Quality

Quality seems to be the mantra of every translator. I have never met a translator who wouldn't swear that he or she produces above-average, if not perfect, quality.

So where do all those poor translations we've all seen come from?

The fact is that quality is an elusive concept and, while it's easy to label an incorrect or unidiomatic translation of poor quality, excellence is almost invisible.

And it comes at a cost.

One can argue that not every client needs a high level of quality. If there is a market for Chevies and Pintos, in addition to that for Cadillacs and Lincolns, why not a second-tier quality for translations? Because translations are not cars. While either a Chevy or a Cadillac will take you from point A to point B (with more or less comfort), a translation where "Do not look directly into the laser beam" is rendered as "Look directly into the laser beam" may have tragic consequences. An awkward style, a poor (but not incorrect) word choice, or a misspelled word here or there will not affect the usefulness of most translations for the intended purpose, but in advertising or literature (to mention only two examples), style is as important as content.

Which brings us to the main point: Quality does not exist in a vacuum; it depends on the purpose of the translation. While "quick and dirty" translations may be acceptable for some purposes as long as the correct meaning is conveyed, there are cases where only the highest quality will do. And knowledgeable translation buyers know that for that level of quality they must be prepared to pay Cadillac and Rolls-Royce prices.

To Edit or not to Edit

All knowledgeable translation buyers and most translators agree that editing by someone other than the translator is essential to ensure the quality of a translation. However, most translators are reluctant, and some outright refuse, to accept editing jobs.

Should a translator agree to edit a colleague's work and, if so, under what conditions?

Some translation buyers will have a translation done by the cheapest available translator, or even by free machine translation, and then expect a competent human translator to clean up the resulting mess. If the client can find a human translator for such an editing job, it usually turns out to need a complete re-write, taking more time and effort than doing the translation from scratch. Needless to say that I, for one, refuse to accept such "editing" jobs or quote a price to reflect the aggravation and the time I expect to need, including for providing a report about the original translation if requested.

On the other extreme is a competent translation, which is given out for editing to fix a few typos, minor omissions, and, if possible, to improve the overall style of the text. I like such jobs because they give me insight into a colleague's thought process and often teach me creative solutions to difficult translation problems I wouldn't have thought of myself. Editing a competent translator's work is a pleasure and can be an educational experience.

Because of such extremes, I never accept to edit an unknown translator's work before seeing the original source-language text and its translation in order to locate it on the continuum between those extremes. When editing the work of one of the regular translators of our company, I already know what type of mistakes that particular translator tends to make (and we all make mistakes) and revise his or her work accordingly.

It's a good practice for the editor to discuss specific problems with the translator. For this reason, when our company has both translation and editing done by outside contractors, we encourage them to discuss specific problems between themselves, just as we discuss them with our translator when we do the editing in-house. Communication between translator and editor results in a better translation and in a higher level of satisfaction of translator and editor, who both feel that they have contributed to the excellence of the final product.

Prof. Camayd-Freixas and the Postville, Iowa Raid

Translators and interpreters are not supposed to take sides in a conflict where they act as facilitators of communication between the parties. But what happens if the translator or interpreter witnesses an act that is patently unfair to one of the parties or if he sees a powerless group of people accused of crimes he firmly believes they did not commit?

Dr. Erik Camayd-Freixas, who teaches Spanish at Florida International University and is a federally certified court interpreter, found an answer to this question not in the law books of his university, but in his conscience. When he saw a powerful agency of the most powerful government on Earth come down like a ton of bricks on a group of 300 undocumented, mostly semi-literate Guatemalan peasant immigrants accused of serious crimes he was convinced they did not commit, he spoke up to denounce the injustice as he saw it.

He reported the irregularities he witnessed in the now infamous "Postville raid" in an essay originally intended for a small group of colleagues, but which immediately found its way to the Blogosphere, becoming the subject of intense discussions both within and outside the translator/interpreter community.

On July 24, 2008, Prof. Camayd-Freixas was called to testify before the House Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law Committee. His statement to the Committee, together with his original essay, can be found at http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Camayd-Freixas080724.pdf.

