, say, five different translations of a phrase and explain to your client exactly how they are different in your source language and what you — the expert — think is important in their language (your target language).
That’s right — you get to explain the finer points of the law to a lawyer who is discussing a text in his own native language.
That’s the premium market.
If you are not able to do that — if you are not able to discuss the law in that detail with 5 different translation options, and a solid reason based on the subject-matter with a lawyer (or engineer, or banker, or physicist, or certified financial analyst) – then you are not there yet.
So your level of specialization should be on a level equivalent to a practitioner in that field.
That requires REAL expertise, not lightweight CPD, so expect to minor in these subjects in college, or go back for formal training. That means formal university training. Without this level of knowledge and expertise you will NOT see errors that you are making every day in your text that a true subject-expert will spot in an instant (several translators with readily recognizable names on social media recently published books containing howling scientific errors — and they had no clue. Don’t be them.) Skipping this step means you are not only delivering a substandard product to your client, your competition out there that does have expertise in the field will soon enough take your clients away from you.
There are many more steps on that ladder and most of them involve daily collaboration with other, more experienced colleagues.
I recognize that people must tire of hearing me say this, but there is NO OTHER WAY to make it to the pinnacle of the craft without leveraging the expertise of other smart, creative, thoughtful and engaged colleagues.
Find an expert reviser (or more) who reviews every word you translate. Establish revision partnerships with translators whose skill sets complement yours, but whose experience is superior to yours. Ideally they should come from an institutional framework, so if you translate physics into English, be revised by other physicist-translators with the American Institute of Physics who have greater expertise than you do. Have them share their marked-up copy with you on every assignment. There is no other way to avoid the “echo chamber” of translation that exists in your head, or to avoid making even glaring errors repeatedly, because nobody downstream has bothered to correct you.
Then you have to go out there and attend the same functions your clients do.
You also have to share your translations in public — perhaps do a slam or two as a form of practice — and see how you stack up against the 20 or 30 or 50 other translators who call themselves “experts.”
Some day — if you do this long enough — you will find your work has made incremental improvements over a very long time, and the distance between what you were producing five or ten years ago vs. what you are producing today will point you in the right direction for being successful in the premium market.
Other translators who have seen how good you are will begin to refer work to you that is too much for them to handle. Other translators working in the opposite direction will have also heard of you, and will be glad to have a trusted name to recommend to their clients for work in the opposite direction. Talent, experience, expertise and your final product drives rates. Not the other way around.
Rates: Welcome to the Premium Market
As you improve through specialization, collaboration and honed writing skills, raise your rates on a regular basis. Use earmuffs if you need them to combat howls of pain from low-ball clients. Use rates as a way to control workflow once it rises to the level where you are unable to service it all in a quality fashion.
If you make it into the premium market, be aware that $0.50 per word is a common rate, and project rates are becoming the predominant quoted practice.
Plus, the demand is intense, as there are simply not enough translators able to produce on this level. Translate a LOT. Every day. In the same way that professional athletes train hard every single day, your success in the market will be determined by your persistent dedication to translating regularly, being reviewed regularly, being revised/corrected regularly, raising your rates regularly, serving your clients exceptionally, and rising up the ladder in that fashion.
Final Thoughts
Finally, Smile. Laugh. Be nice. You are enormously fortunate to be succeeding in a field you love. How many people can say that about their work?
Follow me on Twitter: @Kevin_Hendzel
Thank you, Kevin. This is a nice picture of the professional landscape and what lies beyond the regular line of sight.
Abraços
Hi Gio,
Thanks so much for your comment. Always good to hear from you!
Kevin
I am a journalist cum translator – Romanian national – with some 30 years of experience as a translator – interpreter alone. Old School as I was – it was equally my firm belief that there’ s NO WAY a machine translation (GT or MT, whatever !) could ever compete with a human translator – and for good reason: when I delivered English – I did my best to feel English – and so it was when I delivered the message in my native Romanian, in German, French – or Italian. I still think the “human touch” cannot be duplicated by a Machine, however “intelligent”. BUT I FOUND A WAY AROUND IT – AND JUST A FEW DAYS AGO ! While I am pretty sure that Google, Microsoft – the whole bunch – are doing their utmost in trying to steal my work away from me, I would like to show them I bear no grudge – and join them ! Because this IDEA might pretty well do the trick and solve this challenge for them. Yes, it is possible – and the solution is right under their very nose but their brave soft- developers ARE NOT translators; and they DON’T trust them either – too dam’ proud these yahoos ! Tell me how to get to them, please ! Any idea – anybody ? Kevin – pretty please ?
Jon, I’ll do my best to make this brief.
The issue is not programmers “trying to steal your work away from you.” 99% of all translation today is done by machine, and that number is growing.
First, computers can already beat the best chess players; the best Go players; the best Jeopardy players and understand natural (human) language. Watson, the IBM computer system that beat the two best Jeopardy players in the world, is able to read tens of thousands of medical journal articles in a matter of minutes and actually understand them. It’s being used in hospitals today to help in diagnosis, cross-reactions between medications, and other life-saving applications.
It is crucial to understand that is all done mathematically. They are mathematical algorithms that have proven useful — and in some cases astonishingly so — in beating humans at activities that 20 years ago would have been considered unthinkable.
In the translation market, the situation is dramatically worse for translators, as it goes beyond the math and incorporates actually human translation. That’s right — it’s not the programmers who have it out for you. They are simply recycling the work of your colleagues — many tens of billions of strings of human-translated text — and serving it back up.
So you can hardly blame programmers for leveraging translations already done.
A new program — DeepL — goes even further, and leverages the best translations taken from a Linguee database. Translators who have tried this program have been somewhere between stunned and shocked at how good it is. That should come as no surprise, of course, as it’s just automated the use of the best existing human translation.
So none of this has to do with man vs. machine. It’s more man’s existing translations leveraged on a massive scale by machines. Since GT is free to use, the price is certainly right.
The solution, which I describe in detail in the blog post text, is to move upmarket into areas where you are a genuine expert in the subject matter. Exceptional writing skills in your target (native) language are essential. The way to stay ahead of “good enough to understand” is to become “better than anything out there in the databases now.”
That’s not easy to do. But the demand in the premium market is large and growing, due to the lack of translators with the exceptional skills these companies need.
