Category Archives: Translation

Why Legal Protection Can’t Save Translation and Interpreting

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You don’t have to go far to find out what is worrying those in the translation and interpreting professions. Crowdsourcing, machine translation and large-scale outsourcing could easily make people fearful that the future of translation and interpreting consists of low-paid, low status work, offered by uncaring providers.

But hold on, cry a few voices, we can stop all this madness. All we need is some form of government protection. If there were only a law (or several) that limited who could translate and who could interpret, all of these issues would go away in the blink of an eye.

Alas, in the real world, things aren’t that simple. Leaving behind the whole issue of how to get legislative support for this idea in a single area – never mind an entire economic sector – the problems with relying on legal protection are legion. For a start, given that there is no way of tracking every single document translated or conference interpreted in even a single city, policing such a law would be impossible. Someone would always manage to get their work to slip through the net and in time, things would probably return to the way they are now, with a few possible exceptions in highly visible work, such as court interpreting and international tenders.

There is also the inconvenient truth that certification, which often goes hand in glove with legal protection, is not in itself an indicator of quality. It was, after all, certified auditors who allowed the Enron scandal to go undetected. And there is, as yet, no proof that “certified translators” produce better work than those with equal amounts of experience but no certification.

This, of course, does not mean that certification is worthless. It implies accountability and a professional approach to work, which are assets in themselves. It also implies a readiness to submit your work to outside scrutiny, which again, is worthwhile. When tied to membership of a professional association, such as MITI or MCIL or Chartered Linguist status here in the UK, it also implies a commitment to the good of the profession as a whole. It does not, however, mean that every translation produced by every certified translator will be of an equal standard. Restricting translation to those who are certified would therefore be no good to clients.

Protection, at least as it is commonly described, might even be detrimental to the professions it was meant to safeguard. How are people supposed to get into translation or interpreting if only existing professionals can do the work?

Perhaps we might be better seeking to emulate the practices of those in the medical profession. (Of course, this isn’t my idea, Heriot-Watt PhD student, Robyn Dean, thought of it before I did). The point is that, nowadays, anyone can be their own doctor. The internet offers a variety of different tools and sites, each of which can give medical advice of some sort or another, much like there is a range of ways you can get translation done.  What sets the proper doctors apart from the amateurs is not just training and passing exams but their part in a system which puts accountability and scrutiny at the core of career advancement.

What can and should set the “real” translators apart from the cowboys and amateurs then is not simply a certificate or a title – as good as these things are – but an entire approach to work. Setting up and promoting a system of checks and continued accountability is worth more than legislation. If the system is robust enough, it will justify limiting certain kinds of work to those who are within it. It would be much easier, for instance, to argue that those interpreting in courts should be independently checked and continually monitored by an entire system than that they should have passed a one-off exam. Similarly, it would be easier to argue for clients to use translators and interpreters within this system on the basis of added value rather than simply screaming for restrictions to be placed on the market.

At the end of the day, any system that is set up has to benefit clients and professionals alike. It’s this goal, not simply pushing for higher rates or restrictions on trade, that is worth pursuing.

 

Author: Jonathan Downie

To PhD or not to PhD

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For the majority of language professionals, the thought of giving three or more years of their life over to sitting in an office, reading papers, writing notes and preparing papers sounds like a punishment. Who in their right mind would leave behind (or at least reduce) their professional workload in favour of spending hours on theory and methods. We must be mad!

Believe it or not, research might actually be good for you. Besides helping improve the status of translators and interpreters, besides helping them understand what clients actually want, besides raising the profile of languages, research might actually help make you a better translator or interpreter.

How so? Well, if you have been a professional for any length of time, you will certainly have already used a bunch of the skills researchers use on an everyday basis. If you need to find the right term to use, you need to analyse and classify sources, sort and collate information, think critically, build an argument and follow it through to its logical conclusion. Now, admittedly, you might not write much of this process down but maybe you should.

How many times have you done research for one job and not been able to recall where you found all the information you needed when a similar job came along? Have you ever done a great job of doing the research for one translation only to struggle to follow the same process for the next?

