A lot has been written about the threat posed to the professional translator by machine translation. Some dismiss it as a distant threat. For others, like Jussara who recently commented on one of my old posts, it’s like global warming: it’s real and it’s already happening. And Jussara claims most translators are not even good enough to compete with it.
But another force is at work in the industry: fungibility. And it’s a trend that is also being driven by technology.
Of course, the internet has made it possible for businesses and individuals to specialize like never before. This means we don’t have to shop at a store that sells every car part under the sun if the selection of floormats is better at a store that sells nothing but mats. And we don’t have to use a general translator if we want someone who really knows car engines or the environment. I would say this a good trend. It leads to better translations and it rewards translators who dig deep into their subject.
Driving us in the other direction however — away from specialization — is translation as big business. Large agencies often have large databases, filled with thousands of translators from accross the globe. By plugging into such a vast network, these agencies are able to promise speed and capacity that others are not.
But when it comes to executing these fast or high-volume jobs, translators often get an anonymous email, one that has clearly been sent to tens, even hundreds of his or her peers asking how many words they can do over, for example, the next 24 hours.
A quick message, a click of a button and the project manager has made his job so much easier than his pre-email counterpart could have ever hoped. This is a disturbing trend. Not only does it drive down quality, it can mean a breach of confidentiality if, for example, the project manager attaches a file to an email spread far and wide.
And that’s just just the risk to the client relationship. This practice can can also hurt the agency’s working relationship with its translators. Some have resigned themselves to the practice as the modern way of doing business, thus they try their best to respond as quickly as they can. But this puts translators in competition to see who can be the most available and accessible, not the most qualified.
Translators have more experience than I do with this though, so let me ask them: have you seen this trend grow? Is there an upside to it?
8 responses so far ↓
1 Ryan Ginstrom // Oct 19, 2009 at 10:39 pm
Good point about the shotgunned (I’ll refrain from using the word “spammed”) availability inquiries.
As a rule, I never respond to an availability inquiry unless it’s addressed directly to me. I won’t look at the files and provide an estimate unless there’s a real offer of work.
Too many times, I’ve had agency coordinators ask me for a quote on a job, and when I replied within an hour, they told me oh, sorry, I filled that job 30 minutes ago. Sorry I “forgot” to tell you.
That coordinator saved herself 30 minutes by wasting 15 minutes of 100 translators’ time. Not a very good exchange for us translators!
2 Kate // Oct 20, 2009 at 4:51 am
I personally think that it is the generalist translation agencies, not the translators themselves, whose existence is threatened by machine translation. If an agency is willing to e-mail hundreds of translators in order to get the lowest price for a translation, then quality is clearly not a priority. A translator willing to work for the lowest rate on the market is unlikely to give the translation the due attention it deserves. In this case, a machine translation may produce better results than a human translation, and generalist agencies (and bottom-of-the-pile generalist translators come to think of it) may find themselves losing work to a machine.
However, (and I know I am getting off the point here), I do not believe that machine translation poses a threat to specialised translators who have in-depth knowledge of their subject coupled with top-notch writing skills. Such translators are akin to journalists in their specialist fields. They are required to produce top-quality, well-written, well-researched translations. Until I hear talk of journalists’ jobs being threatened by their own PCs, I won’t break out in a sweat at the thought of losing a gig to a machine.
3 Ellen // Oct 20, 2009 at 6:46 am
I don’t know if the trend is growing. My clients (all translations agencies, mostly medium to large) don’t work that way, unless they’re really in a hurry. I find that I don’t feel the need to respond immediately to those mails, and usually ‘miss out’ on the job because of that.
The real problem doesn’t lie with these serious agengies though. They aim for quality.
I’m not in the databases of the ‘fast and cheap’ agencies, so I don’t know how they operate. I do get the occasional e-mail from them enquiring about my availability, but as soon as I give them my minimum rate, I never hear from them again. Obviously, there are translators that do work for them though, and I can’t help suspecting that they are not the best translators available. And yes, that does bring down the overall quality of translation, and therefore has a negative effect on the reputation of the trade…
4 Glenn // Oct 21, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Thanks all for your thoughtful comments!
5 Kate Lambert // Oct 22, 2009 at 5:45 am
I work for one agency that sends e-mails to several translators, often with an apology for doing so. I usually ignore those e-mails as I assume one of the others will take it instead and I’d rather work for people who specifically want me because the subject area fits my expertise.
6 Koonec | Translations in Barcelona // Oct 24, 2009 at 1:27 pm
for some websites they are crowdsourcing their translation like in open sourcing they tend to compile all of their subscribers ideas of translating each word as one so all they need to do is recheck each word if they are translated right.
7 KVashee // Oct 24, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I think that MT and I mean really good MT (not the current Google variety) is an inevitability.
I think this is so, not because developers want to make humans obsolete but because the momentum in content creation is growing at a pace that human translators cannot keep up with. We should expect to see 10X to maybe 1000X the amount of information being translated in the coming years as more of the world comes online.
However, human translators will ALWAYS be necessary wherever quality is required or on anything that has very high value and/or risk associated with it.
The best MT solutions will have a strong human steering component to them and new kinds of linguistic skills will become important. MT will also create new job opportunities for lesser skilled people “online bilinguals” who can help more and more information become multilingual. Many of these people will work for free because they care to see the info shared - like TED, KIVA, Facebook. Turkey is now the third largest concentration of FB users in the world. This was driven by people who wanted to share.
Asia Online (a company I am affiliated with) is working with Moravia and targeting translation projects that are at least 10X the size of normal localization projects and often 100X or more. They are much higher in value for many global companies as their own customers are asking for 10X to 100X more information. Most IT companies have global markets and 50% or more of their revenue comes from markets that require rapidly growing amounts multilingual content to sustain and build customer loyalty.
We are expanding the translation project focus and expanding the market.
I predict a world where localization experts are much more central to the relationship with the global customer and much more involved in the living dialogue with the customer. This also means that SOME translators will become linguistic experts who guide this kind of massive content conversion.
This should also result in a shift from the commodity view of translators where they are paid like factory workers on assembly lines to a more value based pricing approach.
I hope that more translators will learn to see the changes that are taking place as opportunities and learn to add value to secure an economically valuable role. The zero sum game view of translation that some have, assumes that nobody needs new information and we will always only translate the same old stuff.
I see a future where translation is a force of change and a means to increase global customer engagement, but given the real time nature of this technology is inevitable.
I am sure many translators will see this and learn to add value in this world and thus also rise up the value chain.
8 Ryan Ginstrom // Oct 24, 2009 at 10:44 pm
@KVashee
Just because we need things (like MT) doesn’t mean we’ll get them. Some problems are just hard.
That said, Henry Markram said at TED that he would simulate the human brain within 10 years, and human-level MT will not be far behind such a feat. A simulated brain would soon take over anything that a “meat” brain could do, one of the least of which is translation. Interesting times!
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