There are numerous aspects to our lives as translators that are unknown to, generally unknowable by, and potentially surprising to fellow translators. We each essentially live in a silo-built-for-one that we create for ourselves and we do not necessary do things and experience things as others do. Here are just a few things found in my silo-for-one.
I am entirely self-taught in Japanese. That is the case with some of my contemporaries, but appears to have become less common in the years following my entry into translation. I have never sat in a classroom to learn Japanese, but I have been resident here in Japan for 49-plus years this time around, the first several years managing the Japan operation of a US company.
With foreign language departments and schools shutting down lately, however, autodidact JA-EN translators might become more common, perhaps among the Japan enthusiasts wanting to translate anime and games, although the overall number of professional JA-EN translators who still actually translate—regardless of their Japanese learning method—is clearly shrinking.
My degree and my first two jobs after the US Navy (where I was a Russian specialist back in the 1960s—I have written a bit about that elsewhere) were relevant to my degree in electrical engineering and had nothing to with language or translation, although the second of those two jobs had Japanese ability as a hiring condition.
I have worked through intermediaries about 10 times in the last 48 years. That’s an average of about once every five years. Even on those occasions, however, only one time was it an intermediary I didn’t personally know, usually through face-to-face interactions in the real world. My clients are manufacturers and other corporations, law firms, and an occasional government agency or individual.
I have never been registered on a click-work job platform or reverse auction such as ProZ. This should need no explanation, given my client demographic, which doesn’t hang out in such places.
I have never used, nor have I ever been asked to use CAT. This might shock some CAT-using translators, who might wonder how that could be possible. Isn’t use of CAT a give? No, actually.
My non-use of CAT is simply the natural result of not working through translation agencies. Not once have my direct clients even mentioned CAT to me, let alone forced me to use CAT or grant discounts for repetitions. Most probably don’t know what CAT is, because they are not in the translation-brokering business. I have no “segments” to think about, no trouble converting PDF or other non-native files to CAT-readable formats, no purchases of CAT products to pay for, and no other CAT management operating overhead that lowers earnings.
CAT and the associated fuzzy-match discounts were introduced to—and forced on—freelance translators year ago by translation-brokering agencies as a method of reducing their translation purchase price. Upon the introduction of CAT by agencies, some freelancers rationalized its use, even while realizing that they were using CAT mostly because it is a condition for getting work from many agencies.
To be fair, given a useful and intelligently created and maintained translation memory and source documents with sufficient repetition, CAT might be useful for some translators, but the commonly heard rationalizations about why translators use CAT should be discarded in favor of more honesty, and I have also heard complaints from freelancers about the poor quality of TMs they are forced to use. The translator’s judgment, not an agency-mandated TM, should take preference, but a project manager often (usually, I would think) doesn’t have the ability to get involved in such decisions in an informed manner; it’s easier to just demand adherence to their TM, and most agency-dependent translators appear willing to give in.
As a sidenote, I once heard a JA-EN translator on an online forum rationalize and defend his use of CAT by saying that he couldn’t be bothered to look up kanji characters all the time. I wonder if he realized what that revealed about his Japanese reading ability.
I translate the “old-fashioned” way. Surprise, surprise. I sit in front of my computer with the source-language (JA) document usually displayed on one side of a large screen and create the target-language (EN) document on the other side. No CAT is—or needs to be—involved.
When doing subject matter that I am familiar with—this is almost always the case, since I don’t like doing things I am not good at—I can sometimes produce up to 1000 words/hour of rough translation. That’s more than sufficient. If I were to use voice recognition, I could do more, but I don’t need that speed.
I have never logged onto a client’s “translation portal.” This also, of course, is because I don’t work for agencies. My clients are not in the translation business and none that I know of has anything like a translation portal, which appears to be an agency-monitored hamster-wheel arrangement, from what I have heard from freelancers who are made to run races on such wheels.
I seldom do “terminology research.” I have heard freelancers boast of their expertise in doing “terminology research,” apparently in an effort to distinguish themselves from other, less-capable translators or AI.
If you translate for any length of time in a field and are successful at it, you should have enough knowledge of the terminology used in that field that Googling for terms is pretty much obviated.
Direct clients, hearing that you do “terminology research,” might wonder why, since they, of course, don’t need to do such terminology research. Your mileage with clueless agency project managers might vary.
If you come to translation with knowledge of or a degree in only language and translation, you are at serious disadvantage, as very little translation is “about” language and translation, but is rather about “something else” and that something else is what you need to understand deeply beyond your language knowledge.
Specialization is very important and has grown in importance with the move of agencies away from freelance translators, necessitating interaction with people who can critically evaluate your knowledge and will know when it is insufficient.
Translators who take on work in widely diverse fields—probably more likely to happen when they work for agencies, because direct clients are more domain-focused—will usually do more Googling.
That said, I do Google for things, but almost never specific terms of art in some subject-matter field. For me, it’s more likely to be proper nouns, such as names of organizations, laws, and places, or things like the language to be found in Japanese statutes and English translations thereof, many of which sit in my computer. Much of the terminology resulting from those searches go into a database I keep, which currently has somewhat over 19,000 entries.
I almost never look up kanji characters. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it might be surprising and perhaps annoying to people who are not living in Japan or—more to the point—not living everyday life via Japanese, reading and writing Japanese outside of the source texts they translate.
You cannot afford to be looking up kanji while you are translating; it dilutes your income too much.
Additionally, because I also interpret, on occasion I need to sight translate from Japanese documents live in front of a client or online. You can imagine how well that would go if attempted by a translator who is looking up kanji frequently or relying on CAT to give them a reading or meaning of a character.
There you have it, a number of things from my silo, which I suspect differ significantly from the experiences of many other translators. What’s to be found in your silo? Perhaps only you will ever know, since most translators are pretty reticent about such things or perhaps incorrectly assume everyone is pretty much in the same situation; they are not.