Stop me if this sounds familiar:
I really needed work, so I decided to take whatever came through the door. I decided that applying to mega-agencies/advertising on Fiverr/racing to the bottom on translation job boards was the fastest way to get full-time freelance work. But now I’m stuck; I have to translate 10-12 hours a day to earn a decent living at these rates. I can’t ever take a day off. If I get sick, I’m in danger of not being able to pay my rent, and I have no money to spend on better equipment or professional development. Low-rate work feels like a treadmill that I’ll never get off. HELP.
Breaking out of the low-rate market is absolutely possible; I’ve helped lots of students do it, and not one of them has come back and said Boy, I really miss the low-rate market and I’m planning to dive back into it as soon as I find the time to send out some resumes. Also, let’s clarify that higher-paying clients could be direct clients or could be high-quality agencies. When I work for my agency clients, I generally earn the same hourly rate as I do when I work for direct clients (the agencies pay less per word, but the work takes less time since they’re handling the editing and the back-and-forth with the client, and they found the client in the first place). But in order to break out of the low-rate market, you have to change three things:
- Your business skills
- Your translation skills
- Your mindset
Maybe in that order, or maybe not. Let’s break it down. First, you need better business skills. You need to stop looking for work where thousands of other translators are looking for work, because when the client is choosing between you and 752 other translators, the decision quickly boils down to how cheaply and how fast you can do a translation. Unless you translate Icelandic, or you’re a nuclear engineer, put the job boards in the rear-view mirror and never look back. You need a professional-looking website, even if it’s something very basic that you create yourself on WordPress or Squarespace. You are not allowed to use print-at-home business cards, or business cards that say “Get your free business cards at…” on the back. You are not allowed to cross out your old phone number and scribble in the new one (get new cards!). You need to stop using low rates as a selling point (would you trust a cheap CPA? a cheap heart surgeon?). You need to look in places where other translators aren’t looking; instead of scrambling for pennies on job boards, you need to be the only translator attending the annual conference of the International Association of Whatever Your Specialization Is. And you need to stand up and ask a really smart question during the Q&A period of an interesting session. If it’s not in your budget to attend their conference, at least get on their LinkedIn Group. You need to respond to client inquiries immediately, and you need to be easy to work with. You need to stop assuming that clients’ main concern is price, because there are lots of clients who are not only willing, but eager to pay good money to a translator who is highly competent, responsive, pleasant, constructive, and all the other things that you undoubtedly are. You need to proactively hunt down the kind of work you like to do and are good at; send warm e-mails, work LinkedIn, attend conferences, follow your prospective clients on Twitter. When they close a big deal, fire off a short e-mail and congratulate them; get yourself in their game.
Then, you need to improve your translation skills. You need to help clients say what they meant to say, not what they actually wrote. When you read something nonsensical in a client’s document, you need to not shrug and say Hey, they wrote it, I just translate! You need to flag that for the client and suggest alternatives. You also need to take some continuing education courses in your specializations, so that you understand the concepts you’re translating, not just how to translate them. You need to slow down. No one (not you, not me, nobody) can produce dynamic, engaging, flowing translations when they’re consistently translating 4,000 words a day. You can get 4,000 words of meaning across, maybe. But you can’t get 4,000 words of text that make the client say that’s just how we wanted it to sound. You need to be open to constructive criticism of your translations; when an editor finds an error, you need to think my goal here is to get better; and every time a really good translator edits my work, it’s an opportunity to improve.
Finally, but perhaps most importantly, you need to improve your mindset. Step one in breaking out of the low-rate market is believing that your work and your time are worth more, and knowing that there are clients out there waiting for someone like you. And don’t be afraid to think big: instead of asking yourself what you can do to increase your income by 10% this year, ask what it would take to double your income while working a little less than you do now. You need to see yourself as a serious professional; as someone who does what your clients’ other serious professional service providers do…but in more than one language. You need to make a list of clients you’re going to ease out when you find higher-paying work. Take out a Post-It note and write “I am done working for XYZ on December 1” (you’ve got three months…that’s enough to find some better-paying clients if you hustle). The first time you say to a client I’d love to work with you, but unfortunately I’m not able to offer a discount, because I’m busy all the time at my regular rates, you’ll have a whole new image of yourself as a professional. You also need to be honest about your role in the low-rate market: if clients couldn’t find any translators to work for them at bargain-basement rates, they’d be out of luck. So decide that although you may need to hold on to some of those clients for now, so that you can eat while you look for better paying work, you are not taking on any more low-rate clients, because you are going to go find better ones, starting right now.
A very good article, Corinne. I can subscribe every word of it.
Changing your mindset takes top billing for me. If you can’t shift states, it will be all the more difficult to upgrade business skills, inspire clients to view translation as an investment rather than a cost, and start makng smart decision and not decisions based on fear. Moreover, once one has shifted states and set a line in the sand (on rates, deadlines, types of project and some such that are no longer acceptable), that confidence is audible over the phone and very compelling to prospects. Indeed, why should a prospect trust you with their important documents if they cannot hear you have the needed level of confidence in yourself?
This is great advice, Corinne. To add to one of your points, here’s something I did a few years ago. I had a small, perfectly pleasant, agency customer who had sent me loads of work for a couple of years but who could not increase rate at all. I finally decided “I am done working for XYZ”. Instead of just telling them not to contact me any more, I referred them to a new translation Masters graduate who was trying to build her business. She had contacted me for advice during in her degree as part of research for a paper, due to my specialty, and made a good impression. That lady was delighted, and so was the client. I felt doubly good about both having moved on and having helped someone else take a step up the ladder.
