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

GOOGLE TRANSLATE: IS IT REALLY "STATE OF THE ART"?

After reading Miguel Helft's article called "Google's Computing Power Refines Translation Tool" which appeared on the front age of the New York Times (March 9, 2010), I decided that an article on his article and on the tool itself seemed to be in order. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the author, Miguel Helft covers Internet companies including Google and Yahoo for the Business Desk of the New York Times. More than 150 readers, including some translators, posted comments on the website and at least one translation agency sent a letter to the editor criticizing the journalist for not having consulted a single human translator.

As you might guess from the title, the article is about Google's use of human translations which are aligned to source-language texts in much the same way as translation memory software aligns two texts, "creating," what Dr. Te Taka Keegan, in The Official Google Blog, calls, "a virtuous cycle that benefits both human translators and machine translation". Now, I have absolutely no idea what he means by a "virtuous cycle". Perhaps he meant to say "virtual" in the sense that it was "simulated, or carried on by means of a computer network". Or, perhaps Dr. Keegan originally wrote in a language other than English and the blog was translated by Google Translate!

It goes without saying that there is definitely a place for this tool, just as there is a place for translation memory software, but I was appalled at the widespread use of Google Translate on jobs that really require a human translator who can use analysis, synthesis, association, memory, logic and, yes, imagination to recreate the text in the target language. This is especially true when dealing with documents that are not particularly well written and which contain a great deal of technical language, indeed, the bulk of the industrial translator's work. It is the human translator's knowledge of the subject area that enables him/her to understand the meaning of the source-language text and to accurately interpret it into the target language.

Interestingly, there is a sidebar to the article which features a passage from Le petit prince [The Little Prince] by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and a passage from Cien años de soledad [One Hundred Years of Solitude] by Gabriel García Marquez. Both appear first in the original language followed by a human translation, then a Google Translate translation and one by each of two competitors. I thought it odd that only the names of the publishers of the human translations were given rather than the names of the human translators. This is an egregious omission on the part of the journalist.

In spite of the fact that many consider literary translation to be outside the domain of both machine translation and translation memory software, works of fiction were chosen to "put the tools to the test". When I first looked at the two passages, my initial thought was that both the original passages are well written in straightforward language, which makes a difference in any machine translation. Then, like a bolt out of the blue, it occurred to me that there are already human translations of those texts online and that that is exactly how Google works--by matching human-translated text with similar segments in the source language. Taking that into consideration, the fact that Google Translate's translation resembles the human translation so closely is no surprise at all.

Anyway, I decided that I would see what Google Translate could do with a couple of passages from real-life jobs. I chose one that has some of the characteristics of a literary work. The source-language text is first, followed by Google Translate's version:

Además del manejo de los lápices consta que hizo sus pinitos con los pinceles y se veía capacitado para emplear términos como "claroscuro", "efecto", "menudo", juzgar el mérito de una artista o llamar "bestia" nada menos que a Francisco Bayeu por su cuadro para el altar mayor de la iglesia de San Francisco el Grande, del cual conserva un boceto el X Museum, y a su arquitecto Juan de Villanueva por parecerle "bien".

Besides handling the pencils know that tried his hand with the brush and looked able to use terms such as "chiaroscuro", "effect", "often", judging the merit of an artist or call "beast"nothing less than Francisco Bayeu for his painting for the high altar of the church of San Francisco el Grande, which keeps a sketch of the X Museum, and his architect Juan de Villanueva because it seemed "fine."

So, I leave it to you to decide for yourself whether or not you agree with Alon Lavie, an associate research profesor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University when he says: "What you see on Google Translate is state of the art in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area".


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/technology/09translate.html?scp=1&sq=google%20can%20now%20say&st=cse

THE COMMODITIZATION OF TRANSLATION

I recently received an email from my friend and colleague Bernie Bierman about an internet posting made by a translation agency asking "experienced Portuguese Translators and Proofreaders" to submit their rates for "no match, repetitions, and 75-99% match". He also reminded me of then-ATA president Jiri Stejskal's article "On Statistics and Competition" in the February 2008 ATA Chronicle and suggested that I take another look at it.

Basically, Mr. Stejskal's article is what we call a "feel-good" piece, as are most Chronicle articles, telling translators that they need not fear competition from abroad, or for that matter, any competition at all. The Stejskal article states that "inexpensive translation from developing countries can be viewed as a threat...only insofar as translation is perceived as a commodity that can be produced regardless of location and supplied without qualitative differentiation across a given market." (my emphasis) He goes on to tell us that to "make sure translation is not traded or perceived as a commodity...we need to specialize in order to differentiate our translation or interpreting work qualitatively."

