Anmerkungen des Übersetzers

Professional linguists are strict about differentiating between translators and interpreters. The first deal with written, the other with spoken language.

It doesn’t sound so funny in comparison to the old joke about a jeweler and a jailer (“the first sells watches, the other watches cells”), but I’d say that the interpreter translates (orally) and a translator interprets (written text).

For the sake of argumentation, I am not going to be very discriminate about these terms. Interpretation has many meanings. I am not going to write about philosophers who interpret the world. As somebody with a musical background I am thinking of interpretation in yet another sense.

Long ago when there used to be CD stores, my father-in-law went to buy “Goldberg Variations” in Osnabrück. “By who?”, asked the salesman. “Why, certainly by J.S. Bach”, answered my father-in-law, only to learn that the salesman meant not the composer, but the pianist, that is to say an interpreter of “Goldberg Variations” by the Old Wig.

I was always wondering what makes all those interpretations so different. Pianists interpret the same music sheet, playing it note by note. Conductors use the same music score, allowing only slight variations in tempo and dynamics. But the result always varies. The salesman’s question was perfectly justified. Performing artists meticulously reproduce each written note of the original content, but it is the differences in their interpretation, however intangible they may be, that make people choose “Goldberg Variations” as performed by Glenn Gould, Murray Perahia or Martin Stadtfeld. In fact, it is the interpretation of the same familiar notes which somehow makes them different, interesting and new.

What does it have to do with translation, that is interpretation of written text? I don’t claim it to be an art (even if it is sometimes difficult to differentiate between art and skills, both in music and translation). However, differences that matter and are taken for granted in music, are looked upon askew when dealing with translation.

According to Philipp Koehn, Professor at University of Edinburgh, “translation is unpredictable. If you give a text in a foreign language to a group of translators, you can be sure that each will come up with a different translation.”

For some, this variance seems to be a predicament.

The above quotation is taken from an issue of Language and Translation, focusing on “Machine Translation” (MT). Here, the inevitable differences in translation are interpreted as a flaw. The urtext music sheet calls for various interpretations, but in translation, only one correct interpretation in each given language seems to be desirable.

The “problem” stems from the human nature, so if humans are not capable to solve it, the assumption is that technology can. MT will provide one “correct” translation and disperse all doubts about the right choice. For adepts of MT, diversity and quality are mutually exclusive. MT will set up a paragon of objective quality – translation as one true thing.

However, in practical life MT stands for the opposite of one true thing. The simplest way to produce translation errors (and have something very entertaining) is to use machine translation.

Apparently, MT adepts hope that this real problem of MT could be eventually solved by various approaches.

The long term solution is to keep on trying to make MT produce less errors. The short term solution is to make humans correct MT errors by way of post-editing.

In both cases, one reasonable approach seems to be setting up strict limits where MT, with or without human interference, i.e. interpretation, may be used.

In a recent presentation (SDL Machine Translation for Post Editing: Let’s Talk Strategy), Andy Reid, a product marketing manager at SDL, tries to narrow down the area where application of MT could help cope with large amounts of content, albeit at the cost of poor quality:

The picture is rather messy. I don’t know how you are going to differentiate between “websites” (human translation) and “blogs” (machine translation) or “wikis” (machine translation) and “help” (human translation).

To simplify and deconfuse, I suggest a clear-cut, four segment matrix in the tradition of the Boston Consulting Group:

To answer the question “Where does Machine Translation fit in localization?” I dare say it’s best used to translate machine generated content. It is the lower left, bluish greyish corner on the picture above.

Machine translation goes in line with machine generated content in terms of communication purpose, language quality, target group orientation, copyright and other aspects that need to be considered when debating the applicability of MT. “Give Caesar what is due Caesar”: this is the one logical thing that still holds true, whenever MT is being held for a promise of one true translation.

However, the SDL presentation contains another interesting slide:

Word by word, note by note, everything in its place: mechanisation – industries – grow – inevitable…

This statement is typical of an attempt to present translation as an “industry”, not a “profession”. It takes for granted the idea that translation can be “industrialized” and hence has to be “mechanised” just as well.

Each translation is different and unique, every translator “will come up with a different translation”, but at the same time, translation as such is always a copy, replica or reproduction of something else. “Goldberg Variations” performed by Glenn Gould (or somebody else) are Glenn Gould’s reproduction of the original as composed by Bach. Translation, that is interpretation of written texts, follows the original. It inevitably assumes the production of written content, as a rule, by somebody else.

Do we all agree that production of written texts has become an industry? Do we take it for granted that mechanisation of writing “is almost inevitable as industries grow”?

