Translating instability

I have been a freelance translator for 15 years and have learned one thing about the business: it is dynamic. Specifically, the complex base through which translators ply their trade is in constant change, forcing us to try to understand and adjust to the best of our ability. These changes are reflected in four different areas, at least, that affect our livelihood for better or for worse.

Technology is a major cause of change. Computer-aided translation (CAT tools) utilities with their attendant term memories (TM) have been disputed and implemented for over a decade but have irrevocably changed the manner of translation and project management. Simply put, translator agencies in many cases expect translators to use these tools and accordingly produce more. While there are areas in which TM’s are much less practical, CAT tool use is now a norm.

More recently, neural translation (NT), a form of machine translation (not Google Translate), has shaken up the market. Without getting in the details of how it works, NT can produce understandable text from tens of thousands of pages at significantly less cost and time than human translation in certain cases. Depending on the area, the text may be far from Shakespeare but in many cases the reader will have no issue comprehending it. This automated translation is acquiring an ever-increasing market share and squeezing out certain translation sectors. On the other hand, it is creating a huge market for people to edit the NT output to make it readable. Given the fast pace of improvement of NT, it is hard to predict which niches will be available for translators in five years.

At the same time, the business structure of translation is rapidly changing due to agglomeration and public stock offering.  Once an industry based on small, local agencies, more and more large international business agencies are being created through purchases and mergers. To finance these moves, these large companies are going public, effectively transferring their ownership to the public. The impact of these two trends is to lower translation rates due to the reduction of competition and greater market knowledge of the large agencies on one hand and the need to produce profit to the shareholders on the other hand. To paraphrase Ralf Lemster, a leading German financial translator, we need to either master the technology to increase productivity or hone a specialty to attain high rates.  The middle ground is rapidly shrinking.

In the background of the transformations are local legal developments. For example, changes in patent law eliminated the need for translation of certain documents. By contrast, EU regulations have created a vast need for translation in previous small markets, such as Czech or Gaelic. Likewise, regional or national certification modifications ease or render difficult entry into these markets, affecting the rates. Various ISO and European standards have increased the need for proofreaders. The legal background is truly a wild card for a translator.

A slower but no less powerful force is the ebb and flow of a language itself. Translation into English is one of the few stable markets as few changes have occurred in the demand for documents in that language in the last decade. However, the use of some languages has increased due to economic development, such as Chinese and Korean, while others have declined, such as French. That said, regardless of how small the segment, the demand for transcreation, the localization of a source text into a seamless local version, is increasing and providing good rates for more creative translators of all minor languages.

To be clear, these changes are neither to the complete benefit or detriment of the translator. They both reduce and create opportunities. For example, while the market for translating contracts has definitely shrunk, the demand for editors and transcreators has increased exponentially. The challenge we face is to match our talents, both current and potential, to the opportunities at hand. This effort requires constant, active testing of the market to ascertain what the current situation is, not a simple task in the “fog of war” world of freelancing. “Plus ça change, plus ça reste la mēme chose” does not apply here because the only true constant in business (and life) is change even if we are unaware of the scope of its forces.