Your posts are so inspiring! I feel like I’m going to get off the couch and find a new client!
Spot on as always Corinne! I’ve done all three and can only underscore your points: don’t sell yourself short translators! There are plenty of agencies and direct clients out there willing to pay for top quality translation and language support – who are looking for high quality rather than quantity.
But if you find yourself struggling to find the time to follow some of Corinne’s advice, start with some baby steps: the next time a new client approaches you for a job, offer a price 25% higher than your best rate. You’ll be surprised by the results – and some higher rates could mean extra time (and money) to get to that conference! 🙂
Very nice wrap-up, Corinne.
The only thing I’d change would be to flip points 1 and 2.
I’ve come around to this in the past 18 months.
True, translators are often poor at marketing themselves.
True, a lack of self-confidence is a killer.
But if you can’t translate well — if you don’t really and truly invest the time needed to master the craft — all the confidence in the world will *sound* upbeat and energizing as it takes shape… but will explode in your face when the pressure is on. As indeed it should.
This is a personal opinion, of course. (And a reminder of how very rare it is to get sincere feedback on the work we produce; hats off to mentors and people who work — often through professional associations — to provide honest feedback.)
This is a very big problem in Brazil. If you don’t offer a discount, someone else will, and you lose the client. As you are probably aware, Brazil is going through the worst crisis in its history. I would like to increase my international presence – maybe you could discuss how to do this in your blog.
I am also interested in your books , particularly ‘How to Succeed…’ – how can I buy them?
Here’s the link:
http://www.amazon.com/How-Succeed-as-Freelance-Translator/dp/0578077566/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
There’s a lot of great advice in this comment section from translators who are actually very good translators.
In fact, the validity of the advice and comments rests firmly on that assumption.
A great deal of advice in the various threads on this and other blogs also rests on that assumption. Be confident! Demand fair treatment! Raise your rates!
This is great advice for great translators!
It does concern me that the default assumption is that all the readers of this advice are very good. That they don’t overextend, have sufficient (or any) experience, are not just starting out, think all texts are within their grasp, fail to specialize, fail to research, accept work they’re not qualified for, take on projects in unfamiliar languages or language pairs/directions, don’t proofread their texts, don’t use spellcheck, ignore instructions, think all clients are idiots or otherwise misbehave.
People misbehave a lot, though, as we all know.
We see the horror stories all over FB or Twitter, or we end up rolling our eyes over drinks with colleagues after having had to reject or re-write or fix a job from a fairly well-known colleague. Or a bunch of fairly well-known colleagues.
Or think about this inconvenient truth.
How is it that even the best of us can only find — in an industry of hundreds of thousands of practitioners — perhaps a tiny handful of colleagues whose work passes muster, and who we trust to revise us?
How come some people have only one such person? One. One person. Or maybe two?
Why is this so?
Why don’t we talk about this out loud? We sure do behind the scenes.
So if the default assumption that all these people reading the blog are worth more, that they are terrific translators and just need to claim that mantle, where exactly are they? Because none of the people I know who have written comments so far in this comment section are able to get out of the single-digit range in identifying talent on that level (by that I mean — you trust these other translators to revise your texts and not only add value, but catch your own errors. That in many respects on on certain texts, they are better than you. Name me 50 people who meet that standard in your language pair(s) and direction(s). If you can’t do that, why are we giving blanket advice that really only applies to those in the single-digit category?
So this is a very long way of coming around to the question of what your options are if “believing your work and time are worth more,” identified in point 3 as “perhaps most importantly,” is false? That your work and time are not worth more, or may even be worth less. Maybe a lot less.
I’ve written myself on my blog and elsewhere how shocked I was to find so many very visible translators producing appalling work in the commercial market, something I had not seen in the scientific translation market. And that discovery came about in 1992! This has been a problem for a very, very long time.
In the US government secure space, just to pick one of the areas where quality must be top-notch all the time, the standards are so astronomical as to be ridiculous. You are tested constantly, evaluated by both other linguists and customers daily, GRADED on every translation and randomly tested on texts that — although I can’t describe them, of course — are designed to come withing about an inch of causing your head to explode.
All with a failure rate of about 90%. For linguists with 15+ years of distinguished service under these constant feedback conditions and their translation out there and at risk for their entire careers.
Why? Because the consequences of failure are immediate, deadly, potentially catastrophic on a geopolitical scale, and there’s nobody else who’s going to bail you out.
So I absolutely concur with Chris — there really are no points other than how well you translate, how well that work stands up to your best and most admired colleagues, and how much you are committed to maintaining those standards.
You can toot your horn all you want. You can be as confident as Donald Trump (well, perhaps not entirely self-delusional). But if you’re not able to deliver the goods, are you not on the wrong side of basic fairness to your client and yourself?
I’d like to see more blogs that are not built on default assumptions of the kinds of expertise that always puts translators in the driver’s seat and automatically places them on pedestals that we know can’t be universally true (although I earnestly wish with every fiber of my being that this were more universally the case).
It’s an industry secret that we need to air out and discuss more honestly.
@Kevin — There is much in your long comment I agree with, notably the difficulty finding proofreaders/revisors we deem pass muster to review our work and add value. It’s often a challenge, I could not name 50 I’d consider calling on. I work regularly with a couple-three. Their talent is linked to their mindset, always curious, wanting to up their game, enjoying the inherent research any work calls for, wanting to debate subtle points, and not leaving things as “good enough”.
