Category: For Clients Needing Professional Translation

Professional translations are executed by human professionals. They are not the result of inputting a source text into a collection of software commands and having the result repaired by a hapless out-of-work translator. That is why we do not employ AI.

A few suggestions that might be useful

There are few survival paths for agency-dependent freelance translators who might survive the AI transformation that has demoted professional human translators to unrealistically low-paid AI repair workers.

One path is to work in-house. Because the agencies controlling most of the market and clients have very few translator employees relative to the volume of translation they purchase and resell, in-house employment will need to be sought at non-translation entities. That is not possible for some freelancers, conditions such as location presenting hurdles. There are, of course, many more hurdles to negotiate in obtaining an in-house position.

If you want to continue translating and are currently relying on work from agencies, just about the only other path is to start actively engaging in the business of translation and behaving like you’re in business. You will need to walk the walk if your goal is to break away from agencies and sell to direct translation clients.

Some of the things you should do first are trivially easy, others are difficult.

  • Stop using free email services for business. Things like Gmail are unprofessional and do not inspire trust. Quitting them is trivially easy.
  • Register your own domain—this will enable you to have your own business email address(es) and a website. This is easy to do and won’t be free, but you’re in business, and businesses have expenses.
  • Build your own online presence with your website. Where you need to be as a professional translator in business is not on a platform such as LinkedIn, with over a billion other users, where the clients you need will not find you. Building a website is not that difficult. One dumb way to do it is to buy a book about it and borrow the html code, after which you can learn to add and modify the site as appropriate. Then start learning about websites. For people not wanting to struggle with html and css, another method, if you can get over the ethical hurdles, is to ask an AI model like Claude to provide you the code for a website. It won’t have lots of bells and whistles and it won’t be very elegant, but you’ll have a website of sorts in no time. Because of the potential difficulty in adding material to your website, however, it’s best not to order a website from an entity that packages the site design with its hosting services, as some make it difficult to manage the site yourself, this leading many people to have essentially abandoned websites.
  • Once you have your website, grow it to demonstrate that you’re still active and can write things of substance, another way of saying don’t take the commonly seen approach of having a website that is no more than a CV and a plea for work.
  • Build a network of specific individuals (known as humans in real life) at entities you want as clients—that’s best done in real life, not just sitting in front of your computer. Online is not real life, and the chances of you reaching those individuals on LinkedIn or the like are extremely slim. Network building in real life is a much more difficult feat than the earlier items.
  • Turn your computer off and get out in the real world, where potential clients hang out. Interactions in those places, high-risk as they may seem, will be much more valuable than hanging out with colleague translators, be it online or in person.
  • If you haven’t yet done it, acquire field-specific expertise that can be convincing when interacting directly, including face-to-face, with a potential client who has that expertise. This must be to a level that is convincing when done in an environment in which you cannot use Google. Direct clients will find you out quickly if you try faking expertise.
  • If you are living in your B-language (source-language) country, acquire spoken ability in that language to a level that would be convincing in live conservations with natives of that language. This is not a given; Dunning-Kruger is not your friend, and this is a particularly critical deal-breaker for native English speakers trying to obtain Japanese clients here in Japan.

The last two items can require an investment in at least time and perhaps money as well.

Also, remember that, unlike the translation-brokerng agencies, you can’t lie about your abilities with impunity. Agencies can lie about their 1000s of experts, but you are alone, and your potential direct clients will discover that quickly; you won’t be able to hide.

Speaking of not hiding, disclose your physical address—not just your country—on your website.

Some of these things might seem unnecessary or be impossible for many freelancers. If that is the case, it might be better to abandon the idea of starting to operate and behave professionally. Without the professional infrastructure, skills, and behavior, it will be difficult to build trust with entities that are themselves operating as full members of their business communities.

Front-loaded Quality: Not much back then, and nothing much has changed.

In Japanese-to-English translation, the need to cut costs and the long-held folk beliefs by some native Japanese speakers have often taken precedence over the value of front-loading quality into the translation process.

Back in the late 1970s, most Japanese-to-English translation was done by native Japanese speakers (NJSs), with varying degrees of ability to translate and to write in usable English. There is strong evidence that the demographic makeup of at least the humans still translating remains largely the same, particularly when you consider in-house translators in Japanese entities.

Those translations were often then subjected to what was then (and even now, apparently) called a “native check,” which very often, particularly back then, was characterized as a “brush up” performed by a native English speaker (NES) who would sometimes not be Japanese-capable, making referring to the source text impossible and meaningless. The salient characteristic of this workflow was that frontloading of quality was not part of the translation process. Quick and cheap, followed by repair was the norm.

Numerous hapless foreigners were employed in such work in Japan, some were English teachers, others were recruited from among in-house foreigners working in Japanese companies, but who were not necessarily hired as translators or editors. They just had the misfortune to be standing around when a translation needed a “native check.”

As they became more numerous, NES translators started receiving more JA-EN translation work. There was still, however, a lingering uneasiness among many Japanese clients that a non-Japanese person couldn’t actually understand all the nuances of something written in Japanese. And could they really read the characters? I have been asked as much at translation conferences, even after it was clear that I am a JA-EN translator. One such encounter happened when I attended a translation gathering of the Japan Translation Federation as the head of Japan Association of Translators.

Perhaps more importantly as a business reality, however, NES translators were considerably more expensive than their NJS counterparts, so the process of making a rough translation and having it repaired continued for years. Again, front-loading of quality took a back seat to other concerns.

Decades went by and the number of NES translators who could convince clients of their capabilities gradually grew.

Enter machine translation, years before the AI hype. This gradually turned many translation opportunities for freelancers into opportunities to repair not poor translations done by an NJS human, but rather the output of an MT system, resulting in their earnings tanking even further, as translation consumers demanded cost cutting.

What is happening is that professional humans are being replaced in the translation process by collections of software commands with insufficiencies that are supposed to be fixed by professional humans, but at a fraction of the earnings that were possible when those humans were still being trusted to translate. Post-editing repair crews come to the rescue. Many translators are not eager to take on such work, but numerous translators have few other options, particularly ones in mid-career or later. And that is where freelance translation sits as I write this.

AI Translation: Uncaring Emulation of Human Behavior

Entities that create documents using a collection of software commands known as an AI should order translations of those documents from a “colleague AI.” Those documents deserve no less, and certainly no more.

Most entities, however, have sentient humans write things that need to be translated. Their translation deserves the skill and care that only human professionals can provide.

AI translation merely emulates a human—sometimes not very well—by emulating the behavior of a human. To do that, AI doesn’t need to understand anything, and it doesn’t understand anything; it just emulates understanding.

The most serious flaw of AI translation, however, is that, when dealing with human clients needing translation, it is not capable of caring.

Uncaring emulation. Don’t you and your documents deserve better?