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As a translator/translation agency hybrid, I happen to know that translators are among the most difficult and possibly the strangest people on this planet. Difficult as in working with them and getting along with them. They get really angry very easily for all kinds of strange reasons, usually at the wrong person.

I once sent a short patent for translation to a French translator. He sent me back his translation with a scornful e-mail that was full of indignation, (which must have been directed at me, right?), in which he described the patent as “stupid garbage”. I picked his name from the ATA database and it said right there that he specialized in patents. He forgot to mention that he only likes to translate patents that are really clever and very well written.

So I never sent him another job, of course. I have never personally come across a patent that I would describe as “stupid garbage”, especially to the person who pays me to translate it. All patents are gold to me – they pay my bills! I take it personally when people are disrespectful to patents!

Wife’s generic descriptive term for a translator is “henjin” (変人). The first character means “strange” and the second means “person”. When we talk to a translator, these days usually through Skype, she always says to me after the end of the conversation something like “yappari, kare mo henjin da ne” (it sure looks like he’s a weirdo too). She noticed that when a translator is an easygoing, pleasant and engaging person to talk to, he is not really a translator, he just dabbles into translation and does mostly something else for a living. I must say that it is usually spot on.

She has been hating with a burning fury a certain Japanese translator for 23 years now. She calls him Teru-Teru, which sounds really funny and demeaning in Japanese, because Teru-Teru committed an unforgivable crime 23 years ago. Because he dropped and broke an antique lacquer rice bowl when we were having a dinner with him and his wife, we now have to eat our rice from a rice bowl that is not quite as antique.

Since she is mentioning the vile and dirty deed perpetrated by Teru-Teru on average three times a year, I must have heard her describe this unforgivable act that reduced her to having to eat her rice from a rice bowl that is less than a hundred years old about 66 times so far.

So in addition to being difficult to get along with, translators are clearly also extremely clumsy.

However, my wife also understands that translators can be sometime really useful in spite of the fact that they are generally inferior in most respects to most other human beings who are not translators. After all, she married one of them 28 years ago.

She grudgingly acknowledges that a translator who unlike her can speak really fluently several languages must be in fact really smart, or as she puts it, translators are 馬鹿 (baka) and 天才 (tensai) at the same time.

“Baka” means “a dumb person, a fool” and “tensai” means “a genius”. One of her favorite Japanese proverbs is “天才と馬鹿は紙一重” (tensai to baka wa kamihitoe), which means something like “there is a very slight difference between a genius and a crazy person”.

So she really considers translators to be both really dumb and really smart, sort of like idiot-savants, I think.

There are women who like to wear T-shirts or put stickers on their cars that refer to their regrettable choice of life companion or husband by saying something like “I’m with stupid”. But I have never seen a T-shirt or car sticker that would say in English “I’m with Idiot-Savant”.

I have not been to Japan in many years, but I doubt that a Japanese wife would wear a T-shirt that would be so openly disrespectful of her husband. It goes against the Japanese culture. If you want to disrespect your husband, you do it in private in Japan.

Except, of course, when the words on the T-shirt are in English and the wife does not understand what the words mean, which is usually the case.

There probably are quite a few Japanese women who walk around in Japan with a T-shirt that says “I’m with stupid” who have no idea what those words mean.

After all, they are not translators.

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Like many other newspapers these days, The New York Times is spying on people who read The New York Times online. The newspaper makes people register first and then cuts them off and shows them this screen if they have read more than 20 articles per month because it is trying to figure out how to make them pay for reading the paper online. Given the decrease in the number of people like me who read what on the blogosphere is referred to as “dead tree media”, it all makes sense …. sort of.

Although access to most newspapers is free on the Internet, Wall Street Journal and some other publications charge a fee to access the newspaper for what is now called digital subscription. Other newspapers, and also magazines like The New Yorker, also offer digital subscriptions for access not only from a computer, but also through a tablet or a smart phone.

However, the Wall Street Journal or The New Yorker have never been The Newspaper (or The Weekly Magazine) of Record. They consciously cater to a certain kind of reader only – investors and mostly Republicans in the case of Wall Street Journal, and mostly snobs who live in or near New York in the case of The New Yorker.

The New York Times, for all its faults, probably still is The Newspaper of Record. But will it remain what it has been for many decades when it keeps raising prices – it used to cost a dollar and now it costs 2 dollars on newsstands – while trying to limit access to people who are not willing to pay for reading it online?

I started reading New York Times just after graduation from university with a degree in Japanese and English when I found my first job as a translator of news from various news agencies for the Czech (back then Czechoslovak) News Agency (CTK) in Prague in 1980.

Because I needed to be well informed about the decadent West, it was sort of a part of my job to read New York Times, Newsweek, Der Spiegel and other publications in addition to translation of breaking news from major news agencies such as Reuters, Agence France Presse, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and of course TASS – The Soviet News Agency of Record – which were back then received by enormous and complex short wave antennas on the roof of the building and then printed by huge and noisy electro-mechanical teletype printers.

I did not read New York Times at all when I lived in West Germany in 1981 and 1982. I put English and Japanese on the back burner as I tried to function as much in German as possible, which included reading magazines like Der Spiegel and Stern in German.

After I moved to Japan in 1985, I still did not read New York Times because I could buy it only in one store near Ginza and I did not get there very often. The only English language newspapers that were available in Tokyo at vending machines back then were The Japan Times and USA Today. I am guessing that they decided to sell USA Today instead of New York Times because the articles were relatively short and they were written in relatively simple English.

But shortly after I moved back to San Francisco, I started subscribing to New York Times, partly because there were not that many interesting articles in the San Francisco Chronicle even back then. As I try to read the Chronicle online every now and then, I can see that the situation is much worse now.

