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I am trying to imagine a client who is looking for a price for a certain type of translation, for example a new and thus relatively inexperienced legal secretary at a patent law firm. Many are part time in these times of shrinking budgets.

The first thing that she would probably do would be to run a Google search with a few words describing the type of translation that her boss needs. She would then see on page 1 about 10 advertisements of translation agencies, some on top of the page and some on the right, followed by links to Google listings of translation services, including my humble website and this silly blog, depending on the formulation of the query, as well as links to European Patent Office website, or Japanese Patent Office website, etc.

Do potential customers who look for information on translation prices click on advertisements? When I am looking for information about prices of products or services, I sometime do click on advertisements, but I prefer non-advertised sites displayed below advertisements, especially when it comes to services, because I know that about 80% of the content of a typical advertisement is ….. how do I put it delicately …. not really true (or simply a bunch of lies).

So let’s say that this imaginary potential customer is weary of advertisements and clicks on what Google considers relevant listings for translation services. Most of these translation services listed by Google in order of relevance according to the key words in the query will be translation agencies. A few of them will be websites of individual translators specializing in patent translations.

I would imagine that a smart paralegal would try to quickly read the descriptions of services on a few listed websites and then leave a request for a price quote on at least 3 websites. This should be a fairly quick process because every such website has a link to a free quote request. It is likely that the prices quoted from different sources will be somewhat different – for example prices quoted by translation agencies are likely to be at least somewhat higher than prices quoted by individual translators.

So, is this potential client at this point going to simply go for the lowest quote, or will she chose something in the middle, or will she choose a higher price to be on the safe side? I don’t know. But the chances are that most people would probably either select a lower price, or something in the middle.

Well established, experienced translators can usually command higher prices. But the thing is, a client comparing several price quotes from several translation agencies will have no idea how much of the money spent on the translation will go to the agency and how much will go to the actual translator. It is quite possible that a large percentage of a price in the middle or towards the top will reflect mostly the profit of the agency rather than what the translator will be paid. This would then mean that a “cheap” translator would have to be doing the actual work – perhaps a beginner, or perhaps somebody living in a low-cost country, although the cost of the translation could be quite high.

Responding to my last post about the sometime difficult position of translators, one commenter who apparently lives in Paris said the following about the miserable compensation level for preparing English summaries of foreign patents:

“WIPO sends these summaries to the translation agency in large batches, hundreds at a time. The batches are divided according to language pair, but not according to subject matter, so the translator receives a batch of, say 30-50 summaries, each one related to a different technical field. Thus, the terminology research restarts anew with each and every paragraph translated. Needless to say, no context — i.e., no specification, claims or drawings — is provided for clarification, so the translator is pretty much flailing around in the dark. The going rate for this misery (at least the last time I was offered one of these jobs to turn down) is TEN DOLLARS per 100-200 word abstract, so the translator can ill afford to do much more than accept the first dictionary entry”.

Another commenter, who apparently lives in Japan, sort of disagreed and said this:

“Actually, the process by which WIPO English abstracts are translated depends on the agency. One in Japan pays about 40 dollars per abstract, provides the spec/claims/drawings, and assigns the abstracts according to specific fields which the translator initially selects.”

So, let’s assume that both commenters know what they are talking about and both are right, which I think is likely. It is obviously unfair that one translator should make only ten dollars, and another 40 dollars for the same type of work. But that is not really the issue. Nobody said that this world was supposed to be fair, right?

The issue is, what kind of translator will be willing to do this job for a fraction of what an experienced translator would be willing to accept? Well, most likely somebody who is not very good. And yet, these two translation agencies mentioned by the commenters on my blog might very well be charging the same price, especially if both agencies initially got the job by submitting a tender offer, and the customer would then have no idea – based on the price – that one translator is very cheap, while the other one is not.

The customer would probably eventually catch on, but it might take a while.

Translation prices are sort of like real estate prices. There is no such thing as a correct and fair real estate price. Whatever a buyer is ready and able to spend to purchase a certain house in a given moment and a given location is the correct price.

But at least when you buy a house, you get to see it first, and you can even have it inspected before buying it to see whether the roof is leaking, and then you can look at comparable listings of houses in the neighborhood.

Tying to compare several price quotes for the same translation from several translation services is more difficult than comparing real estate prices.

