About 11 years ago, I went on my first informational interview with a translation company. The project manager’s first question, “What are your languages?” was one that I expected. Her second question, “And what are your specializations?” caught me completely off guard. Specializations?? You mean it’s not enough that I speak another language? Well, as it turns out, language skills alone are not enough to make a successful career as a translator, so here are some thoughts on identifying and pursuing translation specializations.
First, here’s a tip from veteran translator Jill Sommer. Pick an area that you enjoy researching. You’re going to be doing a lot of reading in your specialization, so make sure that you find it interesting. You also want to make sure that your target specialization generates enough paying work for you to have a viable business. Lots of people start out focusing on their avocational interests: weaving, violin-making and the like. There’s undoubtedly work in those areas, but it’s probably not enough, or not well-paying enough, to keep you busy full-time. If you want to work with direct clients, there’s work in pretty much any specialization you can imagine. If you want to work with agencies, you really have to target one of their core areas, for example financial, medical, legal, pharmaceutical, IT, patents, etc. It’s also helpful to identify some of your non-specializations: areas in which you definitely do not want to translate.
It seems to me that some specializations are increasingly dominated by people with significant work experience in the domain. For example in the US, I meet more and more lawyers who either hated practicing law or couldn’t find a satisfying job and thus turned to translation as an alternative. For dense medical texts, you really need a strong medical background to produce a good translation. But many translators are self-taught in their areas of specialization: they pick an area that looks interesting, start with work that isn’t too technical, and learn as they go along.
In some sense, you also want to follow the money. I tell all of my translation students that somewhere, there is an intersection between what you want to translate and what clients will pay good money for. If your passion is art, there may be a well-paying niche translating for art museums that loan and borrow works of art internationally. If your passion is weaving, maybe you can work for textile companies that want to sell their products overseas. In one sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (law, pharmaceuticals) in which clients have to translate in order to do business. But in another sense, it’s smart to focus on an industry (corporate communications, hospitality) in which clients hope that a really good translation will bring them more business.
Finally, if you’re interested in working with direct clients, don’t fear niche markets. As French to English chemistry translator Karen Tkaczyk will tell you, all you need is enough work for one person! I’ve met successful translators who specialize in horses, philately, fisheries and recycling. And if you want to expand your knowledge in your specialization, a MOOC provider such as Coursera is a good place to start. You can read about my experience in a Coursera epidemiology class here.
Please bear with me, Corinne, but I thought it would be fun to re-write two of your sentences to make a point.
Here we go!
____
First, here’s a tip from veteran physician Jill Sommer, M.D. Pick an area that you enjoy researching. You’re going to be doing a lot of reading in your specialization, so make sure that you find it interesting.
It seems to me that some specializations are increasingly dominated by people with significant work experience in that area of medicine….but many physicians are self-taught in their areas of specialization: they pick an area that looks interesting, start with work that isn’t too technical, and learn as they go along.
_____
Patient: ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR MIND????
If this scares the hell out of you as a patient, well, it should.
If you are a translation buyer – as I have been for over two decades – it scares me, too. But I learned a long time ago – the HARD way by spending many years re-writing translations produced by some very well-known translators in ATA – that translators who had
1) Formal university-level training in their subject matter;
2) Practical training in their subject matter; and then
3) Extensive practice and supervision under the keen eye of other working professional translators for, oh, say six additional years (like specialist physicians in the US!) correcting all their mistakes BEFORE they begin working for clients…
pretty much guaranteed that their translations would be unlike all the other translations out there – and it would show.
And it does show. It really does.
Here’s the worse-kept secret in the translation industry:
Translators who own boutique and high-end translation companies actually talk among themselves about who is good and who is not, and who produces at the top of the field and who does not, as well as why that is so (hint: presence or absence of subject matter expertise and writing skills but also the benefit of historical massive collaboration with colleagues).
