There are a lot of reasons why translators have trouble saying no to clients. One is that translators are generally on the introverted side. You kind of have to be introverted if your idea of a great career is sitting alone in your office six to eight hours a day, occasionally realizing that you haven't spoken to anyone but your family members in five days; or maybe that's just me. At any rate, we have trouble asserting ourselves.

Another reason is fear of losing work. Even when you're up to your eyeballs in work, there's that nagging worry in the back of your mind that if you disappoint this client, they may go with someone else the next time, when you're short of work.

Trying to make yourself available to clients is good business. It's very dangerous to depend too much on a single client for work, because when that client goes poof, you'll be left scrambling.

I got bitten a couple of years ago when a big client went out of business, and I had to scramble for a few months to fill in the gap. Since then, I try harder to spread my workload among several clients.

But in order to deal successfully with multiple clients, we've got to learn the fine art of saying "no." Taking work from several clients means that a lot of times two or more clients want to fill up your schedule at the same time. Assuming you're not interested in 3 hours of sleep per night (and you shouldn't be) and threats of divorce, how do you know when to say no?

From my experience, if you're worried about not getting called again, don't. Clients (at least the ones you'd like to work for) respect that you have a schedule and need to sleep occasionally. And they'd much rather have you turn down the translation than do a poor job on it or miss your deadline.

If you're getting a rush from all that money coming in, let me just say that the rush wears off. Hopefully it'll wear off before you get some nice stress-related illness. As for learning to juggle clients better, I'm still working on it :).

It's also important to learn how to tell how long a translation job is going to take. This means looking at the entire document before agreeing to the job — I've been burned a few times when looking at a "sample" of the document, only to get the whole thing and find 10 pages of complex drawings in 7 point font on a blurry fax (which leads to a related point: learn the fine art of re-negotiating deadlines).

When I started as a translator, I also tended to be a lot more optimistic about my abilities. Documents would look really simple until I actually tried to translate them, then I'd find myself out of my depth. The ability to gauge how difficult a translation will be is something that takes experience, but until you get that experience I'd advise you to avoid the trap of over-estimating your abilities.

Remember, it's your fault

Most of us translators bite off more than we can comfortably chew every once in a while. It might not be the way it has to be in this industry, but by and large it's how it is. I think it's very important, however, to take the blame when we take on too much.

It's very easy to get the attitude of poor me, all these clients keep dumping work on me, what's a solo translator like me to do? But that really gets you nowhere. Instead, I say, "Man, I was an idiot to take on this much work. Now I have to miss the Dreams Come True concert on Saturday."

Putting the blame on yourself means that there's something you can do about it. Assigning an external blame means you have no control, which can create a situation of learned helplessness.

As freelance translators, we've probably all been there on that Sunday night, with a Monday deadline looming and asking ourselves, "Why, oh I why didn't I take the blue pill?" I say we should lay the blame squarely on ourselves, and use it as a learning opportunity for the next time.

Cost savings
You will never again pay for previously translated sentences – irrespective of how many times these sentences reappear in different documents we translate for you.

To a customer, that probably sounds great. But let's think about this for a minute. If you work for this company as a freelancer, under no circumstances will you be paid for a translation found in their translation memory. What happens if the translation needs to be changed to fit the context? Who pays for the time needed to maintain consistency between existing and new translation?

Two types of translators are going to accept that kind of work: translators who don't mind working for free, so they fix and refer to the translations anyway; and translators who don't care about quality, so they just skip over the already-translated stuff and wing it on the new material. Translators who work for free are usually scrubs who are desperate for work and mostly not very good translators. Translators who don't care about quality probably aren't the kind of people you want working on your $100,000 globalization project.

So even if you started out with a very good translation (which for Japanese to English is unfortunately not a very good bet), with each succeeding generation of revisions your translation is going to deteriorate in quality, until you might as well have paid $0.02 per word in the first place.

There are situations when I don't charge for 100% matches: when an entire file or section is already in the memory. But if there are mixed matching and non-matching segments, then I charge a nominal fee for context checking, consistency, etc.