Or even more difficult than trying to determine the price of a used car. With used cars, one can at least look under the hood, check the mileage and the price online in the famous “Kelly Blue Book of Used Car Prices”.

But as I tried to explain in this post, the “comps” for translation prices can be quite misleading, you can’t really under the hood of translations, and there is no “Blue Book of Translation Prices” either.

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Contrary to popular belief, the life of a translator is not exactly a bed of roses and the remuneration for working until exhaustion to meet a tight deadline is usually not exactly a king’s ransom either, whether we are talking about highly specialized translators, or jack-of-all-trades translators who are often referred to somewhat deprecatingly as “generalists”.

In some respects it is much easier to translate highly specialized texts such as patents than other types of materials, for instance newspaper articles about …. well, anything. It may seem that translating a newspaper article should not be a difficult undertaking. It’s just a newspaper article, for God’s sake!

But it certainly can be quite difficult to translate even a seemingly simple text. If you don’t know anything about the subject of an article, you are likely to mistranslate something. Especially when translating from a language that is as ambiguous (compared to English) as Japanese, or even a much more straightforward language like French, German or Russian, you must  first find out everything you can about the subject of the article.

How much are translators paid for the time that they must first spend researching the subject of  their translation? Nothing, of course! They are normally only paid based on the number of translated words or “normative pages” as it is simply assumed that they are omniscient, i.e. that they know everything about everything, right away and in advance.

According to one part of this concept, translators are operators who, similarly to file input clerks, manually replace words in one language by words in another language. And although this is a relatively simple operation which is already being done by machines using software, human translators seem to be still for the time being slightly better at replacing words in this manner, so they probably deserve to be paid something for this work, although obviously not that much.

However, instead of a second or two, some “words” may require an obscenely huge amount of effort to locate their correct equivalent in another language.  For instance, let’s say that a word or personal name is incorrectly transcribed into another alphabet, for instance into Japanese or Russian. When this happens, and it happens all the time in Japanese patents, a search engine is completely useless.

What is the poor translator supposed to do in such a case? Who cares? The flip side of the concept is that the data input clerks called translators are at the same time expected to be omniscient miracle workers who must be able to figure out the correct answer each and every time within a split second for the equivalent of a few cents per word.

But that is not how things work. In spite of more than a quarter century of an almost daily struggle to find the correct terminology for every patent application that I am translating, I spend a lot of time researching the terminology for most of my translations.

Patent translators from languages such as Japanese, German and French are in  a way more fortunate than some of their colleagues because most current patent applications filed in these languages are already provided with a brief English summary. But these English summaries at the same time also complicate the situation because the people who wrote them in some cases did not do a very good job (possibly because they did not want to spend much time researching the terminology in both languages as they are paid by the word).

When an English summary of a German patent that I am translating says that “ein Durchbrennbereich” is a “blow region”, and “ein Auslösebereich” is a “tripping region”, should I stick to the terms used in this summary, although they don’t seem to be used in the same context in other patents written in English, or should I use “a burn-through region” and a “triggering region” instead? I think that I should do so because the words make much more sense to me in English, but what if the lawyers on the other side of Atlantic Ocean, or Pacific Ocean for that matter, have been discussing these particular technical issues based on the translation available to them from the English abstract that I don’t like?

And of course, English summaries of Japanese patents written by Japanese speakers whose command of English are usually much worse than those of translators whose native language is German or French. But I should probably still try to stick to the English terms provided  in the summaries, except when I think that they are just too ridiculous, because the English summaries may already be a part of conversation among patent lawyers in different countries talking to each other across geographical and linguistic barriers.

Another advantage of patent translators is that they can often use machine translations that are now available for many current patent applications. But this advantage is again a double-edged sword. Although these machine translations are usually much worse that even the worst human translations, the English terms used in them are now also a part of the conversation among people who can’t read the original language and who may ask me why is it that I dared to use a different term in my translation.

The thing is, there is no such thing as a perfect translation, or even a correct translation in many cases, depending on the definition of the word “correct”. It is true that something will be always left out in a translation, and some things will be added.

The concept of a translator as an omniscient miracle worker who should have been able to anticipate every question even before it is asked is a popular misconception.

It is very easy to discredit a translation, any translation, if that is what you set out to do. I am no expert on the Bible, but I do know that there are dozens of translations of the Bible into English alone.