As a translator, I'm proud to belong to the same community as Dr. Camayd-Freixas, and I salute him for his courage.

Specialist or Generalist?

Unless they come from a field other than translation, translators usually start out as generalists, i.e., they're forced to accept assignments offered to them in any field of human endeavor, from nuclear physics to Sumo wrestling. Is that an ideal situation? No one, least of all a beginner, can be an expert in all possible subject matters, but lack of expertise will sooner or later come back to haunt the non-specialist translator in the form of misunderstood concepts and incorrect technical terms used.

On the other hand, many areas of science and technology overlap today, to the point that one cannot be an effective medical translator without being familiar with electronic instruments, and an article about the environment may require familiarity with chemistry, meteorology, geology, and physics.

Therefore, while specialization is a must in certain areas, the translator must also have a broad general culture in related, and even unrelated fields, to provide excellent work with real-life texts.

According to an old saying, the specialist knows a lot about very few things and keeps learning more and more about fewer and fewer things, until ultimately he will know everything about nothing. On the other hand, the generalist knows a little about a lot of things and keeps learning less and less about more and more until ultimately he will know nothing about everything.

Which of these extremes describes you best? Do you think narrow specialization is an adequate substitute for broad general culture? If so, under what circumstances?

Entering the Translation Market

A reader of the TJ Blog has recently suggested that I should post some pointers for those who are considering translation as a career. While I'm not a marketing expert, 30 years in the translation business have taught me a few things about what to do and, especially, what not to do in order to achieve success as a translator.

First of all, do some research to find out if there is a need for your services and to what extent this need is being covered by other translators. Are most translations in your language combination(s) being outsourced to India and China? Can you rely on your local area for potential customers? While in this Internet age you may have customers anywhere in the world, nothing beats personal, eye-to-eye contact. What quality can your potential customers purchase from their current providers and at what price? Can you match either or possibly both?

It goes without saying that you shouldn't consider translation as a career unless you have mastery of one language (your target language) and excellent understanding of the language(s) from which you intend to translate (your source language(s)). Most successful translators I know also have some formal education or practical experience in a field such as engineering, medicine, or law. Remember that most translations are technical in nature, although "technical" should be understood here in a very broad sense to include any area of human endeavor from nuclear physics to basketball. And all these fields have their own jargons where guesswork immediately betrays the amateur. There are times when synonyms or almost-synonyms just won't work. You cannot use "kidney insufficiency" where the physician uses "kidney failure," or "control device" where the automotive engineer uses "control unit." By the way, the incorrect terms in the above example are literal translations of the correct Spanish and German terms, respectively.

Most beginning translators cannot afford to limit themselves to a single specialty; they must accept work in fields where their expertise is at a less than professional level. This is why a translator must have a broad range of knowledge in many fields, i.e., must be well-read and have a good general culture.

Have a colleague or a spouse review your work; proofreading your own translations is not a reliable method for finding mistakes.

So you have a promising potential market and all the prerequisites of a good translator; what next? You must equip yourself with the tools of the profession: a computer preferably with high-speed Internet connection, a good collection of general and specialized dictionaries and other reference books in your source and target languages, as well as a good translation memory tool to enhance your productivity. Software for desktop publishing and presentations has become a necessity for translators. Learn how to use your computer and your software to maximize your productivity and to present your work in a form that attests to our professionalism.

Having a website with your own domain name is a must in this day and age, even if you're an individual translator. Make sure it prominently shows your special expertise and makes a potential client want to contact you. You can find books and websites that teach you how to enhance the visibility of your site to search engines. Of course, you should also have some printed promotional material to send to potential clients, distribute at trade shows, or mail to addresses you can purchase from specialized companies. Yes, e-mail is cheaper, but most unsolicited e-mail ends up in the trash can even before it is seen by the intended prospect.