That’s the simplest explanation I can provide to you, Jon. If you’re interested in speaking with computational linguists, you might reach out to AMTA, which is the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas, which can be found here: https://amtaweb.org/.
I second Gio’s opinion: The following I kept to read again from time to time:
“So the way to higher rates starts with subject-matter expertise. You have to know the finer points of the law to offer, say, five different translations of a phrase and explain to your client exactly how they are different in your source language and what you — the expert — think is important in their language (your target language).
That’s right — you get to explain the finer points of the law to a lawyer who is discussing a text in his own native language. That’s the premium market.
If you are not able to do that — if you are not able to discuss the law in that detail with 5 different translation options, and a solid reason based on the subject-matter with a lawyer (or engineer, or banker, or physicist, or certified financial analyst) – then you are not there yet”. (KEVIN HENDZEL)
“Translation is not about words. It’s about what the words are about” (KEVIN HENDZEL).
Hilton F.Santos -São Paulo
Hello Hilton,
Thank you for your kind words. People do seem to have an eye for that quote, “Translation is not about words. It’s about what the words are about.” It’s still the most commonly read blog post on the site.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Best,
Kevin
Thank you very much for this very inspiring article, Kevin.
It’s my pleasure, Michaela. Thank you for taking the time to comment. Your words are appreciated.
Best,
Kevin
Great article!! Thank you 🙂
My pleasure, Diana! Glad you enjoyed it!
Best,
Kevin
Beautiful article, Kevin. Thank you for the excellent thoughts.
Tiny thing: I think you meant to say Chartered Financial Analyst (not “certified” – but it’s an understandable mistake many people make). It gets capitalized like that – the CFA Institute insists on it.
There is a lot to reflect upon in this article. For anyone just starting out, especially, it is a good guide to building a meaningful career.
Hi Stephanie,
Very thoughtful of you to take the time to comment. I appreciate your generous assessment. And yes, of course, you are correct: I should have written “Chartered Financial Analyst.” It had been on my mind from a recent exchange and I am very impressed with the credential and the commitment it takes to be awarded it. I think there’s much there for translators to learn in looking to the future.
Best,
Kevin
Thank you very much for this great article, Kevin.
I totally agree: it’s all about specialization and writing skills.
Best regards,
Giselle
Kevin, Kodak and photography was a very appropriate metaphor and I have some first-hand experience. I entered the technical operations field with my personal expertise in photography (in the late 1970’s my personal work hung in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum). In the early 1990’s, I was one of the first three CIA technical operations officers to test Kodak’s DCS-1 and DCS-2, first and second ever megapixel digital cameras. My personal camera collection includes Kodak Brownies & Instamatics, a 1942 Speed Graphic Graflex press camera (think Jimmy Olsen in Superman TV show), not to mention several dozen Canon’s Nikons, Leika, Minox, Hasselblads and others.
The camera/imaging market has many sectors from consumer to professional to medical and even room-sized publishing cameras. For simplicity, let’s focus on only the professional (SLR) and consumer (Instamatic/Polariod) sectors. Digital cameras for those two sectors matured roughly in sync, neither outpacing the other. For a brief period, small digital cameras displaced the Brownie/Instamatic style film cameras before the technology shifted to the smartphone. The professional cameras, like Nikon, are still going strong although showing a gradual downward trend.
You said the smart phone destroyed “the entire digital camera market, a process that began in 2010, eventually resulting in the bankruptcy of the company that invented digital photography: Kodak. This simply isn’t true.
Smartphone didn’t replace any of Kodak’s professional camera business because Kodak never made cameras for the professional sector. Although the smartphone is the successor to the Brownie/Instamatic heritage, those sales volumes were hardly significant in Kodak’s demise.
Kodak failed because of advise they received from their experts. At each turn, they chose the experts’ safe and reliable path. They had no vision to see beyond the experts. Ultimately, as they tried to salvage the company in a last-ditch effort to sell their patents that experts valued as high as US $4.5 billion. At auction, those patents sold for only $94 million (http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/innovation/the-lowballing-of-kodaks-patent-portfolio). See, experts are only experts about the past. Success requires seeing beyond the expertise.
In my opinion, Kodak failed because they did not respond to the greater digital imaging competition that ate away at sales of all their film and film developing revenues. Smartphones are an easy symbol, but they are a “false cognate.” Not only did Kodak fail to transform their business model to use their digital imaging patents, they failed to defend those patents against encroachment from competitors.
Why did their experts’ advice fail them? I think that’s the interesting question. Again, in my opinion, they had a false sense of security that they were already upmarket with no perceived threat. Film’s image quality was so much better than digital and always would be. You allude to this when you “picture quality eventually became startlingly good.” But still, I think that misses the point.
The point is, being or moving upmarket isn’t enough. Kodak as a case study shows that being upmarket isn’t enough. Christensen’s case study of integrated steel mills vs mini mills demonstrates that moving up-market alone is an unsuccessful competitive response. Every time the mini mills conquered the market for a given quality of steel, the bottom fell out of price for that quality and they re-targeted the next level upmarket. Until finally, all but one of the existing upmarket integrated mills were out of business.
Intel’s competitive response to the loss of market share to low-cost chip companies lead to a new mindset that low-end PCs have value and serve the purpose to protect their upmarket business. This change in mindset is the successful competitive response.
To date, the professional translator community has failed to adapt and find that new mindset. Without a new mindset, the handwriting is on the wall. That’s sad.
Tom, you and I agree on more than we disagree here.
As I indicated, Kodak failed because they resisted the digital market, as it threatened their film market, which was their primary revenue driver — a point you also make in your comment.
“Greater digital imaging competition” that ate away at their film and film developing revenues in fact was eventually incorporated into the smartphones, going all the way back to the most primitive CCDs (charge-coupled devices) and later the ICs that so dramatically improved quality.
My point was that the smartphone was and is “good enough” for the enormous market of just regular people who wanted to take pictures, and chose the new Kodak digital phones because there WERE no smartphones with the same integrated capability.
Once that capability got integrated into the phones, the willingness to pay for the digital phones vanished. There have been several case studies on this, and they are fairly consistent on the fact that Kodak and other mostly Japanese companies watched their projected sales of CONSUMER digital cameras disappear overnight.