There was an interesting twist to having a subscription to New York Times in San Francisco before the age of Internet: you could actually read tomorrow’s paper today because the morning edition of New York Times  was delivered to my apartment’s porch in San Francisco around 10 PM the day before it was in fact published. A lot of San Francisco night owls got a subscription to New York Times partly for this reason, including several friends of mine.

People did not realize 30 or 20 years ago that what was printed in the paper today was in fact yesterday’s news, but they sure realize it now. I assume that most people who still read a real newspaper with their morning coffee as I do every day have already read about most of the subjects that are covered in the paper on blogs and other venues on the Internet because just like me, they check their e-mail first thing in the morning.

The news that is printed in the newspaper these days is no longer new and as Mick Jagger sang already in 1967: “Who wants yesterday’s paper, who wants yesterday’s girl …. nobody in the world!” Fewer and fewer people insist on reading a newspaper that they can actually touch with their hands every day. My kids, who are in their early twenties, don’t read New York Times or anything else from the “dead tree media”. They get their information from the Internet through their Macs and iPhones, and so do their friends. This is one reason why newspapers like New York Times and Washington Post keep increasing their prices, which in turn means that there will be fewer and fewer subscribers.

I only have New York Times delivered on Sundays now, along with Washington Post which lands with a thud in front of my porch every day. There is not really that much difference between the two newspapers, so I go for the cheaper one which is more relevant to me because I live in Virginia.

When Andrei Amalrik wrote in 1970 his famous essay titled “Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?”, he missed the date of the actual demise of the former mighty superpower by only 7 years. I certainly hope that the New York Times will survive the year 2020. After 32 years of reading it most of the time in most of the countries where I lived, I got kind of used to it. But I don’t think that it will be The Paper of Record by then.

I think that fewer and fewer people will be reading news on paper as mostly the older generation will still be insisting on such an extravagance because the paper will by then cost at least 3 dollars Monday through Saturday and 10 dollars on Sundays.

In 1982 when the Lionel Richie’s song from the video below was new, a phone call from a booth in San Francisco cost a nickel, buses and trains cost 60 cents, and a monthly pass which used to be called FastPass cost 24 dollars. Since the cable car fare climbed half way to the stars in 2005 when it was raised to 5 dollars and you can’t use your monthly pass on cable cars any more, only tourists ride them now.

I used to hop on the cable car on Powell and Market when I was coming back from work back then and my FastPass was good on it. There was a pizza joint in front of the cable car turnaround where you could get a huge slice of cheese pizza for one dollar. There was a Chinese restaurant, one of those second story restaurants on Market Street, where office workers could get a pretty good lunch for 3 dollars.

I have not been back there in more than 10 years, but I am sure that all of those places that used to charge these kinds of prices are gone now.

I doubt that New York Times will still be the newspaper of record by 2020. I think that their strategy is all wrong, although I don’t know what kind of strategy they should be using. For one thing, you can easily continue reading it online even after you have read 23 articles per month by switching to another browser, or if you read it on your laptop or tablet. If I could figure it out, everybody else will too.

And if they decide to spy on people who read it with different browsers and on laptops and tablets, or try to use the Wall Street Journal approach, most people will just stop reading it altogether and The New Yorker Magazine will have a higher circulation than The New York Times.

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Basic human dignity consists in the ability to contradict what is

Cornel West

I love my dog Lucy, but she has basically no ability to say no to anything. If I tell her that she cannot eat my food because dogs must eat dog food, she is hardly in a position to contradict me. She can refuse to eat her food, but she will eat it later when she gets really hungry.

Dogs have grudgingly come to accept this reality because they understand that this dog ↔ human relationship is still a pretty good deal for them. Of course, it is a pretty good deal for humans too. But as Cesar the dog whisperer tells us, if we allowed our dogs to contradict us, dogs would live in mansions that are custom built for canines and people would sleep in little dog houses. As children gradually learn how to say no to scary grownups, they start becoming real human beings.

The human beings who were waiting for 2 hours in front of a local church here almost three years ago to cast their vote for a black man who had the courage to print his middle name “Hussein” on the ticket were saying no to the status quo.

In fact, I remember that when I was talking just before the election in the gym to a neighbor of mine, mother of a friend of my son, she told me: “I could never vote for somebody whose middle name is Hussein”. Unfortunately, all this talk about change was just a load of …. very clever advertising. The man with the foreign sounding first and middle name lost all of his courage the day after the election. There would be absolutely no difference in anything had those people who so patiently waited their turn in front of the church three years ago voted for John McCain instead.

There are not that many opportunities for people to say no to anything in modern society. If you try to refuse to take of your shoes or even look the wrong way at the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) guy at the airport, the chances are you will miss your flight. So I take off my shoes, put them on the conveyor belt, and try to think about something else. It is all part of the conditioning and for the most part, it seems to be working. So far, anyway.

But given that I am a freelance translator, I do have more freedom to say no to many things that your typical employee would have to accept automatically.  So I try to take advantage of the little bit of freedom that is still available to me.

I don’t have to accept working conditions that I don’t like. True, I have to be able to find work for myself first, but after 25 years of doing just that, I more or less know how to do it.

I don’t have to accept a rate below what I consider my minimum rate. And I don’t, not anymore, not under any circumstances. Because once you do that, even when it is “just this time, just for this job, or just for this customer”, all your future work at the higher rate that you were previously paid will be overpriced.

I don’t have to accept payment terms of more than 30 days. I am willing to wait 30 days, but not longer than that. If a translation agency does not pay me on time, I will no longer accept new work from them. If a major patent law firm takes substantially longer than 30 days to pay me what is owed for my work, I automatically increase my rates.