There used to be times when writing as well as science, ethics, culture and art, actually everything else besides working in a factory or on a field, were declared to be in need of industrialisation. For somebody like me, with a Russian and German background, the word “mechanisation” rings bells. It has its firm place in a series of associations like collectivisation, industrialisation, mechanisation… German Agitprop, Russian Proletkult, Mayakovsky and Bertolt Brecht, cultural Bolshevism of all sorts… Thank God we are through with electrification, at least.

Approximately at the same time, in the beginning of the 20^th century, there appeared the so called Mechanical Pianos, also known as reproducing pianos, player pianos or autopianos.

These were self-playing, automated music instruments, with keys activated not by a human hand, but by the so called “piano roll”. Player pianos were used mostly as recording devices that provided the most accurate and consistent “live” interpretation of a musical piece by an absent human pianist at that time.

The mechanical piano was a cutting edge technology, far more superior than the low-tech phonograph or gramophone. It didn’t pretend to be one true thing, but it certainly was something special and unique. Nevertheless, it didn’t last long.

The crash and the Great Depression “wiped out production” (Wikipedia). However, mechanisation of music interpretation didn’t stop with the virtual death of mechanical pianos in 1929. Nowadays, MIDI files and music notation software like Sibelius or PriMus allow to completely mechanise the performance of music. With notation software you can play back your music automatically, without human assistance.

Characteristically, the area of application is rather limited. The software is great for composers to get a realistic idea how the composition would sound when performed on music instruments, it is the composer’s equivalent of a WYSIWIG editor for a graphic artist.

But however consistent, accurate and natural sounding the machine interpretation of a music piece might be, I have never encountered a recording with “Sibelius” as the performing artist.

I don’t know whose interpretation of “Goldberg Variations” my father-in-law chose among those recommended by the salesman in Osnabrück. It was certainly not a recording of the mechanical piano or some notation software, because there were none available. Never recommended and probably never asked for.

Adepts of Machine Translation have been trying to present MT as the cutting-edge technology in the translation “industry”, as the future of translation par excellence. Arguments to the contrary are usually ignored or dismissed as prejudiced opinions of the soon to be extinct species of slowcoach, technology-averse translators. If you as a professional translator keep rejecting MT, you are either stupid, or simply scared to lose your last miserable, pathetic quality translation jobs, that is what the arguments of all those MT gurus boil down to. If they had read Tom Wolfe’s latest novel (“Back to Blood”, 2012), they could quote a character from his book: “You cannot be cutting edge, if your generation is dead or dying”.

The sad thing is it is only a matter of time until you belong either to one generation or the other. Humans are cursed to hang in between.

It is impossible to predict the future of technology. Despite massive efforts to promote Machine Translation as something cutting edge, the reputation of MT is so low that at the time the term itself is being replaced by newer, nicer euphemisms.

Translators who use machine or automatic, as it is increasingly more often called, translation (e.g. through SDL or MemoQ plugins) try to hide this fact. Clients are getting nervous if something reeks of MT or other “tools”, as automatic translation tools are getting ever more available.

Because no matter how you call it – automatic, semi-automatic, PEMT or even HAT (human-assisted translation) – the old problem remains. It is the problem of a mechanical piano, which nobody wants to listen to.

In the words of Philipp Koehn, Professor at University of Edinburgh, human translation is unpredictable. The future is unpredictable too. But a look into history may be helpful. Because history repeats itself. It simply has to. Nobody listens.

“The Hanging Man” and “Page of Blades” (used for the Machine Translation matrix) are two Shadowhunter Tarot cards by the freelance illustrator and graphic artist Cassandra Jean from Florida.

The picture by Kasimir Malevich is called “Head of a Peasant” (1929, Russian Museum, St. Petersburg). Malevich’s paintings are also mentioned in Tom Wolfe’s new novel “Back to Blood”(2012) which takes place in Florida. A pure coincidence, I guess.

Premium clients can certainly afford “affordable DIY MT systems”, but do they really want to talk to their clients via machines? Or rely on anonymous and invisible “vendors” behind the Chinese wall of intransparent “Big Data” agencies? What kind of language service providers do provide the best benefits for their clients? How can we help our clients identify value amid the offerings in a marketplace?

My previous blog post was largely about quality differentiation in a highly segmented translation market. I was still thinking along these lines, when interviewing Christina Guy, a Dutch to English legal translator living in the Netherlands and the founder of Stridonium (named after an island in the Adriatic, the birthplace of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators and scholars).

Valerij: Hi, Tina. We’ve been talking about Stridonium, machine translation, agencies and all the usual suspects on today’s agenda. The translation market is growing by all accounts. Does the increase in quantity go along with lower quality standards and less transparency in the market?