The hobbyist and professional cameras are still selling — as they should, because those are the tools used by professionals. In our analogy to the translation market, those are the tools used by the upmarket and premium market translators. Translators need to get out of the “good enough” market that his being decimated and move upmarket as soon as possible.
Thanks for this exchange and the long talks we had on FB. Looking forward to your own writings on the subject.
Kevin
Yes, I can agree with the parallel of utility vs professional for photography and translation. Then faced with an explosion in utility digital cameras, professionals photographers migrated to professional digital cameras as their tools of choice. I.e., they didn’t revert to easil, canvass and oils.
In the face of utility translation tools, what do you see are the professionsl tools available to professional translators?
Correction “When faced” not “Then faced”
Also add that professional photographers moved to professional digital cameras DESPITE the professional digital image quality was (and still today is) inferior to silver-based film image quality.
Tom,
Yes, true about digital cameras leapfrogging in actual use over silver-based film, with its superior image quality.
But the comparison was not professional-to-professional tools, it was “good enough” quality in photography = to “good enough” translation in the bulk market.
That was for a huge range of clients who’ve decided that GT is the new smartphone, so they use their smartphones for photography rather than use stand-alone cameras of any kind (in the analogy: they have bypassed professional translators in the “good enough to understand” bulk market altogether).
The way around this for the “good enough” bulk-market translators is to move up and out of the consumer market and into the professional market (out of the “good enough” bulk market into the value-added and premium markets).
With respect to which tools best serve translators in the value-added and premium markets, I’d have to say “wetware.” 🙂
Here’s an important transitional paragraph in the blog post showing how the analogy really only goes so far, because photographers MUST have a camera (or imaging device) of some kind. A translator really only needs talent, experience, subject-matter expertise, and exceptional writing skills, along with a computer to do research and transmit files, but it’s been that way for 30 years and is a product research and delivery system, not a production system.
Here is that paragraph from my original blog post:
“The photographer Ken Rockwell also famously noted: “The camera’s only job is getting out of the way of making photographs.” This suggests what we have known all along – it’s the talent, expertise, experience and collaborative flair of both the photographer and the translator that makes it possible for these artists to create art: To be able to work in both the value-added market and at the very pinnacle of the industry: the premium market.”
I suppose my point is that translators don’t “need” tools. It’s not essential to their success.
Now having said that, I’ve long leveraged the use of voice-recognition technology to increase my daily output, but it was the decades of subject-matter expertise, my ability to compose complete sentences in my head, and vocalize them in a compelling way that made the tool useful. Without all those together, you can’t get any real benefit from VRT (in my case, Dragon Dictate).
Even in the MT industry, there are neural computational linguists well-aware of the existence and price-points of the premium market. This was a comment on Kirti Vashi’s blog where he is guest-hosting my original blog post:
“Despite my current obsession with neural machine translation (and I’m not going to do any spamming here :-)) I can vouch for the correctness of Kevin’s observations. I have several friends who do very well indeed from specialist/premium-market translation. One of them can generate the best part of a $1000 a day, sitting at his kitchen table talking into a small dictaphone. But he does know his stuff inside out.”
Terence Lewis
I do think in the bulk “good enough” market, tools will continue to take over several function performed today by humans, including GT/MT and CAT tools, and to the detriment of humans’ income — a trend that began 5 to 7 years ago, and is both picking up pace, and is increasingly responsible for the persistent downward pressure rates in the bulk-market, to the almost absurd extent where translators are being forced to take rates below even what they were making 25 years ago in non-inflation-adjusted terms.
The reverse is the case in the value-added and premium markets, where there appears to be no ceiling on rates. Translators quote increasingly higher rates when they are booked up weeks or months in advance as a means to control workflow, and are not always successful in dissuading the new client, who accepts the $1 per word rate. In one recent urgent request for a French company, 3 translators worked in collaboration over several days on relatively short texts and were paid GBP 400 per hour each. No tools of any kind whatsoever involved.
As you move up from the bulk market, where tools are ubiquitous — often GT simply displacing the translator — or CAT tools used to pre-translate and then squeeze the translator for every last fuzzy match, tools become sparser and sparser in the value-added and premium markets.
As you move UP the pyramid, clients and their products are much more risk-averse or dependent on exquisite style (a translator offering 5 different translations for one sentence in direct discussions with a client) or a client in the European equity markets commenting how rare really good translators are, and how they pay whatever it takes to keep them. Because the success of their business depends on the writing skills, style, compelling form and knowledge of the translator.
Kevin
I almost thought you missed the point of my question. A simple “Dragon Dictate” would have sufficed. It’s pretty clear that a X1D on the hands of an unskilled person will capture images of conparable quality as an iPhone 7. It’s too bad you didn’t add Slate Desktop to your 1-item professional tools for professionals list. Truly a disservice to your readers.
Ah, but Tom, you did miss my point.
For many very successful translators, a pen and a piece of paper are the only “tools” they need. 🙂 I’ve been told this so often by people I respect — and have built successful businesses and trained expert translators at the top of the market — that I would be remiss if I failed to note it here.
Translators work in an enormously diverse set of circumstances. Some type on their phones. Others use their iPad. Dictating translators, who are about as pro-technology as you can get, are not interested in Slate Desktop. They care about microphone quality and phoneme mapping. VRT pretty much dominates the “Technophile Translators” group on FB, as you know.
I would encourage you to not get too stuck on which camera is best. I disagree that an “unskilled” person will ever be able to produce images of comparable quality than will a skilled one. Photographs are about the person behind the camera, not the smiling person in front of it.
The analogy — once again — only goes so far. For the vast majority of the population, the smartphone is their photographic tool of choice, and will continue to be.
For the experts who serve commercial markets, they will use the superior tools, but that’s because of THEIR OWN SKILLS with these tools.
I’m perfectly happy to agree to disagree on this point. 🙂
Kevin
Thank you for this article. Priceless advice and painfully true. I am witnessing this in the Arabic translation market that is already in a big mess!
Thank you, Bayan. My best of luck to you in moving upmarket in the Arabic field!
Kevin
Excellent article, Kevin! The Latin American market is flooded with generalists having to compete with “my friend who speaks English”, while really specialized translators are fully booked. Unfortunately, though, there’s still much to be done in terms of educating clients about what they can expect in a translator. Very few actually know what a huge contribution a specialized translator can make.
