When the going gets tough… - A call to translators and other freelancers to join associations

 

In November and December, many professional associations, including those of translators, begin their annual membership campaigns. In recent years, the results have been disheartening to one degree or another. At least among translators, fewer and fewer freelancers choose to join even their national association, let alone a foreign-based organization. The reasons for this decline are both technical, economic and social. Yet, joining a national professional association is, in fact, a way to address those economic and social issues as well as to maintain creativity in the long term. All freelancers should seek that connection for both their personal benefit and the collective good.

Membership in professional associations is declining in most fields due to changes in technology, economy and social structure. AI is the mammoth in the China shop, reshaping the entire landscape of how businesses, big and small, work. Clearly, most freelance translators do not have a high degree of certainty about their own future or the future of the profession in 5-10 years. At the same time, rates continue to decline or remain static while many translators are experiencing a decrease in volume, a deadly combination. Paying association fees seems an ill-justified luxury. On a more general scale, many younger professionals grew up with the Internet and consider it their community, convenient and undemanding. The time and energy demands of physical participation, even by Zoom, feel uncomfortable. It is far easier and often more than sufficient in the short term to use one’s Internet persona and make connections. Thus, many newer and even not-so-new translators choose to avoid professional membership.

However, conversely, joining a professional association is an effective response to those issues. First, as nobody seems to understand exactly when and how to use AI, learning from the experience of others in the same position provides a wide-angle and more comprehensive picture of the situation at any given time. A word to the wise is sufficient. Furthermore, even more than ever, associations bring work. More and more buyers, struggling to identify worthy service suppliers in the chaos of the Internet, consult professional associations, seeking some kind of certification or recognition to help them in their choice of supplier. Personally, most of my new customers have found me on association lists. Furthermore, the official recognition allows freelancers to charge higher rates, increasing income. No less importantly, in the long term, the major challenge for any freelancer is to maintain enthusiasm and flexibility. Even if a participant at a conference technically learns nothing new, they leave the event with renewed energy, the result of being around so many talented people. Thus, professional associations actually help freelancers deal with technology, find customers and grow professionally.

Therefore, I believe that when the going gets tough, the tough get joining, gathering the strength, business and knowledge in uncertain times. There is strength and synergy in numbers.  I strongly recommend joining relevant associations at all levels, local, national and foreign, and physically participating in their events.

Executive order

Words can sound good or bad not just in the sense of their auditory quality but also in their associational impact. By the latter I mean the emotional feeling created by that word, or at least one meaning of the word.  Of course, most words are neutral in themselves but life experiences shade the word. For example, a book is stack of papers bound together but a person’s experience may make render the association either positive, a wonderful tranquil experience, or negative, the objects that made my life at school miserable.  In some cases, even without first experience, the mere picturing of the word creates negative impressions. For instance, almost none of us have witnessed an amputation but the image of saw and lots of blood makes the process rather scary and unpleasant.

An interesting example of the associational complexity is the word execute.  For the average person, this word brings up the image of person standing against the wall or sitting in an electric chair, reinforced by repeated images in movies and TV documentaries (Woody Allen’s Love and Death and The Green Mile immediately come to mind). Even the most unsophisticated understand that execution is a once in a lifetime experience of a particularly bad type. Thus, execution has gotten itself a bad name.

Law has reinforced this attitude, at least for some people.  To execute a judgment means to carry it out, as in placing a lien on a bank account or repossessing a car or house.  For the recipient, it is clearly a traumatic experience even if not entirely unexpected at the time. Combined with the word’s first context, execution of a court order sounds like a death sentence.  For that reason, in England and the United States but not France, it is called enforcement. As Hannah Arendt explained in With Eichmann in Jerusalem, it was psychologically much easier to carry out the final settlement than murder.

Curiously, if the context is clear enough and other words are added, execution becomes much more palatable: Sports teams must execute the coach’s plan to succeed; it is the job of the President to execute the law; all persons are entitled to execute their right of attorney.  Most people do not grimace when hearing such phrases since death is far from their thoughts when hearing them.

So, alas, a rose is not always a rose; sometimes it is a thorn bush either due to a bee sting or possibly an allergy to roses. The why of our emotional associations to words is complex but nobody can deny their existence.