Corinne’s piece was on getting out of the low rate market – probably the most popular and oft debated topic on translator websites. Mindset is key in making that leap — not just because of the confidence factor (and we know many translators have personality profiles that keeps them hidden behind their screens, doubting their abilities and lacking daring to go out there and win direct clients.)
But mindset plays a much larger role. Neuroscience is a subject that fascinates me, but this is not the place to delve into scientific details. Without the right mindset, the average translator is not going to have the ability to question what he/she produces and take all measures necessary, consistently, to up their skills and hone their expertise. And when they try, nevertheless, self-defeating thoughts will tend to lessen the positive effects of such efforts. WIthout the right mindset — and your own examples in the US government secure space support that — even an excellent translator won’t dare take on or won’t thrive working on the most difficult projects subject to the most exacting standards.
Mindset goes way beyond outward expressed self-confidence and horn tooting (actually, truly self-confident individuals do not toot their own horns, they don’t need to!) One’s mindset is a key factor in how well one translates, what one does to get to that level and the commitment involved in maintain those standards. It’s personal, internal, tied into beliefs and self-beliefs. If a person thinks they will never measure up, well, they will never measure up – because from the gitgo they won’t give themselves the chance or the means to do so.
I have always been convinced I’d stink at masonry (have much small masonry to do around the house). It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We are in fact in agreement. Nothing else matters than how well you translate. But where does the motivation to get to that level come from? Mindset.
Patricia, thanks for responding.
I’ll be brief this time! I promise. 🙂
What if you should NOT advance?
What if you’re not suitable, or prepared, or ready or otherwise skilled enough for advancing to the higher levels of the market?
What if “mindset” is actually overconfidence? Kidding yourself? The cost of working in isolation?
Since we agree that we trust so few translators to revise us — a figure in the single digits — should we not reserve all this advice for advancing — “mindset” notwithstanding — to those in the single digits, and not universally for all the various people reading this website?
I confess that this it’s easier to see this problem when you are handed hundreds of resumes at various conferences over the years that simply scream “I have no clue what I’m doing” and the very gracious and polite translator is going on and on about taking advice about moving upmarket that they may have read on this or other blogs (even mine, but I write Dickensian novels around how crucial specialization, subject-matter training and experience measured in decades are required BEFORE moving upmarket).
Back at these conferences: I’m left to sort of smile weakly and advise — as urgently and politely as possible — that this kind person should spend “the next few years” (a figure that always dismays them, but frankly is an underestimate) with a mentor until they enter the same galactic cluster of translators to whom the advice above is actually directed.
We need to be exceedingly careful about “the assumption of competence” in an industry with no barriers to entry. It is more often than not dramatically misplaced.
Kevin,
I’d love to paste your comment to insert my responses, but that would take up a lot of web real estate. So I’ll just follow your structure.
– What if one doesn’t advance (or, gasp, even fail)? It happens. How many people change careers in their lives, for various reasons – including discovering that they may not have what it takes to get to the top of the heap (if they want to get there; some are just happy muddling in the middle)? They learn something, they are better for it, and they deserve respect for dealing with it head on.
– Please don’t confuse mindset with overconfidence, that’s an unproductive shortcut. Take Olympic athletes for example. They work their mindset as much as their muscles and breathing. Those that are overconfident may not practice as much (“I’m so good, I don’t need to”), may include extras in their diet that are not nutritious or have other effects (weight gain, sugar levels, cramps, etc.). If you really want to use that shortcut, then let’s make the distinction between a good (useful, open, self-questionning, motivating) mindset and a poor (unhelpful, insecure, bombastic, overconfident) one. Deal?
– I’ll qualify my agreement with you that it’s tough to find revisors to work with whom we trust and who bring value and as a result I tend to work with a couple-three. Why? Because a) I cannot know every translator on planet; if I don’t know them or their work, I cannot suppose whether I’d trust them with mine; b) some I may know in the flesh or by reputation (yourself included), but if I’ve not worked with them, I am not going to hold an opinion until I have had direct experience with that colleague; and c) **just like clients** — and in this case, we are clients! — admit it, we choose who to entrust our precious prose to not only based on competence and sector expertise but also because of the quality of the client-service provider (even if a respected colleague) relationship. That has been a nearly co-equal factor to added value for me in selecting those I want to work with (or team with) regularly. And that’s something not often talked about either…
– I surely make no assumptions about competence – in any field, with or without barriers to entry. Perhaps one or two emails **a year** from translators looking for work are compelling enough to get a reply, the rest sadly go right into the bin. And I don’t think anyone here does. But nor should we make blanket assumptions on lack thereof without due consideration, if only to be able to help mentor those who show promise. Those at the top of their game today surely were not when starting out (were you? Not me!). Where would the learning curve and experience come in then?
Patricia, I think where we differ is in our respective experience.
I spent an appreciable portion of my career in the business of risking my own money on the skill sets of other translators.
So that means I risked my business — and by extension, all my investments, bank account balance and my house, which were pledged to the bank to allow us to pay translators in 30 days while we were being paid in 90 days or 120 days — on the skill sets of the translators I chose.
I don’t think it’s a huge surprise that this figure ran into the millions of dollars. I did the math once, and discovered over a 20-year period that I had paid $9 million to some of the best translators in the industry, all of them subject-matter experts, all of them excellent writers and all of them with a minimum of a decade of experience (this was in 125 languages and to translators in 129 countries, so it was spread quite thin among those with the top levels of expertise).
