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, and 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."

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 to 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 productivity tool (translation memory tool) to enhance your productivity. Software for desktop publishing and presentations has become a necessity for translators.

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. Of course, 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?

The Goalie

They say that in sports like soccer (football) and hockey offensive players may make any number of mistakes, which are immediately forgotten. One goal scored, however, brings them glory and the applause of the spectators. On the other hand, goalies may brilliantly defend any number of shots; one mistake resulting in a goal against their team, however, will draw criticism from the "experts" and boos from the spectators.

Are we translators like goalies whose hits are unappreciated but whose misses are immediately criticized? Who among us doesn't have customers who never say a word of appreciation for many a brilliant solution to difficult translaton problems, obscure terms found after hours of research, and errors in the original text detected and corrected, but send you an indignant e-mail calling your attention to a single word omitted in a 30-page text?

Yes, translators are the goalies of the written word. Credit for a flawless style often goes to the orignal writer, but the translator gets the blame for a hard-to-read text. The penalties we suffer for errors are in no way commensurate with the appreciation we get for a faithful translation or even improvement on the original.

Are there any "goalies" out there who don't feel this way?

Liability Insurance for Translators

What happens if you've made a mistake in a $100 job, your client claims your mistake cost him $100,000 and sues you for this amount? This is the nightmarish scenario that's being used to sell liability insurance, a.k.a. Errors & Omissions (E&O) insurance, to translators. In fact, at least in the U.S., there is no record of a translator ever having been sued, let alone successfully sued, for translation errors.

Despite this lack of precedent, some translation buyers now require that translators carry liability insurance. For translation companies, this may be an attempt to shift the responsibility for translation quality from themselves to the translator. For some unscrupulous operators, it may even be a ruse to raise cash at the expense of the insurance company (and ultimately of the premium-paying translator) by filing frivolous lawsuits for E&O.

Why hasn't there been any lawsuit for E&O against translators in the U.S., the country known for often frivolous lawsuits? We may have simply been lucky, or translation buyers don't consider translators wealthy enough to be sued. This latter reason would of course disappear if E&O insurance became widespread. According to some, translation is protected under the First Amendment right to free speech, but, to the best of my knowledge, this has never been tested in a court of law.

So, is liability insurance for translators an indispensable protection, an addition to our cost of doing business without any tangible benefit, or a dangerous bait, which by its very existence could encourage lawsuits against translators?

Have you ever been sued, threatened with lawsuit, or do you know of anybody who has been sued for errors and omissions? Do translators and/or translation companies usually carry E&O insurance in your country? Is the American Translators Association right in offering such insurance to its members?

Translator Licensing

It has been proposed that translators be subject to licensing, like lawyers, physicians, and accountants are, to be allowed to exercise their profession or at least to sign certain types of documents. Those who argue for licensing expect translators' incomes to rise substantially if we are subject to licensing restrictions, which would be equivalent to significantly reducing the supply side of the supply/demand balance. Those against question the practical implementation of licensing, like "Who will do the licensing?". We don't want government bureaucrats to decide whether or not we are allowed to exercise our profession. Universities are not equipped for this since, unlike medicine, law, and accounting, translation does not depend on a well-defined body of knowledge which is relatively easy to test for. Neither do we want to outsource this function to translation companies, who may have their own agendas and will be suspect as objective testers.

The American Translators Association (ATA) offers certification in 27 language combinations, but only about 1/4 of its individual members are certified.

The debate on licensing is nothing new. It was discussed within the ATA decades ago, and the current state of affairs in the U.S. reflects the outcome of that debate.

It may be time to resume the debate on this issue in this era of globalization. What do you think? Should translators be subject to licensing? Who is to administer the test and grant the licenses? According to what objective criteria? What activities would be subject to licensing? What may and what may not an unlicensed translator do?

If you don't live in the U.S., tell us if translation is subject to licensing in your country, and what is your experience with the current state of affairs there.

Gabe Bokor