Musings on the Translation Industry

A plaint from a translator friend of mine about a small (about 10,000) word job upon which he was required to spend an inordinate amount of terminological research got my brain chugging early this morning. Since I was not sleeping anyway, I thought I'd put down a thought or two, speaking as one who has been both inside and outside the translation industry, both directly and indirectly.

It used to be that translators basically had a two-tier pricing strategy. X cents per word, or page, or cartella (1500 keystrokes), or some such measurement, if working for a direct client, and a percentage of that if working for an agency (naturally agencies wanted their cut for managing the process.) The base rate would fluctuate a bit depending on the complexity and/or technical nature of the project. If you were reviewing or proofreading the work of another person, the pay was commensurately less.

I can fairly say that downward pressure on prices caused by both outsourcing to third-world countries, translation automation tools and translation agency greed have pretty much boinked translators in the butt. I stepped back from freelance translating when agencies started offering me fractions of pennies for various repetition percentages.

You see, there are tools out there that will essentially run text through a grinder and do most of the work of looking up words for you. Huge translation memories (and that's how Google Translate works, by the way - matching phrases against huge corpora of previously-translated text and determining the most likely match) will give you exact matches or 90% matches or whatnot, each highlighted in various colors, and all the translator has to do is "clean up" the output. Since it's less work, say the agencies, we'll pay you less.

But there's a rub.

There's an old homily, much-repeated, with various historical personae as the protagonist, about a navy shipyard which was having some kind of difficulty. The stumped brass finally asked an old, retired 30-year chief if he could help identify the problem area. The man walked up to a section of machinery and made a small X in chalk on one of the boilers. The brass were pleased and told him to send an invoice.

The bill arrived, for $10,000. Leadership squawked, and asked why so much money. The answer was that the chalk mark was $1, and the remainder was for knowing where to put it.

I don't care how much "help" SDL Trados - or any similar tool - offers while I do the work - I still have to read, think about and verify the accuracy of each word I translate into a polished sentence. It may be strange to hear from one who worked a large part of his life helping to develop just such tools, but by the tufted ears of Mogg's maiden aunt, translation is an art, not a mechanical process. My prices per word are fixed - so much per translated word for general jobs, so much for technical jobs, and an acceptable percentage less for agencies. And I refuse to compromise - so I don't work in that industry any longer, unless I happen to find the odd job for a direct client who doesn't mind paying me fair rates for what I do.

Naturally, there is a world of professional translators out there who by dint of patience, changing with the times, finding niche markets, adapting to the tools, and vigorous self-promotion manage to get around these challenges and make a living. My hat is off to them - I count many of them among my friends. Some will say it's simply a matter of unavoidable evolution, but I say that greed has the industry, and that translators are paying the price.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Movie Review: Clash of the Titans

Finally got to see Clash of the Titans last night, courtesy of a free code at Redbox, and found it a delightful popcorn flick.

Liam Neeson as Zeus? Well, it was more like Oscar Schindler as Zeus, but oh well. To the eternal credit of Worthington, it took me a third of the movie to see "JakeSully" in that face - and I only recognized Fiennes because of the voice; his Hades was very convincing and appropriately menacingly insane.

I had no problem with the violent raping of mythology, no problem with the mixing of metaphors, no problem with much of anything - it was a great way to relax for a while, and lovingly made. Since I enjoyed the ride, there's not much sense in picking at perceived weaknesses, but if you want some, just go read the reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, which only gave it a 28 or thereabouts.

On the other hand, every movie like this that I see makes me realize what an amazing piece of work "Jason and the Argonauts" was for its day. For me, dragon's teeth will always mean skeleton warriors jumping out of the ground! PS - have I told you that movie critics annoy me to death?

Overall Rating: 6 out of 10 stars.

Low Bridge

I thought for sure I had journaled about our escapade in Davenport, Iowa. On the way up from Harrisonburg we traveled through Moline, Kansas oops, Moline, Illinois - thanks, Di! - and into Davenport, headed for the Super 8 Motel up by I-80 (a great value, by the way). Following Google Maps, we turned north off of East River Drive onto Brady Street, thinking we'd just toddle up all the way to 65th street.

Fortunately for us, ToniAnne was watching closely, because we found ourselves in front of this, in a truck with 12'6" clearance:



And it was a one-way street, with no way to turn. I had seen it as well, but I have to admit it didn't register as fast as it should have - it was dark, and driving a rental truck I'm not used to worrying about low clearances, even in spite of the flashing lights. I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn't had the good wife along, or if I hadn't been paying attention at all.

In fact, this could have happened:

Yikes! When I first saw that video, sent to me by my good friend DryGrub Willie, I thought for sure that this was our bridge... if you look at the still photo, you can see many scars on that bridge where people had had similar experiences...

As it was, we had no way forward and no way back. As it was late at night, I thought I might be able to back out onto 4th street, but DancingWolf suggested I call the local police for help, and for once I swallowed my testosterone-laced pride and agreed with her, after some initial snarling and snapping. A very friendly Davenport officer came smiling up, stopped traffic so we could back out, and guided us around the barricade until we were happily on our way. I took the time to send a note of appreciation to the Davenport Police Department on their website - disaster was averted, and we were grateful for the anonymous "Officer Friendly" who assisted us out of what could have been a very tight situation!