ARE WE JUST SELLING WORDS?

“I am sure you are not following the trend.

If you are frozen in the 70s and want to keep working

with your typing machine there is nothing I can do”.

- Renato Cedin

  Link Translations (Brazil)

“Welcome to the 21st century: Computers are the future of translation

If you want to be as efficient a translator as possible, Microsoft Word and Excel

should not be your primary translation environments”.

- Jon Ritzdorf, Solutions Architect

  Introduction to Computer-Assisted Translation

  New York University - SCPS

♪ ♫ ♪

CAT for sale

Words perfect and unspoiled

Words never even slightly soiled

CAT for sale

Let the translators pipe of words

In their now extinct way

CAT knows every type of word

Better far than they ...

♫ ♫ ♪ ♫

- Inspired by Cole Porter’s “Love For Sale”

WORDS FOR SALE
(A Multi-Part Series)

Part 1

By Bernie Bierman

As far back as my memory can take me (and that is indeed many years), translators have been debating and arguing the question of the value of translation, and more particularly the best or most effective way to calculate that value.

My own memories and written records of this debate and argument reveal that various approaches were tried over the years in an attempt to calculate that value: per line, per word, per typestroke, per hour, by exotic formulas that combined the per line, per word and per hour criteria, and by all sorts and manner of esoteric calculations. 

For reasons that are still not clear, the per word method outlasted and outlived all the others.  Although many translation practitioners decried the per word calculation as inadequate, the consensus was that it was the most adequate of all the inadequates.  However, it did have the financially-redeeming virtue of consistency, that is, if one could agree on what precisely was a “word” for purposes of calculating a price.  Was a number in digital form a “word”?  And if the number in digital form was viewed or counted as a “word”, was 1000 really two “words” rather than one “word”?  Was 1,789,348 one “word” or nine “words”?   Was a name a “word”?  If the Italians called their city “Firenze”, was the English-language version of “Florence” a translated “word”?   And in the pre-computer and pre-CAT age, if names and numbers were viewed as countable or calculable “words”, the question or problem often arose as to how one precisely went about the actual counting of words?   Did the document really contain 8600 words, or was the real count 8492 or 8710 or 8628? 

And if the question of calculation and/or the method of calculation weren’t sufficient enough to stir the arguments, there was the matter of which words should form the basis of calculation: the source language words or the target language words.  Which was economically more equitable to the translator?  Which was economically more equitable to the client or user of the translation?  Was the source language calculation an accurate reflection of the overall translation process?  Or was the target language calculation a much more accurate reflection of that overall translation process?  And on and on the debate went…and raged.

* * * * *

Here in the United States, a man named Lewis Bertrand came upon the commercial-industrial translation scene in the 1920’s.  Bertrand was not merely a translator and writer (which has the same redundancy as “composer and musician”), but also a highly astute and (soon-to-be) successful businessman in the translation industry.  By the 1930’s Bertrand’s influence on the tiny U.S. commercial-industrial translation community was quite discernible and that influence grew in the following two decades.

Indeed, Bertrand’s incessant preaching of his gospel of translation economics brought many converts and spawned many faithful.  Henry Fischbach, the co-founder of the American Translators Association was a disciple of Bertrand’s translation economics, along with so many of the men and women who helped found and build what is arguably one of the largest translator organizations in the world.  (Sadly to a few, the leaders and members of the modern ATA haven’t the foggiest idea of who this Lewis Bertrand was, but even more sadly and more regrettably, the concepts developed by him respecting the essence and value of translation as a commercial endeavor and later promoted and fostered by such founding personages as Henry Fischbach, the Mins brothers, Robert Addis and so many others whose names are now long-forgotten, have been discarded like a piece of rusting machinery as a new generation of computer worshippers and technological “geek-speakers” have come along to proselytize and spread their own gospel.)