Tina: Not necessarily. The market may be expanding, but I think it’s also fragmenting. The market for high-quality copy produced by specialist professional translators is still clearly defined – as is the market for machine translations of bulk texts or low-importance “gist” work. And at no point do they overlap!

Seriously though, all of us have to adapt and evolve to keep in tune with the market: that’s just good business sense. Look at how the translation agencies have diverged to reflect the changes in the market: although a lot felt pressurised into moving into the low-cost “budget” end of the market, some had the courage to focus on high-end niche services (and of course we mustn’t confuse low-paying agencies with low-earning agencies!).

Valerij: Talking of translation agencies, I was recently both annoyed and amused when three translation agencies approached me simultaneously with a request for the same job and the same client, copy-pasting the client’s email. The client apparently preferred to contact intermediary agencies instead of a translator directly, even if it was a freelancer (me) who eventually got the job. Why do you think a potential customer might contact an agency rather than contacting a freelance provider directly? What makes an agency more attractive and, to recall my previous post where I make a case for high pricing: do translation providers who charge more communicate more value and appear more trustworthy?

Tina: Well let’s be fair, Valerij, most customers wouldn’t have the faintest idea that you would end up with the work. In my experience customers often imagine that an agency has in-house translation staff beavering away behind the scenes, not that they outsource the work to a network of freelancers like us or – even worse – that they take the project and then hunt furiously for someone to do it because they don’t even have the right translator on their books.

Customers – and that includes companies who buy a lot of translations – have very little idea of how the translation process works (and why would they?). Agencies do a lot of aggressive marketing and many do purport to be all things to all men. A cleverly designed website offering every language combination under the sun gives the impression of an enormous organisation, even if there are only one or two people behind it. How is the unsuspecting customer to know that? And don’t forget the “better the devil you know” principle. Even if the customer isn’t totally satisfied with the agency, he might prefer to stick with them for that reason alone.

Valerij: And yet many freelance translators have the experience and resources to take on multilingual translation projects or share large-scale translation jobs among trusted colleagues. “Outsourcing translators“ amounted to 11% of those who participated in my survey [on quoting different prices for different translation quality]. If being an agency is advantageous in terms of marketing, and we’re effectively doing that already, why don’t we all call ourselves agencies?

Tina: Ah, but would we all want to? I absolutely agree with you that most translators could operate as agencies – and would probably excel at it! But a bit of outsourcing here and there doesn’t make you an agency and those of us who outsource to colleagues are usually doing it to help the customer. Most of my colleagues wouldn’t be interested in marketing themselves as an agency because they don’t want to be project managers or administrators – and if they were successful, that’s exactly what they would become. I can only speak for myself, but I enjoy translating and I value the freedom that comes with being a freelancer. I wouldn’t want to give up either.

Valerij: So what are you doing to compete with the agencies in terms of marketing?

Tina: The main challenge for service providers is to adapt to changing markets. That doesn’t mean we throw the baby out with the bathwater – traditional values and common sense will always play a large part in my business – but all of us must be open to change. The market we’re operating in today is a world away from the market of twenty years ago – the competitors we face now are very different from those faced by our colleagues then. In addition to using modern marketing methods such as Twitter and Facebook we must change the way we think.

I’ve noticed that we’re hard-wired to think in black-and-white terms of translator OR agency – but is that the only choice? I don’t think so – in my view there’s a third way, where freelancers cater for larger projects by coming together in flexible, bespoke teams. That would also counter the stock agency argument that freelancers aren’t able to cope with volume.

Valerij: And you are doing that on Stridonium now?

Tina: Yes, we’ve just introduced Strido TagTeams. It’s our “third way”, if you like.

It dawned on me that in Stridonium we had a very valuable resource for customers. Not only can we advertise ourselves as professional freelancers, but we can form tag teams to take on larger projects.
All of us on Stridonium have come to know and respect each other and we’re happy to endorse each other’s work. That in itself is an extremely valuable asset.

Valerij: With regard to managing team projects, do you envisage there being managers who will be in charge of administrative functions rather than translation?

Tina: No. This is all about thinking outside the box, the third way – the last thing we want is to be yet another agency in all but name.

Flexibility is the key word. Each team will decide on its own approach – and they will liaise with the client. We are just using the Stridonium portal to bring the two together.

And last but certainly not least,  I recently told a new customer about the Strido TagTeams project. Having stayed with an agency for a couple of years despite being unhappy (a great example of “better the devil you know”!!), he now wants me to find someone on Stridonium.

I think that goes some way to proving the point, doesn’t it?