All methodology really boils down to is the discussion of different ways of gathering and collating information. What do I lose or gain if I do my research this way? How do I know the information I am gathering is trustworthy? How do I define “trustworthy” anyway?

And theory? Well, as Prof Graham Turner says, there is no better theory than practical theory. Theory can mean two things in Translation and Interpreting Studies, both of which may well be handy for professionals. The first thing theory does is to divide up the world and place pretty labels on the bits. As soon as you start talking about the difference between translation, transcreation and adaptation, you are talking theory. Yet this difference might be really important, financially important above all!

The other kind of theory starts to predict stuff. If I translate this sentence like this, will it make the translation work better or worse? Do my agency clients want something different from my direct clients? What happens if I increase my lag when doing simultaneous interpreting? Will anything bad happen if I am 100% accurate here?

Research is not quite so alien after all. In fact, it might have some useful stuff to say to professionals and professionals might actually have something to say to research too. It might even be the case that professionals could do worse than to get involved in it.

Now, not everyone is going to go as far as to go get a PhD. But there are several good reasons why professionals might want to keep their finger on the pulse of Translation and Interpreting research. If nothing else, keeping an eye on practical research might give us some useful ideas to try out, ideas that should have already been tried and tested.

Author: Jonathan Downie

Edupunk, Engagement and the Rise of Peer Training

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Last week, the Thesis Whisperer visited Heriot-Watt. No, it wasn’t an expert in animal training nor was it a visiting speaker who hadn’t learned to project their voice but instead Dr Inger Mewburn, known online for her Thesis Whisperer blog. Although her talk was aimed at helping young academics use social media to help them up the career ladder, one of the most memorable moments was her presentation of the idea of “Edupunk.”

Edupunk is new, dating from just 2008. Basically, it promotes a “do-it-yourself” rule-free approach to teaching and learning. What Dr Mewburn added was that this could easily apply to academic careers too. At a time when blogs and twitter feeds say as much about an academic as their publication list and CV, why play by the existing rules? Why not use new technologies to get the word out about what you do rather than spending all your time filling in form after form after form?

It’s not far off an approach that was tried here at Heriot-Watt to get Deaf and signing people more engaged with research. Since these people are online and engaging with blogs anyway, why not aim a blog at them and let them engage with research online? You will need to either come to the upcoming BAAL conference or wait until the paper hits the journals to find out how that went.

Still, whether that was successful of not, the point remains that nowadays, online, interactive, innovative learning is hitting the mainstream. In the world of commercial translation and interpreting, providers like eCPD and experts like Marta Stelmaszak are making waves with courses like Business School for Translators and showing that translators and interpreters can and should learn from their fellow professionals. National associations have long shown that this path is worth treading. ITI is only one example of a professional association that has long made a  point of providing opportunities for its members to learn from each other.

It’s a cultural shift that is spreading far and wide. But this wouldn’t be a LifeinLINCS post if we just left it there. Just as crowdsourced and professional translation might not be implacable enemies, so it is with Edupunk and traditional training. There are, after all, good reasons for boring-sounding concepts like Learning Outcomes and Syllabus Design. While you could almost certainly string together micro-course after micro-course and spend the same number of hours on informal translation and interpreting training as you could on a degree course, it wouldn’t add up to the same thing.

Of course, some would say that this only favours online and peer learning. A masters degree does not a translator make. That may well be true but it is also true to say that the good degrees can be recognised by the fact that they mix both practical and theoretical training, alongside exposure to events that provide a starting point for the transition from graduate to freelancer.

There might therefore be space for partnership between the new and the old or even for them to learn from each other. The new online course providers could perhaps do with looking at how universities pull together courses into a single package and how they check that the courses they offer are working. They might also want to take a peek at the transferable skills that graduates are supposed to learn to see what they could add to their approach. Learning how to learn effectively is, after all, as necessary a skill for aspiring freelancers as learning to market their services.

