yndigo

Client meets translator

While applying for a teaching fellowship to France back in 1993, I needed my birth certificate translated into French, so I went to the consulate in Boston to find out how to do it. They gave me a list of translators and phone numbers and told me I should expect to pay about $40. My eyes widened in surprise. Forty dollars for one page of text! There couldn’t have been 200 words total! Who were these people demanding such sums?

For most of my career in translation, I have worked between the client and the translator and I have enormous sympathy for clients who are just ignorant about the industry. There’s no reason they should know about it; they know their own business and, as I discuss in So Misunderstood, ours isn’t exactly common knowledge. I have sympathy for translators, too, having been one myself, but the learning divide is wide and can be closed only one person at a time.

Imagine you’re an attorney. You’ve just photocopied 20 pages of commercial code to support your case and you need it translated. You send it to an agency and they ask you how soon you need it and start in about word count and price per word and such (why they can’t just charge per page is beyond me!). You soon learn there are 1,200 words per page and the whole thing is going to cost thousands of dollars and take a week or more to do!

I mean, on your desk it’s such a humble looking stack of paper. You don’t even need a binder clip to keep it together — the regular old paperclip will do. Now it’s turned into a huge production and you’re nowhere near ready to hear how one service is worth a little bit more and a few extra days.

Getting clients to realize that translation is not just an adjunct document service, like photocopying or Bates stamping, takes some time and energy. Adding to this is the lure of machine translation, progress of which has filtered out to the general public more frequently than news about human translation, so client education can feel like an uphill and never-ending battle.

Patience. Clearly explaining that translation is done by humans at a rate of only a few thousand words per day is a good start. And it’s important to sympathize that yes, translation is an expensive process, but in the grand scheme of things, those that take the profession seriously and strive to do it well charge only a small amount more than those who don’t. Unfortunately, trial and error is often the most efficient teacher, so many of the best translators and translation services get clients who have come from a bad experience.

Whether a client is new to the world of translation or not, it is important to remember what it feels like on the other side of the phone or e-mail. Just think of any specialty service or store you patronize: wine store, car mechanic, computer store. For me it’s the bike shop. The moment they talk over my head or sigh with condescension when asked to explain — once more — the differences between this tire and that one, or why I can’t use this chain with that sprocket, is the moment they’ve lost me.