There are a lot of disparities within the translation and interpreting industry, and one of those is the difference between language pairs/specializations that are fairly rare versus those that are fairly saturated. In this post I’ll both offer and request advice, since I often have students in my online translation course who work in saturated markets (and I’d like some fresh tips to offer them!).
First, let’s look at some numbers from the ATA membership directory, in terms of the number of people who have the following language combinations listed in their profiles:
- English to Spanish translators: 2,111
- German to English translators: 800
- Russian to English translators: 480
- Japanese to English translators: 394
- Arabic interpreters: 148
- Burmese interpreters: 3
Obviously I selected these to prove a point. But even the number of people registered for a fairly large language pair such as German to English pales in comparison with the 2,000+ English to Spanish translators. I’ve recently begun the process of preparing for the French court interpreter exam in Colorado. French isn’t exactly an obscure language, but there are currently no certified French court interpreters in the state. By contrast, the list of certified Spanish interpreters takes up several pages. I would assume that the situation is the same for certain language pairs in other countries (for example English>French translators in Quebec).
Saturated markets have a few issues:
- Competition among translators and interpreters is often intense and very price-based.
- Clients, especially large clients, are often able to keep rates on the low end of the spectrum. For example, PRI’s The World recently ran a story on pay cuts to court interpreters in Nevada, and certified Spanish court interpreters here in Colorado make $35 an hour.
- Freelancers who work in saturated markets are often reluctant to share information with their colleagues; they are afraid to disclose who they work for or how much they charge, for fear of being undercut by someone else who charges less.
- Freelancers in saturated markets have less incentive to get new credentials or improve their skills, because they don’t feel that they can charge commensurately higher rates.
- The sheer number of people in the saturated market creates an “anyone can do it” mentality, and the market becomes even more saturated with people whose skill levels are not up to par.
But enough doom and gloom: the real question is, what’s a translator or interpreter in a saturated market to do? Here are a few suggestions, and (please!) feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments.
- First, a pep talk: remember that you do not need enough work to keep all 2,000 English to Spanish translators in the ATA busy. You just need enough work for yourself. I would venture a guess that many established translators earn the bulk of their income from their 3-5 main clients. Do you think there are 3-5 clients out there who will pay real money for your services? Right, I think so too. So let’s figure out how to find them.
- For translators who are not restricted to working with clients in their home area, the obvious solution is to look for clients in other areas. For example, for English to Spanish translators who live in Latin America, I would definitely recommend looking for clients in the US and/or the UK.
- In order to do that, make sure to solicit the help of a native English speaker who lives in your target market country. For example if you want to apply to translation clients in the US, your application materials must be in error-free US English.
- Look for direct clients. I work for and enjoy working for both agencies and direct clients. But I think that many direct clients get attached to translators they like, and are also less price-sensitive than agencies are, so they are a good bet if you work in a saturated market.
- Get some credentials. For example, of the 2,111 people registered as English to Spanish translators on the ATA website, only 484 are certified for English to Spanish. 484 people is still a lot, but here we’ve already narrowed the pool down to 1/4 of what it was. I think that any credential you can earn: ATA certification, a translation certificate, court interpreter certification (if at the Federal level, even better!), etc. is a big plus.
- Concentrate on the advantages that you offer: familiarity with the source language culture, ability to do on-site work, ability to provide multiple services (voiceover, transcription, subtitling, etc.) all spring to mind.
And please tell me that you have some more tips too!
Great points, Corinne!
As you said, providing a range of services (if you have the skills, of course) is a great way to find more work. Another thing to think about is your customer service. I always look at my customer experiences as a model, and I am certainly more likely to continue a professional relationship with a friendly and approachable contractor!
I would second Megan Onions’ emphasis on customer service. Skills and good translation apart, I believe our clients have to *like* us on some level. Being agreeable (without being a pushover) improves the client’s day and makes the translator happy because the work continues to come in.
