Greater than 5 minutes, my friend!
I Want It All, I Want It Now! Real-Time Translations
Have you ever received a translation request on Friday evening due on Monday 9 a.m., or on Christmas Eve for Boxing day? If you are a translator, your answer is probably a big yes.
Why are translations increasingly urgent? This is especially true for my specialisation – economics and finance – but also in other industries, legal, technical, marketing, etc., from what I read in the forums and translators’ groups.
Although I strongly believe that MT, “Gurgle” translate and PEMT are not a threat to professional specialised translators, machine translation and other automation systems have increased the perception that translation is real time, that you can translate a sentence into another language in a blink.
Even our relatives, friends and families have no idea of what we do as translators. We know foreign languages, all the languages of the world, and all the words in any language of the world…“How do you say pomegranate in German?” Personally, I have no idea, I have to look it up in the dictionary!
I have been an English>Italian financial translator for 23 years now, and financial translations have always been urgent, it is their intrinsic nature since financial markets evolve very rapidly. However, new translation needs emerged with social media, blogs, Facebook corporate pages and websites, as well as new regulations and reporting requirements. More than a need, it is often the perception of a need. You must publish your product, your news, your article before competitors, in real time and in many different languages. That is also the case for EU documents, just to make an example.
Translation volumes increased too. I am sure you all know about the survey from Common Sense Advisory. They interviewed more than 3000 non-English mothertongue consumers in 2014. The survey revealed that potential clients do not buy on-line, if information is not in their native language. Moreover, 75% of respondents buy only when they can find information in their mothertongue, and this percentage increases to 85.3% for financial and insurance services (and other expensive products, such as cars).
Are all these translation requests really urgent? “Urgent” means an unavoidable emergency. For example, a client is suddenly granted a job interview unexpectedly, and needs to present some papers within 48 hours. This is truly urgent.
However, many times translations are requested with very strict deadlines only because of lack of organization. Based on my direct in-house experience at two translation companies in the past, I know that most project managers do not ask clients when they actually need the translation. They refer to standards, e.g. 2,500 or 3,000 words per day, regardless of the translator’s availability. They guarantee a standard delivery to the client, and in order to respect it, they need to change translators continuously for the same project or split the text among more translators.
How many times did the client contact you several days after delivery to ask for clarifications? They want the translation urgently, but they open the file after one week. Sometimes they perfectly know they will need to prepare a collection of documents for an important meeting weeks in advance, though they inform the translator only at the last minute, requesting 100 pages in a weekend. They did not write 100 pages in a day, they have been preparing the meeting (and relevant documents) for a couple of weeks!
Sure, your potential clients may not know how long it takes to translate their documents. They are not translators. That’s why we should inform our regular clients about how we work to streamline the process. Professional translators do not accept unrealistic deadlines, they educate the client, share and ask information. If a client always asks me translations in real time, but I understand that they do not even open the file for a week, I will not trust them any longer. Trust is not only the client’s trust for his provider, it’s also the translator’s trust for her client. It is part of a win-win relationship, of mutual trust. I will deliver my work on time, and you ask realistic deadlines and understand when something is not within professional standards.
Accepting this real-time commoditized market, not asking for adequate payment, acting unprofessionally, without putting “quality and value” limits to clients’ requests, translators spoil the market. It is a vicious circle of unprofessionalism.
I strongly believe that the translators of the future are not only linguistics, or specialized professionals, they are consultants. We should help clients decide what needs to be translated (and what not), we should explain how long it takes to do a professional “value” work, we share information, we collaborate in organizing deadlines and find solutions.
First of all, professional translators ask the right questions: what is the destination market? Your target audience? Your ideal client? Do you have any reference material? What is your brand tone and message?
Professional translators anticipate needs. If I know a new regulation on accounting reports will be published, I prepare and advice the client about translation requirements. If my client often participates in tenders, I will explain that I need time to complete the translation process, I help him to organise the entire translation process. I must know my client, understand her objectives, learn his processes. I will try to understand who is my contact, adopting a proactive approach. I need – and share – information.
Translation is not a commodity, it is a complex service. Translators also need feedback to give clients what they need, to give them value, to improve our service. Translators often forget they are free to choose their ideal clients as well.
What if the translation is really urgent? Professional translators will be prepared thanks to specialisation, well-managed resources (glossaries, memories, document management!), a network of fellow translators. Professional translators know how to search and where to find the adequate terminology. They prepare style guides. They know how to manage their time. In one word, they are ready!
Whether emergencies are only perceived (we will put on our consultant hat, inform and educate our clients) or real (something we can solve with good planning, specialisation, and professionalism), I believe that our actions as translators and human beings are too often driven by fear: fear to lose a client, fear not to have enough work, fear to give the wrong impression. Fear is driven by short-termism.
All practical solutions (from style guides to memories, to specialisation) will be of no use if our attitude, our mentality is wrong. Marie Brotnov explained this very well in her post on the translator/prisoner’s dilemma.
If our approach as professional translators is not collaborative (and I underline once again the word professional to distinguish from unprofessionals with whom we do not compete), if we do not collaborate (even tacitly) to achieve the best solutions for the entire translation industry, if we accept peanuts, unrealistic deadlines, if we are driven by fear and not by professionalism -like other categories such as lawyer, doctors,…- if we do not embrace a different mind-set, clients may not be able to recognise professionalism and value in the mass of unqualified services. It is OUR FAULT when we do not communicate our value, and gain visibility as translators… opsss as “professional” translators.
Happy new year to all professional and would-be professional translators!