For pre-Edupunk academics, the lessons are more striking. For one, if the edupunk approach is has merit then some of the structures normally put around learning might be completely unnecessary. At the very least, it might mean mixing up the methods used for teaching and making more materials available online to absolutely anyone. Edupunk, engagement and peer learning tell us that people want to be far more involved in their own training. Perhaps it’s time to give them that opportunity.

Author: Jonathan Downie

[Editor’s note: The first public version of this post erroneously suggested that national associations had “jumped on the bandwagon” in providing online, peer-learning courses. It has been correctly pointed out that this is not the case and in some cases the courses provided by national associations pre-date some of the examples given by several years. Jonathan apologises for any offence caused by this inaccuracy.]

Crowdsourcing and the Shrinking Middle

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So, with the creation of new tech firm VerbalizeIT, the world has another company that says they can reduce the cost of translation and interpreting. It’s not as if the idea itself is that new. Regular LifeinLINCS readers, will remember our posts on NTT Docomo (among others), who offered a similar service. The difference this time? Well, it’s people. Instead of trusting your important call to the whims of Machine Translation and Voice Recognition, now you are to trust it to other humans.

Sounds a lot better. But wait, there’s a catch. Anyone who has read the ads VerbalizeIT have posted on translation and interpreting job websites will notice something is missing. There is zero mention of experience or qualifications. In the words of their CEO “we want to tap into the one billion people who speak a second language.”

Okay, no prizes for guessing why they think they can hit lower “price points” than their competition. By going for people who “speak another language” as opposed to those with qualifications to prove the point, they are able to get lower rates than you would ever pay for an in-person, qualified and trained professional.

For this reason, much the same can be said about their services than has been said about every other service that has attempted to overturn the industry. It will no doubt do just fine for tourist needs and perhaps (in a pinch) for trips to the pharmacy to buy medicine but I wouldn’t trust it in a doctor’s surgery or hospital. It is very doubtful whether it will make much of a dent in the business or conference markets too.

There is and always will be a need for telephone interpreting and its newer, slicker cousin, skype interpreting. However, for this to be reliable, it needs to be offered by people who actually know what they are doing. Crowdsourcing is all well and good but in places where quality matters, you will want a professional, just as it might be fine to get your Uncle Mick in to change a fuse for you but you would call in a professional to rewire your house.

There will always be a need for professionals and there will always be a need to educate people about the difference between professional translation and interpreting and the kind you can get from “bilinguals”, most of all those who want to enter the profession themselves. For students and those who one day want to go pro, services like VerbalizeIT might provide an insight into what the job involves and some handy cash but they shouldn’t be confused with the high end, quality-driven services that only fully-fledged professionals can offer.

Still, what this new startup reminds us is that there should always be room for language professionals to re-examine their own pricing structure. This might not mean dropping rates but it might mean looking at whether real efficiency savings can be made in how interpreting and translation are provided. There may be occasions where skype is a perfectly acceptable interpreting medium and where post-edited Machine Translation might be all that is required.

Lastly, while the advent of this new startup is not at all a threat or a real disturbance to the industry as a whole, it may be a sign of things to come. It doesn’t take a Nostradamus to predict that the already fragmented language industry will fragment even further, with even larger gaps between the “professional product,” where quality is king and provider-client partnerships rule the seas and the “crowdsourced zone” where price-points and speed hold sway. The middle ground, it seems is growing ever smaller. The question is, are we ready to cope with its loss?

IPCITI Comes to Heriot-Watt

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Last week we announced that the BAAL conference is shortly coming to Heriot-Watt. This week we are pleased to announce that the International Postgraduate Conference in Translation and Interpreting (IPCITI) will be taking place here on 14-16th November too.

The IPCITI Conference is the result of a long-term collaboration between Dublin City University, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Manchester. It is designed to provide new researchers from all areas of translation and interpreting studies with the opportunity to share their research with peers in a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment. Day one of IPCITI is devoted to pre-conference workshops; days two and three are devoted to keynote lectures and parallel conference sessions.