Overly optimistic claims like the one above are basically a way to try and dress up bottom-feeding, crappy translation with slick terminology. The results are the same, but a few clients are going to get burned before they wise up. And unscrupulous translation agencies are probably banking on that.

The idea that certain words simply can't be translated into another language seems to be on translators' minds a lot. It's also a common theme over at the transubstantiation blog.

I agree that certain words may be difficult or impossible to translate into equivalent words in another language — if you stick to the level of the words. I find that if I can get away from the words and see the message, very few thoughts are so unique that someone hasn't found a way to express them in the target language. Of course, figuring out how to express the source concept naturally in the target is the hard part, and at the same time keeps our jobs safe from the machines (for now).

When things do get hairy is when something about the original text relies on the words (or their structure) themselves. One particularly vexatious example from Japanese is when the author goes on about the kanji used to write a word. Another, more difficult problem is poetry and other artistic uses of language.

But for your run-of-the-mill concept, I think there's very little that can't be translated very accurately. Sure, you might miss that single word to capture a nice one-word concept in the source language. But honestly, nobody's going to miss it except the fellow bilinguals looking over your shoulder — and they're not usually your target audience. If we don't say it that way in the target language, obviously nobody's going to miss it when you use a write-around.

I'm probably going to invite a bunch of flames here, but I think that translators between European languages tend to focus on the words slightly more than my Japanese-English colleagues. The reason is simple: a nearer to word-for-word approach goes a lot farther when you're translating between European languages. Between Japanese and English, a focus on the words starts giving ridiculous results a lot sooner.

Truth in advertising: I used to know German a lot better than I do now, but I never knew it well enough to translate it. I do, however, speak Spanish well, and have translated it professionally since before I learned Japanese (although not so much any more).

Photo by Fenchurch

Fuzzy stuff, like corporate social responsibility (CSR), has no such guarantees. There's all kinds of icky, soft stuff in there like nuance, and spin, and emotion. It can be an interesting exercise, but it's like subsisting on cotton candy compared to the stick-to-your ribs beef bowl that is technical translation. Cotton candy is fine at the carnival once in a while, but not every day.

So I'm always trying to figure out ways to back gracefully out of offers to do translations on fuzzy subjects. I got a request to do a trial for a CSR type document a few weeks ago, and I thought I'd be very clever. You see, the end client is a big tech company, for which I do a fair amount of technical translation — so I didn't want to annoy them by refusing point blank to do it.

Along with the trial (paid, natch) came the prior year's Japanese and English versions as "reference samples." The English was one of those monstrosities that big Japanese corporations seem so fond of creating. And here's where I got too clever for my own good: I completely disregarded the reference, creating an extremely native-like English translation that I was confident would make whomever approved those lame originals very displeased.

I didn't hear anything back for a few weeks, and figured I was in the clear. This week, however, like the Ghost of Christmas Past the agency coordinator contacted me again. She said that the client was extremely happy with my trial, and wanted me to not only translate the original document, but to re-translate a whole slew of CSR materials as well — about 150 pages total. D'oh!

I accepted the job because I figured it was my own damn fault. But now I know not to get too smart for my own good. From now on, I'm going with the tried and true, "When do you need it by? Sorry, I'm busy then. When else can you set the deadline? Sorry, busy then too. A week after that? Sorry, busy then. But I really would have liked to help you. Best of luck!"

In it he claims, among other things, that translation is becoming a profession for "housewives" (yes, he actually writes this), and that an annual income of $70,000 is practically poverty level in the United States.

Let's look at these claims, starting with the most ridiculous. First, Bernie points out that according to the ATA's 2007 Compensation Survey for an independent freelance translator,

…the average gross earnings … of a full-time freelance translator in 2006 was $60,423. … The average gross earnings … of a full-time freelance translator in 2006 with 21 years or more of experience was $69,883.