In economic and commercial terms, translation to Lewis Bertrand was not about words.  The idea that translation was about the sale of words was so anathema to him that he could literally break into a wild rage over the slightest suggestion in that direction.  To Bertrand, translation was about communication; translation, particularly in the commercial and industrial domains, was a communications service; translation was not about the supply of words; translation was about the supply of ideas, concepts, knowledge, a supply delivered by a person or persons having certain well-defined and unique skills…and talents.

I was only a teenager when I first heard one of the numerous Lewis Bertrand stories about translation and translation economics.  The one particular story that remained with me for a lifetime – as if it had been branded into my brain – went like this:

He was asked by one of his firm’s more difficult and chronically-complaining clients why it was being charged for “translating” names and numbers and what was the rationale for this “seemingly unfair charge”.  He was asked by this difficult and chronically-complaining client whether his firm could eliminate all the names and numbers from a translated document, thereby lowering the invoice by what could be a considerable sum.

Bertrand listened attentively to his client’s complaints and attempted to explain the nature and essence of a translation service.  But the client was adamant.  It did not need names and numbers “translated” and certainly did not want to pay for any such needless “translation”. Bertrand politely acceded to the client’s wishes.  The next translation job to be done for this client would be absent all non-translation elements, i.e., names, numbers and other “noise of like purport and tenor”, and the invoice would duly reflect a sharp reduction in the client’s translation cost.  The result was something like this:

“Dear Mr. [see original] :

“We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated [see original] and with regard to the delivery of [see original] tons of [see original] rolled steel scheduled for shipment on [see original] via the SS [see original], we would like to advise you as follows:

“Because of major dredging problems in the port of [see original], Captain [see original] of the Port Authority of [see original] issued Directive No. [see original] which prohibits vessels over [see original] tons displacement from entering port channels Nos. [see original] and [see original] until [see original] at the very earliest.  Although we could arrange for transshipment in [see original] between the dates of [see original] and [see original] to a vessel of lesser displacement, the costs would increase, and the letter of credit No. [see original] issued by the [see original] Bank in the amount of US$[see original] would be insufficient.

“Should you have any further concerns, please feel free to contact the undersigned by telephone at [see original] or telex at [see original], or his deputy manager, Mr. [see original], whose telephone number is [see original] and whose telex number is [see original].

“Yours, etc.

“[see original]

By: [see original]”

The upshot of this was a very quick telephone call from the chronically-complaining client: “Mr. Bertrand, we got your point.  Please provide us with a complete translation and charge us accordingly”.

Lewis Bertrand was never happy with or enamored of the per word method that was the dominant method in calculating the value of a translation service.  He saw it as a reference tool at best, a reference tool that was far too often not reflective of the true value of the service and all of the elements that went into providing the service. At worst, he viewed the per word invoicing method as a manifestation that the translator was really selling just words.    He and his contemporaries and competitors often tried combinations of various calculation methods, such as per word and per hour or various complex formulas that combined numerous calculation methods.  Bertrand believed fervently and passionately that translators possessed certain highly-defined skills and knowledge that could not be adequately compensated by the mere counting of words and attaching a figure to that count. 

“We are in the communications business”, he would often bellow.  “We are not a bunch of (expletive) clerks”, he would yell.  “We are not  (expletive) typists or transcribers”, he would scream.  [In the mid-1940’s, he charged a client US$100 to translate one word – it came out as two words in the target language.  “If an advertising agency can charge a client thousands of dollars to come up with a 5-word slogan or phrase”, he said, “then surely all of the thought, time and talent that went into finding the right expression in another language for that one English word makes the $100 fee not just a bargain, but a steal”.]

In his day, lots of people in the translation industry (both in the U.S. and Europe) listened to this fiery preacher of translation economics, and many followed his preachings.  Although Bertrand was certainly around in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when the first attempts at computerized translation were undertaken, he and so many of his contemporaries dismissed this endeavor as a bad joke and as a need by certain people to robotize everything in sight (and even out of sight).