I have a choice of two grocery stores I can go to in the village where I live. I go to the one where the proprietor – all right, this loses something in translation! – greets me with, “Hello, darling!” and a smile. Admittedly, she greets many customers in the same way, but I still like going there.
One thing to consider is that just because there is a big number of translators/interpreters in a language pair doesn’t mean it is saturated. For example, there are way more English into French translators than Russian into French translators here in France, but there is also a much larger volume of work.
I agree that being friendly and personable goes a long way.
I think the main differentiator for translators and interpreters in a saturated market is to look to specialization: how many of those 2000+ Spanish translators have a background in aviation or software localization, or better yet, military helicopter manufacture or iOS platform game localization? market is so much more than a language pair!
Do you have any thoughts (or planned posts) on markets that are “rare pairs” but dominated by low prices? Theoretically the native English speaking translator of (Chinese, Russian, Burmese…) should command extra sparkly high prices because of scarcity, but I find in practice the market is flooded with native speakers of the rare language translating the other way (into English, their foreign language), who fill the gap of not many native into-English translators and who also accept very low prices for various reasons.
If you’ve posted on this in the past I apologize, but I’ve only seen the “rare pair = high prices” model mentioned here.
@M
I think anyone in the rare pair/low price market should think again about (1) specialization(s) and (2) how they are marketing themselves.
Except in very rare cases (I’m thinking of the guy here in France who translates from Cambodian to modern Greek: he’s got that market all sewn up :-)), I don’t think language combination alone is enough.
You’re best off developing one or more subject-matter specializations — which will take time and effort. We agree that the translators (and many translation companies) claiming specializations in everything from Algebra to Zoology usually don’t pass the laugh test, right?
But back to my second point.
Once you’ve got those specializations firmly in hand, you have to get out and *make it known you have them*. Maybe do some lateral thinking about likely venues and/or invest in some proactive, constructive participation in specialized forums to get your name out there.
Here’s an example: I work in financial & corporate translation (Fr>Eng). Six months ago, a client called to ask whether I knew any (equally skilled :-)) translators working from French to Vietnamese/Chinese/Korean/Arabic/Brazilian Portguese.
I’m not an agency, and in cases like that, I’m usually very happy to pass names along, but only if I have some clue that the name being passed along is not going to embarrass me as ref — which might include seeing their (signed) work and/or seeing them participate actively on specialized discussion lists like the Financial Translators Forum.
In this case, try as I might, I couldn’t come up with any genuinely highly specialized Fr>Viet/Chin/Kor/Arabic translators. Dabblers, yes, but that was not the brief.
Sure, I may be blinkered (there’s no reason why I should know every translator on the planet), but I was still surprised at how — sparse? no, frankly *empty* those niches seemed to be, based on association and web searches.
This reminds me, too, of a Fr>Mongolian translator I met through the professional association here. There’s not a call for her services every day in my field, but I’m glad to know her for the day something does come up!
Nice points, Chris. What a surprise that we both thought to go to specialization first! 🙂
As many of you already know, I owned and ran a premier translation company for over 15 years, before selling it in 2008 to a publicly traded company. The company was ASET and it was the only translation company sold to a publicly traded company that year in the US. When I took over the translation operations of ASET in 1992 (it was originally a consulting firm) its translation operations yielded about $350,000 a year and it was using translators with no subject expertise; when sold in 2008, language services were producing over $20 million a year in free cash flow. I only point that out as a way of emphasizing what I’m about to say.
Subject expertise is everything. Everything. Every translator for every job in every subject and for every client came down to this: What does this translator KNOW about physics, mechanical engineering, neural networks, clinical psychology, medical devices, financial reports or legal contracts? Not how much that translator has translated in that field, but what does that translator KNOW?
A good litmus test of your subject-knowledge expertise as a translator is this: Could you go to a social function with practitioners in that industry, say a reception for physicists, and would they believe after discussing with you in detail their current research, that you are also a physicist? If they think you are — because you speak intelligently and ask questions about very complicated subjects — then you are in the right neighborhood. It helps if you actually are a working physicist, of course, and all of us who work in that field successfully have college-level training in the discipline, although we may not be doing what is called “real science” at present. But the point is something else — what is your comfort level on the subject itself in a room full of experts?