And you don’t get to that level without being ripped to shreds yourself. I certainly did! Reading through red-ink corrections on my translations is pretty much how I spent the 1980s and early 1990s.
Fun times.
I confess that I do find it a bit distressing that translation in this highly complex technical age of the 21st century is still stuck in a training time warp, behaving much like physicians did in the 18th century – not yet scientific, not yet rigorous, still part of colleges of barbers and surgeons.
Still learn as you go!
This is terrible for our clients, just like 18th century physicians were terrible for patients, often doing more harm than good.
Let’s up the game, folks, and please encourage formal subject-matter training and extensive colleague supervision as the baseline requirement for best practices in our profession, especially when the subject we are discussing is “specializations.”
Kevin, I don’t mean for a second to argue with you: I have neither your experience nor your knowledge of the industry, so that would be preposterous. I am just trying to make a humble contribution to the debate, but if I were anyone else I would definitely believe you rather than me! 😉
Unless I am missing something, you are saying that medical texts should be translated by people who have been through Med School, practiced medicine and then trained for years as translators. Legal texts should be translated by people who have been through Law School, practiced law and trained several years as translators, and so on.
The world is a very big place, so I am sure that such people exist in every field: there must be former doctors out there who are at least close to bilingual and bicultural, AND who can write decently in their native language. But I suspect there are not many.
I totally agree with you that such people would make ideal translators in every field, but the Theory of the Second Best is a well-established principle, and it exists for a reason in most areas of life including translation. In the real world, where such perfect translators are few and far between, doesn’t it make sense for people who are nearly bilingual and bicultural, who write well in their mother tongue and who have some training and interest in a certain field to try to develop that training and interest further and turn it into a specialization? We are, after all, translators: our trade is not medicine or law, but translation of medical or legal texts, which is surely a different thing.
Of course, the closer one gets to that ideal that you mention, the better one will be as a translator. But, in an imperfect world and in an imperfect industry, I would not write off second-best options offhand.
Hi Veronica,
Thanks for your thoughtful comments.
Let’s see if I can re-frame my original post a bit.
I originally re-wrote two of Corinne’s sentences to give some emotional power to my point that “learn-as-you-go” is a terrible way to run a skills-based business like translation. This is especially true when you are charging a poor hapless client to learn at that client’s expense.
What I mean by that is that, as you are learning, you are charging real money to deliver mistakes.
I used a medical example to show how a lack of expertise can be frightening when you are on the consumer side of the equation rather that the provider side, where all of us who are reading this reside.
The same economic point holds true if we are speaking of medicine or plumbing or electrical contracting — in none of these fields are professionals encouraged to charge market prices while “learning as you go.” Each has an apprentice period, usually measured in years, where practitioners are on a firm leash before being let loose on the public.
The problem is magnified in our industry because — unlike kitchen contractors or plumbers or even trash collectors — our customers are often in no position to judge the quality of the results.
Now the exception to this rule lies in translation companies owned by translators who can actually evaluate translations. I was one of those myself for 20 years — I evaluated translations and hired translators and ran a major boutique company and still do some of that today — and it was from that vantage point that I saw the destructive wasteland spawned by translator hiring based solely on nebulous “reputations” of freelance translators, to say nothing of “certified” or “sworn” or otherwise validated translators who produced shockingly bad work. This was present everywhere, every day, and in all language combinations.
There is an astonishingly large volume of crap work out there. This fact is often swept under the rug or simply not discussed in our industry, sort of like how families secretly agree to deal with Crazy Aunt Irene.
In my original post I was summarizing the three skill sets that were always present in the strongest translators. The first, subject-matter expertise, was framed as “university-level training,” which of course does not mandate that a person become a trained physician to translate medical texts, just that the translator acquire serious subject-matter skills — over a period of years — that enables that person to convey complex ideas in that particular domain.
The same is true of any specialist field. The path to mastery is measured in thousands of hours, not 10 minutes on Wikipedia.