Clearly, if some “geek-speaker” appeared before a vast assembly of translators in the days of Lewis Bertrand and his contemporaries – or even in the days of their successors – and told the audience that “once a word or sentence or phrase or paragraph had been translated, that very same word or sentence or phrase or paragraph (or a close facsimile thereof) would never ever have to be translated again”, the laughter and howls in the assembly hall would have been of a decibel level that would have surely compromised the structural integrity of that assembly hall.

If Bertrand and virtually all of his contemporaries were blind to the coming of robotized translation, which was not merely on the horizon, but rather just around the corner, there was not so much as a nanosecond thought given to the possible economic impact upon the translation industry that this robotization would wrought.   Of course, there was only handful of people anywhere who saw a world connected through a place that didn’t as yet even have a name.  And never mind the word “globalization”, the concept alone was if not science-fiction, then certainly economics-fiction. 

[To be continued in Part 2]

COMMODIFICATION AND THE CALCULATION OF RATES

Several people sent me emails about my last post rather than making comments here. Two in particular had to do with Bernie Bierman's email to his clients, and I passed them along to him. So that the discussion can continue, I am publishing his reply below:


Dear Jodi and dear Aliza,

Rosene Zaros, the publisher of this blog and journal informed me that both of you disagreed with me – in slightly different ways - on the matter of charging on the basis of target language words. I would be truly shocked if there were more than ten persons in the entire world of translation who agreed with me, not just on this issue, but on any other translation-related issue.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have even written my “letter to my clients”, for it was based solely and totally upon erroneous thinking, and worse upon truly dinosauric concepts. In a phrase, I should have listened to the voices bellowing in unison, “Hey, Bernie, get with the program”. Stupidly, or unwisely, I chose to ignore those voices and proceeded along on my hind legs. If someone called me a slang term denoting the egress of the rectal canal, he, she or they would have been absolutely correct..

You see, my very dear ladies, when I wrote my letter to the client, I was still cemented into the thinking and attendant belief that there are still more than a sufficient number of translators in this vast world who perceive of themselves as writers, as specialists in communications, as persons having knowledge (profound or peripheral) of certain or many subjects, or for the very least the terminology, the phraseology and the writing styles of those subjects. Indeed, as I was writing my words, I kept laboring under this very antiquated notion that in the ultimate the fee of a practitioner in this business – whether an individual translator or a translation service company – was really based upon some very unique skills combined with knowledge and other gray matter components, and all wrapped up in a package labeled “communications service”. And I further kept laboring under the equally antiquated notion that the word count was merely the best of all of the other inadequate methods (e.g., per line, per stroke, per hour, per coffee break) to be used as a mere reference upon which this fee for a communications service could be based. I really don’t know what possessed me to keep thinking in a period of time that now seems like at least one thousand years ago.

Incidentally, the reason that gave rise to the writing of my letter to my (ever dwindling number of) clients was US$4.80. Yes, that’s right, US$4.80. No, not US$48.00 or US$480 or US$4800, but US$4.80. If you yourselves don’t see the picture, I do believe you see my drift. (At least I hope so).

There are at least two (2) facts of the matter that I should have paid more attention to and carefully considered before writing my letter to my clients. While I have every reason to believe that both of you are fully acquainted with these particular facts of the matter, permit me to address them merely for the sake of the few fellow dinosaurs who may read this tract, and whose understanding of the ways of modern translation need remediation. The first is that there are fewer and fewer translators involved in the translation industry. Translators, as we knew and defined them once upon a fairly short time ago, have been replaced by a genus called CAT workers or CAT operators (a genus somewhat akin to the now-defunct keypunch operator). The second fact of the matter is that with the ever-growing dominance of CAT, it is the computer that undertakes a so-called “scientific” analysis of the text to be translated, comparing it to texts that have been previously translated and stored in its memory, an analysis that includes not just the exact number of words to be translated from “scratch”, but also the number of words that may be similar to those already in the memory; this process is called “matching” and the computer undertakes all sorts and manner of calculations to determine percentages of this “matching”. All of these analyses and calculations of matching percentages are done on the basis of the text to be translated, i.e., the source language text, and the CAT worker or operator is told right from the get-go precisely how many (SL) words he or she will have to “translate” and how much he or she will be paid for those “translated” words. And there is no arguing by the CAT operator with either the computer or the translation agency. (Of course, this latter aspect raises some interesting questions of independent contractorship, but that’s another story for another day.)