Some of these translation must be closer to the original meaning of texts that were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek, and some of them probably have some or many mistranslations in them. And although many people may have different opinions one way or the other, nobody really knows for sure which is which, just like I cannot be absolutely certain that “burn-through region” is more accurate than “blow region”, and “triggering region”  is better than “tripping region”.

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What payment terms are translators putting on their invoices these days?

As far as I know, here in United States, “30 days net” has been the most commonly used payment term for several decades in the translation business, or  the translation industry or whatever you want to call it, at least when one deals mostly with translation agencies.

But there are some agencies who pay much faster, and quite a few that will let you wait for your money about 2 months or more. The same can be said about direct clients as well.

At this point I work only for a few agencies, but 2 agencies sending me work regularly pay me within a few days, which is why I find it difficult to say no when they have a job for me even if I am quite busy at the moment.

One is a mini agency, or rather an individual who has been sending me work for about 20 years. He pays when he receives my translation. Period. Even if the tab is several thousand dollars. I don’t know how he does it, and I don’t really care. But when he calls or e-mails, I go out of my way to fit his job in if at all possible.

Another agency that pays me within a few days must be quite big, and they seem to be doing all kinds of things in addition to translating. They pay every two weeks, which means that I usually have to wait for my money no more than about 10 days. Does that mean that other types of agencies, for example employment agencies, pay much faster than translation agencies?

I don’t know, but I think it is likely.

So it is not really true that “30 days net” is the norm when it comes to how long freelancers have to wait for their money. There is no norm. Everything depends on what kind of client you are dealing with.

I still usually put on my invoice “30 days net” if I am billing a translation agency or a patent law firm that has been sending me work for many years because I don’t think that it is a good idea to change payment terms out of the blue. About half of the patent law firms pay me within 30 days or slightly sooner, the rest of them take about 6 weeks, some 7 weeks.

Because a month is a really long time to wait for your money, as of this year I started putting “21 days” on invoices for patent law firms that I never worked for before. Some of these newly acquired customers do pay within 3 weeks, especially patent law firms abroad. Some take 4 to 6 weeks, regardless of what is on my invoice, especially law firms in US and Canada.

After I delivered my first translation of a Japanese patent about a year ago to a new customer in Australia, the lawyer who received it called to tell me how pleased he was with the translation. He told me that they were not happy with the previous supplier and that they would have more work for me. But after I politely reminded the law firm’s accounting department that 30 days was up that, they responded by saying that  “payment terms of 3 months are not unusual”. So I patiently waited for my money for 3 long months and never worked for them again.

As I said, there is no norm and everything depends on what client I am dealing with.

It has been my experience that with notable exceptions, the worst customers or customers who let me wait forever for that check are large corporate enterprises. Which is why a law firm that has hundreds or thousands of lawyers is not my ideal type of customer.

As far as I can tell, an ideal customer for me is an individual such as a sole practitioner, or a small to medium-sized patent law firm with just a few lawyers in it. The fewer people there are in such an enterprise, the more accountability one can usually expect from them, and vice versa.

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I will end this post with an example of how shabbily I was treated as a beginning translator by a translation agency that was sending me a steady stream of Japanese patents about 25 years ago. At one point, I was owed well over three thousand dollars by the agency, (which would make it well over five thousand in today’s money taking into account inflation), for several invoices which were about between 5 to 7 weeks old.

So I called them. There was no Internet back then, they were sending me patents for translation by Federal Express and I was sending my translations printed on paper back the same way. I used to always deal with a very nice coordinator there, her name was Lidia and I really liked her.

When Lidia called the owner, he told me that the check was sent about 10 days ago. “But I have not received it”, I replied timidly. The man started yelling at me, his voice booming into my ear in my telephone receiver: “What are you insinuating?”, he said. This was the first time that somebody accused me of insinuating something. And the last time. So, trying to keep my cool, I said that I was not insinuating anything, that I just needed to get paid to pay my bills.

After the irate owner calmed down some, he said he that would check with his bank and call back. And he did. As the check obviously did not clear the bank, he told me that he would have to cancel the check, send a new one to me, this time by Federal Express, and that the bank cancellation fee and that the Federal Express fee would be subtracted from the new check.

So I agreed as I did have bills to pay, and I received the check next day by Federal Express.