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“It is OUR FAULT when we do not communicate our value, and gain visibility as translators” < I could not have said that better myself! I think that the freelance segment of the translation industry lacks maturity. We have plenty of amazingly talented translators who, for some reason, refuse the idea of marketing, refuse learning new skills that are essential for building a successful online business. That's why all those job-bidding platforms still live and prosper. I think we need to take control of our lives and push our agenda together. Unite and rise. Raise awareness. That's what I'm trying to do with the help of The Open Mic. We need to work together to have a better online presence not only for ourselves but for our profession as a whole. I don't know many other freelance professions, where freelancers sell themselves short or fail to understand the value of their services as often as translators do. We need to do something about it.
I try to apply these ideas in my daily job, you Dmitry are doing a great job with OpenMic. Maybe we should start collecting and sharing practical tips on how to behave in tricky situations. When I talked about real-time translations at the Italian Conference, some colleagues replied “you are absolutely right, but I do not work if I do not accept such conditions… your is an ideal world. In theory I agree, but in practice I find it very difficult because the market is spoilt”… This mentality is more widespread than I thought. Personally, I fight against this mentality, and I would like to know what other people think about it.
That’s a very interesting observation. I’ve seen this kind of mentality way too often. A lot of people feel that they’re helpless or nothing can be changed. But that’s just not true. I’ll it takes is action. If all of us acted upon our ideas and worked together to make change we would have a better industry and a healthier attitude.
I think it’s a very interesting idea for a discussion. I was thinking of starting a #OpenMicChat on Twitter at some point in the future, maybe we could’ve discussed these mentality there. We really need to figure out a way to change the perspective of how other translators view the industry and the world economy.
We have one of the most strongest and rapidly developing industries in the world. It is definitely not spoiled, there are just some bad apples and a people who are willing to eat those bad apples, but it doesn’t meant that the whole garden is spoiled.
Excellent piece Francesca, and so many of your points had me nodding my head in agreement. I am reminded almost daily of the saying ‘Procrastination on your part doesn’t constitute an emergency on mine’. And while, at the beginning of my career, I used to think, ‘Well, the deadline is ridiculous, but I may as well do it because if I don’t, someone else will and I’ll lose the customer’, these days I just turn down anything that makes me cringe in annoyance. I want to continue to love my job, and yes, there always will be ridiculous conditions and impossible deadlines but there are also plenty of jobs and customers out there who don’t have such high demands.
Thank you for your explanations and reasons why everything has become so ‘real-time’ Francesca – very enlightening!
“There always will be ridiculous conditions and impossible deadlines.” < Luckily we're the only ones who can choose to accept or decline those conditions. And the more proactive and coordinated we're in our joint effort to educate our clients, the better our working conditions will become. Simple as that, IMHO.
Thank you Allison for commenting. We briefly met in Rotterdam but did not have the chance to talk, maybe next time! Reading that you agree and have similar experience is encouraging for me. And yes, I love my job too and would like to continue to enjoy what I do 🙂
Loved the post, Francesca, with important reminders of our value as specialized and professional translators.
Francesca, when I read Dmitry’s list of the top ten Open Mic posts in January and saw that this post was among them, I HAD to come check it out — and now I see exactly why it was so popular.
I couldn’t have read your post at a better time: this week I was contacted three (count ’em, 3) times by agencies with which I occasionally work to translate a segment of a humongous project due by the end of the *same day*! One of them called me from the other side of the ocean, and another sent me an urgent email at 12:30 a.m. this morning (Saturday!), as if I were monitoring assignments in the middle of the night. What’s going on? It almost makes a Friday assignment with a Monday deadline look like a luxury 🙂 But, like you, I refused to drop everything I was doing to make up for somebody else’s bad planning or feed their fantasies of real-time translating. I never get such requests from the best agencies because they educate their clients and because they do not want to alienate their translators: these agencies are professional and they treat us as professionals.
You make a number of incisive points in this post. Distinguishing between a “real need” and the “perception of a need” is one of them. So much of our interaction with our clients — and other human beings in general — is based on our perceptions of the situation. Indeed, I would go a step further and say that our interaction is always mediated by perceptions, and that perceptions ARE reality precisely because nothing lies outside them. I’d also argue that both parties in any dialogue are always trying to influence the other’s perceptions. If that is the case, then the question becomes, how can translators exert more influence over the perceptions that our clients and the public have? In other words, how can we shape the definitions of reality at play? You’ve done a great job here addressing how, when “urgent” deadlines are at issue, translators can influence clients’ perceptions through educating them — and especially through being proactive by anticipating needs. Yes! It makes me wonder how we as individual translators or as a community can be even more proactive and start molding the public perception of the time element of translating. It’s a formidable task because, as you rightly point out, real-time tools like “Gurgle” Translate and the promises that mega-agencies plaster all over their websites have reshaped the public’s notion of what translating is. I don’t know exactly how we can do so. Perhaps if we learn how to construct better narratives — tell good stories — in our individual marketing materials and in articles published in the public media, we might be able to recapture some of the control over perceptions that we lost to the purveyors of quick and dirty solutions.
Thanks for such a thought-provoking post!
Sorry Catherine, I noticed your comment only a few minutes ago. Story telling would be a great idea! I am not very good at marketing, I like my “techical” job as translator, but I have learned to communicate better with clients over the years. The most difficult thing is to fight against this “quick and dirty solutions mentality” as you call it. I will keep on doing my job well and with passion and hope we all (professional translators) can share ideas to improve the perception of our profession. Thanks for your contribution!