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.