Thanks, Denise. I understand the dilemma in Latin America. There has been a recent first-rate blog post by my colleague Paula Arturo who shows how specialization, working with direct clients and perfecting writing skills have made it possible for her to cross the proverbial “six-figure” (USD) annual income while still working in Latin America. It can be found here:https://translatorsdigest.net/2016/02/10/on-being-the-underdog-and-earning-six-figures-as-a-translator/
Good stuff Kevin, thanks. Your writing here and other places on the web continues to be some of the most valuable coaching I receive, as I get close to logging 3 years in this business. I’m getting lots of practice/experience (1.4 million words in 2016), but my practice is still weak on collaboration (i.e. my work still infrequently shared or reviewed with peers, where I receive the feedback). When collaboration is possible, I always learn a ton, so I’m always open to peer feedback when I can find it. My previous career as a PR writer was a much more collaborative environment, so I know the value. Thanks for sharing it here, along with painting and image of the trajectory track many of us aspire to follow. Great stuff for those of us coming late to the game, but planning to accomplish all we can in this industry. Very best to you.
Good to hear from you Steve! And thanks for your very kind words. I’m very pleased to be able to share my experience and am doubly touched that it has proven — and apparently continues to help — as you move into new markets and tackle new challenges.
I can also promise you that whatever my own personal experiences may be, I will share them with you at no charge. Our industry unfortunately seems to have become a magnet for people who are still in the bulk market trying to sell “advice” after having been in the market only a few years, and actually charging their colleagues for it! This strikes me as both wrongheaded (they haven’t yet amassed the expertise to sell) and philosophically objectionable, as my personal belief is that with success comes the obligation to help others at no charge.
Good luck to you, as always.
Kevin
Great analysis, Kevin.
This puts into writing the trajectory I have followed over the past decade, and provides great insight into where I need to keep heading.
Thank you for your clarity of thought and expression.
Great to hear, Nicholas. Good luck on your continued success.
Kevin
Kevin,
You are certainly to be congratulated for bringing these issues out into the open. I believe there is definitely a need to expose them to the wider translation profession and industry for debate, as too often – if at all – they are discussed only in the darker recesses of T&I association newsgroups and huddled groups at the fringes of T&I conferences.
But that doesn’t mean I agree with everything you write, or with your conclusions. At a meta level, I do not recognize what you refer to as the “premium” market. What you describe seems to characterize as a fundamentally desirable and achievable goal a state that is only ever achieved in practice by a handful of translators, and even then only from time to time. It smacks to me of some sort of Huxleyan dystopia, an elitism that I cannot accept or condone.
I have a handful of more specific comments, and a question that I think is so fundamental that it lies at the heart of the future of translation as a profession.
First, I don’t think that annual report etc. translations have the bright future you seem to think they have. The hardcore financial stuff is ripe for automation, and I can see that happening increasingly over the next five to ten years. As for the “glossy” parts, i.e., the image/magazine sections, I have to ask: Who reads that stuff anyway outside the organization itself? Very few people, I think. A lot of annual report image sections are basically vanity publishing. You could probably keep the photos and replace the text with lorem ipsum, and few people would notice. Plus, the move towards integrated reporting will see the corporates necessarily forced to trim their budgets for image sections. I confidently predict that a large part of this type of work that currently lies within your vision of the “premium” market will fall back into the “value-added” market in the near future.
Second, I’m curious as to why you stick the CU 0.50 per word figure into your thesis (CU = currency unit). It’s a meaningless figure on its own. If translator A takes twice as long to generate CU 0.50 per word than translator B does to generate CU 0.25 per word (and I think we can assume that this will be the case in your “premium” markets), they both earn the same. And if translator A takes more than twice as long as translator B, then A has got their sums wrong and they’re going to have to reassess their business plan. In fact, translator B may well end up with a higher income than translator A. And ultimately, it’s income that matters, not rates. Yes, you also note that there are other ways of calculating projects, but why spend so long attacking the low end of the market and then use one of the very tools – per-word prices – that are accused of being employed in the bulk market to drive down translator rates and income? If translation isn’t about the words, than it isn’t about word prices! This fixation on “price per bulk unit” (words, lines, pages) also runs the risk of making translators who will probably never achieve 0.50 per word feel inadequate and second-rate, and it’s another expression of elitism that I deplore.
Machine translation: I believe GT is a lot better than most translators will admit. My own tests show that, for many financial and legal texts, it can produce German-to-English translations (a language direction that has been traditionally very challenging for MT developers) that are, overall, on a level with junior translators. This is both frightening and impressive. Translators who deny the achievements and future potential of technologies like neural and adaptive translation and stick their heads in the sand will find themselves suffocating very quickly. To borrow from Trotsky: “You may not be interested in MT, but MT is interested in you.” If translators do not learn to harness MT, fast, and to take a leadership role in integrating human and automated translation capabilities (what I call “translator-mediated technology”), they will be sidelined.
Finally, a couple of comments on your answers:
You wrote: “The reverse is the case in the value-added and premium markets, where there appears to be no ceiling on rates.”
This is the same nonsense that I’ve been hearing from some quarters for decades now, and it’s as untrue now as it was then. The market always imposes ceilings on prices. To claim there are none is to display a lack of knowledge about how our markets work. It may be the case that individual players may be able to command significantly above-market prices for shorter or even longer periods, but that does not mean that these price levels can be made into a standard case that can then be rolled out across the market. I think it is bordering on abusive to give translators the impression that there are no limits.
You wrote: “tools become sparser and sparser in the value-added and premium markets.”
That’s simply not true. The difference is that tools become increasingly managed by the translators, rather than the clients, in the higher ends of the markets. Even literary translators are now trying out TM! And people like me (and many expert colleagues I know) are trying out MT.
And now to the question: Where are the value-added and premium translators of the future going to come from? If it takes so many years to make a value-added translator, and then many more years to make a premium translator, where will they start if there is no entry-level market any longer? Young translators won’t be born value-added out of the box. They also need to learn the tools of the trade and, if possible by “learning by doing as they’re told.” What you describe seems to me to be a profession that will die out relatively quickly for lack of rejuvenation. A supplemental question that follows from this: Where does this leave the professional T&I associations? If they want to survive, they’re also going to have to adapt to the new world of fewer and fewer translators demanding increasingly sophisticated CE/CPD. At some point, the economics just won’t work any longer.
