Category: Personal Rambings

Lise, please don’t interpret this.

I was interpreting at a Japanese law firm one day in a meeting between my Japanese manufacturer client, their US attorney (also my client), and the Japanese manufacturer’s local Japanese attorney. It was a meeting regarding US litigation between the Japanese company and a European competitor of theirs in the US.

The meeting was going ostensibly well for about an hour, when suddenly the Japanese attorney turns to me, saying “Lise-san, please don’t interpret this.”

He then addresses his Japanese client and launches into:

“What’s happening here is that both you and the opposing party are being manipulated by your Jew attorneys, so …”

The term for Jew and Jewish in Japanese is yudaya, obviously fully understandable as a slur when used adjectivally before the word for attorney in either its English or Japanese form.

That aside, did the Japanese attorney stupidly think that, by telling me not to interpret, he would keep his antisemitism a secret from my client? Or did he just want to avoid annoying his US attorney at the moment while insulting him as he sat there?.

I needed to travel with the client after that meeting, but he was well aware of it already as we rode the elevator down to the ground floor.

I mentioned to him that, upon hearing this slur, I was toying with the idea of letting drop in the meeting that I am a Jew (although I am not), but discarded the idea, as I could imagine getting into an ugly and time-consuming debate with the jerk about his lack of civility and common sense about what is and is not proper behavior in a business meeting.

I am happy to say that this Japanese attorney was never my client, and that the US attorney remained my client after that.

There are reasons not to boast about your terminology research ability.

I sometimes hear freelance translators complaining about AI, saying that it just spits up poor translations quickly and cheaply, whereas they, being professional translators, can do things like “terminology research.” This ability is also sometimes cited as a justification for taking higher rates.

This makes me wonder about the nature of (and reasons for) this terminology research. I also wonder whether it is something to brag about, or rather something that is best kept hidden, at least from potential direct clients, a client demographic that—as AI-using translation-brokering agencies move away from purchasing the services of professional translators—might allow some translators to buy some time.

If you have one or more fields of specialization and competence, you should need to do little research when translating in those fields. There is, however, a long-standing resistance by some translators to specialization, perhaps because it is feared that specialization will result in an insufficient amount of work.

It could also be that people believe that they can Google their way out of problems caused by unfamiliarity with the subject matter they have been asked to translate. That view is probably comforting to translators who have neither true field-specific expertise nor clients that can provide enough translation work in a small number of fields in which they could achieve a level of understanding that goes beyond Googling terminology.

What message does boasting about terminology researching send to a client?

If your main clients are translation-brokering agencies, regardless of how they position themselves—for example, as “global providers of language solutions” or some other bloated characterization—you are probably not dealing with somebody at the agency who has much field-specific knowledge. They tell their clients that they have expert translators in any and every field, then purchase translations from freelancers and hope for the best. The client is comforted by being able to tell themselves that their documents are in the hands of experts, the actual expertise of which they are, of course, not provided the opportunity to verify beforehand. Translation tests are not reliable tests of actual understanding.

But if you need to deal with direct clients, you will most likely be directly interacting with people who might wonder about your abilities.

Why do you need to do terminology research, the client might wonder? Is it that the work they need done is beyond your scope of knowledge and understanding? If you need to meet and interface directly with those clients—something very likely with direct clients, particularly Japanese clients for JA-EN translations—they will be able to discover the answer to that question very quickly.

Unlike “project managers,” the people you need to deal with at direct clients are experts in the things they need you to translate. If you don’t have expert knowledge and understanding of the subject matter, the relationship will probably be difficult to establish, and you could be facing a series of gently slammed doors as you ply your translation wares among the direct client demographic.

The “Value” of Agencies

The above situation underscores the problematical value of a broker between translators and translation consumers. The brokers are free to lie about the expertise of “their translators” (although very few actually “have” any translators) and hope for the best in being able to purchase translations for their clients, even using less-than-expert translators who will do their best to “research” their way out of problems caused by insufficient domain-specific knowledge.

What are the outcomes?

It often works, precisely because there is an intermediate broker, which might not provide added value beyond acting as what could be called a distress buffer. The translator is saved from a trial-by-expertise that would happen when facing a translation consumer (direct client), and the client is allowed to tell themselves that an expert is doing their translations.

As most translation-brokering agencies move closer to not having to purchase translation services from professionals, however, the protective brokering arrangement will shortly become a thing of the past, and that change is already well underway.

Agencies will use mostly machine translation, with or without the requisite buzzword AI, and translators hoping to survive will need to face and acquire non-AI using clients. Since that will mean mostly direct clients, the domain-specific knowledge hurdles faced by a translator will grow dramatically, leaving many translators out in the cold and, ironically, perhaps looking back fondly on those brokers who would do their lying for them.

