Month: April 2024

Who gets to decide how good is good enough in translation?

Online interaction between freelance translators is filled lately with comments to the effect that translations created using AI are not good enough. Assertions are made that grave things will happen if AI is allowed to translate. Further assertions are made that clients will come back to “us” (to whom, I wonder?) when they realize the problems. And some translators posit that loss of lives and grave legal consequences will follow if AI is used to translate medical texts or documentation for machinery that could be dangerous if operated incorrectly.

All of these comments serve the very good purpose of what I call—borrowing from my NY upbringing—kvetch-bonding (wound-licking also comes to mind), between translators who feel they are being attacked on all sides by the migration of agencies to using AI to replace professional translators.

But most of the comments ignore the reality that the translation the kvetchers have been making their living from is, before—and, yes, even above—concerns over quality, a business, and people pursuing that business and their paying clients (translation consumers) get to decide whether a translation is good enough.

The subtext here is that most translators are not pursuing translation as a business, but have for decades—and to an increasing degree lately—been participating in what has been more recently been characterized as a gig-work economy.

The agencies have denied translators their agency in determining how they work. Requiring the use of specific software products and the use of hamster wheel translation platforms are good examples of this. Reverse auctions where translators bid jobs down are another. Of course, complicity on the part of freelance translators is a necessary element in making this gig-work economy function, and function it does.

Ultimately, as has been the case for as long as I can remember, the balance between cost and quality will be evaluated by and will inform business decisions by people in the translation business and their paying clients. The volume of translation work given to professional translators has significantly dropped precisely because significant numbers of clients are willing to bear the risks of lower quality if it is accompanied by a much lower cost.

No amount of complaining by freelance translators is going to change that. And the level of complaining among translators themseves, who cannot change things, reminds me of that old Chuck Berry song. Translators need to stop playing with their own ding-a-ling and interact with the people who can make a difference and who are making decisions about how good is good enough for them.

Translators will not be successful at moving agencies already heavily invested in efforts to eliminate professionals. That points clearly to clients who pay for and consume translations.

As a translator, your marching orders are clear. Can you hear the drums? Or are you playing with your…

Predictions: Premature, Wrong, and Spot-on

Over the years I have seen predictions come and go. Some go quietly when it is clear they are wrong, while others hang on, particularly if the predictor has a vested interest in having people believe the prediction, at least for a short time. Let’s take a look at a few.

More than a decade ago, MT reared its hopeful head, promising to make quick work of the annoyingly expensive process of translating one natural language to another. And it would do it at a fraction of the cost then incurred for what some thought was a necessary, but too-expensive evil.

At the time, most translators scoffed at the notion of an MT takeover, but more than a few translators were somewhat alarmed. A non-translator friend of mine asked me if I wouldn’t shortly be out of work, as computers were taking over.

Well, that prediction was a quite premature, but it appears that the introduction of AI is combining with not only a long-standing distaste for spending money for translations but also the realization that the good-enough paradigm is largely valid. The result has presented a very real existential crisis for many translators. The prediction was quite premature back then, but it has turned out to be correct.

Switching from the sublime to the ridiculous, we have the recent promise of flying cars, like something revived from Popular Science articles in the 1950s. This time, however, there are working models. But the catch is that flying cars are aircraft, with inevitable regulatory and safety requirements that will sink this dream before flying car startups go into production.

The chances are microscopically small of us seeing the skies over highways (or over anywhere, realistically) blackened by flying cars, piloted (or unpiloted), carrying passengers to their destinations without having to deal with traffic congestion down below. I think it is a safe bet that, for all intents and purposes, the flying car hype doesn’t amount much to more than showcasing of technology. A proof of concept does not mean proof of acceptance by a society and its regulators.

Turning back to languages, I ran across a book about writing systems today (Andrew Robinson, The Story of Writing, Thames & Hudson 1995) that I bought more than a decade ago at the British Museum. My motive was to learn about various writing systems that have evolved throughout the ages, and I was interested to see some of the things the author had to say about the Japanese writing system.

He effectively and correctly disabused readers of the commonly heard mistaken notion that kanji are ideograms that represent ideas and more properly characterized them as logograms, which represent words.

Then I encountered a section in which the author posits that kanji are on their way out.

It looks likely that the need for computerization must one day lead to the abandonment of kanji in electronic data processing, if not in other areas of Japanese life.

Written, as amazing as it seems, in 1995, this was clearly off the mark. I guess the author was a bit prescience-challenged. It is a shame that the author fell into this trap, particularly only a few pages after he correctly explained the large number of homophones in Japanese as the reason the Japanese are not able to easily abandon kanji. What, I wonder, would an AI system do with texts written only in kana phonetics? Something quite comical (or tragic), I would imagine.

Predications will continue, including those that are premature, wrong, and spot-on. Which they are only time will tell.