Well, I can certainly see the advantages of opening a third way. If we could help our clients benefit from flexible, scalable, easily customizable and dedicated teams of qualified translators, we could overcome the limitations of both agencies and freelancers. We could bridge the gap between volume (Tina’s “stock agency argument” against freelancers) AND quality (freelancers’ argument against agencies).

I for one can certainly testify to Stridonium being an insular spot for very talented language professionals. My main question (which I hope to address again some time soon) is how to communicate this value to our clients. How to translate the advantages of Strido into tangible benefits for a potential translation buyer (to use the marketing speak).

We need to start building bridges and reach out to our clients. What are transparency and personality worth for the client, what do TagTeams mean in terms of reliability and turnover time, but also as regards communication (who is in charge and who to contact). As a “marketing guy” I believe that success of Stridonium (which I wish could become a trend setter) largely depends on how we help our clients to answer a simple question: Why should I as a translation buyer choose Strido (or the Strido model of translator communities teaming up to tackle translation projects) among other market players – agencies, freelance translators, affordable DIY machine translation systems and the rest of saints, dragons, angels, humans and machines in every thinkable combination.

I look forward to taking up a client’s perspective in our next conversation. For the time being, I wish Strido much luck for its first “strides in the Third Way direction” (and towards the clients) and thank you very much for the interview, Tina!

(Photo: Swedish Maritime Administration – Lifeguard 901, 2011)

The coffee mug (photo courtesy of Rose Newell and Aurora Humarán) comes from IAPTI, not ATA. Well, it is the inscription that matters and, since this year is supposed to be a big coming out year for professional translation associations, maybe we all should really start thinking more about these acronyms. Before we run out of letters in the alphabet, a letter grinder may come in handy, if it helps us 1. create a shared vision of the value of professional competence in translation and 2. differentiate not between various associations, but between professional quality translation (whatever abbreviation you choose) and everything beyond and in between.

Quality differentiation in translation was the subject of my previous blog post. The question was about whether it makes sense to differentiate translation quality for marketing purposes and if (m)any of us offer translation of varying quality at various prices.

My impromptu idea to put up an opinion poll turned out to be a success. In fact, I never expected a hundred blog readers responding to my call. Thank you all so very much for taking part in this survey!

SurveyMonkey is a great and very easy-to-use tool, even if it limits the number of respondents to 100 in its basic free version and occasionally has some hiccups along the way:

The monkeys worked diligently. Here are the results from the 100 data sets.

Quality differentiation: a viable model for the translation business?
[Click to enlarge image]

75% of respondents offer different rates to different types of clients, 62% quote different rates dependent on delivery time (i.e. surcharge for express translation jobs, “overnight and weekend surcharge”, “taking a premium for the 5-to-9 or the Friday-to-Monday turnaround”, also “surcharges for various formats, e.g. translation from PDF, PowerPoint or Visio format”).

23% of respondents quote different rates according to translation quality, whereas 67% offer translation at only one quality level. The remaining 10% (“other”) provided interesting comments, which I am going to cite verbatim:

• “ich musste noch nie eine Übersetzung nur zur Information erstellen, nur qualitativ hochwertige” [I never had to do a for-information translation, only high quality ones]
• “No variations in translation quality as such (my clients will always get a true, correct, proofread (4 eyes) translation – I do charge extra for final proofreading of to-be-printed publications, though, as I don’t do any InDesign, for example, and a lot can go wrong when programmers/designers merge the translations into their templates”
• “I was never asked for “for-info” translations but would probably quote lower if asked.”
• “I try to get the same high rate for everything and avoid translations that are published because it is impossible to charge rates that are commensurate with the effort involved.”
• “I only do excellent quality. I’m expensive. I try to stay expensive so that clients who don’t care about excellent quality will not come bothering me.”
• “no, but I’ve thought about it; I’m just nor sure anyone would go for it if I told them explicitly “this will be less than perfect”
• “When I quote, I offer a surcharge for proofreading by a second translator. I have never offered different rates for various nuances of translation quality though.”
• “only to people i know very very well i would give a lower quality for-information translation.”
• “No, but sometimes quality and cost are related. E.g., the quality could be higher if I invested more time than the budget allows; or I take an “into-non-native” job at my regular “into-native” rate, but it is understood that the quality will be “non-native” too, etc. Or it can be a client-dependent thing.”

Well, this certainly gives a lot to think about, but, considering the limitations (both of the Survey Monkeys and) of a blog post, I will try to restrict myself and pick up only one statement which I think (at the risk of sounding arrogant) worth repeating:

I only do excellent quality. I’m expensive. I try to stay expensive so that clients who don’t care about excellent quality will not come bothering me.

It stands to reason that I was not going to advocate for poor quality when putting up the question of translation quality differentiation. I also “only do excellent quality” and, like I said, don’t “add garbage to diversify” (yet ).