The Outlook for an Endangered Species

Executive Summary: Japanese-to-English translation work is ending for almost all freelance translators, and working translators are not the only people who need to be concerned.

Many working professional JA-to-EN translators are accustomed to getting work from agencies and are seeing their translation work shrinking or disappearing with the appearance of much cheaper MT/AI solutions that are good enough for translation-brokering agencies and good enough for the agencies’ clients.

Some freelancers are clinging to hopes that AI will fail so badly that their work will return. I would urge such translators to do some more thinking, removing themselves from like-minded optimists and focusing on the real world outside of their echo chambers.

But it’s not just working freelancers who are going to be affected by the ongoing replacement of carbon-based professionals by computer code running in silicon-based hardware. There are also the people currently studying or thinking about studying Japanese with the hope to make translation a career.

I could be kind and say that the outlook for students learning Japanese is not bright, but such kindness won’t help them. The more precise truth is that the outlook is nearly hopeless for all but a tiny number of people currently learning Japanese with hopes of earning a living by translating. If their goal is a career translating for a living, they are learning Japanese several decades too late.

There are certainly good reasons to learn Japanese, but earning a living translating is no longer alone a justifiable reason for investing the time and expending the considerable effort required to join the rapidly shrinking ranks of professional translators able to earn a living translating.

Freelance translating has gone the way of John Cleese’s parrot; it is an ex-career for all but a very small number of potential translators. Japanese ability can be a useful addition to some other, solid specialization or qualification that could stand alone as sufficient to build a career on without Japanese ability. Japanese ability alone is not going to be that useful.

The ranks of newbies entering translation and some translators’ organizations appear to be shifting their interests to entertainment translation. There are, however, several pieces of bad news for people interested in things such as anime and game translation.

  • The entertainment-related translation business is not immune to AI transformation. That has already started, and you can hear translators already moaning about it online.
  • Those entertainment-related fields are very small compared to the demand for fields such as business/finance, technical/industrial, patent, and legal, which are being taken over by AI.
  • Because of the popularity of entertainment content, competition has been fierce, making rates very low, relative to rates formerly common in the fields that are being largely taken over by AI.
  • Competition for entertainment translation work will heat up even further as many more mainstream-field translators try to shift fields to survive.

Given the above, things like anime and game translation are not promising as a lucrative field for beginning translators, nor are they safe havens for out-of-work people from other translation fields.

Regardless of what field you are in, it’s ending, the only difference being the possibility of a buying time if you can acquire clients that don’t use AI. If we are talking about Japanese-to-English translation, that essentially means direct clients, meaning it is ending for almost all freelancers, for reasons that should be easy to understand.

Both educational institutions and translators’ organizations (e.g., Japan Association of Translators and ATA) must work up the courage to recognize what is happening and appropriately and honestly counsel their students and members, respectively. To do anything else is simply self-serving and irresponsible.

Don’t interpret, just translate.

I was interpreting one day in a deposition in the US Embassy and needed to make a comment on the record about why I had interpreted a certain term in English the way I did. Everyone appeared to understand and agree with the comment, but one of the attorneys piped up to say “Please don’t interpret, just translate.”

Both the interpreters in the room had to hold back from laughing. The attorney was demonstrating one of the reasons people outside the interpreting/translation tent often confuse the terms and call an interpreter a translator. I have often corrected people when they get these terms wrong, but I think we translators and interpreters (and the rare individuals do both translation and interpreting between JA and EN) might consider admitting defeat in the interpreter/translator battle.

It’s just a translator.

Some years ago I was interpreting in depositions at the US Consulate in Osaka. It happened that the opposing side’s interpreter, who would be interpreting for the attorney examining the deponent, was engaged rather suddenly and was not yet on the list of persons to be allowed into the Consulate. He was being made to wait on the first floor while they tried to work through the administrative problems to let him in.

Since the deposition couldn’t proceed without a lead interpreter (I was the check interpreter), we took a break. In the waiting area outside the deposition room, the deposition-taking attorney was at a window discussing the problem.

“Is it an attorney downstairs waiting to enter?” a Consulate official asked him.

“No, it’s just a translator (sic)” was the reply, referring to the interpreter.

The mistake of characterizing an interpreter as a translator aside, this makes me wonder how the attorney intended to examine the Japanese deponent if the person who is “just a translator” was stuck downstairs, waiting among huddled masses of visa applicants (mostly Brazilians that day, as I recall), yearning to breath free or whatever they intended to do in the US.

The interpreter in question is well-known and had spent many more years perfecting his professional skills than did the youngish above-noted attorney.