And I can usually get away with it. Even though the law firm may have offices in many cities on several continents and I am just one person, this is one of those cases when it’s not about the size. I have more power as an individual than a large law firm if the firm momentarily needs me more than I need the firm. There are hundreds, or possibly thousands, of large and small firms that can use an experienced patent translator such as myself. But how many people have my experience and can do what I can do for these law firms at my reasonable rates? If the answer is “not that many”, I am negotiating from a position of strength.

So I try to fight for basic human dignity and contradict “what is” when this “what is” is something that in my opinion should not be.

I don’t use Trados or any other CAT tools because I don’t like them and I have no need for things like that. Contrary to popular belief, there are many translators who do exactly the same thing,

I don’t sign long and demeaning “Confidentiality Agreements” stipulating strange new conditions, such as that “intellectual property” created while I work on a project for a translation agency is the property of the agency. Does it mean that what was in my head when I was translating a Japanese patent is now the property of a translation agency that bought the translation from me and then resold it to a patent law firm? What else could it mean?

Another very strange but ubiquitous clause is a relatively new condition that says that should the agency in its wisdom decide to sue a translator for some reason, the translator would be responsible for “reasonable attorney’s fees”. In a country with a hundred thousand lawyers, there must be thousands of severely underperforming and severely underemployed lawyers willing to sue just about anybody for just about any reason at all.

Do most translators sign such agreements? I would hope not, but perhaps they do. In which case it would be probably true that just like my dog Lucy, not that many translators still have the ability to contradict what is.

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I mentioned several times on this blog that I am frequently asked by translation agencies to proofread and edit patent translations that were done by other translators who are probably less experienced than myself. I always turn down such requests, although I used to do this kind of work for a while when I was a beginner, which would be back when Reagan was president. It’s just not worth the hassle for me because the payment is invariably really low for this kind of work.

I think that just about anybody who can write good English and has some common sense can proofread translations of Japanese and Chinese patents, provided that the documents were translated by a competent  and experienced translator. Of course, if it is for example a complex chemical patent, it helps if this quality checker is a patent lawyer who has a PhD in chemistry, as well as a translation degree in Japanese or Chinese and 20 years of solid experience in the field of patent translation.

But let’s face it, how many people like that are even alive in this moment on this planet? I would say probably less than a dozen for each language. And how many of them, if they do exist, would be willing to proofread a poor to really bad patent translation for 40 dollars an hour, which is what most agencies would pay me for this kind of work? None of them, of course. Why would they want to waste their time by proofreading translations for peanuts when they can make substantial salaries filing new patents or fighting patent litigation battles for corporate clients?

So what usually happens is that a poor translation is proofread by a beginner who is still learning the ropes so to speak, who wants to find out how other people are translating things that they themselves are not quite sure how to translate. This is why I was accepting this kind of work back in the eighties, in spite of the low pay.

At least two “universal quality standard methods” have been created to guarantee the quality of translations, the EN15038 quality standard which is used in Europe, and the ISO 9001 standard which is used in the United States. I don’t really know what is happening with the European method, but I think that the ISO 9001 method is mostly good only for advertising purposes. Although I see it being advertised every now and then on websites of translation agencies, I have never been asked by a patent law firm whether I am adhering to the rules of this method or any other method officially designated to ensure high translation quality standards.

I think that it would not be terribly difficult to create a quality assurance method for example to ensure an acceptable quality of toys imported by Walmart from China. You check them for lead and sharp edges, then you throw them a few times against the wall, and they either pass the test or not.

But I do not believe that it is possible design a foolproof method that would guarantee high quality of translation.

It is not really the method that is used as much as the persons implementing the method, or any method, who can be guarantors of quality, provided that certain conditions are met.

Even the best, most qualified and highly experienced translator-quality checker will not be able to turn a really bad translation into a really good one, regardless of the method that is used.

Besides, I think that it is simply silly to assume that the same procedural method can be applied to every type of translation, including financial translation, technical and medical translation, or translation of novels, etc.

Should a translator who is translating into Mongolian the latest Wall Street scheme designed to extract wealth from Mongolian nomads by selling them “interest only” 30-year mortgages with a “balloon payment” every three years to purchase top of the line Mongolian yurts use the same method as another translator who is translating the latest version of a software manual from Japanese to English?

And should the same standard procedural method be used also by a team of translators who are working on a new Bible translation, or by somebody who is working on a new translation of the complete works of Dostoyevsky?

I think that what the Mongolian translator would need in this case, in addition to a solid grasp of the concepts and the lingo of the Moneychangers, would be a good understanding of the economics and of the psychology of said nomads.

The people on the team of biblical scholars would need to be perfectly fluent in languages that were spoken in a certain part of the world a few thousand years ago, and they would also need to have a thorough knowledge of the history and culture of that region in ancient times.  A pretty tall order, I think.

On the other hand, the Japanese translator translating Version 3.04 of the latest software update would mostly need to know some Japanese and also to be proficient with Trados if the previous versions were translated using Trados. Application of the EN15038 quality standard or of the ISO 9001 quality standard is probably a good idea in this case if the Japanese or English of this translator is not all that great, or if he does not have much experience yet.

And the translator of Dostoyevsky would basically need to be a really good translator of Russian novels to English. I think that you in fact need to be born that way. It’s called talent. Neither the EN15038 quality standard nor the ISO 9001 quality standard would be applicable in this case.

Each and every one of these translators could use a completely different method because translation quality is not determined by the method, but by what the translators know and how well they know how to use what they know in a given field.