Anyway, arguments/discussions/debates/discourses about TL-SL counts are now meaningless; the computer has become and is unquestionably the undisputed master and sole arbiter of this aspect of the translation process, and both the translation agencies and the hordes of CAT operators who labor for those agencies now worship fervently at the altar of this omniscient and omnipotent deity.

If my letter to my clients said anything, it said that I am of the age of the quill pen and parchment paper. And now I shall take leave of you to get into my horse-drawn carriage and repair to the blacksmith.

Always your Most Hbl., Dvt. & Obt. Svt.,

(Hell, if I am to be classified as a dinosaur, I just as well write like one, eh?)

Bernie Bierman

THE COMMODIFICATION OF A PROFESSION

After years of working with the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's international Dictionary, I recently purchased the American Heritage Dictionary because I had been led to believe that this dictionary looks to the future, that it is descriptive rather than prescriptive and offers advice on appropriate usage. So, when I looked for the word commoditization", I was surprised to learn that the preferred term is "commodification". No matter, "a rose by any other name would smell as sweet" or, depending upon your point of view, as foul.

Ten, even five years ago, I would never have imagined that translation could become a commodity in the way that it has. Now, overwhelmingly, it is sold on the basis of price, a price that is based upon the word count in the source language (before we even take into account TM, with repetitions, fuzzy matches, etc.), which assumes that translation is nothing more than matching words. This is a far-reaching topic and it deserves our attention.

Yesterday my friend and colleague Bernie Bierman copied me on an email he sent to his clients. This was an eye-opener for me in that I had just gone along with the general switch in the industry to payment being based on the target language. I had never even thought about how truly "unprofessional" those odd-ball amounts are.

I am posting Bernie's message because I feel that it is indeed an important message. The things that he points out are things that we should all be thinking about. The idea that translation is about words and numbers of words is taking us in a direction that I believe is dehumanizing. There will be more on that topic in future posts--and I promise that they will be forthcoming. In the meantime, I offer Bernie's message and invite everyone to comment on it.

Dear Client:

I am sending you this message not just to explain or re-explain my fees for translation and how I bill for them, but also more importantly to apprise you of a certain business philosophy which you yourselves might want to consider as applicable to your own clients.

The fees I charge for my translation services are based upon a TARGET LANGUAGE COUNT. The source language count means absolutely nothing to me except as a rough guide to the volume of the particular job or project. Indeed, source language counts are meaningless to me, both from the point of view of the end-product and the invoicing for that product.

Permit me at this point to impart some philosophy (or perhaps "philosophy") about translation and the translation process, and in an effort to catch your attention - which I hope will be undivided - I shall write what follows in larger, bold-face characters:

Translation (and) the translation process, is (are) not about words...big words, little words, short words, long words, whole words or particles of words. It is equally not about numbers or names or formulas or equations. Translation is about writing and communication. Indeed, before the so-called "wizards" of technology came long in the late 1990's or early 2000's, translation was viewed by many as one branch of the communications arts. Indeed, from any clear point of view, whether objective or subjective, translation is about writing and communication. It is not about word-matching, as some if not many of today's technologically-obsessed translators, CAT workers and CAT operators believe.