OK, fine. But then Bernie's critical thinking skills seem to go a bit south. He goes on to state that after taxes, an income of around $60,000 is really around $45-48K, and that since "a person earning $45,000 a year with 4 dependents is below the poverty line," translators earning $60,000 a year are practically impoverished! Certainly not primary "breadwinner" levels (yes, he really does write "breadwinner"):

Thus, an independent (freelance) translator with just two dependents earning $60,423, would be left with approximately $45,000 - $48,000 after deducting business expenses and mandated income taxes and social contributions. And it is safe to say that a person with just 2 dependents and an annual income in the range of $45,000-$48,000 would probably fall into that mass of people who are without basic health-care insurance. It is also safe to say that someone with 2 dependents earning between $45,000 and $48,000 is fairly close to being a candidate for food stamps (according to Federal labor statistics, a person earning $45,000 a year with 4 dependents is below the poverty line).

Just in case you didn't notice the gaping hole in Bernie's argument, he is comparing after-tax income with with pre-tax income. Disingenuous or severely lacking in critical thinking? Neither interpretation does a lot of good for Bernie's thesis that translators can hardly earn a living at translation any more.

Bernie rightly points out that globalization and automation are having a huge impact on the translation industry. In fact they're transforming all of society, and not just translation, and not just in the United States. Meanwhile, Bernie also notes that the US is heading into a recession. The fact that translators are holding their ground amidst pressure from globalization, automation, and recession ought to be encouraging; I bet the Detroit auto workers wish they could have held their ground after the automakers realized that they could make cars a lot more cheaply in Mexico.

Bernie concludes his article with this gem:

If there is any veracity in the translation industry's current economic indicators, then perhaps the time has come for all to ask themselves whether translation is an endeavor in which a person can earn a supplemental income at best, and whether it is an industry that constitutes a welcoming harbor and nurturing environment solely for "housewives" (desperate or proverbial), and one in which most of the practitioners are quite willing to march to their own slaughtering pens.

Despite Bernie's gloom and doom predictions, I and most of the translators I know still make a comfortable living in the translation field. In 2007 I worked fewer hours to earn the same money as I did in 2005 and 2006.

As to whether $70,000 is a paltry income, maybe it is if you're living in Manhattan. But the beauty of being a freelance translator is that you can work for Manhattan clients without living in Manhattan! Most of my clients are in Tokyo, yet I live in Okinawa, in a house I certainly couldn't have afforded in Tokyo, overlooking the ocean on a subtropical island. If you can't adjust your income upward, adjust your location to where your income is adequate. I'm sure there are many places in the US where $70,000 would be a fine income for a "breadwinner." (Why does that term give me images of Ward Cleaver coming home from a hard day at the office?)

To sum up, this article looks suspiciously like someone taking a conclusion and trying mightily to shoehorn the facts to fit it. Unfortunately for Bernie's thesis but fortunately for us translators, I don't think we'll have to retrain as "the guy who maintains the robots" for at least the next couple of years.

I may just be lucky, but I've never been stiffed on a job. The closest I've come is when a company tried to get me to lower my invoice after the work was delivered (I agreed but never worked for them again — oh, it felt so good when they begged and pleaded…).

It might be because nearly all my clients are Japanese companies. For some reason, you don't hear about them failing to pay as often as with US/European agencies. (Long payment cycles are another thing though — about two months is common, but I've waited up to 5 months)

I do, however, practice due diligence before taking work, such as:

• Checking their website
• Getting referrals from fellow translators I trust
• Taking small jobs first

"Lecture meeting" is almost always a "translation" for the Japanese 講演会 (kouenkai), which means seminar/workshop/talk etc. Why is this term, which is almost (?) never seen in authentic English, so often used as a translation for kouenkai?

I submit that this is an example of cargo cult translation. Some ink-stained wretch toiling on a translation in the dim past came across the term 講演会, and not knowing much English, decided to coin his own term to translate it: lecture meeting (a literal translation of kouen — lecture — and kai — meeting). Succeeding generations of translators, themselves unburdened by an excess of sensitivity for or knowledge of their target language, came across the gloss and plopped it into their own translations, and like Wikipedia, the more the gloss was referenced, the more authority it gained. Indeed, "lecture meeting" is the only gloss offered for kouenkai in the venerable and much revered Green Goddess.