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I noticed this strange acronym (LSP) for the first time about two years ago when I started reading blogs about translation. Although I have been a freelance translator since 1987, as a relative newcomer to the blogosphere I did not know what this strange thing meant.

As I wrote already in another post, “when [in September of 2011] I Googled LSP,  I got back a lot of interesting suggestions, such as Louisiana State Police, Latino Studies Program, Liskov Substitution Principle, Landowner Stewardship Program, Legal Services Program, Life Sciences Partner, Label Switched Path … even Lunar Soil Propellant, but nowhere in the first 10 (TEN!) pages of helpful suggestions from Google was I able to discover that LSP can also mean a Language Service Provider.”

The acronym seems to be very popular among translators, most of them like talking in acronyms like LSP and PM (project manager) in comments on blogs, possibly because they are typing on an iPad (which is not really an abbreviation, is it?), while the general public, namely non-translators, also known among translators as “civilians”, have absolutely no idea what this acronym means.

Chris Durban, a financial translator from French based in Paris, explained the origin of these three letters in a comment to a post on my blog here, and also in this explanation in a comment to a post by Jill from Musings of an Overworked Translator in which Chris said among other things this:

The background that I am aware of is as follows: when EUATC, the European Union of Associations of Translation Companies, first floated the idea of a pan-European quality standard for the translation industry (in 2002?), their draft referred explicitly to “translation agencies/companies” as the (sole) parties on the supply side.

So when professional associations of  *translators* got involved (including SFT in France, very ably represented by Jackie Reuss), our reps made the point that if the European standard excluded freelancers from the git-go there was a very real possibility that buyers complying with it would not be able to buy from freelancers. Literally not be able to use them, because the standard referred to “agencies”.

As a result, “agency/company” was changed to LSP, which explicitly covers both freelance suppliers of translation services and companies/agencies supplying same.

I personally don’t like this acronym. First of all, it makes no sense to me to keep using an acronym that is understood only by people who work in the translation industry, i.e. translators and agencies. Since the abbreviation is already 10 years old, one should be able to find easily an explanation of what it means if you Google it. But you will probably only find an explanation of this acronym if you read what bloggers say on their translation blogs.

The second and more important reason why I don’t like this abbreviation is that I think that it is misleading.

Although the abbreviation LSP might have been originally designed to include both translation agencies and translators in the term, it is now used, both by translators and by agencies, only to describe a translation agency. If a translator says about herself “I am also an LSP”, she does not mean that she is also a translator, she means that she is a translator who also functions as a translation agency because the term LSP is now synonymous with the term translation agency.

Many translators operate their businesses like this, including this one. I am both a translator and a translation agency, as I generated about 30 percent of my income last year by buying translations from other translators and then reselling them at a substantial profit to my customers, mostly patent law firms.

So I am definitely also a translation agency, and it is possible, perhaps even likely, that I will be functioning more as an agency than as a translator at some point. I hasten to add that I am not looking forward to that day, if it ever comes, because I am one of those weird people who like being a translator.

On the other hand, the truth is that I am getting lazier and lazier, and I must say that it is kind of nice when most of the work is done for me by other people and all I have to do is proofread it and prepare an invoice. Although I have to pay the translator, of course, often well before I am paid myself, which is the part that I don’t like … but what can you do.

I am only guessing here, but I think that the term LSP was probably designed partly to hide from public’s prying eyes the fact that translation agency is just an agency, a broker, a middleman. An agency is not a provider of translation services, the services are provided by translators, although some agencies add as resellers a useful service to a service that was originally provided by a translator, for instance in my case if they know how to proofread a Japanese patent (which based on my experience is almost never the case).

Stores like Best Buy that sell big TVs and small iPods purchase electronic gadgets like TVs and iPods from manufacturers of these products and then sell them them to direct customers. As far as I know, these stores are called “resellers”, not providers of TVs and iPods.

Translation agencies purchase translations from translators and then sell them to direct clients. Ergo, translation agencies are not the providers of translation services either, they are also resellers of translations that were already sold once to them by the translators.

Perhaps a more honest abbreviation for a translation agency would be an LSR – Language Service Reseller, and the abbreviation LSP should be reserved only for translators who actually provide the translation service, which is often, but not always, sold first to an agency, and then resold by the agency to a direct client.

But this is obviously not going to happen, and even if it did, the chances are that only people who actually work in the industry would understand what these abbreviations mean. This would also in a way complicate things even more since as I noted above, some LSPs would be also LSRs, for example this mad patent translator.

It would make much more sense to me to start calling a spade a spade, an agency an agency, and a translator a translator. But this is even less likely to happen than that a new abbreviation, LSR, will be introduced to confuse “civilians” even more.

Because once people start throwing around silly new abbreviations and acronyms, for some reason they never stop doing that, even if very few people understand what these new shiny things really mean.

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The second week of 2012 was a very slow week for me. I had only two jobs this week:

1.         I proofread and edited a translation of a fairly long Chinese patent, which took me about 4 hours. This translator is very good, but a lot of editing is still required. Incidentally, although I make pretty good money when I translate, I make at least as twice as much as when I translate per hour when I proofread the work of other translators before I send it to the client.

2.         I have been and still am translating a medical report: the case history (about 5 thousand words) of an 85-year old man who did not seem to have much luck in life. Both of his parents died when they were still quite young and he had no siblings or children, although he is still married. What he did and does have is a lot of diseases (diabetes, glaucoma, chronic venous insufficiency, heart disease, several heart surgeries).

In the interest of keeping all of his his information confidential, I am not going to identify the language, which means that he could be Japanese or European. It is almost as if God was punishing him by keeping him alive so that he could go through a lot of suffering for as long as possible. Maybe he did some really bad things in his previous incarnation. I became so curious about him that I had to use Google Earth to take a look at his house (the report also has his address although this kind of information is supposed to be blacked out). I do things like that sometime. It helps the translating process, I think.