A few days later, a check with the missing payment, presumably the one that I was “insinuating” I had not received, mysteriously turned up in my mail. The postmark on the envelope was about two weeks old, but since it was printed on the company’s postal machine, there was no way for me to determine when was the check really mailed.

A few days later, Lidia called with the cheerful news that she had more patents for me to translate. She seemed genuinely surprised when I told her that I would never work for her company again because I kind of did not like too much the way I was treated by her boss.

This particular translation agency owner died some time ago, but the agency is still around, and as far as I can tell, they are still looking for beginning translators who charge low rates as I did a quarter century ago (their appeals to zombie translators found their way into my mailbox as nobody at the agency knows who I am and Lidia is running her own agency now).

It makes me feel very good when I see that this translation agency’s Google ranking is quite a bit lower than mine. When I type into a search engine certain key words, namely those that I know customers who are looking for the kind of translations that I provide are using, my website usually comes up among the first listings on page 1, while this company’s website is usually on page 2 on Google and on other search engines.

25 years later, I still haven’t gotten over it.

I still hate this company.

Hatred is not a good thing … but it is what it is.

UPDATE

This morning I found out from a new direct client that my bid for a translation project was accepted by this new client over the bid of the translation agency that mistreated me long time ago as mentioned in the second part of this post although their bid was lower.

Don’t ask me how I did it, I would disclose a trade secret only under extreme torture, on the point of dying.

Since I have not really given any thought to this particular translation agency for the last 25 years until I wrote this post yesterday, to me this is clear evidence of what Karl Jung describes in his theory of synchronicity.

Or it could be the result of what John Lennon calls “Instant Karma”:

“Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you right in the face” ….

It took 25 years for this particular instance of Instant Karma to manifest itself, but then again, 25 years is less than an instant in the grand, cosmic scheme of things.

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If you don’t have a plan, you become a part of somebody else’s plan.

Terence McKenna

I see on social media and on blogs that many translators are incessantly complaining about “huge profit margins” of translation agencies. And it is true – profit margins of translation agencies who know what they are doing, have been around for a while and have a lot work for translators, are very healthy, probably higher than the profits of agencies in another line of business.

Although I am not sure about that. When I lived in San Francisco, I had a friend, who worked as a graphic artist for a mixture of customers consisting mostly of private businesses with a few advertising agencies, who told me that the profit margin of the marketing agencies was 50%, which would be about the same as in the translation business.

Some translation agencies would like to present translation not as a task that is performed by a translator, but rather as a process in which a translator is only creating a draft translation during the initial stage of the process, which is then improved in many other stages.

Most people with a functioning brain will be able to tell that all of this talk about numerous quality control stages is transparent marketing propaganda. When I work as an agency, I know that once I find a suitable translator, the process is really simple. I proofread the translation and fix a few typos, if any. Oh, yes, and sometime I fiddle with the formatting. That’s it, folks. Why would I want to mess up a perfectly good translation? In spite of my own description of this blog (Diary of a Mad Patent Translators), I am not really crazy.

But in fact, I happen to believe that these healthy profit margins of translation agencies are basically reasonable and well deserved.

Although “an independent translator” who works for a translation agency has to first translate everything and do as good a job as possible, this translator would have not been able to work at all without the work, effort, and money that went into what I would call the infrastructure that made it possible for a particular translation job to eventually end up as an attachment in a translator’s mailbox.

The agency is selling you access to its own infrastructure, and there is no reason why an agency should sell access to its infrastructure, the all-important pipeline supplying work to “freelance translators”, for a less healthy margin. This access is crucial to many translators, although not to all of them, and possibly not even most of them. But if you want to use their infrastructure, you should be ready to pay for it.

After more than 26 years of making my living as a freelance translator, I am barely able to charge a slightly higher rate to translation agencies than the going rate. But as I have my own infrastructure in place, I do not depend on access to somebody else’s infrastructure, as most of my clients are direct clients. So I don’t really need work from agencies, although I will gladly work for them if they pay my rate.

Some translators believe that solution to low rates is organizing by translators in order to pressure translation agencies to pay better rates. It may be a partial solution, but I am not convinced that it will work. It kind of reminds me of the old battle cry “Workers Of All Countries, Unite!” That one did not work so good, did it? But who knows, I could be wrong about it. Different business models can definitely work.