We do no service to beginning translators to perpetuate this “learn-as-you-go” nonsense. It’s shockingly poor advice for beginners, who should be steered into best practices in a world that is becoming increasingly competitive and more demanding of translators and their skills.
Hi Kevin,
I totally agree with you; translators working in highly specialized areas should seek formal training. I can say this from experience. Even with formal training and experience, you still have to do a lot of “learn as you go” and the amount of time and research it takes to produce a good translation becomes impractical if you start from scratch.
I am at a point in my career that I revise a lot more often than I translate and the amount of bad translations out there is shocking! I can only speak for the medical and pharmaceutical field, but people should really seek training before they advertise their services as medical translations. You do your reputation and our industry no favors by delivering poor quality work!
Hi Karen,
Thanks for your comment.
Because translation necessarily means peering into the minds of writers, it’s impossible for translators to know everything their writers do because, alas, we are not REALLY mind readers.
It’s just a convenient fiction to illustrate the difficulties of translation.
Where translators get into trouble is thinking that they are in fact excellent mind readers because they’ve decided — with absolutely no other experienced translators around to review them or correct them or shake them out of their foolish complacency — that every translation they produce is just peachy keen.
I’ve written on my blog about the enormous dangers of confirmation bias in translation, the invisible cognitive tendency we have to seek and repeat what’s familiar, rather than what’s correct.
And that’s made immeasurably worse by the Dunning-Kruger effect — where novices consistently overestimate their skills and only discover (and finally acknowledge) their failures after they’ve been properly trained — as Kevin Lossner notes below
Don’t kid yourself — you can no more “learn as you go” in translation than you can “learn as you go” in dismantling a nuclear weapon and extracting and shipping the fissile material safely.
There are a dozen ways it can kill you that you’ve never even thought of.
I like that quote you gave: All you need is enough work for one person. And specialization probably is the best we to get it.
Hi “EP”
Corinne was referring to me there. I’ve been saying it for along time, ever since people told me early on that there wasn’t enough work in chemistry and that I should think about needing extra areas. I’m glad you liked it.
Thanks everyone for your comments! Kevin, I definitely see your point, but here’s a counterpoint. I think that translators need three main skills: source language reading, target language writing and subject-area knowledge. I’d argue that we need those skills in equal measure. Subject-area knowledge is really important, and I agree completely that not enough translators have it. But I think that it’s not *more important* than the other two critical skills, and I think that there is lots of good translation work out there that doesn’t require PhD-level knowledge in a specific subject area. Sure, there is work that requires a PhD, or a JD, or an MD, but that’s not the majority of our industry. And hopefully, people know their limits and leave that type of work to those who are qualified for it.
Hi Corinne,
Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I’ve been extraordinarily privileged to have some terrific translator colleagues out there in the course of my career.
But the best “translator” I ever counted as a friend?
Carl Sagan.
And I was HIS translator.
While many people think of “translation” as a matter of languages, it in fact is a matter of ideas. Transferring ideas back and forth from book to film, or from screenplay to stage or in Carl’s case, from extraordinarily complex ideas to easily digestible ones.
And that means that all translation is grounded on a bedrock of ideas. We take this shared knowledge for granted as translators because we think we all — source-text writers and translators together — inhabit the same world of ideas.
But in fact we don’t. The writer inhabits a different world of ideas than the translator does. The translator is just called on to do the impossible, which is know everything the writer does.
Yikes!
I learned (the hard way) that a huge number of professional translators share your view that it’s really about languages and they can “learn as they go” and do it on their own.
This, unfortunately, generates stratospheric overconfidence because feedback is so rare in our industry, so they pound away at the keyboard for years, blissfully unaware of the mistakes they are making and the “translationese” they are producing.
(One of the reasons Chris Durban and I often sound like the same person on this subject is that we’ve both spent a career making this very same observation, just in different specialty fields.)