Like a cargo cult, glosses like these accrete in dictionaries and references, compiled and used by people who follow the form of translation without much idea of what translation actually (or at least ideally) entails.

A piece of code works. I don’t really understand how it works or what it’s doing. But if I copy it over here, tweak the edges and poke it a few times, I’m pretty sure I can get it doing what I want it to do well enough that I don’t have to know how it works.

This happens quite a bit in the field of translation as well. Most of my clients are Japanese companies (either agencies or end clients), usually without a native speaker on staff who is really capable of telling good from poor English writing.

As a result, they tend to codify translations and turns of phrase they have accepted in the past, which are often of very poor quality or even plain wrong. Dealing with such clients can be a real pain — getting back a perfectly good translations marked up with corrections based on ignorance.

For example, one former client often had me translate letters announcing conferences and such, but forbade me from using any form of the word "invite." Instead, I had to use something along the lines of "your attendance is cordially requested" (ugh!). Their reasoning: using something like "You are cordially invited…" would cause readers to mistakenly believe that there would be no fee. The translation coordinator I dealt with seemed to understand that this was incorrect, but could only say "this is how we always have done it."

Sometimes, the client will accept your translation without comment and rewrite it with their own cargo-cult trappings. There have been times when I only found out about such incorrections after seeing my translation in print.

I'm always of two minds about pointing out such issues to clients. On the one hand, there's the issue of taking pride in my work, and providing my clients with extra service by pointing these things out. On the other hand, in my experience clients are usually not very happy to have their cargo-cult translations pointed out. Generally, the longer they've been using the translation in question, and the more erai the person who approved it, they less happy they're going to be.

I usually try once or twice to point out problems with glossaries or reference translations I'm given. If they're receptive, great. If they brush me off or get defensive, I drop the matter and reevaluate their importance to me as clients.

yndigo also asks,

To what extent can these choices be measured as objectively better or worse? How much constraint or freedom does the translator have? What types of source documents (law, patents, advertising, literature) afford the translator the most creativity?

The short answer is, it depends.
In general, my aim is to create the same effect in the translation as in the original. If the original is clear and easy to understand, I haven't done my job if my translation is hard or even nearly impossible to understand.

As a technical translator, I get to have a rather simplistic view of it. I look at my source text as a cake recipe. If someone can follow my translated recipe and produce the same cake in the same amount of time, then my translation is correct. And that's pretty much where the technical translator's job ends, in my opinion.

That's really the job of all translators though, isn't it? At IJET-19 I had the pleasure of speaking with Peter McMillan, whose translation of the One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu has recently been published. He told me that his goal of translating poetry is to evoke the same emotional response as the original. A bit more tenuous than a cake, but the same goal.

But maybe the tastes of your target audience are different. Americans, for example, tend to like sweeter cakes than the Japanese. They also tend to like bigger portions. Should I adjust the recipe to make the cake just as tasty for American eaters as Japanese eaters? Yes, sometimes. But this is where the work veers away from translation and into something else, however you want to define it (copy editing, localization, …).

Sometimes, most of the time, you're just called on to duplicate the recipe. Once in a while, they want you to change it to use bittersweet chocolate instead of bitter, or extend the recipe to serve 8 instead of 5. That's also a fine goal of translation — just make sure you get paid for it and that you're up to the task.

But if you're given a recipe for peach pie and you come back with a recipe for cow pies, you probably haven't done your job.

And whichever way you go, make sure it's what your customer wants!

But there was a snag: they didn't want to pay for the trial unless they got the job. I balked at this; firstly because the trial was somewhat long (3 pages), and secondly because I wasn't even guaranteed the job if I passed the trial (the agency has to compete with other bidders on quality and price).

So the risk-reward payoff was looking pretty poor, and I fired up my email program this morning intending to turn down the offer of the trial. But I was in for a pleasant surprise: the agency had decided to pay me for the trial after all!

Not to toot my own horn (well maybe just a little toot — toot!), but I think I'm probably better qualified than most to do this particular job. And that's the problem with unpaid trials from the buyer's perspective: you risk missing the most qualified people, who probably are able to fill their schedules with paying work.