Tag: translation

Plan B needs to be upgraded to plan A.

Executive Summary: People aiming to build a career as a freelance translator and thinking that they can do it by working for agencies need to rethink that plan. Freelance translating for agencies is quickly ending. The best advice at this point is simply don’t bother. There are more hopeful paths and other things you should think about doing with your language ability.

Every time I read through posts made by freelance translators on platforms such as LinkedIn, many of which complain about their plight and the behavior of translation-brokering agencies, it becomes more obvious that freelance translating for agencies is ending. It started ending a few years ago with AI use by agencies and, arguably, much earlier than that, when agencies started using other, non-AI technologies to reduce their price for purchasing translation services from freelancers. Now, the major players that sell most of the translation that users purchase are eliminating their need for freelance translators entirely.

If you are in a university learning languages, continuing with the goal of becoming a freelance translator is unwise. In fact, it’s reckless. If you have what it takes to acquire clients not in the translation business themselves, you might want to try for that. But most freelancers will find that impossible.

One path for averting career failure is to acquire a non-language specialization that can stand on its own as a basis for a career, leaving the option of combining language knowledge with that non-language specialization.

At this point in the evolution of the translation busines, thinking that expertise in languages or translation alone, without another specialization, is going to turn into a career is recklessly optimistic. You need to have a career Plan B not reliant on freelance translating for agencies, and you should treat that as your Plan A

The Abnormal Requirements Many Freelancers Accept

The thought has occurred to me that, with a number of years having elapsed since the large players in the translation brokering industry transformed the lives and drastically lowered the earning power of freelance translators by imposing technology requirements, there might be freelance translators who, having experienced nothing different, think it is normal to:

  • need to use a specific software product to receive translation work,
  • need to bid on jobs on a reverse-auction click-work platform in order to get work, which these days might not even be translation work, or
  • need to log onto a specific platform and translate a document on that platform, while being monitored by the entity purchasing their efforts on that hamster wheel.

None of the above is at all normal, and all are quite foreign to relationships with direct clients that are translation consumers.

The above are merely requirements imposed on freelance translators by translation-brokering agencies that do nothing more than purchase and resell translation. Because those brokers are now in the process of moving rapidly away from ordering translation from professionals, freelancers need to quickly devise a plan B, and agencies are extremely unlikely to play a part in that plan.

The road forward is not going to be easy, but staying where you are isn’t going to end well, although it certainly will end.

Some more ideas for translators are provided on the parent website.

AI Translation: Uncaring Emulation

I welcome entities that create documents using a collection of software commands known as an AI to order translations of those documents from a “colleague AI.” Those documents don’t deserve less, but they don’t deserve 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 human skill—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?

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.

Desperate and Clueless Spaghetti

Two plates of spaghetti were thrown against my wall today. They were of different flavors but essentially demonstrated the same phenomena of desperation and cluelessness. Neither had a chance of sticking.

This morning, I received two emails at an email address that was formerly listed on the US Embassy website in harvestable form. I have since changed that to just my URL, but it’s been harvested before and anyone can go to directly to my business website to read from the graphic of the email address if they really want it. Two people today really wanted it.

One was a real estate broker wanting to sell me on “unlisted” condominium for about USD 1.7 million.

It was, of course, a non-personalized, shotgunned cold-call email.

Several minutes after that I received an email from a translator in Europe—a place on the Balkan peninsula to be a bit more specific—offering translation services in a variety of European language directions at about EU 0.027 per word.

Amazingly, his selling point was that he uses Trados, and his CV indicates that he does everything. Well, I don’t mean that he claims to “do everything,” but rather that he lists the fields he can do, and it’s, basically, everything, in a large word cloud of totally unrelated fields.

Yes, desperation and cluelessness are the underlying themes in the emails that made it through my server-based spam filtering today.