At the time, I wrote a commentary in the Gotham Translator about the absurdity of thinking of specialization as being a way to prevent the commoditization of translation, but I was thinking about outsourcing then. I was not thinking about the role that translation memory software would play, indeed, has played in the commoditization of translation. So, what exactly does it mean to "commoditize" something? Investopedia defines it as follows:

"The act of making a process, good or service easy to obtain by making it as uniform, plentiful and affordable as possible. Something becomes commoditized when one offering is nearly indistinguishable from another. As a result of technological innovation, broad-based education and frequent iteration, goods and services become commoditized and, therefore, widely accessible." (my emphasis)

That definition seems to be a fairly accurate description of what translation software does, and I think that we could go so far as to say that, more than outsourcing, the imposition of translation memory software on translators (with Trados appearing to be the most required software product for more and more jobs) is leading inexorably to the commoditization of translation. This trend is accelerated by the fact that translators have been seduced by sales pitches such as you will never have to translate the same sentence again". What is more troubling and worrisome is that this translation memory software has been used not just as a tool of efficiency, but as a kind of combined rotary saw and sledgehammer on translation rates and, therefore, translation earnings. The brutal fact of the matter is that today's independent or freelance translator who must adhere to the non-negotiable requirement that he or she use a CAT tool, quickly finds out that there is absolutely no payment or a pittance of a payment for the words in that sentence that are viewed by the program as "repeats" or "quasi-repeats" or "semi-quasi-repeats", say nothing of the fact that perhaps the "same" sentence actually should be translated differently in a different context. Although translation memories can, under specific circumstances, provide greater consistency, the consistency just may be all wrong. Inaccurate translations become part of translation memories and, as such, are perpetuated ad infinitum. It indeed seems to me that if we use Investopedia's definition, industrial (as opposed to literary) translation is well on its way to being commoditized.

To support his proposition that "specialization" will somehow prevent translators from becoming victims of the commoditization process, Stejskal gives former ATA president Marian S. Greenfield as an example of a successful translator who specializes in financial translation. In reality, she may be an excellent example of a translator who has successfully capitalized on the commoditization of the translation industry. Earlier this year many translators received an email from SDL-Trados which contained the following testimonial:

"I just completed [sic] a 34,501 word project in 10 hours thanks to AutoSuggest, Context Match and the other nifty time-saving features within SDL Trados Studio 2009 SP1. That's without having much of anything in the pre-existing TM!" --Marian S. Greenfield, Translator and Trainer.

When other translators expressed some doubt as to whether what she had done could actually be called "translation", it was revealed that she was working with an Excel file with many repetitions--in essence, the sort of document that translation memory software handles quite well. Nevertheless, thinking about this "feat" from a financial point of view, 34,501 words in ten hours at $0.10 per word (which, believe it or not, was on the low side a scant ten years ago) would indeed make her a financially successful translator! However, one might ask how much she actually was paid for all those repetitions, if she was paid at all for them. Also, one might wonder about the "qualitative differentiation across a given market" that Stejskal says is so important. It looks a little like Ms. Greenfield's "specialization" may have been the promoting of Trados software.

In closing, I do not want to leave readers with the impression that I am against translation memory software, for this is definitely not the case. It certainly has its place in today's technological scheme of things, for in the case where a translator is asked to translate a second document (a shop manual, for instance) from the same end client, the TM software might be quite useful. I do have doubts about its being used for all types of documents as some companies are now doing. Under those circumstances, no amount of "specialization" can prevent the commoditization of translation which, in turn, is bound to change the face of the translation industry itself, if it hasn't changed it already. But setting aside the discussion as to when or where translation memory software is or is not useful, the bigger question remains whether TM has become the instrument by which to drive down translator income to the point where translation practitioners become nothing more than extension of the clerical furniture, translating a "new" word or phrase here and there, and receiving a token payment for what is, in effect (at least in the eyes of the translation buyer), a token effort. These are things that all translators should be thinking about and discussing if we are to be prepared for the challenges of the 21st century.

About those help-wanted ads...

In the days when translators were still writers and linguists, the following piece would have been the object of derision, cat-calls, mocking laughs and other expressions of like purport and tenor. Of course, today when many translators are or have become so-called "language engineers" with the scantest knowledge of idiom, punctuation, grammar, syntax, etc., etc., not an eyebrow will be raised.

Dear ATA Translators:

I am seeking to hire a full-time French-English Quality Manager. Quality Managers proofread/edit translation projects for clients. If you're interested, please feel free to reach out to me, and attach a copy of your resume. This position would be based in New York, however, we are open to having people work from one of our other offices where we are set up to do business in the United States. Feel free to review our website at http://www.transperfect.com/

[Underscoring added to assist "language engineers".]