What I DIDN’T do was pay $40 million or $100 million to novices in the bottom of the bulk market, which a considerable number of companies do, albeit at a few pennies a word.
And they would pay this to people who did not specialize, translated into their third or fourth languages, did not have colleagues reviewing their work, claimed subject expertise they didn’t have (and often couldn’t even spell) and otherwise revealed through their use of English in their resumes that they should not be allowed within a few parsecs of some poor client’s work.
Let’s not forget about the poor clients out there who lack the ability to judge what they are being sold for their hard-earned money.
Please just sit with this a minute. I’m not writing about translators who have the experience to move upmarket. I’m speaking about the very considerably larger number of those who don’t. Some will never develop that experience and others will, but for the time being, they don’t have it.
So this brings us back to the inconvenient truth.
There are very, very few exceptional translators, and an extreme minority of very good ones. This is why all of us have such trouble finding translators we deem good enough to review our work.
The advice in the main blog post fails by what I’ve been calling “the assumption of competence.” That all the readers of this blog are competent enough to advance to the higher levels of the market.
This is untrue.
Perhaps I should copyright the notion of “the fallacy of the assumption of confidence.” 🙂
This is an unpopular opinion — I get that. But judging from my email, there are a number of prominent people who share my opinion, but don’t want to catch the public heat for saying unpopular things.
So let’s reserve advice about moving upmarket to those who’ve made the considerable lifelong investment across multiple domains — subject-matter expertise, writing skills, native-language mastery and collaboration/ revision by their colleagues.
It’s honestly a disservice to those who are not in this class. They read this advice and think it applies to them.
It can backfire on them in many unfortunate ways, including by ending in their abandoning the profession in frustration or being completely horrified by a valid revision to their translation by truly experienced translators and becoming so dispirited that they quit.
I’d rather people come at this process in the correct sequence — expertise first, advance second — rather than by being simply encouraged to make a blind leap because all translators should have the right “mindset”, without the person doing the encouraging having any idea whether such translators should in fact make an attempt to take such a leap without recognizing that they stand a good chance of getting 50% across the canyon.
Kevin, of course I have not risked my business, my assets and my home to build a translation company and take a gamble on others’ skillset – nor would I ever want to; my aspirations and my joy are elsewhere. But I do suppose you did so because you felt you had a better than even chance to make a success of it (or else that gamble would be nuts!) and I do understand the pressure of finding top notch translators in 125 languages (and we cannot check them all!) to perform the work and shine.
I do not believe Corinne (but she can speak for herself) assumes all readers of her blog are competent enough to advance the higher levels of the market (should she have put “reader warning” all over her piece?). Nor would it ever cross my mind that confidence is the necessary and sufficient pre-requisite to do so. On that, I do not think you hold an unpopular opinion, it’s just logical! Again, in your concluding paragraph, “mindset” is used in a rather short-cut and perhaps misleading manner; it is not interchangeable with “confidence”. Perhaps the word is the problem, because in our personal-but-on-the-web debate, that is the main thing we are splitting hairs over 🙂
Sure, the translation industry is particular (and sometimes peculiar) in many ways. But generally, it is no different from any other profession: you’ve got the stars, the narrow top tier, the run-of-the-mill performers, and the beginners (who may or may not progress) and life-long flops (frauds?).
In all fields, incompetence or insufficient competence leads to poor and sometimes dangerous outcomes. In all fields, excellence takes time – to gain the skills **and** to perform them — rushed deadlines and crappy rates have an impact on deliverables, whether a translation or technical construction plans. In all fields, you have buyers who lack the knowledge to assess what they are buying or what they have been delivered (until such time the translation boomerangs, the house falls down, the IRS audits faulty accounts and so on). We can bust our chops, so to speak, to raise awareness, educate clients (some who do not give a hoot about being educated and I have some choice stories on that), guide and support budding colleagues, rant against the bottom feeder wannabees and all that we do so well. It’s a one-person-at-a-time process, but we’ll never reach them all.
I’ll leave you to compose the closing words on this conversation 🙂
Fair enough! 🙂
This conversation has resulted in a lot of chatter in email and other venues behind the scenes. This is not unusual — unpopular opinions are often worked through in serene settings and away from the unsettled crowd.
The overwhelming consensus is that we need to recognize that the “assumption of competence” invalidates much of the advice on which it is built, and it urgently needs to be addressed in public.
But it remains an unpopular opinion. It’s almost impossible to talk about it in an intelligent way without either making it seem like you’re elevating yourself and your friends and peers over others, or putting down other people, a practice that makes me cringe in horror, especially since I’ve spent a career mentoring a lot of talented translators.
Let’s put it in other terms.
I’m a huge believer in data. The more, the better. The reason I outlined in such detail my business background involving screening thousands of translators over a 20+ year period is that my conclusions in this discussion are based on that huge data set. In fact, that monstrously huge data set. We as translators do this all the time — we test terminology and concepts by running them against Google data, e.g. usage in Google. Right? I consider my 20-year, many-thousand-translator data set to at least be valid enough for this conversation to take place.
And that data suggests that the market talent set is a huge pyramid, with those who SHOULD be encouraged to move upmarket occupying the very top segment.
But the readers of this and other blogs occupy the entire pyramid.
This results in a fundamental conflict that creates an environment where well-meaning advice that assumes an audience largely consisting of the top of the pyramid — which should move upmarket — is being consumed by people throughout the pyramid (the whole audience for the blog), many of whom have many years ahead of them before even considering moving upmarket, assuming they have the skills, dedication and thousands of hours to devote to reaching that level.