What I think does work is creating your own infrastructure, a base of clients who, because they are not translation agencies, will pay you double of what you can get from people who let you use their infrastructure.

I believe that it is in every translator’s power to do that, although it is likely to take a lot of work for years.

How would one go about creating this infrastructure?

1. Identify Your Best Market Segment

First, identify a market segment that needs the translation service that you are providing, a market segment that is likely to pay good money for good work. It took me about three years to figure out the answer to this question, but by about 1990 I realized that in my case, this market segment are law firms, and patent law firms in particular.

2. Stop Sending Resumes to Translation Agencies!

Secondly, instead of sending your resume to thousand of fly-by-night translation agencies, which is what thousands of other translators and would-be translators all over the world are doing in this very moment, find a way to market your service to this market segment. I started with mass mailings to patent law firms in early nineties.

These mailings were very labor-intensive and quite expensive, but some of these law firms who found me in this manner still send me work more than 20 years later.

A much cheaper and much less labor-intensive method is creating a website targeted at the market segment that is likely to pay good rates. I started working on my own website in the year 2000. The first three years I had no response at all. It takes a while before you figure out what will work for your website because everything depends on your particular strengths and weaknesses, such as your language combinations and other particular skills.

But I did eventually figure out a formula that was and still is working for me in my particular case.

3. Do Whatever Else Is Likely To Work for You 

Thirdly, there must be many other ways to create your own base of direct clients, depending on where you live, how you use social media, whether you are able to market yourself directly, for example by attending conferences, or by making the dreaded cold calls, etc.

4. If You Can’t Be Bothered To Look for Your Own Clients, Stop  Griping About Excessive Profit Margins of Translation Agencies 

Fourthly, if you are not willing to make a major investment of your time, effort, and money into creating your own infrastructure, don’t gripe and moan about the “exorbitantly high margins” that translation agencies are enjoying, while you have to do all the work as the translator.

It is true that you do all the work, and they are making all the money, seemingly for nothing. But they did the important work involved in creating the infrastructure that eventually lured the customers to their agency. They are allowing you to use their infrastructure because they need you for a particular job, and now they are making you a part of their infrastructure, a part that is designed to be easily replaceable.

If you don’t like this arrangement, what is stopping you from creating your own infrastructure?

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The most terrifying words in the English language are “I am from the government and I am here to help you”, Ronald Reagan, circa 1980.

This is one of the funniest and most effective quotes of Ronald Reagan, because there is obviously a lot of truth in it. The great communicator had quite a few such quotes in his folksy repertoire in his day. He used this particular clever sentence among other things to help to dismantle a modicum of control that people like you and me used to have through their elected representatives over how modern corporations are dominating and defining our lives. He of course later had plenty of help in this respect from Bill Clinton, another communicator par excellence, who was so sincerely and deeply “feeling our pain” that he helped to get rid of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 – a law that made it clear that the taxpayers were on the hook to cover the losses of their neighborhood banks, but not the losses of the casino style Wall Street banks. This then made it possible for Wall Street bankers to plunge the whole world into a series of financial and economic crises, which is still very much the current situation in most countries more than 7 years later.

Wall Street bankers made out like the bandits that they are as they were bailed out thanks to the new laws once their fraudulent schemes stopped working because all of the money that they could steal was already stolen, while millions of people lost their jobs, their houses and savings for their retirement as the pensions plans sold to them by the big banks lost their value.

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But my blog is supposed to be about translation issues, so I  will try to write mostly about translation.

I already said what I think about the futility of universal “translation standards” in this post a few weeks ago. From what I have seen so far, I believe that attempts to design a standard that would ensure a high quality of translation are mostly transparent attempts at self-serving marketing. 

But as I found out from a recent article in the ATA (American Translators Association) Chronicle by David C. Rumsey, an ATA director who serves on the ATA’s Standards Committee, “Whether we like it or not, translation standards are coming our way”.

I also found out from this and other materials that there are already many translation standards in existence which “the translation industry” is trying to throw at customers hoping that one of them will finally turn into a useful marketing gimmick.