Feel-good, deceptive language in the translation business, Part II: Collaboration

Perhaps some translators feel good thinking that they are collaborating with the translation brokers they depend on for work.

Translators are not collaborating with translation brokers. The term collaborate implies that both sides are contributing. Most translation is sold by translation brokers that are incapable of becoming involving in the translation process, beyond purchasing a translation from a translator and reselling it to a client. Even when a translation broker performs some intermediate processing on the translation they purchase before reselling it, that processing is usually also a service that they outsource (purchase) and resell as part of the translation. There is no collaboration in sight.

Translators sell translations to translation brokers. They are no more collaborating with translation brokers than a chicken owned by a chicken farmer is collaborating with the farmer when the farmer takes an egg from them and throws them some chickenfeed.

Feel-good, deceptive language in the translation business, Part I: Linguist

When did translators get “elevated” to the position of linguist? Was it around the time toilet paper became bathroom tissue? Or when problems became issues?

The timing of this mischaracterization aside, the inappropriate use of the term linguist to refer to translators has taken hold, and even some translators have embraced the term, although the usage is almost always wrong, regardless of which definition we chose to use to defend the usage. Let’s take a look at the definitions.

(1) : a person accomplished in languages

especially : one who speaks several languages

(2) : a person who specializes in linguistics

Regarding definition (1), yes translators should be accomplished in at least two languages, although just speaking two languages won’t suffice. Being accomplished in two languages does not mean you are a translator or are capable of being a translator. Being a professional translator requires a number of skills and areas of areas entirely unrelated to being a linguist.

Definition (2) is even more distant from reality. I know many translators and can name only a handful who could or would lay claim to being specialized in linguistics, an academic field devoted to study of human speech including the units, nature, and language, these aspects of language not being necessary or sufficient tools for success as a translator.

Years of studying linguistics will not qualify someone to be a translator. There is some small overlap between linguists and translators, but it is small, and becomes very tiny when we compare the population of linguists with that of translators of commercially important texts. John McWhorter is a linguist; almost none of my capable translator colleagues are linguists.

But if translators enjoy being mischaracterized as linguistics, they will be able to continue to enjoy, because translation brokers continue to mischaracterize them, perhaps thinking that it makes translators feel good (perhaps some do) and perhaps thinking that it makes their clients feel good about the elevated academics doing their translations (i.e., selling translations to the broker), although the purchase-resale transaction is not apparent to many clients, many of whom surely think that the company they purchase translations from actually does the translations.

There is nothing wrong with characterizing translators as being translators, and translators should strive to educate clients regarding just what professional translators are capable of doing and why they don’t need the title of linguist to do it.

Part II will deal with another deception in the translation business, that of collaboration.

With a few lifeboats still available, too many translators are both cursing and holding onto a sinking ship.

Numerous translators are actively discussing in various online venues the problems with AI translation and are saying that clients will come back to them when they discover the problems of AI. Although these discussions provide opportunities for bonding among colleagues, they serve no other identifiable purpose, and they certainly do nothing to impede the obvious headlong race into a world in which translation is viewed as a commodity by both translation brokers and their translation-consuming clients.

The underlying, persistent reality is that translation is a business.

The amount of money translation brokers have needed to pay translations they purchase for resale has been a constant profit-diluting annoyance to the LSB (language service broker) community. In response, brokers have employed numerous devices over the years to lower their translation purchase price. One device is the mandatory use of broker-specified CAT tools, with an accompanying discounting of rates that can be received by translators. Another is forcing translators to work on hamster-wheel online translation platforms in order to receive work.

But now the brokers on which most translators depend have a new way to lower (or almost eliminate) the cost of obtaining translations to sell, this being the elimination of professional translators from the translation process step.

And there is abundant evidence that they are succeeding at doing just that.

One reason for the brokers’ success is that the good-enough paradigm has been widely adopted and is working for a huge portion of the translation market.

Another reason is more serious for freelance translators and needs to be recognized by translators wishing to survive:

Brokers conduct themselves based on the correct understanding that very few translators from which they purchase translations can compete with them in acquiring direct clients themselves. Most translators don’t even know who their potential direct clients are. And, even if they do know, they generally don’t know who to approach at those clients or how to approach them. Many, for a variety of reasons, do not have the ability to access potential direct clients.

The adoption of AI by brokers succeeds largely by the monetization of their control of customers, combined with the inability of most translators to compete with brokers. It succeeds because good enough is good enough and, more critically, because most translators are trapped, with little ability to compete with brokers and no alternative income-earning path.

To survive by translating for earnings anywhere near what they previously could expect to earn, translators will need to acquire direct clients. For most translators, that will not be possible.

That is where broker-dependent freelance translators are, and it is essentially the end of the road for most translators wishing to pursue translation as a way to earn a living.