Robin
Hi Robin,
Thanks for your long and thoughtful response.
My comments about there being “no ceiling” on the premium markets comes from a broad rage of first-hand reports over an extended period of time recounted by a large number of translators working in the markets I cite. In Europe. In the U.S. In Japan. Even in Latin America! (Despite what we’ve taken as gospel regarding the lower rates there).
While I don’t literally mean “no ceiling whatsoever,” I do mean that there is far more upward potential in these markets where translators use rate increases as a way to try to manage their packed schedules. They simply have no time available for weeks or months. They are in very high demand, and have no real free time.
I would reject your dismissal of both the value-added markets and the premium markets. It’s a mistake — a common one — to draw solely from one’s own private experience and then extrapolate that into this enormously fragmented, complex and ballooning multi-billion dollar industry.
When I took over as ATA National Media Spokesman in 2001, the first task I had was learning everything I could about the markets I DIDN’T know, and I was already running a company that had been in business for over a decade and we worked with translators in 29 countries — so I already had decent visibility.
But then I learned about premium and value-added sectors all over the landscape — these not only still exist, but have since expanded — including very high-end patent work in Japan and other Asian countries on a large volume (again, in the $0.50 per word range and above — I use this as an average, as it’s come from averaging over a wide range of cases); high-paying media and technology work in Asia; huge volumes of high-paying regular marketing and legal work spread out across the major banks, financial institutions, regulators, and rating agencies in both the EU countries and in countries scattered across the globe; those same markets for Fortune 50 and Fortune 500 clients in many places you wouldn’t expect; and even a plethora of small and mid-range specialty companies desperate for translations that portray their expertise and help drive their success — in print, on the web and at conferences.
On just a personal level, I’ve had experience with my speaking about premium markets being dismissed with a wave of the hand. I’ve spoken for 2 decades about the enormous potential of the premium markets in the secure government space — as just a single example — and been dismissed by everybody from CSA to individual translators who don’t believe anything they haven’t actually done or seen themselves. I was dismissed by EVERYBODY at ATA. People simply didn’t believe me. They had never heard of SAIC or Leidos or the other 100+ government contractors fighting to hire and place translators into these spots. I have known it was there because I built a company by knowing how it works.
In a recent exchange with Renato Beninatto, who as far back as 1998 denied these markets even existed, despite my standing up at his sessions and demanding that he learn something about them, I discovered that he came to the conclusion that they should be valued in terms of total spend collectively at about the size of what CSA only a few years ago said was the total global commercial bulk market ($24 billion). By themselves! Just the U.S. Quite a road for him to travel, even if it took 2 decades! 🙂 And they pay translators in the $150K – $175K range, which I believe has had them in the premium market for this whole time.
I think you may have missed the point of my comments on GT. My argument was really the same as yours, which is that translators deeply underestimate the quality of GT, and do so at their own peril (which is why it’s so urgent for them to move up and out of the bulk market — to sharpen their subject-knowledge and writing skills and find direct clients who need their skills instead of agencies). That was at least the first 500 words of my post. This has become apparent from blind “mystery shopper” experiments where the GT ends up superior to that produced even by “ATA Certified translators.”
The more formalized the text, the easier it is for GT to leverage the billions of excellent human-produced translations it has in its corpora. I think we are both on the same page here, although I see huge markets where that kind of output not only doesn’t work, but won’t work until the next quantum leap in computational capability, where computers are able to, say, actually write novels and poetry on a level superior to what humans can do. Or they can interview public figures and write compelling articles about those people.
Now that will certainly be a different era, and they will look back at our clunky CAT tools and MT and laugh at how we thought these were able to do everything a human translator can do.
As to the associations, I think they are already dying. ATA hit a wall in membership growth eight years ago (!!) and has been totally stagnant since. With the exception of the annual conference, where all the interesting content is provided by a core group of members, there is not much “there there.” There is an embarrassing lack of strategic thinking, and ATA has jumped in bed with all the tools manufacturers anyway, abandoning the best interests of their members ($$$ talks). The number of people who have given up and walked away would really surprise you (a lot).
ITI and the SFT are smaller and more adept, but they offer real hard-skills training and special events, in the latter case including clients who speak to the value of premium-quality translation.
The future of translator training and socialization will be akin to the “Translate in the..” series of training seminars, which focuses on the premium market, sponsored by Grant Hamilton and Chris Durban and that involve some of the best trainers in any language pair. These are currently only offered in Eng<->Fr, but their enormous popularity — combined with how they have had such a strong impact on helping the best translators move upmarket beginning on the first day of the conference — they change the trajectories of careers — suggest that this will be the successful model for training at least premium-market translators in the future.
Most of what is shared and discussed about translation today occurs in cyberspace, mostly on Facebook, LinkedIn, individual blogs, and spread across Twitter. The associations provide venues for the people who know and work together in cyberspace to socialize and train, but the day of the association was really over when translators flocked to social media (certain Facebook translator groups are already larger than ATA, are actually growing explosively (80 new members a day in some) and most are larger than the most active of the small associations).
Back to technology.
I am hardly anti-technology — I use Dragon Dictate in my own work, and have proselytized about the huge multiplier factor in productivity that comes from the use of such tools. But those tools only work because I am able to translate fast enough, have expert-level knowledge of my subject matter, and have the ability in these particular fields to form complete sentences on the fly.
And I am not opposed to any technology that helps translators in their own work as long as translators control the output (and ideally the input and the rates). In the case of Dragon Dictate, ALL the benefits of improved productivity end up in translators’ pocket.
The industry has a bright future as long as translators realize that they have choices and that those are dictated by the subject-matter expertise; their willingness to work in collaboration to improve their product, and their writing skills. The fact that there is not a single road-map nor a single picture of reality — or that markets are in fact shifting in reality, which is what this blog post is about — does not negate the fact that so many translators today working in certain markets are seeing their schedules packed; are making more money than ever, and have to use rate rises to control the rising tide of workflow from new clients, often referred to them by other translators with similar skills who are simply unable to accommodate new clients.