But even on slow weeks like this, I usually ignore offers of potential or real work, as I did this week. After 25 years of freelance translating I don’t try nearly as hard to please everybody as I used to.

This week I ignored for instance a request for a price quote for a short translation of an excerpt from a Japanese contract that had to be done THE SAME DAY! I would have to charge a low flat fee, like 30 or 40 dollars, certify it, put my signature on stationary that was e-mailed to me in digital form, and then prepare an invoice and wait a month or more to receive all this money. I would probably have to work for more than an hour to do all this …. for measly 30 or 40 dollars. And I would probably still have done it if I were interested in the agency (I am not going to call an agency an LSP, I’ll call them what they are) that sent me the job. But the e-mail looked like it was sent to several people so that whoever answered first with the lowest bid would get the job. They even have a name for it: “first responders”.

So I ignored the e-mail. As far as I know, translators are not supposed to be “first responders”. That would be firefighters, or the dudes who come running with a stretcher to a scene of an accident, and who know how to drive really fast in crazy traffic with the siren at full blast and how to administer CPR (Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation) and things like that, not translators like me. Firefighters and paramedics have a similar skill set, which is why they are called first responders. But translators are not supposed to be first responders. Or slaves.

Translators like me like to finish the book they are reading first before starting a new translation. We don’t like to be rushed for a measly 30 or 40 bucks! We treasure our comfort zone and intensely dislike people who want to mess up our quiet, peaceful and blessedly uneventful lives.

I also ignored several requests to go to a website and fill out forms so that I could be considered for potential translation work in the future.

Here is an excerpt from one of the e-mails: The Language Geniuses (not their real name) are looking for the best and brightest to contract as translators. Being that you are an ATA member, we know you would be a great asset to our team. We best form partnerships with individuals who have a customer-oriented mindset and who try to stay on the cutting edge of the language industry.

I am an ATA member, but that does not mean that I would be a great asset to their team. Don’t The Language Geniuses know that all you have to do to be an ATA member is pay the ATA a yearly membership fee of 160 dollars? They must know that. They just don’t seem to be smart enough to come up with a better pick-up line.

I must say, filling out forms of generic translation agencies is not exactly my concept of “trying to stay on the cutting edge of the language industry”. I now usually only send in response without any further comment a link to one of my posts from last year to geniuses who are exhorting me to join their team, namely this link.

I also ignored a request to quote a price for translating a patent into Japanese, Chinese and four European languages, which was sent to me by a patent law firm in Israel. It would be a huge job, I don’t remember the exact number of words, but it was more than 5 thousand words per language.

I occasionally (actually, quite often these days) translate patents from English into other languages, but only for clients that I know and trust to pay me on time. I specialize in translating into English, because that means that I can do most of the work myself. But I can only translate into English. What if something goes wrong and the law firm in Israel does not pay me? I would still have to pay the translators.

I quoted on several projects to patent law firms in Israel last year for translations of long Japanese and Chinese patents, but never got any response from them. They must be casting a wide net and looking for rock bottom prices over there.

I will still quote for translation into English if I get a translation price quote request, regardless of in which country the customer is located, but not on a risky project like this. I don’t want to be left holding the bag.

So these were some examples of offers of work that I ignored this week.

I probably could have made a little bit more money had I been more industrious and less capricious this week, maybe quite a bit more money if the stars were properly aligned, with the Moon and Venus in the seventh house.

And I could use the money – April 15th (when taxes are due in US) is just around the corner.

But who needs the aggravation?

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The lack of authenticity is painfully obvious in modern world to the small minority of people who still dare to use their brain to question the grim reality that surrounds them everywhere they go.

In suburban America, you are surrounded by uniform chain stores wherever you go if you live in a slightly bigger town. I have my hair cut at a place called Great Clips, which is some sort of a hair cuttery chain, not to be confused with the chain that is in fact called The Hair Cuttery.

We buy our groceries at one of three chain stores in our neighborhood: Food Lion, Farm Fresh, or Harris Teeter. Food Lion is the cheapest store. It is owned by a corporation in Belgium but most people don’t know that, including the store employees. Harris Teeter is the most expensive chain store and it usually has the best selection of everything. Last year it stocked 5 different brands of Czech beer, but this year it’s down to only three brands (Food Lion only has Pilsner Urquell, Farm Fresh now has three brands too). We used to have a Piggly Wiggly supermarket here too but the store closed a few years ago, it then became a bookstore selling religious books, and now the former supermarket is a church. The building still looks like a typical shoebox type of a supermarket building with a huge cross on the roof.

Most restaurants within less than a mile from our house are chain restaurants, except for a few Chinese joints: Chinese people don’t like to start fake chains, they prefer to start their own business. We can go to Ruby Tuesday for burgers or spare ribs, to La Cantina for nachos and burritos, or to Subway to buy a foot long sandwich stuffed with various a-la-carte ingredients, but these are all chain restaurants. I thought at first that the Three Amigos was an authentic Mexican restaurant, but it is a chain restaurant too. So we mostly go to a local Chinese restaurant. We know the owners, we know a lot about them and their children, and they know quite a bit about us too, although they only know a few hundred English words.

There is no independent bookstore in the city of Chesapeake, VA, population 220,000. If I want to go to a bookstore, I can chose from two national chain bookstores: I can either go to Barnes & Nobles, or to a chain bookstore called Waldenbooks that sells books that are full of pictures to people who would probably not buy a book if it didn’t have a lot of colorful pictures in it. I would even say that calling Waldenbooks a bookstore is a bit of an exaggeration. Barnes & Nobles at least sells real books.