However, if we provide services to get paid, I think it is a good idea to align our understanding of quality with that of our clients. It can well be that our clients do not value, cannot recognize or even don’t need excellent translation quality as it is. They may care more about speedy service (e.g. to the detriment of stylistic adequacy) or constant availability of the translator. Their understanding of quality may be more about quality of service or, if this matters, about price.

Starting identifying the value of our translation services for our clients, we are going to get more discerning about quality differentiation from the viewpoint of our clients. The inevitable next step – and that is why I am actually writing this – is getting more discerning about clients as such.

If I “only do excellent quality”, there is no reason not to select among the fish that come to the net. Fish come from everywhere, and “signals” come from both sides.

If I receive an email request for quotation without any details about the intended translation project, it is a clear signal of the potential client’s priorities. Each time I see the question about my rate (irrespective of all other variables), I am tempted to ask in return if this client’s company is a company with only one – unspecific – product, differentiating itself solely by price.

If we, that is 70-80% of us, don’t offer translations of varying quality and are not ready to make compromises, why offer premium quality to all clients? Instead of flooding an undifferentiated market with offers of quality translations, why not help the market purge itself?

I believe we should learn (and think) more about market segmentation. Chris Durban’s differentiation between premium and bulk markets is a must read for serious, professional, quality-driven translators.

Because it is clearly the bulk market that Luigi Muzii describes with his second-hand car dealer analogy. It is the bulk market of wholesale translation agencies with their anonymous and invisible “in-house translators” and their free stock photography websites, slightly adapted to advertise all languages translation services in their headlines.

It is the bulk market of “affordable DIY machine translation systems” touted by pseudoscientific trainers of future machine operators (a.k.a. post-editors). I am not a naysayer to the Machine, mind you. I am a naysayer to lumping together communication between people and interaction between machines. Start treating people like things and you will end up being treated like garbage.

In other words, it is the bulk market which a serious translator should best stand clear from. The aforementioned market actors are not those we need to compete against. Define it how you may, but, if I may quote Tony Soprano as a marketing guru, these market actors are all like “Comley Trucking, Christopher, and you leave Comley Trucking and every other f*** item on this planet that belongs to my uncle Junior, including his hemorrhoid donut, the f*** alone.”

Back to our offers.

Premium pricing (“I try to stay expensive…”) is an elegant communication strategy to draw a distinction between yourself and the cheap commodity market. The more garbage the bulk market generates, the tougher the competition on price. It is a benefit for those who target the premium market where non-price differentiators – sustainable competitive advantages other than price – do matter. The rare the premium products are, the higher the price.

From my own experience I know premium clients who don’t pay much attention to price. They don’t care about absolute figures. Rather, they are capable to perceive differentiating signals that premium prices send. They are not to be fooled, so if you quote premium prices, you’d better deliver outstanding quality too. But you’d better communicate it through a justifiable premium price not to deliver any ambiguous and misleading signals.

Premium pricing is nothing new. A high price stands for value (in B2B, as opposed to B2C marketing, where it is used mostly for snob and luxury goods). In the B2B space, it signals to clients that the product is high in quality, that there are no substitutes for it, that what you deliver is special and unique (expertise, specialization, superior writing/authoring skills). A high-end client is not so keen to communicate with an affordable DIY translation machine, rather with someone who has a personality, experience and a grasp of things on a par with his/her own.

These principles are valid for other professions. But my feeling is translators need to translate them for their own needs more than other professions.

I argue for the necessity of being more discerning and differentiating, but I don’t think that translators, business- and marketing-wise, are any different from, say, journalists, designers, architects and many other occupations. A successful creative in the advertising industry is serious about the measurability of his/her work, a tax adviser may come up with a creative marketing campaign.

A look “across industries” (other industries also are challenged by low quality, low cost suppliers and even machines, you know) may open up your eyes.

For the time being, I’ll refrain from any further marketing advice (from Tony Soprano and myself) in this post. Ours is a highly segmented market. Translation agencies, freelance translators, outsourcing (hybrid) translators are not the only groups of market players.  The next blog post will focus on another setup which is particularly suited for bringing together high-end clients and premium translator teams.

The subject of this and the previous posts was differentiation. I believe that differentiation in terms of specialty, quality, prices and clients helps to get aware of one’s position on the market as well as make clear what market to target (and how) and what market to stay from. I’d rather we leave Comley Trucking to Uncle Junior and leave the market altogether if Uncle Junior and Comley Trucking are turning this market into junk space  (if I may misspell and misuse Rem Koolhaas’s fitting term). Because translation, if it is not a commodity, like so many other things, is about multiple choices.