And the phenomenon is not just restricted to the high-level expert fields. I would argue based on my own experience — almost 25 years evaluating other translators’ work — that this overconfidence extends deeply into general and non-specialized translation, and infects even the simplest legal contracts or agreements or balance sheets or even personal letters.
Grant Hamilton has an entire Twitter account devoted to pointing out common blunders in French-to-English translation, as you know. If we had 100 Grant Hamiltons out there doing it across the language spectrum my guess it that you’d be shocked to see how much blundering is going on.
I used to run seminars in Russian-to-English translation at ATA — this was before your time in ATA — where I would list out the Russian source-text expressions in very common fields like contracting and business correspondence in one column of a table, and in the second column (headed — “Is NOT Translated This Way) I would list the translationese I knew almost everybody in that room was producing. That room used to get VERY QUIET when I first handed out the worksheets. 🙂 We would spend 90 mins together batting solutions back and forth until the real translations would emerge. We would write those in the far right column. 🙂
Anyway, my concern is that it’s a disservice to tell beginning translators that they can “learn as they go.” This does not work. Leaving aside the fact that it’s disrespectful to clients who are often unaware of the garbage they are being sold, it perpetuates this idea that translation does not require expert knowledge from the start.
It does.
There needs to be a feedback mechanism, a hard one, for beginning translators and it must be in place for a long period of time if you want a new generation of expert translators out there — in all fields of translation, down to the simplest texts — who can actually beat Google Translate rather than spending the rest of their careers making minor corrections to it.
“Extensive practice and supervision under the keen eye of other working professional translators for, oh, say six additional years…”
“There needs to be a feedback mechanism, a hard one, for beginning translators and it must be in place for a long period of time if you want a new generation of expert translators out there — in all fields of translation, down to the simplest texts — who can actually beat Google Translate rather than spending the rest of their careers making minor corrections to it.”
Although I don’t have hard data my impression is that there are less in-house translation positions (in translation or other companies) where a new translator could get ongoing feedback. ITI and other professional bodies offer mentoring programmes but they usually run for a limited time and wouldn’t amount to this kind of formative experience.
What advice would you give to translators who want to get this kind of continuous feedback?
Hi Arline, I’ve written a blog post on the pitfalls of a “learn as you go” philosophy in the context of my own life experience, located here: http://bit.ly/1aVLjzU
We’ll explore possible solutions to this problem in the comments there in much the same spirit of collegial support we’ve observed here.
My thanks to Corinne for tolerating this very fruitful discussion in these comments! 🙂
Worthwhile topic and discussion. I think I have to side with Kevin’s point that learning as you go is only OK when you are getting feedback from a subject-matter expert. Translators with time, a particularly strong work ethic, and expert research skills can get away with claiming subject-matter expertise for much bulk market work, but it’s not the same as knowing the subject in your sleep. We all know the confidence that comes with translating a text we truly “get” in comparison with one where we are learning as we go. We all look back at our jobs or TM segments from years ago and cringe as we see a translation we thought at the time was OK. Wise people who have learned on the job and been providing “acceptable”, even “great”, work to agencies for years crave edits by subject-matter experts.
As a subject-matter expert with excellent source language skills in that field and generally, what I needed when I started was to improve my craft and target-language writing. Working on team projects where my work was being edited by a master translator for a lot of my first two years as a freelancer was how I began to learn – but it comes back to Kevin’s point. I was only learning and growing because of all the tracked changes I was seeing. So many of us continue in error blindly for years. Corinne, I know you often work with a partner. I think that makes all the difference. You’re used to seeing your work edited, so you are continually growing.
Something else I observe working into English in a technical field is that translators frequently use reference materials that are written in English by non-native speakers. Translators then propagate errors in English target texts. Discernment takes knowledge and experience that is very hard to develop alone.
Kevin, I agree with most of what you say, of course. In particular, it would be in everybody’s interest to have a systematic feedback mechanism in place. That would definitely take the translation industry to a new level, and it would also make the translator’s professional life cycle even more exciting, actually.