Here’s a quick analogy of how that might work in a different domain.
If we assume that a random set of self-proclaimed pilots in a hypothetical classroom can all fly jet fighter aircraft competently, and without testing, evaluating or otherwise at the very least CAUTIONING them, any advice that encourages these untested and random “pilots,” to advance to more demanding aircraft or missions, at the same time that many of these self-proclaimed pilots may have just seen aircraft from a distance, or flown a glider once or watched “Top Gun” or wandered unsuspectingly into the room, to “improve their flight skills by being more proactive in engaging their superiors” (the equivalent of “improving your business skills”) or being more confident (the equivalent of “mindset”) sets up a situation where I want to put myself as far away as possible when these people actually climb into an YF-17 aircraft.
In fact, it makes me want to run in the opposite direction. As fast as humanly possible.
Does that visual make more sense?
I also appeal once again on behalf of the poor clients out there (that’s the people running as fast as humanly possible in the other direction). 🙂 We owe them as professionals our adherence to best practices. Let’s at least do more in that vein than pay nothing but lip service to the idea.
Ah, Kevin — I give up! We are not in disagreement, yet you seem to enjoy thinking we are. OK, fine, whatever makes your day 🙂 My only “beef” – and you cited it again – is your “confidence as the equivalent of mindset”. It is neither an equivalent nor a synonym. Why you may wish to persist in making the terms interchangeable is beyond me, but I do not find that helpful/constructive.
Funny you should choose fighter pilots as your visual — pionneers in aviation have been a constant in my life for decades. I am **very** careful with whom I fly and have become rather adept at making that informed decision right on the tarmac / landing strip / glacier 🙂
Ha, now that Patricia and Kevin have drained their batteries (perhaps :-)) in sparring, a few more comments and thoughts that come to mind:
– the order of Corinne’s “three things to do” now seems to have changed a bit — all for the better, as I see it.
– Wordplay and wordsplitting aside, if you are a mediocre linguist or iffy translator, there is NO WAY you should be contemplating pitching to demanding clients; haven’t we (those of who are members of professional associations, anyway) all signed codes of ethics forbidding that? At the very least, think of how unfair it is to clients, and how it reflects poorly on the entire profession.
– That said, Corinne makes many good points in her post, and if we can agree on this basic issue — that it makes no sense to boldly stride out into the world touting your services when those services are simply not very good — well, we’re moving in the same direction.
– @Patricia, I follow your arguments to a point, but you neglect one essential part of the whole quality business: a feature specific to translation is that our clients simply cannot judge what they are getting, especially once, say, “factual accuracy” is established. And I’m sure we all know of many many market segments where “accuracy” alone doesn’t cut the mustard. (Plus, as Kevin notes, very often translations delivered are not even factually accurate.)
– @Kevin, not to call your bluff or anything, but I haven’t seen many discussion lists picking up your (insightful) “fallacy of the assumption of competence” argument. Certainly nobody has mentioned anything to me in private (OK, I do have a very limited social media presence, but even so). I think this is partly because you’re getting perilously close to the soft underbelly of the middle/low-end translation market with such talk. (See frustrated client story below.)
– More generally, the only way any of us can have any idea of what other people produce — or insinuate or claim to produce excellent work ourselves, for that matter — is by getting texts out there in the public domain with our name on them. Full stop. End of story. Otherwise we’re back to word of mouth (which is better than nothing I suppose, sigh.) And don’t start going on about certifications and standards; a different universe altogether.
– These days I tend to read a lot of the claims about how demanding [“I”] am by this or that translator with a wheelbarrow load of salt — having seen plodders delivered by all sorts of people who are either working too fast or simply stretching beyond their field(s) of expertise. People who can and should be taking more care. Who are counting on anonymity (or harrumphing about non-natives or third-world folks) to hide their tracks. That is irritating, and sometimes worse.
– Here’s an “entertaining” example: Tony Parr and Marcel Lemmens (of Teamwork in the Netherlands) conducted a mystery shopper experiment this past spring, commissioning a marketing text (Dutch to English) from five suppliers. They presented their findings at their professional association’s conference.. and the conclusions were pretty dire. That is, three awful translations and two less awful ones.
The client himself was on hand and made a presentation explaining how he’d gone about looking for a translator. I gather he was disappointed to observe that *all* of the suppliers he’d seen (a few dozen) were pitching on the basis of price, not quality. “And I wanted quality,” he said plaintively. At this point a translator stood up and said it was clients who were responsible for the poor work since they all insisted on low prices. “But I wanted quality!” said the client (who hadn’t insisted on a low price).
Do these people live in alternate universes or what?
But an even more interesting fact (which gets back to my remark to Patricia) was that this savvy and pleasant client could not, on his own, judge the relative quality of the five texts submitted to him. He spoke fluent English, I’m told, but simply couldn’t judge.
All sorts of “translation” suppliers are in business for that reason alone.
However, being a positive kind of person, I’ve also been impressed by translators prepared to show their work.
E.g., at the recent Translate in Chantilly masterclass sessions, there was a “Vois-là mon travail” table open to all participants.
The organizers had made specific mention of it in advance, and it ended up fairly groaning with work — some of that work very good indeed.
Why this happy turn of events? I think it was partly due to self-selection: people concerned enough about their translation skills to invest three days in mid-summer to work very hard, in granular mode, on improving those skills, with highly motivated instructors, understand that part of the deal is standing up in public and owning their output in public. These were not just people gassing on about what good translators they were in the abstract (much less touting about their business skills), they were saying “Here’s what I do — what do you think?” to their peers. Very refreshing.