As a translator I am a writer and communications specialist. I think and write in the TARGET LANGUAGE (which in my case happens to be English). Indeed, what can be said with 10 source language words, oftentimes needs 15 or 16 or 17 target language words, and conversely what sometimes can be said with those same 10 source language words might require just a mere 5 or 6 target language words.

Thus, the end-product which you receive from me is a TARGET LANGUAGE product, and that precisely is the product which your client will read, use and act upon. In more than a manner of speaking, the source language text is merely a reference text. It is not the end-product of the service that I am rendering to you, and which you in turn are rendering your client.

Some of you may counter the foregoing by asking, "OK, How do we provide our client with an exact, down-to-the-penny quote?" If you would like an answer to that question, please feel free to write to me, and I'll be happy to provide you with an answer based upon my 35 years of experience as a successful translation service company owner and executive and that of literally hundreds of my former colleagues and competitors in the business.

Finally, permit me to reiterate another important aspect of my invoicing. You will never receive an invoice from me for so-called odd-ball amounts like $67.31 or $283.94 and $1,131.76. Why? Because on texts over 1000 target-language counts, I round off to the nearest 100. Hence 1234 words = 1200 words and 1278 words = 1300. For texts having less than 1000 words, I round off to the nearest 50. Hence, 724 words = 700 words and 832 words = 850. But in the final analysis, you are not paying me for words (the word count is used merely as an equitable basis for billing). You are paying me for a unique communications skill and my attendant knowledge and experience.

I thank you for your attention to this message, and should you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

Bernie Bierman

CONSISTENCY, "NEW WORDS" AND THE COMMODITIZATION OF TRANSLATION

Only a fool would deny that the translation profession is in a profound state of change as is the world in general. Values and attitudes are changing and, by and large, people seem willing to believe that they have no control over their destinies. Translators accept the notion that "consistency" is good and that they will only be paid full price, which is substantially less than what it was a few short years ago, for "new" words. They are willing to accept a fraction of that for "fuzzy" or "near" matches and nothing or almost nothing for repetitions. The idea is that they can produce more in the same amount of time and thus come out ahead, while assuring greater consistency.

At the outset, I think that it is important to emphasize that consistency can be very important; in fact, it is essential when you are translating shop manuals, users' manuals, etc. It is in the translation of documents such as these that translation memory software can be a very effective tool. But, beyond that, we can wonder if "consistency" does not lead to boredom. We all know that many concepts can be expressed in a variety of ways and that good writers throughout time have avoided repetitions by using different words, sometimes to reinforce the idea by expressing it in a different way and at others simply to make the text more interesting. You can imagine how boring it would be to read over and over again the words "he said" when the writer could have used "he affirmed", "he stated", "he announced", "he remarked", and on and on. As translators, we are first and foremost writers, and it is our job to communicate a message in an interesting and informative way.

So, yes, consistency does have its place but, in reality, it is a small one and by making it something desirable in translation, we are denying the nuances and subtleties of language. What is even worse for translation is that if a certain sentence is translated in a certain way and becomes part of a translation memory, that sentence is perpetuated and its accuracy may never, ever be questioned. Indeed, the sentence may have been a wonderful translation in its original context, but may be woefully inadequate in other contexts.

More and more, I am seeing the concept of "new words" being used to exploit translators whether they use translation memory software or not. Translators are told that they will be paid only for the "new words" in a text, and it's a matter of take it or leave it. I recently received a job offer from an agency that involved translating an employee survey. It was supposed to be a "literal" translation where grammatical errors were not cleaned up. As we all know, this is something that only human beings can even hope to do. There was a translation memory of sorts with only two repetitions and the job was to be delivered as a bilingual .rtf file. I replied that I would be happy to do the translation but that I do not use Trados.

The PM accepted my offer to submit a single English .rtf file and we agreed that I would only be paid for the "new words" in the file. There were two repetitions which, as it turned out, were "Merci". As I translated the .rtf file, it was difficult to tell where one response ended and another began. I followed the formatting of the French .rtf file as far as spacing, etc.