In the absence of such a thing, however, I still take Corinne’s “learn-as-you go” approach as a decent second best. It takes a lot of work (definitely not 10 minutes on Wikipedia) to try to do a little better everyday. There are a zillion things one can do to get better subject-matter knowledge in both source and target languages, and, while that will not make up for the lack of hands-on subject-matter expertise, it should dramatically improve the quality of the work one does. I think Corinne made it clear in her post that learn-as-you-go is not a passive exercise: you don’t just learn by translating (badly). You have a responsibility to really try to really learn, to put some serious effort into understanding your specialist subject matter better as a precondition to translating better.
As a relative beginner, I have got little feedback from fellow translators, although I have tried to learn from it whenever it has been available. I embarked on NYU’s Certificate in Translation partly to make up for that too. But, of course, none of this can be even remotely regarded as subject-matter-related. In my case, I have tried to step up my reading, to find good sources of material to turn to when the need arises, and to read target-language texts in my areas of planned expertise. Plus these are hardly random: as a translator, I decided to specialize in things that I was a relative specialist in anyway, with the commitment to getting better at it everyday.
Karen, your point about working with a partner is one I had not thought of that way before. And it makes perfect sense. It sounds like something that I should explore in the coming months, because it is a good way to make up for the absence of feedback from agencies. Thanks a lot for that.
Hi Veronica,
The problem that many new translators have (often working for agencies) is that confidentiality agreements mean they cannot share work to get it edited. We can only get feedback on work for clients where there is no such agreement, or where we can get an exception, or for “practice” work.
Thanks, Karen. I will bear this in mind, of course. I imagine it is also hard to build a partnership that works (both to find a suitable partner, hopefully with similar professional interests, and to make sure the relationship works well in practice, and works both ways). Still, it is worth pursuing, I think, because in a world with virtually no feedback it may be, as you say, a valuable, feasible path to professional growth. And I am thinking not just about corrections, but also about debate, about finding the word that fits best instead of a word that fits, and so on.
I completely agree that the “talking” portion alone is very valuable, and most of us can achieve that without breaking confidentiality agreements. I think Corinne has written or spoken about her partnership before. Maybe she can point us to a post.
Hi Corinne / Kevin,
Great discussion here that sheds some much-needed light on a dilemma that I think a lot of translators face when pursuing work or deciding whether to accept or decline jobs. I certainly include myself here.
Although I would generally agree with Corinne’s assertion that the three skills of source language reading, target language writing and subject matter expertise are more or less of equal weight, I wholeheartedly support Kevin’s call for a rethinking of how we learn as translators and how we sell our expertise to clients. Getting from A to B (what we have now vs. what Kevin would like us to have) will not happen overnight, but here are a couple ideas on how we could get there.
1) Whether they work freelance or in-house, translators (or translation agencies) need to make a better case for being a real part of project teams. With highly specialized texts, it’s never enough to simply make use of dictionary resources, produce the translation and be done with it. Truly excellent translations require translators to have access to subject matter experts– doctors, pharmacologists, oilfield engineers, lawyers, etc.–so they can ask questions and get clarification. I’ve seen this in practice in oil & gas and manufacturing companies, and the results are brilliant.
2) The translation industry as a whole needs to demand better education, both in translation itself and especially in various subject areas. For a long time I’ve considered a myself a competent translator of legal documents, but after attending several sessions at this year’s ATA conference devoted to legal translation, I was shocked at how much I still need to learn. Although grateful for the excellent sessions, I felt they only scratched the surface in terms of making me an even better legal translator. How great would it be to have a certificate program in legal language or legal translation available at a law school, for example.
To get from A to B, I think it’s incumbent that translators and organizations like the ATA take steps to actually make it happen, because as Kevin states, the vast majority of clients don’t realize it when they’re sold bad quality, so they’re not in an position to advocate change. For them, ignorance is bliss.