@Chris – Far be it from me to neglect the specific issue of many clients not being able to judge the quality of the translations they commission, but granted I did not abuse of Corinne’s hospitality to expound on that since the “word choice” sparring with Kevin didn’t focus on an issue about which we’d be in total agreement.
Segway, however — while this is a very prevalent issue in the translation industry, it is not limited to the translation industry. Case in point as mentionned custom-built homes with grave faults that are not immediately visible, a legal document where one word is missing or a comma misplaced that can change the meaning of that article John Q. Public cannot immediately notice even if the document is written in his/her native language, and so on. As professional translators, of course, we take our work very seriously and in many areas, the smallest error in nuance in translating and interpreteting can indeed have immediate and dramatic repercussions – international politics offering a plethora of examples to illustrate that. But sometimes I feel we could be a tad more humble (or realistic?) and recognize that our critical concerns are not unique to this industry. We position ourselves as partners / trusted advisors to our clients and the work we do is linked to many other professions.It seems to me there is a fine line between setting ourselves apart on this very issue and our ability to fully be a team player in some client projects.
Back to the point at hand —
That most clients are not equipped to assess the quality of the translations they are receiving is central to many of my discussions with clients and prospects. How those conversations play out crossed with prospect profile typologies (ha ha.. not to open up a Pandora’s box, but that individual client’s mindset — not profession, nor corporate position, or industry sector) would make for a long and possibly interesting article. On one end of the spectrum are clients who are lucid, know they cannot judge what they will be getting, and place their trust in their translator (these clients will have done their due diligence in the selection process – I don’t need to expand here how that can be done). In the middle are clients who think they master foreign language X and can either hairsplit on a term or phrase with a translator, convinced they are right, or take the opportunity to learn from the translator to up their foreign language skills (both types are the most time consuming clients – the first sometimes frustrating, the second very rewarding). Client type 1 and 2B are my favorites and most often a long and rewarding parnership ensues. At the other end of the spectrum, sadly, there are those who clearly either don’t give a hoot (or remain clueless no matter what) or whose priorities and concerns are wholly elsewhere – even when budget is not an issue and the ROI is huge. I have had one of those on my radar for a few months (it would be inappropriate to cite it here), trying through different approaches to get my alarm bell across — without even pitching my services, because it matters, the sums are huge and the positive (or negative) outcome can have long-lasting effects.
You can’t force people listen. Sometimes clients get smart after having been burned, choosing more carefully, learning translators are not interchangeable and an inexpensive translation is already way too expensive. But sometimes, as with what I was speaking about above, they will not have a second chance. And sometimes our best efforts to raise their awareness fall flat.
As I said earlier, whether supporting translators who have all that it takes to hone their skills and up their game or about clients who are open to have their awareness raised – it’s a one-person-at-a-time process.
@Kevin — I well understand your point when you write and argue repeatedly:
“I do think that we need to ask ourselves as a profession whether enough care is taken in blog posts to take adequately warn the broad audience that the advice posted may not be aimed at them at all.
In many cases, by virtue of the writer, blogger or trainer, the blog audience may constitute the “soft underbelly” of the bulk market, as you so eloquently put it, but it nonetheless carries with it assumptions that are in fact solely — and I mean exclusively — aimed at the very top of the market or those who are approaching it.”
Yet how do you propose solving that? Should most bloggers just stop blogging? Should Corinne have included a “reader warning –I’m talking to XYZ translator type and not others”? Can one indeed help a certain segment (virtually, remotely) while at the same time preventing others from using advice not intended for them and that could mislead them?
And to push the issue **way further out** and beyond the Wonderful World of Translation – what do you propose about any article, on any subject, that ends up being read by people for whom it was not intended? Not an easy question, no easy answers. Fundamental values, freedom of expression and all jazz.
Just as one can strive to raise awareness one translator and one client at a time, at the end of the day it does boil down to that individual’s own responsibility and choices.
@Chris – Batteries not dead :), but full charge needed now to take care of a client.
Batteries drained? What is this strange universe you speak of? 🙂
Well you’re hardly going to get much of a challenge out of me — you’ve made an excellent case for my same points using entertaining and illustrative examples.
The discussion and rumination about the “fallacy of the assumption of competence” I referenced before, and you just mentioned above, has been through emails and some other “venues.” I didn’t want to get more specific than that, but they’re not discussion lists — when I threw up my hands on ATA and finally quit out of pure exasperation, I resigned from the last discussion list I was ever on, which was the ATA BP list, a list people tell me is relatively silent these days compared to just two years ago. In any event, I was not referencing discussion lists (which I think of as kind of quaint reminders of the 1990s.) 🙂
I think I mentioned email twice because the people contacting me by email — who have a presumption of privacy that I respect, so whose identity I can’t and won’t disclose without their explicit permission — would certainly surprise you (in your case Chris, probably shock you) as would the discussions we’re carrying on there.
I do think that we need to ask ourselves as a profession whether enough care is taken in blog posts to take adequately warn the broad audience that the advice posted may not be aimed at them at all.
In many cases, by virtue of the writer, blogger or trainer, the blog audience may constitute the “soft underbelly” of the bulk market, as you so eloquently put it, but it nonetheless carries with it assumptions that are in fact solely — and I mean exclusively — aimed at the very top of the market or those who are approaching it.