Or, like Carmela told Tony Soprano:

“You know, Tony, it’s a multiple choice thing with you. ‘Cause I can’t tell if you’re old-fashioned, you’re paranoid, or just a f**king asshole.”

The American Translators Association (ATA) used to have a coffee mug with the slogan I was looking for. I don’t know if the “Coffee Mug blue w/white logo ($8)” from the current ATAware merchandise still has it. I couldn’t find the picture, but it doesn’t matter. The coffee stains have always been part of the header image above, and the inscription reads just as well in plain black on white: “The translation is not a commodity”.

This non-commodity attitude is something I can strongly identify with. In her “Translation: Getting it Right”, downloadable in many language versions from the ATA website, Chris Durban (she coined the phrase, as far as I know) doesn’t explain about commodities or fungibles, but another ATA brochure – “Translation. Standards for buying a non-commodity” – does. Besides many points of difference mentioned there (type of document, subject-matter expertise, the intended readers or target group, purpose, etc.), it was the quality of translation and service which for me always mattered most.

As I was updating my German website last week, I tried to explain the idea of the relation between translation as a non-commodity and quality of translation. Many clients appreciate quality of service (e.g. delivery time, readiness to accommodate last minute changes, etc.), but cannot easily judge translation quality by itself. More often, it is the clients of our clients (“the intended readers or target group”), who can tell the good from the poor.

As Bernd Pitschedsrieder, the former German CEO of VW, once cynically said, “the worm must taste good to the fish, not the fisherman.” I don’t envy a sales manager who sells worms to fishermen, but he probably knows how to explain the difference between various species. For a translator, making a pitch to a potential client and promising to deliver the right quality for the “fish” (the client’s customers, business clients, partners, audience, users of technical documents, recipients of financial information) is a problem.

“Liar, liar! Pants on fire! Who can afford to tell the truth about translation quality…?”, asks Paul Sulzberger in his conversation with Luigi Muzii on how translation providers should (or should not) communicate quality to their clients.

I will get back to Luigi Muzii, his latest “Quirks” and his understanding of translation technology (the “Big Wave”) in one of my next blog posts, so stay tuned. This post is about something different. However, Luigi’s statement brings me back to the main point: “When every translation provider in the market attempts to stand out from the crowd by claiming that they deliver “quality”, it’s no wonder that buyers find it hard to tell the difference between them. Promising to do “a good quality job” is hardly a unique selling proposition, is it?”

No, it isn’t, and the bad news is: this is only the first problem. The other one is related to the statement on the mug that I was looking for: “Translation is not a commodity”.

On one hand, we argue against measuring everything by the same yardstick. On the other hand, we claim, unisono, to deliver products that are invariably and intrinsically good. We promise a uniformly superior quality. Why so?

A good news after the bad is: I know a simple solution to both problems. I know quite a few translation providers who resolve these contradictions simultaneously, whether fully aware of any contradiction or not.

In recent offerings from several Russian translation agencies and freelance translators I was struck by a price differentiation for various quality grades. There were quotes for “business class translations”, “premium translations”, “standard translations”, “basic translations”. Thought provoking indeed:

After spending a dozen or so years as a translator of marketing materials and an interpreter for CEOs, CFOs and marketing consultants, I was struck by the fact that it never occurred to me to offer translation of varying quality, at various rates. But perhaps I worked for the wrong trainers.

If you take the three classic project variables, i.e. cost, time and quality, it is only the first two which get usually tuned and tweaked. It seems reasonable to me not to have any uniform price (I, for one, don’t have any). I also know translators who quote two rates – for standard and express delivery.

Fast, cheap, good. The client is invariably called upon to “pick two”. But why not grade the third variable, i.e. quality?

In so doing, we would communicate that quality matters. We could offer various quality grades as proof.

If Luigi Muzii is right when saying that “buyers have difficulty differentiating between good and poor quality work“, we could proactively help the buyers with our structured value proposition. We could show how to differentiate and be discerning. We could offer various products with different price tags and make our “non-commodities” more tangible. Allora, we can “signal” (Luigi’s terminology) translation quality better.

What the heck I thought, why not? Tony Soprano is not only a made man, he’s a made marketing guru. There are books like “Tony Soprano on Management: Leadership Lessons Inspired by America’s Favorite Mobster” and many others which I probably should read next. There are business trainers and economists I’d certainly need to work for to learn about diversification.

But even without a little marketing help from Tony Soprano and his friends, I think it is a good trick to push the price up, not down. An extra mile that we promise the client to go is certainly worth a few more cents for a word. Quote .15 for your “regular style” translation, but tell the client your “premium class” is only .5 more. Marketing-wise, wouldn’t it be a viable business model?