Thanks everyone for your comments; interesting discussion! Yes, as Karen pointed out (thanks for saying what I should have said initially!), the vast majority of my work is either with a consistent partner or in an “open” team of translators where I can communicate at liberty with the other people on the project. That’s what I meant by the “learn as you go” approach. When I started out in international development translation, I largely learned from other, more experienced translators. 10+ years later, I’m one of the other, more experienced translators and I now work on teams with people who are less experienced, but who have very strong language skills. Just for the record, I’d not advocating “selling garbage to clients,” just pointing out that given the formal training system for translators in the US (minimal), realistically, most people *are* learning on the job, whether or not that is the optimal method.
Not a minor point, Corinne! Have you written about this before? If not… could you, please? I’m very interested! I agree with Kevin: it is not immediately obvious to a beginner that learning on the job could take this much more structured form, and it’s definitely good to know that such things exist and to read that top translators have benefited from them when they were staring out. Now I am on a mission to try to find out where they are!
Reblogged this on Translator Mentoring Blog and commented:
Here’s some really good advice on specialising!
Hi Corinne,
Thank you for this blog, you are amazing in sharing knowledge and experiences. I enrolled in one of the courses (Stunt Writing for Personal Growth) it will start in January. I will definitely let you know my experience and what I achieved.
Amal
I tend to to consider the language and writing skills as prerequisites to our profession and not as qualifications. I mean, if one doesn’t have these skills one should not pursuit a career in translation.
I think that subject matter expertise is critical. In a way, it is better to have a person with excellent subject matter expertise and mediocre language skills translating in a specialized subject than a person with excellent linguistic with mediocre subject matter expertise. The former would be much easier to fix. Needless to say, the most appropriate approach is to have both linguistic prowess and subject field expertise, but in specialized fields subject matter expertise is most important, I think.
Translation is a very complicated profession. One has not only continue sharping his or her language skills, one also has to keep up with the advancement in one’s specialty area(s) – both in terms of substance and linguistics (terminology, style, Jargon). Not an easy task. This is in part (arguably the biggest part) of why translators should earn quite high fees for this combination of knowledge, expertise and skills (skills in the terms of this elusive cognitive process that allow them to capture ideas and convert them fluently into another language).
Sadly, it seems that a lot of translators don’t know their profession and actually hold similar perceptions as those of translation buyers (any one can translate as long as they know a language, and there are even dictionaries and machines to help; this is a skill-less profession; I should be thankful that someone even considers paying me for this).
There is no shortage of generalists in our profession, that’s fine as not all content is specialized, there is quite a lot of low-priority general text with short shelf life (corporate communications is probably the post child for this type of content), the problem is not that existence of general content and practitioners, it is in the facts that generalists take work in which they know nothing about and relay on dictionaries, Google, and some online platform, thinking that just finding out how a term is called in another language is enough.
I know a fair share of generalist translators that derived their specialization from looking back on their project history and declaring specialization based on what seems to be the leading subject they have worked in (granted, they probably gained some knowledge in that field throughout their work, but it doesn’t necessarily mean expertise).
If you beard with me so far 🙂 I will conclude by saying that this is a great blog article because it touched upon a very important subject. The lack of career guidance is a big missing gap for many newcomers (and even more season translators to the profession (those with profession intents; not the amateurs and frauds) who believe that it only takes linguistic skills and that a translator should translate anything and everything, because it is just about “converting” words and not writing a specialized text from scratch.
Excellent observations, Shai.
What we are told early in our careers can have a strong impact on their trajectory, which is why I’m being fussy about this on Corinne’s blog right now (sorry).
This blog has a great reach among newbies (to Corinne’s great credit) but I fear that sometimes the message about the importance of real expertise and collaboration gets muddied or washed out or actually inverted.