Most of the independent businesses still surviving where I live tend to be either car repair shops or ethnic restaurants. The car repair shops are usually authentic, the restaurants are often not. The owner of the car shop where I have been taking my business for the last 10 years is a car mechanic with a philosophical streak named Jimmy who is very authentic. Jimmy is the exception to the rule that American suburbs inevitably kill authenticity, and some would say love too. If you ask Jimmy how much is it going to cost to fix an oil leak, he will give you a lecture about the too common human failure to grasp the real meaning of existence worthy of Martin Heidegger or Jean Paul Sartre.

There are several sushi bars in the Great Bridge area of Chesapeake but they are all run by Chinese, Korean, or Thai people, and some of them sell fake sushi in addition to authentic Korean food or Thai food. The sushi were kind of mushy in all of the fake sushi restaurants that we tried so far. Maybe somebody could start a new chain of sushi restaurants and call it “Mushy-Sushi” (or “Mooshi-Sushi”)? It’s easy to remember, which is very important. There are two Vietnamese restaurants here called “Pho 76″ with huge plasma TVs on the wall where customers can watch a football game while slurping noodles, so that must be a chain too.

The restaurants here in Eastern Virginia are really very different from the small Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Cambodian or Brazilian and Basque family restaurants that we kept discovering year after year in San Francisco, Petaluma and Santa Rosa.

The lack of authenticity is painfully obvious also in the translation business. Type the word “translation” in the Google search bar and take a quick look at the first 10 websites (I would skip all advertised entries if I am looking for authenticity).

They all look the same: Photoshopped images of enthusiastic young people representing different ethnic groups with fake smiles on the faces of human mannequins who never translated anything and never will. The women are usually young and curvy, but sometime they wear glasses giving them a serious, almost severe look. The men in the pictures are earnest, sincere, and studly androids. An 800 or 877 number  is usually answered by an answering service that only takes messages (but somebody will call you right back).

These websites often either have no geographical address, only an information/price quote request form to be filled out and e-mailed, or they have 5 or more different addresses in different countries … the more to chose from, the better and the more authentic.

You are not dealing with just one company … you are dealing with “a family of companies” in some cases according to the propaganda on their websites. Which means that a lot of people in this big, happy “family” have to take their cut first before the translator is paid … peanuts.

There is clearly an opportunity here for small but authentic translation businesses to enter the online translation marketplace, but few translators seem to be aware of this. Most just keep sending their resumes to agencies, including my humble enterprise. I send a dozen translators’ resumés to the recycle bin on my desktop most days. Some translators have websites, but these websites don’t seem to be designed to compete with the faceless and often addressless translation agencies who sell their services to customers on the Internet.

I think that it would be a mistake to use the same approach that is based on completely fake Photoshopped illusions to create a translator’s website. We all have different advantages and disadvantages, strengths and weaknesses. But unlike the opaque yet transparent, bottom-line-driven translation enterprises, each and every one of us is a real, authentic individual. Why not use our authenticity to sell our product without a broker?

Here is my New Year’s resolution: I will not try to sell Photoshopped propaganda to my customers in my patent translation business. I am selling a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) product to my customers, with all the authenticity and sincerity that I possess.

Because as a smart politician once put it back when we still had smart and engaging politicians in this country:”If you can fake authenticity and sincerity, you’ve got it made”.

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There is a theory that most rock musicians write their best music about 5 years after they first put together a band and start performing and writing songs. Beatles published Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band about 5 years after they first put their band together. The Rolling Stones released Beggars Banquet also about 5 years after they started performing, etc. One could say the same thing about Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, but of course, these two musicians did not have enough time left on this earth to disprove this theory. I am not sure whether I agree or disagree with the theory, but I have not heard from Paul McCartney, the man who wrote “Yesterday”, any new song that would be really worth listening to in the last 30 years or so.

I think that there is a certain logic to this popular if unproven theory. It is really the energy of youth that powers the music of rock musicians. No musician can possibly continue to be inspired by the same things (love and death, beauty and ugliness, loneliness and pain) forever. When even the most powerful emotions are no longer new to us, they lose their power and no longer inspire as they used to. To mix a Latin metaphor with something that J.D. Sallinger, who wrote only one book that is worth reading while he was still quite young, said about sixty years ago, there is nothing new and really powerful under the sun for people over thirty.

Oh, if we could still feel what we felt when we were young and our bodies still looked the same, is a complaint that one can always hear from us old geezers. Or as Mark Twain put it, “youth is wasted on the young”.

But unlike rock musicians, writers, painters, sculptors, actors and people in other professions, for instance scientists, can sometime do their best work long after the magic of youth has disappeared. They can do their best work in their seventies, eighties, or even nineties because they draw their inspiration not only, or not as much, from powerful emotions. Youth is all about emotions that are new and overpowering. Middle age and senectitudo are about emotions that are tempered by experience, and in some cases even a little bit of knowledge.

I think it is safe to say that unlike rock musicians, translators don’t do their best work while they are still quite young, because they don’t really know anything about anything when they are still young, even the talented ones. Translators don’t need as much inspiration as writers or actors, although they do need some. But they definitely do need experience, and the more the better. Ten years of experience in the field of translation is better than nothing, but it is not much. Twenty years is better than ten, and thirty is better still.

I have been making a living by translating since I graduated with a degree in languages in 1980. Every job I have had during those years had something to do with translating, and I have been a freelance translator for the last 25 years out of those 32 years. I think that the fact that I have been able to support a family on one income in this dog-eat-dog world for the last 25 years now means something. In any case, it means something to me.