Add garbage, go forth.

But let us get serious for a change. The question is how to grade. The labels “business class, “professional grade”, “standard” or “basic” do sound euphemistic. There must be something else besides “quality translation” (wrong signal!) and “subprime” (such is a perfidious word). There certainly is a better classification.

Back in the nineties, the EAGLES working group (Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards) made a rough distinction of translation quality and set four generic levels:

1. raw translation that conveys the information core of the original text, may contain some minor grammatical or syntactic errors without impeding the understandability of the target text and could be used e.g. for translations of large amounts of scientific abstracts;
2. regular quality translation that achieves full and grammatically correct transfer of the information and presents reasonable linguistic fluency, might be somewhat flawed in terms of register accuracy (style) and could be used for technical manuals;
3. extra quality translation that achieves both fluency and idiomatic accuracy, is properly adapted to the cultural context of the target language and is typically used for advertisements and literature;
4. adaptation that is not the direct translation of an original text, but the re-authoring of newspaper articles and some types of advertisements , it can also present extreme cases of pragmatic text translation to overcome cultural barriers (see “Methods and the role of revision in academic and professional environments of translation” by Georgia Kostopoulou).

Another differentiation of translation quality is my favorite. It is found in Chris Durban’s ATA brochure I mentioned in the beginning of my post. Chris Durban differentiates between for-information translation (“accurate yet unpolished work… can generally be produced faster and more cheaply”) and for-publication translation (used “to sell or persuade, or if image is important to you”) (see “Translation: Getting it Right”).

There are other distinctions and differentiations, the main thing is they are all about varying degrees of quality and various quality levels. Translation is not a commodity, after all. If we have differences, let us differ. But diversify? I might be fond of rhetorical questions, but these are not rhetorical ones.

I have been doing extra quality translation + adaptation (see above) for many years. Time to change?

I don’t diversify (yet). Do you?

Find-a-Translator, sooner or later (a new database project)
For those (probably few, but you never know) who are wondering about the obvious misprint in the title of this blog post, it’s an allusion to a song “The Times They Are a-Changin’”, released exactly 49 years ago, in January 1964. Steve Vitek, author of one of my favourites, the PatentTranslator’s blog, might have started his post with a YouTube video, but I’ll confine myself to the original cover photo and cut to the chase.

The keyword is “change”
There has been much talk about change in the last months. To quote from Jost Zetzsche’s Toolbox Newsletter, received by many of us on New Year’s eve, “machine translation has found its way into translation environment tools and the production process of many professional translators… while not everyone is happy with these changes…  they are changes nevertheless, and we are free to take them up or leave them aside”.

I am not sure if our “freedom” is anything more than a mere figure of speech. The fundamental changes in translation technology bring about corresponding changes in the translation process, but is there something more a-changin’? Is the whole landscape of the translation industry undergoing change?

The Big Players and their tales of “Big Data”
In “The End of the World of Translation as We Knew It”, Rob Vanderberg of Lingotek (“a company that is looking to change the future of translation”) gets to the heart of the first change.

His “Big Data” is no less than a paradigm change, a shift from the conventional landscape centred around freelance translators and small translation companies (because “they won’t scale”), to a Brave New World dominated by the Big Players. It is a welcome change for the big translation agencies.

No longer would they be looked upon as mere resellers which generate little or no added value for the customer. No, “Big Data” will grant them the right to embrace the global challenge of localisation, taking care of bulk translations and cloud-driven translation processes (“companies used to translate content one document at a time, and now the cloud will enable bulk translations and easy scalability”).

On the Facebook forum of the Russian Translators Union, where a link to the article by Mr Vanderberg was posted, someone commented: “I read it twice and didn’t grasp a thing. Many fancy words, little sense. My increasing feeling is that many of these experts don’t understand what they write or don’t want to understand”. Assuming you, dear reader, are a freelance translator, these words sure make sense. They describe your – our – future, dawning now.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m afraid, your – our – place in the new world of translation is to be but a droplet in this nebulous cloud.

Clouds on the horizon
That brings us to the second change: the formation of the cloud.

One big cloud goes by the name of ProZ. Assuming you, dear reader, are a freelance translator, you will already know what ProZ is. Among job sites for everybody and his uncle, ProZ is probably the largest “marketplace” for translators of all sorts. Without going into the specifics of this particular job site, let me just state that all of them – from ProZ to Fiverr (“the world’s largest marketplace for small services, starting at $5″) – have already shaped the cloud, the heavenly skies for the Big Players in their Brave New World of translation.

ProZ and other job sites are the counterpart to the bulk translation providers which they effectively cater for. It makes sense and is pretty straightforward. ProZ caters for the large-scale and wannabe Big Data Processors, who in turn cater to Big Business with their global brands.