These indispensable standards for quality in translation include (but are not limited to, as a patent lawyer would put it in a patent claim formulation of a new inventive step): EN15038, created by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) in 2006, Active Standard ASTM F2575, a US standard for translation providers, available from the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM), while another standard currently being developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), is called IS 17100. Also, in addition to the EN-15038 European Quality Standard, there is also the ISO 9000 series standard of the International Organization for Standardization, the Italian UNI 10754 standard, the German DIN 2345 Standard, Austrian standards Önorm D 1200 and Önorm D 1201, Canadian CAN CGSB121.10 standard, and I am sure that quite a few other ones are already being developed, from Denmark and Norway to Mongolia and Papua New Guinea.

In a familiar tone, David C. Rumsey’s article states that: …. “standards are actually here to help you – whether you are an individual translator working with an end client or a large multinational. They are intended to clarify the translation process for all parties involved: the translator, the agency, and the buyer” (emphasis added by Mad Patent Translator).

I did not realize that translators desperately need to have the translation process clarified to them by one of these selfless, learned translation standard committees, did you?

So I will try to clarify how I see them.

If you take a closer look at all of these standards, they are mostly developed to convince customers that only “the translation industry” (i.e. the relative small segment of translation industry represented by translation agencies) adheres to “best practices”, for example by using a “separate reviser” for every translation, preferably in several steps (the more steps, at least on paper or website propaganda, the better) and having each reviser sign off on the quality of the translation, which is something that individual translators, who based on this ingenious method are merely relatively unimportant peons engaged in the initial rough translation process during the first stage of one of the dozen mysterious quality standards, are unlikely to do.

As I wrote in my post about the so called “four-eyes principle”, this particular principle is likely to work only under certain predefined circumstances, which in fact means that it usually does not work at all, because the “separate reviser” is typically an underpaid CC (Clueless Coordinator) working for the agency, or an equally underpaid beginning translator who is willing to work for peanuts to gain valuable experience.

Personally, I don’t see great future for translation standards. Clients are not stupid. They can see through marketing propaganda.

One commenter on my blog this week put it best:”Few end clients believe marketing propaganda, because it is just that. They might be convinced the first time around, but if burned, they are unlikely to return to agencies providing poor translations and/or service.”   

To which I would only add, once burned, clients are unlikely to return to a translation agency, regardless of which “quality standards”, “certificate of compliance” and “quality edits” and how many “layers of control” it swears by.

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Here is my self-serving advice to clients who want to achieve the best possible quality standard in translation in 3 simple steps:

1. Stay away from translation agencies and their marketing gimmicks. Instead, try to find a freelance translator who in your opinion is really good based on his or her last translation. This will probably take a few tries.

2. Keep sending your translations to this individual translator. If you do that, this lucky translator will eventually learn everything that he or she needs to know to do a very good job for you just about every time. Translators are not magicians, they sometime make mistakes. But if you work with an individual translator instead of a translation agency, you can always call or e-mail this person directly any time and let him or her know if something is wrong. With an agency …. it’s not that simple. They like to keep the translators under deep cover because if the clients knew who the translators were … what is there to prevent them from cutting out the middleman?

3.  Treat your translators as valued professionals, which basically means three things: pay them a decent rate, don’t give them impossible deadlines, and  pay your bills on time (at least most of the time).

That’s it. You have successfully created a hand-crafted quality standard specially designed for your particular translation needs, a quality standard that can’t be beat. And unlike the EN15038 standard, the ASTM F2575 standard, the IS 17100 standard, the ISO 9000 standard, the UNI 10754 standard, the DIN 2345 standard, the D 1200 and D 1201 standards, as well as the CAN CGSB121.10 and other ingenious and absolutely indispensable standards still in the pipeline, this standard is no marketing gimmick.

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As I was listening to some Renaissance music on my FM radio this morning, which is a perfect musical accompaniment for translating long Japanese patents about semiconductor devices (New Age music is better suited for chemical patents), after a while I got tired of the poor audio on the FM channel. So I Googled the FM frequency with the name of my town and sure enough, within a couple of seconds I was listening to the same music on my computer with crystal clear digital audio reception.

This is how most people do everything these days, with the possible exception of stubborn senior citizens who refuse to use a computer because they are afraid that the mouse could bite them. Whatever it is that we are looking for, we can usually find it these days on our computer or cell phone, which is in fact now a small but quite powerful computer.