I delivered the file with the usual covering note and heard nothing for a day. Then I received an email asking me if I could paste my translation into an Excel file and match the French with my translation. This took several hours because of the way the French .rtf file had been set up. It was only possible to tell where one response ended and another began by looking at the Excel file. To make matters worse, the PM had no budget to cover this extra work and asked me to do it "as a favor".

First of all, this job was not a job that should have been done with Trados. The idea that you can get repetitions and "fuzzy matches" from an employee survey is nothing short of ludicrous, especially if you are attempting to duplicate grammatical errors. The translator should have been given the Excel file and been asked to work with that.

This is just one example of what seems to me to be a misuse of translation memory software. I received another job offer which would have involved working with a "Trados-enabled" file from which I would only translate the "new words". It would jump from new segment to new segment. I turned it down. I am a firm believer that meaning only exists within a context, so the very idea of translating only "new words" seems to be missing the point of what we are supposed to be doing. Meaning is dependent upon a context which the translator must analyze and interpret. It is not a matter of producing words.

When I hear people cry out against the "commoditization" of translation in one breath and then propose translation memory as a boon to translators, I can only wonder what they are thinking. When we accept a text as being made up of a certain number of "new words" and a certain number of sort of new words, and a certain number of old, used, repeated words, we are certainly reducing translation to a commodity that consists of words and is not all that different from quantities of corn, wheat, or pork bellies.

So, that is the current state of affairs. What tomorrow will bring depends upon what we do today and, unfortunately, I see no signs of life in our community. There may be a little "gentle" outrage from older translators, but it stops there. It is typical of what I see happening in the nation and in the world as we are increasingly willing to admit defeat and slip into decline.

Reply to February 17, 2010 Blog

By George Witherington
16 June 2010

In her blog post "PROFESSIONALISM" REVISITED" of February 17, 2010, Rosene links the "present sad state" of our profession with ill-advised efforts to "formalize" translation. "Would-be protectors of our noble profession" (me included) are taken to task for trying to force the "art" of translation into a scientific straightjacket.

From the client's standpoint, Rosene's objections against rationalization may seem out of place in an industry being transformed by computer-assisted translation (CAT). Its two main elements, machine translation (MT) and translation memory (TM), have been a veritable boon to translation service users. Capacity, efficiency and rapidity gains have at last become possible. Large-scale projects, which were previously considered impractical or too costly, have become feasible today thanks to CAT tools.

Yet continuing translator unease over this "invasion of the machines" is also understandable. MT violates fundamental rules of the art. In particular, it delivers approximation in place of strict accuracy. Worse still, MT creates the illusion that there is no further need for human translators. To believe that automation can replace humans is to ignore that CAT depends on recycled human translations. It needs further up-to-date human translations if matches are to be current. To advocate wholesale automation is, furthermore, to imply that language and translation training, whether academic or professional, is pointless.

Translators' coolness towards MT and TM is also financially driven. MT shrinks the pool of work available to translators. TM is blamed for rate modulation according to TM match; e.g., 75%-95%, 100%. Both have contributed to stagnating or lowering remuneration rates. On the other hand, the increased productivity enabled by MT and TM means that translators who do use these software tools can earn more than they otherwise would.

It was inevitable that translators would be caught unawares by the arrival of CAT tools. The profession's narrow "craft" focus meant that it paid little attention to downstream processes (typesetting, post-editing, proofreading, paper and electronic publishing). Translation seemed oblivious to the fact that its outdated practices were preventing users from efficiently exploiting translated material.

The new technology was introduced by software specialists from outside the industry with an eye to rationalizing the entire translated document production chain and not just translation. A profession with a stronger voice and clearer idea of its role within the chain might have engaged in a more constructive dialogue with the innovators. That could have led to fewer unintended consequences for all the parties concerned...and Rosene would have been happier.

George Witherington

16 June 2010