Is there something a-missin’? Well yes: us. In contrast to other major freelance industries, we, i.e. serious, quality-driven, highly skilled, experienced, high-value translators, have more difficulty upholding our own status and our market place (not to be confused with a marketplace like ProZ or other job sites).

An increase in professional awareness
The third change has been less marked than the other two, but the signs are there: there is a growing professional awareness among  translator communities.

National professional associations are becoming distinctly more active in asserting their role in the changing landscape. Last year, the BDÜ definitely gained ground with its euphorically received conference (“Übersetzen in die Zukunft”) and its first (albeit still timid) efforts to open up for social media.

There is nothing wrong with Big Players and their services for the bulk translation market. It is virtually impossible for professionals to compete on price with machine translation, crowdsourced translation or semi-professional translators of all kinds. But this already severely commoditized, mainly price-driven market is not necessarily the market in which we have to compete.

Our “freedom” can become more than a mere figure  of speech: in regards to the bulk translation market or post-editing for the Big Players, we “are free to take them up or leave them aside”. The more pressing problems to solve relate to the high-quality, premium market. You can buy all your groceries at a discount supermarket, but if you are looking for a nice bottle of wine, you are likely to receive far better service in a specialist wine shop. Often at no higher price.

The problem: finding the right translator
However, the problem with high-value, premium translators (as compared to premium wine shops, and please don’t tell me I cannot tell one from the other, that is B2C from B2B) is that really good translators who also specialize in the subject in question are hard to find.

Our professional associations, many of them with tough vetting procedures for their members, offer search functions for anyone looking for a specialised, high-quality, premium translator. But I doubt that many potential corporate, direct clients ever use or are even aware of them. Unfortunately, many of my German SME clients have never heard of the BDÜ or ADÜ Nord.

In fact, combing the public directories of various professional translation associations to find the right specialists, and, in turn, setting up their own databases, has been one of the key tasks of professional translation agencies (bottomfeeders will stick to ProZ). One man’s joy is another man’s sorrow, and the void left by professional associations as non-profit organisations is filled by the matchmaking activities of commercial entities of all kinds.

I am absolutely not interested in getting hauled into a verbal war on this. I don’t see anything wrong with the Big Players or translation agencies, and I don’t blame our professional associations either.
(Recently, when looking for a specialised architect in Hamburg, I made the acquaintance of the official Chamber of German Architects and wished there were some private company like a translation agency to help find the right architect for me. But the fees for services of architects and engineers in Germany are regulated by a standard scale, so the market is different.)

The solution: search and you shall find
Could there be an easy way to tap into the information and expertise held by our professional associations?
Well, if there was, it would probably not bring about the “end of the world of translation as we know it”. But I am sure it could be a major game changer, if not a breakthrough for many of us, überqualifiziert, like the Germans say, for the bulk market, the Big Players or ProZ.

The concept of a shared access to the publicly available databases of professional translators and interpreters associations was recently put forward on one of the many Facebook groups for translators. The option of a single point of access will promote the high quality standards of professional associations and make it possible for anyone – be it a member of the public or the localisation manager at a large multinational – to search and find the right translator or interpreter among any of the associations’ records, either by selecting a single association, a particular combination, or all of them.

A new, improved ProZ? No, because ProZ is not targeted to the premium translation market of direct, high-value customers. At the moment, there is no single, central international platform to fill the gap between professional, quality-driven translators and clients who require more than what the bulk translation companies have to offer. Instead, there are various local or national professional databases (which were started long before ProZ). The idea is to make these databases more widely searchable and better known to the target group. The change – and challenge – talked of here lies in making this resource more accessible to customers.

We are still to look into technical feasibility of the new approach. But, aside from the technicalities to be discussed elsewhere soon, the success of the new “Find-A-Translator”* engine will largely depend on it being widely known. If you’re looking for a book, chances are you’ll go to Amazon. If you’re looking for a specialist translator or interpreter, you’d go to …?

In an ideal situation, which is far, far removed from the Brave New World of translation envisioned by the author of “The End of the World…”, I would envisage a go-to search platform for quality translators, one which is immediately recognisable to potential customers and the industry alike.

Is the end of translation (as we know it) on the horizon? Or is there something a-changin’?

*name most definitely subject to change. This story started out with DYLAN, which could stand for Dying Language Association Network or Do You Love A Nerd. I don’t think Dylan is the right name for this project. But, sooner or later, we will learn more about a new database initiative and perhaps find a better name.

And thanks to Rose Newell (@lingocode) and Jayne Fox (@jaynefox) for proofreading this text!!!