I could not agree more with the critical importance of transparency in evaluating translation quality — and that includes everything from signed book publications (as mine all are and as all your work is, Chris) through translations presented at workshops, translation slams, open-venue translation contests, linguist tests, etc.
There is no other suitable way — none at all — that beat this set of approaches to fleshing out quality.
And it never fails to surprise me how quickly people will agree on what was in any group of translations the best one(s).
Let’s please continue this discussion. We need to ask ourselves how much this assumption of competence is costing us in how we go about encouraging people to do the extraordinary amount of work that is needed before they can or should be considered for moving upmarket.
I for one have grown weary of looking at people with sad eyes (I have stories…) for so long, almost at a loss for words in trying to explain that a few online courses and lots of spunk are not going to get them into the room with the high-paying and duly respectful C-suite direct clients.
@Patricia, here’s an idea.
Corinne is both a colleague and a friend of mine, and one of the most fair-minded people I know in the industry.
She is also a prominent trainer, so an appreciable part of her audience consists of people who are relatively new to the profession.
So perhaps a well-meaning caveat might be in order on blog posts for translators who want to move upmarket, take on direct clients, substantially raise their rates or make a leap that they’ve earned through many years of effort, because as we’ve been discussing, they occupy the top of the pyramid that for better or worse may not include much of the blog readership.
So something like this:
“This blog post is aimed at people who have invested at least 10 years in translation, collaborate with and are revised by colleagues, specialize in one or two areas and have specialized technical or relevant training on the subject matter they are working on.”
My criteria and my wording, of course. But you get the idea.
Another way of dealing with this is to just incorporate the caveat in the content. My posts on moving upmarket ALWAYS cite what’s required to do that, and I’ve written very extensively on the topic.
I doubt there are any readers of those posts who are not aware of the requirements, and I hope none that I’ve discouraged by outlining what’s needed.
The good news is that we are at least making the case for moving upmarket. Let’s continue to do that, but not in a way that has such a potential downside for people who have not made the investment to succeed as they take the leap. No credit for getting halfway across the canyon. 🙂
Works for me, Kevin. At least it makes the author’s intent and chosen readership clear. After, it remains the (intended or unintended) reader’s responsibility to take heed of the advice (or user warning)!
My rant of the day – which loops in to quality issues and signing your work – is having to go through a third set of proofs. How a layout person, duly instructed in the differences, for instance, in French and English punctuation rules, can manage to take a spotless finalized file, create mistakes during layout, make new ones when correcting said mistakes is just beyond me. There is no excuse for sloppiness and lack of attention to detail in my book. Checking galleys is built into my rates, but not three versions (or more) of them! Rant over. Visine required.
Hello all,
I’ve been following this discussion with interest.
First off: thanks Corinne. One of the nicest things about this blog (the only one I actually subscribe to, though I’m an assiduous lurker on the online translatorsphere) is that a post pops into my inbox, regular as clockwork, every Tuesday.
As often as not, it gives me food for thought.
Note: I’ll be using first names throughout in my comment, but I don’t actually know most of the people here (including Corinne).
1. I wish a wider spectrum of professional translators would chip in with their thoughts on this issue. What’s your take? Here’s mine, for what it’s worth: 1. translation skills 2. mindset 3. business skills.
If you don’t have the skills: you can fool all of the people, etc.
So:
You’re good at what you do (skills)
You pysch yourself up to sell your skills (mindset)
You sell them well (business skills)
Full disclosure: my business skills are wobblier than I’d like. But I’m working on it.
2. Remember that Walter Mondale campaign? “Where’s the beef?” Alternatively: put your money where your mouth is. If your work is good, it’s good enough to show (see the “V’la mon travail” ref. in Chris’s comment above).
3. That’s a stonking good tip from Karen, BTW. I’ve used it on occasion. If I’m busy, I pass on the work to someone who I know will do a good job. Win-win. There’s nothing I dislike more than throwing an innocent client to the wolves. It’s a jungle out there, as Kevin has said eloquently in his comments.
Finally:
4. If you tap “Thoughts on Translation” into your search engine, it gives you Corinne’s blog as the top hit. And links to sections of it underneath. One of them is: “Who writes this blog?” Corinne, right? So – no disrespect or anything, but why don’t we let her decide what she wants to put on it. Personally, I couldn’t care less who else reads it. I suspect an awful lot of translators striving to up their game do, and even if they never comment, perhaps – like me – they’re squirreling away little nuggets of wisdom from the posts and the comments.
Hope my two cents have been useful to someone, somewhere. Good to hear this post has generated private chatter. Hope more people will speak up here.
Lakshmi
I was interested in Patricia’s remarks on mindset because I believe very strongly in the nuance she was seeking to point out.
Allow me to preface my comments by saying that I agree that there are many translators who do not have the required skills to move upmarket. I suspect, however, that most of them already know this about themselves. As for those who don’t, the market will tell them sooner or later.
However, there is a large group of intermediary translators who have never had the opportunity or been challenged to up their game in a meaningful way, but who are capable of it.
I see this in my own work environment. I have hired industry stars in the past who have walked in the door already able to perform among the best. But I have also hired junior translators who have shown a spark of genius or creativity, then sought to nurture their latent talent.
I remember a particular case when we had a slogan to translate. It was assigned to a junior translator, and to me as reviser. When the translator was finished and his suggestions came to me for approval, I was pretty disappointed with the result. But instead of trying to rework them myself, I went back to the translator with a copy of François Lavallée’s seminal work, Le traducteur averti, and asked him to read the chapter on slogans. I added, “When you’re finished, see if you have any other ideas for the slogan you might want to include with your first list.”