You should also decide whether you want to enter the freelance market or establish yourself as a translation company. Your chance of success as a freelancer is greater if you have solid mastery of your target language at the level of an educated native speaker, and excellent understanding of your source language(s). A translation company must handle a variety of languages and subject matters, but not necessarily all at a high professional level, since it has freelance translators to rely on. You should also consider if you wish to handle the expense and hassle of payroll, taxes, and a dedicated office that a translation company must have.

If you're a freelancer at the beginning of your career, you're well advised to market yourself to translation companies. The universe of translation companies is smaller than that of potential direct clients, and a reputable translation company will give you feedback on your work, helping you to perfect your skills as a translator. Errors that would make you lose a direct client will be corrected by the translation company, which will thus act as a buffer between you and the end user. You may look for direct clients when you're confident of your ability to provide professional-level work.

Another advantage of working with translation companies is that you can find them in the same place where you can find colleagues with whom you'll want to network: in your professional translators' association. Being a member of such an association and participating in its activities is a valuable tool for honing your skills and knowledge as a translator. You'll be surprised at the generosity of your colleagues who, while being your competitors, are often willing to share their knowledge and experience. You may also be able to establish a network of translators for mutual referrals.

Consider membership in other associations related to your specialty. These associations, as well as chambers of commerce, can provide you with opportunities to meet prospective clients and to learn or perfect the jargon of a specialized field.

Being a translator is not easy these days, since you must compete with the whole world, including translators from low-rate countries. You must have the initial prerequisites for entering the market and invest time, money, and energy to develop a client base and perfect your skills. Only if you're willing to make that investment can you expect to be successful as a translator.

Certification

The American Translators Association and several other national translators' organizations test for the individual translator's ability to translate between specific languages, and they certify successful candidates accordingly. Most translation buyers test their prospective translators. One translation company has recently started certifying translators; however, most translation buyers issue no certificates and some of them don't even tell translators whether they've passed the test. The U.S. State Department prohibits translators from mentioning the fact that they have been successfully tested.

The ISO (International Standards Organization) 9000 family of standards prescribes "good quality management practices" and certifies companies or individuals complying with those standards. However, ISO certification means only that the certified entity follows certain procedures; it does not attest to the quality of the entity's product, i.e., in the case of a translation provider, to the quality of the provider's translation. ISO certification may cost tens of thousands of dollars.

At least one vendor of computer-aided translation software is certifying the software's users; however, this company may be motivated by its business interests: they expect their certification program to increase their market share in addition to earning them extra revenues.

Which certification, if any, should translation buyers require their providers to have? Which certification offers the best indication of a translator's ability to perform a specific job? Are certain programs self-serving or do they fulfill a legitimate function of screening individual and corporate translation providers for quality and good business practices?

Machine Translation

Making computers translate has been the dream and goal of computer scientists since the early days of computing. The idea of machine translation was born before word processing, spreadsheets, and electronic data transfer, and long before DTP and the Internet.

We have all seen horrible examples of machine translation (por ex., at http://accurapid.com/accurapid/goodbadfr.html#MT, which has prompted some experts to declare that "machines will never replace human translators." But let's not forget that the same experts had also predicted that computers would never play chess at the level of human grand masters.

The fact is that computer hardware and software is becoming more and more powerful, which has made the use of new techniques such as corpus-based translation possible. (Several articles of the Translation Journal describe how corpus-based machine translation works.) The successes achieved with these new techniques have given rise to predictions of the opposite extreme, namely that high-quality machine translation of any imaginable text is just around the corner.

Today millions of words are being translated by computers every day, and this number is bound to increase exponentially in the near future. Don't expect the works of Shakespeare to be translated into Quechua by a robotic superpoet tomorrow, but machine translation of many types of straightforward text between the major languages already meets the quality standards for practical applications.

Where does this leave the human translator? Those of us who lack specialization or skills to perform at a superior quality level will have to change careers or content themselves with doing pre- or post-editing of machine-translated texts. Only the true aces of the profession will survive and prosper in an era where the bulk of translation work will be performed by computers.

Do you agree with these statements? Where do you see our profession and yourself five or ten years from now?