Training for Translators

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Translation industry news


Corinne McKay

News from the ATA TCD Conference

The American Translators Association Translation Company Division held its 9th annual conference in Denver this past weekend. This was a high-quality conference, even for those of us who are technically freelancers and not translation companies; the presentations were very well done and it was a good chance to get an agency’s-eye view of the industry.
I attended sessions on machine translation, international payments, creating a motivating workplace, online communication tools, workflow management software, organizational constraints, and the current state of the TenT (translation environment tool) market.

I came away from this conference with a few (admittedly unscientific) observations:

  • Agencies are frustrated with the current state of the translation software market and are ready (and I mean ready) for some alternatives to the major players. During Jost Zetzsche’s presentation “The Technological Vice Grip: Is it No Way or the Giant’s Way,” audience hostility toward the market leader translation software companies was a major topic. A few agency owners in the audience had invested heavily in Idiom WorldServer just months before Idiom was acquired by SDL, and one even commented that agencies “…are concerned that some of the independent companies may not be viable, but that if they become more viable, they’ll be bought up.” In his presentation, Jost stressed that open source and open standards are the most reliable form of protection against investing in software that either becomes orphaned or is acquired by a competitor. For example at present, none of the market leader TenT companies has signed on to the XLIFF standard that allows the exchange of bilingual files between tools.It seems that agency owners are in a bind when it comes to translation software. The biggest agencies either develop their own tools in-house or purchase a software company and the smallest agencies don’t use translation software at the enterprise level at all, which leaves the medium-sized agencies out in the cold, feeling that they have to choose between having their technological trajectory dictated by a large software company or gambling on a smaller independent company that may or may not still be independent/in business next year. It will be interesting to see if any of these medium-sized agencies invest in their own open source or open standards tools, coming up with funding either individually or as a group.
  • The market is going better for freelancers than for agencies. Again, this is just my gut feeling, but nearly every freelancer I talk to says “I’ve never been busier…I keep raising my rates and I still have more work than I want.” In contrast, I got the feeling that many of the agency owners at the conference are concerned not so much about work volume but about profits, and that agencies maybe cannot make pricing decisions as impulsively as a freelancer can. In addition, I think that many U.S.-based agencies that have traditionally depended on translators in other countries are being hit hard by the falling dollar. Here again, many U.S.-based freelancers are benefiting from the exchange rate situation by seeking new clients abroad, which is a more difficult proposition for agencies.
  • Agencies seem to be taking a new look at the possibility of employing in-house translators. I talked to several agency owners who feel that in language combinations where the agency has large volumes of work, in-house translators can improve customer satisfaction, translation quality and the agency’s bottom line. Some reasons for this? In-house translators can turn around small rush projects very quickly; in-house translators save project management time because they’re right there in the agency’s office; in-house translators allow agencies to respond more quickly to requests for pricing and turnaround time; a preferred client can be given access to their preferred translator again and again, and because in-house translators are on salary, the agency can more easily forecast its costs. Clearly there are downsides too: agencies are under ongoing obligations to in-house translators in a way that they aren’t to freelancers, and unless the in-house translators are highly experienced in a variety of fields (which might price them out of an agency’s salary range), they might not cover all of the specializations that an agency needs. This is another interesting phenomenon that is worth following throughout the second half of the year!


Corinne McKay

An April Fool from Trados?

Although Taco Bell garnered an estimated $1 million in additional revenue from its April Fool’s Day Taco Liberty Bell joke in 1996, I’m guessing translators may be a little less amused by Trados’ announcement that it will discontinue upgrades for Trados 6.5 and earlier and SDLX 2004 and earlier on April 1. Thanks to sleuth Jill Sommer for pointing this out. We’ll see if Trados takes Taco Bell’s “just kidding” approach once the word spreads, or stands by its current policy.


Corinne McKay

Juvenes Translatores

School outreach, the idea of getting high school students and even younger children interested in and informed about translation, seems to be picking up speed as the current generation of translators reaches out to the next. Today, 27 teenagers, one from each EU member state, will be in Brussels receiving their awards as winners of the first Juvenes Translatores (Latin for “young translators”) contest. At the risk of sounding overly casual, I have to say, how cool is that?