I also think that because the work of translators is based on what they know about their languages and the world around them, most of them probably do their best work only after about at least two decades of solid experience in their chosen field, whether they translate mostly novels, or mostly patents as I do.

After twenty five years of on-the-job experience as a freelance translator, more if I include also other jobs in which I had to use more than one language on three continents, I am no longer a beginner in this profession. I am probably somewhere on the intermediate/advanced level at this point, and my hope is that I will do my best work during the next twenty five years.

Freelance translators are among professionals who can work well into their old age if they want to or need to (or both).

A few years ago I translated a long Japanese patent for a patent law firm that for some reason did not seem to have a website. When I did not receive anything after about 5 weeks, I tried to find more about the law firm on the Internet and I realized that this firm did not really exist anymore since the nineties. According to information available on the Internet, the partners of this law firm started practicing patent law sometime in early sixties, and the reason why they had no website was that they were retired. This made me a little bit nervous because the nonexistent law firm owed me two thousand dollars.

But the telephone number of the “retired” partner who sent me the patent for translation worked. By looking at his resume, I estimated his age at between 80 to 85 or maybe even more. When I called him, he apologized for the delay and said that he would have his client send me the check directly. And I did get the check within a few days.

It’s quite possible that rock musicians do their best work after about 5 years, and retired patent lawyers and elderly patent translators after about 50 years on the job.

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1.         I don’t like it when people who don’t know me call me Steve.

I switched from T-Mobile to Verizon because customer support kept referring to me by my first name. What’s next? Are they going to start calling me “boy”?

Since there is really no difference between the services provided and rates charged by wireless carriers in US (which used to be called collusion, price fixing and monopoly, namely something that is illegal and that used to be prosecuted when corporations still had to pay attention to little details like laws and regulations in the United States), they’d better be polite to me or I will keep switching carriers as long as there are at least two of them left.

2.         I don’t like it when translation agencies call me “vendor”.

Don’t they know that I am a translator? It is one thing if a law firm’s accounting department calls me a “vendor”. Lots of businesses sell services to law firms. For instance businesses providing blood spatter pattern analysis sell their services to law firms specializing in criminal law, along with translators. I don’t mind if law firms call me  a “vendor”. But translation agencies buy only one commodity – translation, because that is what they sell, based on the revolutionary and extremely ingenious principle that when you buy translation low and sell it high, you can make mucho dinero.

If you are an agency and you want me to work for you, don’t call me Steve until we get to know each other better. And don’t call me a “vendor” either. Didn’t your mother teach you that politeness costs nothing and it can get you everything?

3.         I don’t like it when translation agencies lie to me.

They don’t realize that they can be very easily caught if they lie to translators because we have blogs and we talk to each other ……. constantly. For instance, I was working on a project at a reduced rate for a while for one agency. The guy who initially wanted me to accept an even lower rate eventually agreed to what I asked for, which was still a discount on my part, and then said “You are the only translator who can get this rate from us on this project”.

But another Japanese translator who was working on the same project told me that he was told the same thing by the same guy. So it was obviously a lie. I stopped working for this agency last year. They were just too greedy and too stupid. Don’t they know that it is not a good idea to lie unless you absolutely have to because you can get caught?

4.         I don’t like it when “translation auctions” masquerading as real jobs are sent to a bunch of translators called “team members” so that they could keep underbidding each other.

It is one thing when somebody finds my websites and sends out of the blue an inquiry to me and a number of other translators. But I refuse to participate in translation auctions of an agency that I have been working for for years. This is just a ploy designed to make me lower my rates, which is why I don’t respond to demands for price and turnaround time quotes sent en masse to all “team members”.

I am not really a team member. I work for myself. I will try to fit your job in if I have time and if you can pay my rate, but that’s about it. The last time I participated in an auction was when I bought a used Ford Taurus station wagon in Napa, California, because it looked like a really good deal. But counting the money I had to spend on repairs, it was a really bad deal.

5.         I don’t like it if I am not paid for my work within about 30 days.

Even 30 days is a long time to wait for my money. I can stretch it to about 40 days, but if you take longer than that, I will drop you like a hot potato if you are a translation agency, and I will raise my rates to you if you are a corporation.

I understand that it may be difficult to change accounting terms and conditions in a big corporation. But the big corporation (or a small law firm) must understand that they have to pay me more if they let me wait longer because time is money. It’s not personal, it’s business.

6.         I don’t like it when somebody wants me to translate something “today”.

As in “It’s only a few hundred words but we would need it this afternoon”. Sure, I could do it today if it is only a few hundred words and I am not working on a rush translation. But don’t people know that I have a life too, or am trying to have one, even though I am only a lowly translator? I’d like to finish the mystery novel I am reading first because I am pretty sure I know who the real killer is, and then I need to walk my dog for thirty minutes. Unlike your translation, she can’t wait! When you got to go, you got to go!

Unless you give me at least two days, I will charge you a really high rate because you are trying to prevent me from living a normal life that is meaningful to me and my dog.

7.         I don’t like it when one long translation is split between several translators.

I understand that this is sometime inevitable, but I try not to participates in such projects because it is usually a recipe for a disaster. It is basically impossible to make sure that the translation will make sense when you have 3 or 4 or 5 or more cooks cooking the same meal, each with different ingredients and based on different techniques.

I usually say no to such jobs. I am just trying to stay out of trouble.

8.         I don’t like long “Confidentiality Agreements” designed to turn me into a slave.

I mean the word “slave” literally. If I agree that the agency does not need to pay for my work if it deems my translation inadequate and that I am responsible for “reasonable attorney fees” should a translation agency decide in its infinite wisdom to sue me, I am not an independent contractor, I am a slave.

