Tag: translation

Let’s get back to the real world, folks.

Now that international translation day celebrations are over, and we’ve all convinced ourselves—that includes me, of course—that professional translators are the best thing since sliced bread, it might be a good time to return to ground level and think seriously about what has already happened to the profession of translation.

Part of that needs to be active avoidance of what should be characterized as a level of denial and delusion on the part of both individual translators and their organizations that is not conducive to the development of useful strategies.

Extremely tough decisions need to be made, and those decisions need to be based on observable phenomena and facts, not wishful thinking and comfortable but baseless narratives.

Nobody here but us chickens.

I continue to see freelance translators characterize their work for translation agencies (resellers) as “collaboration.”

The use of this agency-promoted term greatly mischaracterizes the translator-agency relationship in most cases. 

In the majority of cases—probably almost all cases—translators are not involved in collaboration with translation agencies any more than a chicken is involved in collaboration with a poultry farmer when it lays an egg.

Just as poultry farmers cannot lay eggs themselves, translation agencies rarely have any translation capability. That’s why they purchase translations for resale.

And the very etymology of the word collaboration should show translators that it is inappropriate. The term collaboration is promoted by agencies to give freelancers a warm feeling that they’re a partner with an agency in a concerted effort to translate. That is very rarely the case.

I would never presume to be collaborating with my direct clients. I sell them translations, which they, just like translation agencies, are incapable of doing themselves.

For the small number of freelancers who might survive, I recommend discarding the term collaboration, as it hinders your own self-image as the owner of the translation process.

Denial & Delusion

The level of denial and delusion about the future of translation exhibited by many translators and even their organizations is truly impressive.

Many translators are wasting energy that could be better applied in efforts to find a survival path, which for most will not likely involve translation, and not even repair of AI-generated translation if they are not already financially independent or don’t need to eat or house themselves.

The post-editing task has been hyped by translation brokers and imagined by delusional translators as a more sophisticated role than “just translation.”

I call total bullshit on that and, in their hearts, most translators must realize that, but they can’t bring themselves to face it. 🪦