In reading the press release about this contest, a few aspects of it struck me as particularly intriguing. First, over 1,300 17 year-olds from across the EU participated in this contest, in which they had two hours to translate a text about sustainable tourism into one of the EU official languages. Thinking back on my own foreign language skills as a high school senior, I find it very inspirational that over 1,000 European teenagers are even capable of doing this type of test. You can read the passage on the Juvenes Translatores website, and it’s not simple!

Second, the Directorate-General of Translation used this contest as an opportunity to highlight not only the work of the young adults who participated, but also that of its own professional translators who evaluated the students’ translations and picked the winners. Leonard Orban, the European Commissioner for Multilingualism, remarked that “These young people have shown that they are the actors of their own and of the EU’s future. They have built bridges between cultures while assembling words for their translation. I am also proud that the work of our translators, often invisible but indispensable to the EU, is in the limelight today.” This contest struck me as one of those win-win PR/education/outreach events that benefits everyone involved; as part of their prize package, the student winners get to travel to Brussels for the awards ceremony and to visit the Directorate-General of Translation, where they will see the DG’s team of professional translators in action.

School outreach is happening on this side of the Atlantic too; The American Translators Association’s School Outreach Program even supplies all of the materials that ATA members need to give a presentation about careers in translation at their local schools. As the School Outreach Program’s web page says, “The linguists-to-be in America’s classrooms today are sitting next to a whole lot of clients-to-be. The more these future doctors, lawyers, and businesswomen know about our field, the more likely they’ll be to appreciate the importance and complexity of our work and compensate us accordingly.”


Corinne McKay

The new ATA compensation survey: some interesting statistics

The current issue of the American Translators Association‘s Chronicle includes an article on the results of the most recent ATA compensation survey, which uses data gathered for the year 2006. The survey is interesting enough that I’m thinking of purchasing the full report ($45 for ATA members, $65 for nonmembers), but even the summary that appears in the Chronicle contains some really useful information.

When taking a look at the results, it’s important to remember that this represents a very compartmentalized snapshot of the translation profession; 979 out of 8,700 people who received the survey responded (ATA’s current membership is about 10,000) and the ATA is certainly not representative of all working translators, even within the U.S.

That being said, I found that some of the statistics corroborated my own theories about trends in the industry, while others really surprised me. For example, my own hunch about the level of education required to enter the translation industry turned out to be correct: only about 7% of the survey’s respondents have less than a Bachelor’s degree (so much for Parade magazine’s touting translation as a “no college degree required” profession!) and over half have a Master’s or higher.

I was surprised by how much the average full-time freelancer’s income has risen (to slightly over $60,000, a figure that I think is quite achievable by translators who have excellent language skills and are willing to market aggressively), but also by the fact that translation company owners earn an average of slightly over $67,000, which seemed low to me when offset by the added responsibility and constraints of running an agency.

The highest and lowest-paid language combinations were also interesting; English>Arabic and English>Danish topped the list, while English>Italian and English>Portuguese came in last when ranked by per-word rate, and Chinese>English and English>Chinese commanded the highest hourly rates.

In addition to the yearly average earnings that the compensation survey cites, I would be interested to know how those earnings break down in terms of the hours that the individual works each year. For example, when looking at the average earnings of full-time in house and freelance translators (approximately equal, with in-house translators earning a little below 60K and freelancers a little above 60K), my assumption is often that the in-house translator has to work more hours for essentially the same money. Admittedly, this is based on my own tendency to take at least four completely work-free weeks of vacation each year and at least two additional weeks where I might work a couple of hours a day. In addition, my average work week is probably closer to 30 hours rather than the 45 or 50 that most in-house employees are probably working.

However, it’s likely that many freelancers work that much, say 2,000 hours a year or more, which then  makes the in-house and freelance earnings figures much more comparable. It’s an interesting topic, and I’m looking forward to learning more from the full report.