Details of workshops, keynote speakers, call for papers and topics of specific interest for IPCITI 2013 will be announced by mid-March.

Authors: IPCITI 2013 Organising Team

Being There

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What’s the difference between an interpreter and a translator?

Most people reading this blog probably already know the answer. Interpreters work with signed and/or spoken language; translators work with written language.

Still, for the most part, there is an even more obvious difference. Despite the growth of remote and video interpreting, it is still typically the case that interpreters work in the situation where their output will be used and translators (normally) don’t. For the most part, interpreters are there: in the doctor’s surgery, in the conference, in the factory; while translators are somewhere else: in a different office, in a different city or even on an entirely different continent!

Those of us have done both translation and interpreting will tell you that this makes a big difference. For some, the extra space and time that being separated from the place your text will be used is a real blessing. Without the constant pressure of being watched while you work and with the time to really think about what is needed, you stand a better chance of catching all those tricky details that take time to get right. Nevertheless, this separation can lead to problems of its own. How much of your work do you get to see being used? There might be nothing better than receiving pay for a job and then getting to see it displayed on a website, on a poster or even in a museum but for most translators, however, it’s all too rare to see their work there.

Interpreters don’t have this problem. Even when working remotely, they have the privilege of receiving instant feedback from their work, written on the faces of those they work with. They get to see their work in use almost as soon as they have produced it. It doesn’t take much work, even at the biggest conference, to observe people using what you are saying.

Yet there are risks attached to this privilege of being there. Being there with your clients brings severe time pressure. Split second decisions have to be made. Research during the assignment has to be done “on the fly,” where and when you can fit it in. This means that even the best interpreters can have problems with getting across some of the details.

Similar problems crop up in the research world. Here at the Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies at  Heriot-Watt, many of our researchers are used to “being there.” We have experienced interpreters and translators researching translation and interpreting. We also have a former documentary film maker researching film. People like this have been there and some might still be there. So, you would expect that their work would be fairly close to the realities of the job. You would be right.

But what about those who haven’t ever physically sat in a booth or who have never translated something just for the money? Perhaps, like translators, they will be slightly distant from the world they are working with. Unlike translators, they might occasionally come up with ideas that the people “there” might find irrelevant or obtuse. They might even be happy with the idea that their work is nothing to do with the actually day-to-day work of translators or interpreters at all!

So, where does this leave us? Is it always better to be “there?” Maybe, or maybe not. You see, just as translators might actually find putting some distance between their work and its use beneficial, so might researchers. Being there might actually mean that you miss out important details. It might mean that you gloss over the realities of your work. It sometimes takes someone from outside your area of expertise to open your eyes to your own strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps researchers might need input from people who have never been “there” and perhaps professionals might need it too.

A Year and a Bit of Blogging About Research

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On 1st October this year, LifeinLINCS celebrated a year since its launch. Since then we have covered a whole range of topics from subtitling to court interpreting and from getting a career in translation and interpreting to minority language rights and why people would put careers on hold to go and do research.

It has to be said that the reception has been superb. People from more than 110 countries have checked out the blog. Since the end of February this year, more than 12,000 different people have read at least one post. More than that, almost 100 comments have been left since the blog began, which means that our number of comments far outstrips the number of times we have posted!

And what have you been saying? Well, it seems that odd client behaviour isn’t actually as odd as it might seem. The UK government’s arrangements for court interpreting still inspire anger and it is impossible to over-exaggerate the personality quirks of language professionals.

All of this from a blog that struggled to gain 10 visits a day in its first week. If you had asked the experts then if a blog about research aimed at practising professionals would survive, the answer would have been hidden in fits of laughter. Nowadays, one of our editors gets a bit disappointed if we get less than 100 visits per day and it is not unknown for days to hit ten or even twenty times that!

If nothing else, the past year and a bit has shown that professional practice and rigorous belong together. It has also shown that when this research and the thinking that goes alongside it are presented in an easily accessible way, people will not only read it but will start to talk about it.

So, maybe translation and interpreting isn’t in such bad shape after all!