It’s so important to recognize how enormously diverse and complex this industry is. It’s a constellation of galaxies, each enormous and distinct, and we have to appreciate how our own experience in certain sub-markets does not give us visibility to extend our experience THERE — in that one limited place — and project it everywhere, and declare that projection to be reality.
I do appreciate your very long post and the points you make and thank you for your contribution to the discussion.
Kevin
Thank you, Robin, for articulating 80% of my thoughts on this. I’m afraid that there is a bit of mistaking the forest for the trees going on at the moment and it’s nice to get some fresh air and leave the forest behind entirely 🙂
Jeanette, the difference between my position and Robin’s largely turns on the existence, as well as the size, diversity and complexity of the premium market, and whether translators will be able to prosper there by moving upmarket — whether their skill set is in fact sufficient to save them from existing and future GT/MT innovation.
What’s remarkable is that it took us several messages for it to become clear that we both had agreed all along on the risk posed by both the current generation of GT, as well as upcoming innovations.
Since this was the central point of my blog post, it indeed seemed odd that I had to repeat it so often. That’s fine — we can easily get wrapped around the axle when working out our points.
Having just come out of a period where I’ve spent 20 years working to provide visibility into the premium secure market — all the while being dismissed in ways remarkably similar to what Robin was just posting — only to have the most vocal critics acknowledging at long last that the premium market they were insisting didn’t exist for the last 20 years turns out to be so immense that its valuation is in the neighborhood of what CSA claimed to be the value of the global bulk market ca. 2010 ($24 billion) — is instructive.
People believe and hear what they have seen with their own eyes and ears. Working to extend visibility beyond that is an immense challenge, especially if it is crafted in the form of a warning that the winds are about to pick up dramatically, and some changes in navigation may be in order.
So this is a long-winded way of my explaining that 1) I’m used to being dismissed and doubted (something I learned wrestling with ATA politics when I was National Media Spokesman for a decade), but persistence tends to pay off over time; 2) There are as many different paths and approaches to moving upmarket as there are practitioners. I’ve done my best to list the most common ones, but I think we should soon see people begin to tell their own stories about the paths they took, and 3) This is a development I welcome with open arms.
This is a strategic discussion that needs to be aired out in the open. None of the associations or even speakers at conferences seem to be interested in discussing the growing impact of GT, or its effect on rates, nor the long-term sustainability of individual business models, which is something both Robin and I have been saying through these exchanges is drastically underestimated by translators.
Change is in the air. It’s happening right now. It’s not yet widely appreciated because its more comfortable to ignore, and because it threatens people’s world view, it’s an even more difficult slog.
But I am grateful that we are having that discussion.
Thank you for your comment.
Kevin
Well it’s late here but I was just at BP and am still in Budapest at the moment, I’ve been to four conferences in Europe in the last twelve months, including one with Robin, and MT has addressed at length at all of them, so I’m not quite sure what you mean by that.
MT has been discussed in the hallways and along the margins of translation conferences for the last 35 years, dating at least back to Systran, and before that, IBM (whose first announcements about how MT would replace humans were published in the New York Times in 1957). So sure, there is talk.
But is there a strategic discussion of the future of the profession?
What I’m talking about is a frank and open strategic discussion of the direction of the markets. On how MT has driven down rates and turned so many translators into unwilling post-editors. On work lost invisibly to clients who think MT has made humans redundant. On the future feasibility of translation as a profession (where Robin’s stated position in these comments so far is much more pessimistic than my own).
Or as Robin stated in the first paragraph of his original comment: “You are certainly to be congratulated for bringing these issues out into the open. I believe there is definitely a need to expose them to the wider translation profession and industry for debate, as too often – if at all – they are discussed only in the darker recesses of T&I association newsgroups and huddled groups at the fringes of T&I conferences.”
That was the purpose of this blog post and the ensuing discussion.
Hi Robin, as usual I enjoyed reading your comments and agree in part with some of them.
That is, while I think Kevin referred to 0.50/word to bring his point home to the per-word counters in our midst, it is indeed remuneration per time unit that really matters — and while we’re at it, let’s make that net please, not gross.
I’ve also thought that the term “premium” can be counter-productive in certain circles, not least because it gets some backs up (“elitist!”).
On the other hand, maybe not, given how readily — how persistently! – so many translators claim in public to produce “outstanding work” (but rarely while standing next to said work… :-)).
An interesting discussion of this is sure to come up at Tony Parr and Marcel Lemmens’ presentation of the latest iteration of their Mystery Shopper experiment at the upcoming ITI conference in Cardiff. Am thinking “blind spot” here. Should be good.
But then my reading brought me to your scoffing “no ceilings on rates” section. Ah, Robin. A trip down memory lane. Having just counted back, I realize that our own discussion on this very issue dates back nearly 20 years – an early ITI conf, wasn’t it?
At any rate, I’m happy to pop up above the parapet and self-identify when you claim:
“This is the same nonsense that I’ve been hearing *from some quarters* for decades now, and it’s as untrue now as it was then. The market always imposes ceilings on prices. To claim there are none is to display a lack of knowledge about how our markets work.”
Hey, thass me. And you were mistaken then, as you are now. 🙂 (“The market always imposes ceilings on prices.” (???))
I do agree that it is easier to risk announcing higher rates with some business models than others. My explanation at the time was that you were running a translation company (an excellent one, too) with serious overheads. So you simply did not have the flexibility to risk testing the upper level – flexibility that a specialized, skilled freelancer had. And still has.
Your question on where tomorrow’s premium translators are going to come from is a good one. At the risk of sounding hopelessly elitist: certainly not from the profusion of anything-goes, short-term courses that some universities are opening and operating on a shoestring, accepting all applicants. And yet I *have* met (through professional associations like SFT and ITI) some very skilled young translators. So they’re definitely out there.
My two cents.
I’m coming late to the party, but anyway…
I strongly agree with Chris on all the above points.
On the term ‘premium’: yes, it gets a lot of people on the defensive. But Robin, given that the mainstream translation market is hurtling its way into oblivion, it is only right to share insight into the only realistic way to avoid being engulfed by the ‘creative destruction’. Being ‘nice’ and ‘inclusive’ will not help people – or specifically, it will not help anyone at all.