The critical role of collaboration and learning from others — NOT “doing it yourself” — was left out of the original blog post, but has slowly emerged from Corinne’s clarifications and the comments of others.
It’s important for those of us who have succeeded in this career to give the right kind of guidance — even if it’s tough love — because it optimizes newbies’ chances of success and minimizes their chance of crashing and burning.
For example, I was told when quite young — while still in my teens (!!) — that a good technical (specialist) translator must have three crucial skills, and in this order:
1. Subject-matter expertise. You can’t translate what you don’t understand.
2. Target-language writing skills: It’s how you craft the ideas.
3. P.S. — It helps to know a foreign language.
Sure, this was said in jest, but it made a huge impact and saved my career in dozens of instances where my young and language-talented colleagues flamed out and disappeared.
Kevin, I think the hierarchy of skills you mention is not a joke, but rather something to be taken very, very seriously. It’s also why most of the best translators I know have never studied translation in an academic environment. They are what the Germans call “Quereinsteiger” – they come to translation with subject-matter expertise that cannot be matched by translators who have never studied those areas and acquired work experience in them. Even collaboration and lots and lots of feedback cannot make up for the missing academic and work experience in some subject areas. I’ve seen some real disasters in science and financial translation from individuals with decades of translation experience and lots of good feedback from all the wrong parties.
Unfortunately, the educational biases I have observed in Germany and elsewhere have resulted in too many professionals in translation who suffer greatly from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Yeah, I was in a translation master’s program (mainly to work on my source language skills and get a visa), and there were many who had studied only translation and linguistics since their first year of university. Which is fine for becoming an academic, but I couldn’t help but wonder how these people would become professional translators, having no specialized knowledge at all. I see this being an even greater problem in Europe, where, as I understand, people usually specialize in undergrad from the beginning, as opposed to the US system.
I fully agree with Kevin here. I used to translate many pharmaceutical and biotech patents. Sometimes I edited other translators’ work and the lack of subject matter expertise was easily seen in some cases. These were extremely technical texts and there was no way out if you didn’t understand the science.
I totally agree with Kevin Hendzel. In fact, the idea for my next blog post was to write about lack of translation criticism (and its role) for today’s technical, medical, marketing and other translation professionals. Perhaps “translation criticism“ it is not the right term since it is typically understood as an academic field reserved for evaluation of translated literary works. Unlike literary translations, our work tends to remain hidden and inaccessible, so only a few stray reviews come to mind when specific, real-life examples are analyzed by peers and more experienced colleagues. In Russian, Pavel Palazhchenko (Kevin probably knows or heard of him) occasionally reviews newspaper translations, but I cannot remember anything similar where expert translators would systematically give their feedback for specialty translations. Given the current development of the “language industry“ (e.g. crowd-sourcing), there are ever less chances for translation criticism to take root. However, translation criticism would be something of great help not only for beginning translators, but would also promote translation as a profession and could help all professional associations and serious translators to stand out from the undiscerning bulk translation market.
Yup, I agree with Kevin (actually, both Kevins). I’m a translator but I used to work as a technical writer. When I review technical or business-related translations, I’m often struck by how different they sound to anything that a monolingual writer would produce – and not in a good way. They often sound like they’ve been written by someone with no experience of business or industry. I would really recommend that would-be translators get at least a few years of first-hand experience working in industry before becoming a translator.
I agree that translators should have access to experts when translating subjects they are not 100% familiar with (as well as having the ability to say no if something is above their abilities), but it is unrealistic to expect all translators to have degrees in the subject areas they translate. Someone who goes to med school usually does so because they want to be a doctor, not a translator. Sure, there are some former doctors who go into translation work, but there aren’t enough of them to fulfill all translation requirements for the medical field. So some people will have to just *learn as they go*, and unless something is highly technical, they may be capable of doing just as good a job. It really depends.