We built ASET largely on the market share lost by translators and translation companies that did not — or would not — grasp this.
It amazes me that specialty field(s) is not the second phrase out of every translator’s mouth, after language pair and direction. I have noticed that it tends to be the second phrase out of the most successful translators’ mouths and that has, in my experience, remained quite consistent over the years. And I think it is far and away the most crucial differentiator in the current market.
Kevin, your comments are a good reminder of the investment needed to develop a specialization and stay current in it — massive reading (and thinking).
But I’d temper your “Subject expertise is everything” statement with “Don’t forget writing”.
That is, I’ve seen subject-matter experts with remarkable depth of knowledge who can’t put two words together and maintain any kind of flow. So I firmly believe that translators looking for a spot at the premium end of the market have to work on their writing skills, too. These have to be well above what you develop in college; translators *are* professional writers (or should be).
I say that because for many types of text, the tech knowledge without the ability to write clearly and engagingly simply won’t make the cut. And I’m often dismayed at how easily translators sell technical texts short (a “well, this isn’t *literature*, it just needs to relay the information” attitude.)
It’s encouraging to think that both subject-matter knowledge and writing skills can be developed by investing time and energy.
Thank you both, Christine and Kevin. I think you both make very good points, and another aspect of the solution in my case may simply be geography. I live in my source country, so I need to expand my foreign client base even though I do enjoy working with my Czech clients.
The last point about the ability to write well definitely bears out in my experience. I’ve been approached in the past to “save” (retranslate) the unreadable work of an expert. Effective writing is one of my strong points, so in the spirit of focusing on what you do best, I’m currently working on polishing my writing in addition to deepening my knowledge of my specialty areas.
Thanks for the food for thought!
Hello There,
Thank you very much for the posting, please keep up the sharing.
Thanks,
Dev
http://www.notarizedtranslations.com/
Chris, thanks for your comment. Yes, I agree that all translators are writers by definition, and should work throughout their careers to improve their writing skills. However, this requirement is something most translators know instinctively, are told in school or find out in their work environment, or have realized after they are asked repeatedly to bring their considerable skills to bear to save a text that defies comprehension in any language.
The reason for my “absolutism” about subject expertise is a practical one. I’ve found that it’s the only approach that works.
For much of my professional life my job has been to evaluate, hire and edit other Russian-to-English translators working in variously complex technical subject areas. I’ve always had a huge incentive to find people who had the necessary skill set, as it invariably would involve dramatically lower levels of intervention by the editor (me) and would also give me flexibility in distributing work in the future. Yay!
Even with this incentive — OK, massive positive bias — it was this hopeless and immensely frustrating experience to keep running up against a granite wall of reality that too many translators do not know the subjects they (purport to) translate. And don’t care. Or lie about it, either to themselves (very often) and to you, too (more often than anybody wants to admit).
We really have to resume our discussion on that future ATA session on that very subject. 🙂
Anyway, it was not a positive experience in life to spend endless surprise working weekends locked away in a room with a closed door attempting not to scream every five minutes, “Are you f’in KIDDING me?”
I was not born with an editorial silver spoon in my mouth by a very long shot, but I did spend well over a decade of my life having my texts edited, re-worked, disemboweled and re-assembled right before my eyes, and by translators with shockingly brilliant and hard-earned expertise in the lab, out in the field and at their desks.
That doesn’t even include my published book translations in physics, which at this point number thirty-four volumes.
As you’ve found on the project you and I have been working on recently, there are many into-English translators who seem to have few collaborative skills because 1) Nobody has edited their work (many translation companies lie, too); 2) They refuse to edit others and 3) Once they submit the translation, they no longer consider it to be their problem.