Whatever we decide to call it, telling people they need real skills to succeed in translation – writing skills that beat most native monolingual copywriters or technical writers in your field and subject-matter expertise on the level you’ll find yourself turning down job offers at conferences and trade shows – is doing them a significant favour. This is the kind of change management advice and industry analysis companies pay hundreds of thousands for. This warning, if heeded, will help the premium translators of tomorrow focus on their targets, while those who are perhaps aware that they will have difficulties have time to adjust and find their own path.
Is that elitist? To admit the reality, that not everyone’s work is equally good, and that the future will only hold a place in it for those at the top of their game? Maybe, I don’t know. It’s also a fact of life, and businesses will only want the best, or good enough, and if good enough is free from Google nobody is going to pay for it for the sake of it. It sounds scary – apocalyptic, even. I am quite sure Kevin, Chris, and nobody else around here wants ordinary people, the non-elites, to suffer … But raising the alarm didn’t cause the fire. So what good does it actually do to turn up our noses at the business strategy most likely to ensure survival, just because it doesn’t align with our kumbaya politics?
Or, to put it differently: I’ll not stand at the shore praying for the entire burning, exploding, sinking ship and its passengers when I can grab a boat and save the best swimmers who made it closest to the shore.
As someone who has studied the monster more closely than many of our colleagues (I studied Human Aspects of Information Technology at Master’s level, including Natural Language Processing, have my name on a related paper, and spoke at a computer linguistics conference), I’m confident that I can see where things are going, and my vision is much like Kevin’s. I’ve seen the signs from around 2010, when I started hitting what I felt to be a price ceiling with most agencies, and even a ‘rubber ceiling’, with some previously good agencies going down market and asking for discounts.
It was my observance of these market trends and progressing technology that made me take that Master’s in the first place: I knew I needed subject expertise if I was going to have any place in translation in the future. Then it was during my course, as a result of these ‘close encounters with the beast’ (I just like the comparison – I’m not afraid of MT nor do I think it’s a bad thing; I’m no Luddite), I realised I’d need to add a few more skills to that and up my game as a matter of priority. Starting during that same MA, I took courses in online marketing and intercultural communication alongside the pure geeky stuff, and this has helped me and inspired me immensely. Obviously, I’ve had to maintain skills through various means, but that’s not what this course is about. Kevin’s already outlined what CPD helps people break into and stay in the premium market, and how it works, so I don’t need to go into that.
I don’t know the full story behind this ‘rates ceiling’ dialogue you and Chris have obviously had going on for some time. However, I agree with Chris, and I also think her explanations for your differences in perceptions sound plausible.
As a freelancer, it is much easier to call a client’s bluff. You can take the attitude, “Fine, I’ll make time for you if you accept, but if you don’t, I’m going to have a fun day at the spa/playing golf/on the beach/playing computer games.” In other words, freelance translators without the responsibility of staff to pay for and take care of can use ‘calling their bluff’ as a way to supply and demand. It is also a way to ensure you do occasionally get some time off – as Kevin said, it gets busy in the premium market. (I can attest to that – and I’m only just getting my feet wet.)
I loved what Kevin wrote about the premium market on this point as it sums everything up very nicely:
I’m firm believer that there is no real ceiling. Why? Because more often than not, when I call clients’ bluff, they bite anyway. And that’s how I end up overworked… Sure, you might find demand tapers off a little among certain client groups, but there isn’t exactly a ceiling to what translation services can cost (or are worth!). Getting something done right when only right is good enough can be worth a lot. I’ve been very overworked and been using rate increases to limit demand as much as possible. I even told a roomful of translators at a conference back in 2015 to start working their (supply and demand!) curves!
There is no glamour in being ‘busy’ – people who are actually overworked and have been on the edge of burnout know that, and put strategies like this in place. For freelancers in high demand, the rate increases don’t make much of a difference … And this is why translators like me don’t think there is a real ceiling.
I’m upping my rates by around 20% every nine months and can’t see any reason to start slowing down… If I hit a ceiling, I’ll let you know.
Kevin,
A very brief initial comments. I think you misunderstand what I was saying. I very much endorse the division of the markets (though it is also a very fluid division) into “bulk” and “premium”. And I’m rather astonished that you should think I don’t believe that, not least because I market myself as being a “premium financial-legal translator”. Where I disagree with you is in the description of those markets. I would regard a lot of what you call “value-added” as “premium”, with what you call “premium” the upper end of what I call premium: sometimes achievable, but rarely a constant.
I also reject (entirely) your accusation that I’m extrapolating from the personal to the general. That is a mistake I have definitely learned to avoid (the hard way). On the contrary, I think that is exactly what you appear to be doing, not least because you repeat arguments and claims that I’ve heard from certain quarters for many years.
In fact, I suspect that I am much more attuned to the translation markets than you appear to be: certainly a reversal of our roles ten, maybe fifteen years ago. Perhaps you need to leave your self-imposed exile and “get your hands dirty again”, like I have been doing over the past year or so. That’s also why I am evidently less sanguine than you are about the long-term survival prospects of the premium markets. At some point, the willingness of clients to accept “good enough” quality is going to catch up with those translation providers, too, unless they adapt and become even more agile.
Finally, I think it’s important to point out that the “Translate In…” series and similar events focus on only one segment of the premium market, and primarily on only one skillset (writing). They are no doubt very valuable, but are not a proxy for all CPD for the premium market.
Robin
Keeping up the brief response approach here:
1. I’m confused about what makes you think I’m on a “self-imposed exile.” I translate every single day. I translate in the premium market. My work is not only published into an expert audience, it is graded and reviewed, and I am tested annually — if I fail even one test, I’m out. It’s the nature of my customer and my work that compels me to not get into the specifics of that work, nor identify it beyond that general (already public) description. There is what I do that can be shared publicly (what is on LinkedIn, for example), and what I do that cannot. It is the most demanding translation work so far in my career, which has included 35 published translated books in physics for the American Institute of Physics.
2. I understand that you are rejecting what I am classifying as the “premium market” as only occasionally attainable — as an outlier, as it were. One purpose of this post was to shatter that fiction. It is fiction. There is a very robust market across the globe where a very large number of translators have built the skill sets to charge dramatically higher rates while booked solidly into the future. It’s multiple markets. It’s highly specialized. It’s across multiple countries. While I appreciate that your borderline snark dismissals of historical comments on this market are aimed at both Chris and me, you and I have been friends long enough for me to both respect you immensely and understand that you are not going to pull any punches with me, and they are offered in that spirit. Fair enough.