There is more to come from LifeinLINCS as we seek to broaden the range of language research from Heriot-Watt that we cover, as well as commenting on language stories in the news and, of course, attempting to be funny from time to time. Lookout for next week’s post on what modelling clay can tell us about our clients.

Author: Jonathan Downie

Your Training, Your Way?

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In a recent post, we started thinking about the usefulness of translation and interpreting degrees. It was very encouraging to see the response from LifeinLINCS readers.

Now, it’s time for your views to take centre stage. A few people here at LINCS would like to run online courses, centred on what you want to learn. To help us, we would like you to fill in this 5 minute survey.

The more responses we get, the better we can tailor the courses. So far, we are looking at two main options:

1) Short online webinars
These would be around 90 minutes to half a day long and would give you the chance to quiz experts on translation and/or interpreting on different areas: from everyday business skills to handling technical translations. The whole idea of these events would be that you would be in charge. By filling in the survey, you would help set the theme. By sending in questions, you would be in control of what was covered. By participating in online chatting and tweeting, you would help to steer the event.

2) Full-day online CPD events
Ever wanted to go to a translation or interpreting course but couldn’t afford the travel and accomodation? This could be your answer. Once again, these events would be built around the topics you want covered. They would be a mix of short presentations, panel Q&A sessions and interactive work. Again, these events will be interactive, taking into account the views you express by tweeting or chatting.

The whole idea of this is to provide your training your way. However, those of us who would like to see these courses run, we need to hear what you think. So please:

FILL IN THE SURVEY

Translator Sayings

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(in honour of International Translation Day)

Here at Heriot-Watt, we love doing cutting edge research but we can also have a bit of fun. On Wednesday, normal service will be resumed with a post on why some of our PhD students chose to do research. But for now, in honour of International Translation Day, here is a list of the top 10 most common Translator sayings.

10) Working from home does not mean I can spring clean the house before you get back from work!

Yep, it’s the perennial favourite, the myth that working from home means translators do nothing all day. Of course, translators can spring clean the house, wash the cat, dust the dog and change the light bulbs before our partners, children and/or pets get home. No problem! This 3,000 word contract will take care of itself, right?

9) These aren’t pyjamas; they’re my work clothes!

Okay, so few translators actually translate in their pyjamas (we think!). Still, it can be a mite embarrassing when you answer the door to the postman at 10am and are a) still in the house and b) still wearing scrappy clothes. Still, it’s better than having to get up and don a suit by 7am. The idea of being in all day leads to…

8) No, I do not need to “get a job.” I already have one, thank you!

Ever met relatives who felt sorry for you because you didn’t have a 2 hour morning commute to an office? Yeah, someone’s logic is flawed there!

7) It’s 5,000 words long and you want if for 5pm today?

Show me a translator who hasn’t taken one of those calls and I will show you a translator on their first few jobs! It’s is absolutely incredible how we can all fit in so many words before the end of the day, even after we have finished washing the cat!

6) Sorry, I don’t do discounts for large jobs.

… mostly because translators don’t want to lock themselves into a poor rate of pay for months on end!

5) Sorry, I don’t do discounts for “easy” jobs either.

… mostly because clients and translators have different opinions as to what counts as “easy!”  Doing 5,000 words by 5pm today does not count as easy! Especially when you have a cat to wash.

4) I use Trados, MemoQ and thirteen software packages you have never heard of.

… which is an excuse for charging at least the going rate!

3) My specialist areas are x, y and z.

… which means you know you are getting someone who knows what they are doing. It also means it has cost time, effort and money to get this expertise so that’s why the rates are so high.

2) Conference? Did someone say conference?

One of the drawbacks of most translators’ schedules is that it means spending long hours alone. A conference, meet up, tweet up or even random course can mean actually going outside (shock!) and meeting other people (double shock!). Believe it or not, most translators actually know how to make conversation, once their eyes adjust to the light, that is. This leads nicely to the most common thing I have read and heard translators say…

1)    I love my job!

Author: Jonathan Downie