Speaking of depending, another point is that translation is not a science. Yes, terminology is important, but there is a high degree of subjectivity in translation (of course, if a document is highly technical there may not be that much subjectivity, but many texts aren’t in this category). In some cases it’s your writing in the target language that really matters, and those are language skills, not subject area skills. You may be a former engineer, but that doesn’t mean you can transmit ideas or write well in your native language.
Sometimes translations are just plain wrong, but sometimes people just have different ideas on how to transmit ideas. Everybody learns as they go in all professions – neither doctors nor lawyers start off being experts. They make mistakes, too.
Annie, there was a time it was considered “unrealistic” for medical doctors to have college degrees. This was true through the 18th century and even into the 19th, when medical doctors “learned as they went” and were allowed to treat patients with about as much practical training as many translators have today.
Which is none.
This was not good for patients, to put it mildly. Reading 18th century surgical practices will terrify you far more than anything Stephen King ever wrote.
When medical training became more available — and the scientific method more widely embraced — the difference in outcomes between trained physicians and er, “freelancers,” became so dramatic that the road out of the woods was clear.
What I’m suggesting to you — and what several others in this thread have argued as well — is that there is already a ton of terrible translation work out there. There are huge swaths of garbage produced by the untrained, overconfident, all-I-need-is-language-skills crowd.
There are legions of translation “patients” being killed by overconfident butchers every year.
It’s unlikely you would see enough of this shoddy work to be aware of it unless you were in the position of evaluating a large number of translators or building and expanding a major company based on your ability to discern the skill sets you need to grow vs. those that everybody else is buying.
I admit, it was a huge shock to me as well. I came from the scientific academic publishing community where collaboration and editorial oversight are ironclad rules and were dropped into a free-for-all food fight where translators whose appalling work I had actually seen would tell me with a straight face that their work was terrific because they had learned on their own for 25 years.
A couple of thoughts. Based simply on comparisons of my translations from two years ago with those I produce today (and antipating similar comparisons in two more years) I agree with Kevin H regarding the difficulties encountered by those of us who learn ‘on our own’.
However, I also think it’s important to remember that markets operate in large part due to laws of supply and demand. Yes, in an ideal world, all translators would work in their respective fields for years before moving into translation, but clearly, based upon the excess of demand for translators, there aren’t enough specialists to go around. Furthermore, it seems to me that many in this discussion are making an erroneous assumption that all clients expect and need to receive top-quality translation. Most people, especially those involved in business, realize that you get what you pay for, and I don’t think translation clients are any different. I’m not sure how many clients are truly shocked (although I’m sure they would express shock to the translator) when they receive an OK or poor translation for a rate of .04 USD per word.
Now, I’m not saying that it is ok for translators to submit inferior translations, nor that it is ok for translators to neglect our responsibility to further our professional development through education, etc. But I do think that in almost every field of business, some variation in quality is accepted, and these quality discrepancies are often correlated directly to pricing discrepancies by suppliers. In the absence of a surplus of truly specialized translators, I believe the world is better off with a surplus of translators of varying quality than a small clique of specialists and the sky-high rates this would entail, SO LONG AS end-clients are informed as to the quality of translation they receive for their money.
And that brings me to my final point: there should be better mechanisms in place to ensure that end-clients are aware of what they’re paying for, as well as better mechanisms for improving translator professional development; I think the ATA could do a better job in both respects. In some fields, such as medical translation, such mechanisms should perhaps involve governmental oversight. It should be a crime (and perhaps it already is?) for any agent or translator to pass themselves off as a specialist in medical translation for texts intended for clinical use.
In other fields, this could mean increased supervision by the ATA of agent and translator erroneous claims to direct clients regarding translation quality/educational efforts on the part of ATA to clients regarding the type of translation they can expect for their money.
One other radical idea, in terms of translator education, what about the possibility of ATA providing a database of pre-approved translations by specialists in various fields . There are numerous subscription-based legal document websites, but haven’t seen any great translation based ones.
I whole-heartedly agree with you – five years late, but still.