3. I see you conveniently sidestepped my example of the premium market in the secure sector and how I had to deal with dismissals like yours for nearly two decades. It’s only recently come into public view and the (presumptive) market valuation at $34 billion by one of my most vocal doubters should seriously open observers’ eyes to the enormous size of this SINGLE MARKET in the premium sector. This is just one example of where I had to deal with constant challenges and dismissals until the stars aligned for people to actually see it.
4. Since you have not been active on social media where translators share experiences, collaborate and work together by the thousands — and I am solidly in the middle of that work and collaboration on a daily basis — it’s hardly fair for you to even suggest that I might be “out of contact” with the market. I’m far more involved, engaged and aware of what goes on with translators working with agencies, direct clients and the media in what I would conservatively estimate at 50+ countries around the world than I ever was in the pre-social-media ATA media age, where I had to go out and beg people for information for years before developing talking points and promoting translation and translators as critical to clients’ success — a function that, judging from the immense response (200 million readers, listeners and viewers) and the volume of inquiries on the ATA translator database, was a resounding success.
5. We are going to have to agree to disagree about whether clients in the premium markets are going to accept “good enough.” These clients are looking for the ability of translators to bring magic to their work — to deploy creative and authoritative skills equivalent to unscrambling an egg — that are even a monumental challenge for most working translators. There are many factors driving this — real financial and legal risk; importance of public image and success in foreign markets. Also, not coincidentally, the survival of the world.
I’ve played various roles in that very activity going back to my time on the US-USSR Presidential Hotline (DCL/Molink). It’s since expanded dramatically, but I assure you that translators continue to play a critical and irreplaceable role at the pinnacle of not only business, but also diplomacy.
Kevin
Kevin, I think you have made this way more personal than Robin ever intended it to be. I say that as a friend. I think you may be out of touch with what Robin does on a near daily basis for the GLD, for example, since German is not one of your pairs. I also am not quite sure if you are aware that a German language Translate In is being planned for 2018 and it’s my understanding that Robin is very much involved with that. I had asked my fiance to let you know that privately, but I’m not sure that the message got through.
Jeanette, Robin and I have been friends for something like 20 years. I expect him to come at me with no holds barred — in fact, I’d be sorely disappointed if he thought he had to pull his punches with me. He knows I have the hide to take it.
I also have immense respect for him as a professional and a thoughtful commentator, so what might seem to be pointed exchanges need to be seen in that context (go back and read his original post — I think his comments directed at me such as, “I think it is bordering on abusive to give translators the impression that there are no limits” and “It smacks to me of some sort of Huxleyan dystopia, an elitism that I cannot accept or condone” are pretty harsh observations about my positions. But that’s fine — we go back a long way, including the period in the early 2000s when we in ATA were imploring Robin to continue to do the pre-conference workshops for German at ATA in order to keep standards up. His sessions were always packed, everybody attended them (even those who didn’t work in German), and standards were starting to slip.
I was of course well aware of the stirring effort behind adding a German “Translate in the..” in 2018, so much so that I voiced some concern that ATA was to be intimately involved (this is often a recipe for disaster when the Board sticks its nose in, which has been the practice in recent years, pulling authority away from the divisions).
I expressed at the time that I just hoped that they (ATA) kept their hands off the format and instructors and allowed the talent (Robin, et. al.) to control that, much like ITI allowed the French folks to do when ITI provided the institutional support — and institutional support alone — for “Translate in Cambridge,” leaving instructor and text selection to Grant Hamilton, Chris Durban, David Jemielity, Dominique Jonkers and others.
Thanks for this post, Kevin, I found it a valuable summary of the current state of play in the translation profession and a timely warning to avoid complacency.
What stood out for me personally was the call for shrewd judgment and strategic thinking in the direction that we as translators decide to take. It’s easy to get caught up in the cycle of busyness, but so important to take a step back now and then and reflect on what we’re doing, what’s happening in the market and where exactly we want to be.
Taking the time to do this has helped me immensely. And I’m very grateful for the insights shared by successful translators (including you and other commenters here) that have guided me away from unhelpful pathways and helped me find a direction that works well for me.
This is what I’d recommend other translators to do, too – stop for a moment, analyse what’s happening in your market, and work out what that means for you. And if it means you’re going to need to work 12 hours a day just to make ends meet, think again and find another direction to take. This may mean learning new skills, making new contacts and getting way out of your comfort zone, but with some planning you can break it down into manageable steps.
I’m working my way along this journey too. I find it challenging and pretty tough at times, but overall I’m enjoying it immensely.
Thank you for this excellent post, Kevin. And I have to agree with you, Jayne, it is too easy sometimes to just translate and translate without knowing where the journey is going. It’s hard and challenging, but mostly fun at the same time.
What a good post (thank you Rose for linking to it from Facebook). I will definitely be sharing this post with other translators, especially young ones. I think many translators exist in a sort of bubble, and don’t see the huge Beast bearing down on them from Google. I’m not a Luddite either–I love all the things you can do with machine translation, including, for me, reading Turkish or Japanese newspapers–but it’s important for translators to look at the future with clear eyes and realize the threat to their livelihoods unless they upgrade.
I’m fairly new to professional translation (although not to translation) and I’m also not young, so the challenge for me is how to reach this premium level as fast as possible while using as much as I can of what I already know. I don’t have as much time as other people, and certainly don’t want to take ten years to get there. Your advice is helpful, especially about competing and cooperating.
I’ll definitely be reading this blog in the future. Thanks for this post. Appreciate the comments too. (Hi Chris)
Good morning Kevin, 5 years down the line, I would be interested in hearing your opinion about the current state of the industry. – for instance witht the DeepL meteor crashing into our landscape.
Just stepped out of the booth of a 5-day high-end conference for a huge international institution with top-level participation (meaning: any fuck up would have strong impact so they were not taking any risks) and TWO booths (ZHEN and RU EN from which we took relay) were 100% robots (speech to text and subtitling included) – the result was 98% fine and everyone said “it’s good enough for us”… Thank you for your article, I have circulated it widely.
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