It’s human nature to be selective about one hears in terms of advice, guidance or feedback. Our minds filter reality to make sense out of it, and protect our sense of self above all else. So our minds amplify those aspects that we like, and suppress those that we don’t.
By “suppress,” I mean “don’t hear.”
And that’s fine.
But I’m sticking to “subject-matter expertise is everything.” It’s been the only saving grace that has kept me from a life with one of those dire and unexpected surprises, much like the one awaiting Zelda Fitzgerald.
Reblogged this on Traduzioni e altre storie and commented:
Dopo l’esperimento di qualche settimana fa, devo dire che la funzione di “Reblog” è molto simpatica, e conto di usarla più spesso… Questa volta, per un interessantissimo post in inglese scritto da Corinne McKay sui “mercati saturi” nel settore della traduzione.
Just shouting “Hurrah” at Kevin’s posts. I’m a subject-matter expert and I am sure it is the secret to my success. Without it, I’d be an ordinary freelancer with decent communication and excellent technical writing skills (because I took Chris’s advice and got training). I’m pretty sure great technical writing alone would not have got me where I am today. It’s the subject expertise that hooks clients in. The good writing then means they keep me once they have found me.
Another vote for subject-matter specialisation. I always say no to jobs outside my area of expertise when I know I’ll be out of my depth. The result is that sooner or later those same clients come back with a text in my field, confident that I will do it well. So, paradoxically, refusing one job today will lead to another job tomorrow.
A few people have mentioned “specialization” as a strategy to compete and I’ll second that idea. Professional marketers tell us that markets naturally divide and specialize over time. The market for English-to-Spanish translators for example is in reality many markets of specializations defined in one way or another. Specialization is a proven marketing principle, and is somewhat contrary to the idea of offering a broad range of services.
The view from the other side of the fence, perhaps, might be useful here? I work for a creative agency where I am always looking for freelance translators to join our busy localisation team. I am naturally looking for quality and experience – but I also want translators, editors and proofreaders who are prepared to really get to the heart of what our clients are offering. I expect them to ‘immerse’ themselves in the brand and do plenty or research before a project starts. They should be used to translating marketing material, and should also have some specialised knowledge if it’s required (eg medical, automotive etc). They should be accustomed to translating for a number of different media channels: print, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter etc. If they live locally, I get them into the office to meet the rest of the localisation and creative team, and sometimes our clients when they are visiting. We want to build long and fruitful relationships with these individuals. We want them to be as passionate about what they do, as we are. And believe me, it’s not always easy to find them!
This discussion has been really helpful. As a budding freelance translator and currently working as an Admin Assistant at Veritas, it is interesting to see what aspects of the industry are considered to be most important. In university they are constantly telling us that we must be honest on our CVs about our specialities because we will get caught out one way or another. There is no point in saying you are experienced in Biochemistry if the only experience you have is reading articles on that subject! This is sure to lead to nights spent frantically searching around in an unknown field, grasping for the correct words to use and ending up with a sub-standard translation.
A few thoughts on English>Spanish translators. Although there are indeed a lot of English>Spanish translators at the ATA membership directory, the number is by no means too large. On the contrary, I would say there are too few English to Spanish translators who are true professionals and members of accredited translators associations. As tongeincheck pointed out, there is a lot of work for translators working in certain combinations, such as English>Spanish, and the need for good translators keeps growing. The number of native speakers of Spanish is growing every day and, as so much content is still produced primarily in English, so is the need for qualified English>Spanish translators. The problem with this market is that too many bilingual people/non-translators are fulfilling that need without the proper specialization and of course charging very little or no money at all. This makes it harder for true professionals to find good clients, but they are out there, you just have to make a greater effort to find them.
Very interesting points and comments! I, of course, agree with many of you that specialization is an important, if not crucial, aspect to take into account when we decide to differentiate in a saturated language pair. But, at the same time, I agree with Xenia that there are not as many good professionals out there as we think. Quantity doesn’t mean quality.
Regards!