The list came back to me with about ten more suggestions, and let me tell you that that translator hit it out of the ballpark.
More recently, I was editing the work of a just-hired recruit fresh out of university. She is immensely talented in so many ways, but has yet to come up against the full range of writing styles she can encounter in our very busy office. On one particular job, things did not go well.
But something was amiss. I was finding sentence after sentence that just did not bear up to scrutiny, but they were not at all in keeping with her writing abilities. So I had a close look at the original French, and noticed how dense and abstract it all was, and how very difficult the text was to translate into English.
Again, instead of painstakingly redoing her work, I invited her into my office and went over a few sentences with her. We didn’t even look at the original French. All I did was read a few of her English sentences to her aloud and ask her what she thought of them. She said they were horrible. So we then discussed what the original author had meant to convey, and how we might say it in our own words. My instructions to her were this: “Go back through the text and see if you can find more sentences like these ones that could do with a facelift. Then make those changes and send the text back to me.”
Once again, the result was spectacular. What she needed was the CONFIDENCE and the PERMISSION to listen to her own inner ear and brush aside elements of the original text that were interfering with idiomatic translation. She needed to be told she was a good writer who was being distracted by French.
Many, many translators respond well to this type of mentoring and become authorities themselves. I have seen it happen over and over again.
So if people tell you that you have a pleasant writing style, that you are concise and understandable, that you strike the right tone, and that you have a good command of grammar and punctuation and vocabulary, but you also realize that your translations sound a bit stilted and unnatural, what you need is (probably several years of) practice under the skilled eye of a tutor. If you’ve got the will and determination, I guarantee you that it’s worth the effort.
Thanks for joining the conversation, Grant. Those are wonderful stories and examples, and you must have felt terrific being able to make such a difference in these young translators’ lives and careers.
In addition to, as you aptly pointed out, their needing confidence, permission and helpful orientation, these translators also had what I’ve been trying to explain is the right mindset. They *wanted* to learn and up their game, they took criticism constructively, did not behave defensively, and did not pass the buck (the GIGO, ‘good enough’ excuses we hear often).
Teachers can see that pretty early on in secondary school – the kids who, not necessarily born brilliant – end up achieving way beyond what one might expect because, as Dr. Carol Dwyer would put it, they have a “growth mindset” rather than a “fixed mindset”. Those with a growth mindset believe they can improve their knowledge and skills if they work at it and are persistent — and believing it means they will be motivated to give it their best shot. Not all will succeed of course in making it to the top of the heap, but those with a fixed mindet will never stretch beyond where they are.
The list order for me remains 1. mindet (required to be able to) 2. (boost) translation skills and 3. business skills 🙂
Thanks for those heartwarming stories Grant. As someone who’s own work has come on by leaps and bounds as a result of peer review (and the wisdom of one truly terrific mentor), I can only concur.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be part of a supportive set-up though. Most of us are out here in the jungle on our lonesome. If you feel that way, dear reader of this comment, see above. I wouldn’t have met the people I’ve learned from if I hadn’t gone out looking for them. (Still learning, obviously. That’s one of the fantastic things about this job).
Grant, you prefaced your comment with: “Most of them already know this about themselves. And if they don’t, the market will tell them sooner or later.”
I’d be interested to know how that squares up with Chris’s earlier comment – that clients don’t know what they’re getting. Or am I missing something?
Seems to me self-knowledge and a functioning moral compass, are, or should be, an intrinsic part of our skill set. Self-knowledge (as opposed to self-delusion), i.e. a proper idea, based on constructive outside input, of where you’re at and how far your particular translation skills can take you.
Patricia, I totally agree that a flexible mindset is necessary to improving skills. But the skills have to be there in the first place. So I’m sticking with my classification 🙂
On the other hand, I hope your comments and Grant’s on mindset will encourage some of the shyer people who have something to add to the discussion to speak up too. Corinne, thanks again for giving us all an opportunity to chime in.
Happy weekend everyone.
Lakshmi
(currently in between websites, but in case anyone’s wondering which bit of the woodwork I crawled out of: France-based French and Italian to English translator, dealing mostly in arty-farty texts in that vast and amorphous realm known as “culture”. Got one on the boil actually, so better skedaddle).
Me again. Can’t believe I left in “who’s” for “whose”. And it’s one of my pet peeves, too. Sorry!
Thanks everyone for your thoughtful, interesting and lively comments! I don’t generally respond to individual comments, not because I don’t find them thought-provoking, but because I feel like I said what I had to say when I wrote the post. But be assured that I do read every word of every comment that everyone posts, and I really appreciate what you have to say (even if it totally conflicts with what I have to say…that’s when things really get interesting!).
In response to your query, Lakshmi, when I say that the “market will tell them sooner or later,” I’m referring to the premium market, the clients who are willing to pay top dollar for top quality work. These clients have a keener ability to recognize good work and may in fact be translators themselves. And if they didn’t have the ability to spot good work, someone in their work environment will probably eventually tell them the translation work they are receiving is not good.
Thanks for taking the time to reply Grant. OK, I see what you mean.
Great post and comments, thanks to one and all.
I love the paragraph about “changing your mindset”. When I first started I thought the biggest obstacle to overcome was point 1 and 2 but in reality changing your mindset is much harder. The problem is working on your mindset while you are stuck in a low rate – while still in college it’s much easier to work on your mindset.
As insightful as always! Keep up the good work and I look forward to reading more of your articles.