Since translation agencies keep making these agreements longer and more demeaning, I don’t really work for agencies much anymore. Instead, I am becoming a translator/agency hybrid. I have never sent any agreement to translators who work for me, unless the client demanded that I do so, in which case I send a Confidentiality Agreement that really is only a Confidentiality Agreement.

9.         I don’t like it when somebody is interested more in my software than in my experience and qualifications.

My software is MS Word. That’s it. I don’t use Trados or any other CATs or DOGs. Hence, I don’t give discounts for fuzzy matches as I strive to achieve a perfect match each and every time. If you don’t like it, find yourself another translator. There must be a zillion translators out there who have been translating Japanese patents for 25 years, just like this mad patent translator.

Good luck to you!

10.       I don’t like it when people have absolutely no idea what I am talking about when they ask me what do I do for living and I tell them that I am a translator. Dozens of people told me over the years that I should move to New York because I could work there for United Nations as a translator.

And also that I will be out of work very soon because machine translation will soon replace human translators. I used to try to explain things to non-translators, but I pretty much gave up on them. I mostly just smile now in response to their inane comments. But I still don’t like it. And when they then ask how many languages do I speak, my standard answer now is “I can fake very convincingly seven languages”, which is in fact true.

That at least gets me a smile from them too and it usually stops any further inquiring about my profession, which, as everybody knows, will soon disappear because all translation will be done by computers running MT software within a year or two.

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Most people don’t remember this anymore but a couple of decades ago, people used to send documents to translators by fax. If this document was a second or third generation fax of a Japanese patent, the details of many complicated characters became completely illegible, rendering translation impossible. In fact, because Japanese patents were often filed by fax until the late seventies, the resolution of original old patent applications that are available on the JPO (Japan Patent Office) website is still often not very good.

Fax resolution has not improved much in three decades, which is one reason why not many people still use fax. But unlike in the eighties or even early nineties of the last century, clearly legible patent documents can now be easily downloaded from the websites of JPO, EPO (European Patent Office), WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) and other websites of major patent offices in seconds and for free.

To my knowledge, JPO was the first major patent office that started offering free machine translation into English in the March of 2000. It was later followed by the EPO and WIPO websites. But these websites now provide in addition to clearly legible copies of patent applications, which can be downloaded as PDF files or as HTML files and other forms, also machine translation (MT) of patent applications into English (JPO, EPO, WIPO), or into English and many other languages (WIPO).

Although JPO has the oldest interface for downloading and searching and for the MT function, or maybe because of that, JPO has what is in my opinion one of the most cumbersome interfaces, although the interface of the German Patent Office (GPO) seems even more cumbersome and counter-intuitive. You have to keep clicking, 5, 6, or 7 times before you can switch from an English page to a Japanese page and vice versa.

The JPO website system seems to have been designed based on the premise that there are two kinds of people in this world: People who are Japanese and who therefore use the Japanese part of the website, and people who are not Japanese and who will therefore use the English part, sort of the variation on the “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet” concept.

Thanks to the Internet, the world is now a really crowded meeting place of different languages and cultures. But when I am on a JPO search page in English and click on the icon “Show Japanese Document”, the document is shown at such a low resolution that is as poorly legible as second or third generation faxes of Japanese patent applications used to be 25 years ago. I have to go back to the Japanese part of the website and keep clicking on different icons several times before I can display a legible Japanese document.

To save myself clicking on multiple icons, I usually download now even Japanese patents from the EPO website, instead of going to the JPO website. I usually also download a machine translated version of the Japanese text into English, which makes it easier for me to estimate the likely English word count in my translation. The actual English word count will be higher because MT ignores among other things the title information since most of it already available on the site as an Abstract document, as well as tables, flowcharts, words in figures, etc., because MT can’t handle these forms yet.

If you are a beginning patent translator, you can explore the various functions available on the JPO, EPO and WIPO sites through my website here. If you translate from European languages, in particular from French and German, you can also explore the Find Patents Worldwide link here, or the links to the French Patent Office and German Patent Office on my website. But I think that the easiest way to download most patent documents in different foreign  languages is to simply download them from the EPO (European Patent Office) website.

The WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, which is a United Nations Office) website offering what I consider the easiest interface for navigating the website of a major patent office. WIPO also offers 3 different machine translation systems for translating with the MT function (see a short discussion on my blog here) between many languages. When I entered “Schnittstelle”, which is the German word for “interface”, in the search field on the EPO website, there were four hits and four patent applications including the word “interface” were displayed in English. When I typed “Schnittstelle” on the WIPO website, there were 5,001 hits, and patent applications were displayed in English, German, and other languages.

In fact, if you click on the “Options” and then the “Interface” icon on the WIPO website and then replace the “Simple” option with the “Translator” option, you can confirm this option as your “default option form”, which means that the results for any query will be shown by the PATENTOSCOPE system for “Titles” and “Abstracts” in parallel in all languages available in the system (usually in English, French and German – these are summaries translated by human translators, not machine translations).

That’s what I call a translator-friendly system. About 25 years ago when I lived in San Francisco, a local translation company (Benemann Translations – it does not seem to exist anymore) asked me to come to their office to assess the “translatability” of a Japanese patent faxed by a law firm to their office. I had to take the 38 bus on Geary to Market Street, and then the elevator to the office, only to confirm that nobody would be able to translate the blobs on the faxed pages that must have been clearly legible Japanese characters at some point. I wasted a whole hour 25 year ago in this manner only to return home without a patent to translate.

Times have certainly changed. Internet and machine translation made translating much easier for human translators in many respects. Since translation of patents by experienced patent translators is such an important part of the patent filing and patent litigation process, this is a very welcome development and I hope that it will continue.