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But if a potential customer finally gets tired of the consistently poor quality of translations from a translation agency (called these days “LSP”, as in Language Services Provider) which quite inexpertly translates every subject from any language into any other language through Project Managers (called PMs these days, although I refer to them as CCs, as in Clueless Coordinators), will this customer be able to find our specialized translation service on the Internet?

If I Google a translator’s name, I can often find his or her “personal profile” on Proz or Translators Cafe or something like that. But when I searched for example for “Japanese to English technical translation”, only one website of an individual translator was displayed on the first page, right under Google Translate, namely mine. One more individual translator’s website was shown on top of page 2, and two more translators were found on page 3, one of whom I met him many years ago in San Francisco. Most of the entries on the first 3 pages were for machine translation services and translation agencies, some of which specialize in Japanese.

The truth is, relatively few individual translators have a well designed website for their specialized translation service that is likely to be picked up by a search engine.

It costs about 150 dollars to have one’s particulars listed in the ATA (American Translators Association) database of translators. I have been an ATA member since 1987 and every year I get quite a bit of new business from my listing in this database, but only from translation agencies. This is not a resource that direct customers would be able to find and use – at least I don’t recall a single case of being found by a direct customer in this manner in the last 26 years.

A simple way to increase a translator’s visibility to direct customers is obviously a well designed website. Just about every café, store, restaurant, has one. A well designed, professionally looking website is particularly useful for a home-based business providing a specialized service that can be delivered through Internet, which is pretty much a definition of a home-based freelance translator’s business.

But as my simple search engine test seems to indicate, relatively few translators have such a website. You can design your own query with a few words that describe precisely your type of translation business and test it on Google and other search engines.

What words is a potential client likely to use while looking for your type of translation service? That should not be too hard to figure out. These are the words that should figure prominently in the information describing your services on your website, and if possible, also in the domain name hosting your website.

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A few months ago, a translator was complaining on a translation blog that although he was “doing everything right”, he was only getting work at very low rates. He found it not believable that other people are paid much higher rates for the same type of work, and asked for advice on how to finally make more money.

By “doing everything right” he meant having a personal profile on discount auction sites such as Proz and Translation Café. When quite a few people were trying to give him good advice and point him in the right direction, and several of them were very experienced, well known translators who were trying sincerely to point out to him that he was not really doing at all what he should have been doing, he became indignant and started calling these translators liars. In the end the bloguese in question had to pull the plug on the comments to put an end to his threatening outbursts.

At this point, Internet still provides a more or less level playing field for businesses big and small hoping to attract new customers. God knows how long will this situation last, maybe not that long.

Larger businesses in the translation industry do have several advantages over individual translators. For example, they can spend more money on the design of their website and on regular search engine optimization updates than you and I can.

But if these larger corporate businesses specialize in everything, and most of them do, this is also their Achilles’ heel, because after paid advertisements which most people are likely to ignore, a good search engine such as Google is more likely to display among the first few entries the website of a small business with a content that is highly relevant to the search words used in a query rather than websites of translation agencies who “specialize” in translating every subject from and into every language.

Shouldn’t it be your website?

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Bitter complaining about the evil and devious practices of the modern type of large translation agencies as representatives of so called “translation industry” is a favorite sport of many a freelance translator, including this one.

Whenever I write my trademark dark, plaintive, accusatory posts on this popular subject, they always get a lot of tweets and likes. Which is obviously one reason why I do that – addiction to tweets, likes and reprints is tough to beat. If so many people seem to appreciate what I am saying, I feel that I am no longer a “vox clamanti in deserto” (a voice crying out in the wilderness).

But the fact is, the typical translation agency model is really typical for only a very small segment of the entire translation industry market. Think about it – there must be hundreds of thousands of translators on this planet, or at least people who make a living translating. How many of them can possibly work for a typical translation agency of the kind that translators such as myself love to deconstruct, despise and bash on our blogs and on Twitter and LinkedIn?

Probably not that many out of the total number of translators. Even if you are a freelance translator who is partially or mostly locked into their business model, you must also have worked for other clients who belong to a completely different model.

It is also true that only some translation agencies operate based on the predatory corporate model that is based on incredibly demeaning “Confidentiality Agreements”, coupled with demands for automatic discounts for “fuzzy and full matches” (repeated words), which is a determination made by the agency in its wisdom, with payment terms of more than 30 days, sometime even two months or more.

Most translation agencies are small, and it has been my experience that many small and smallish translation agencies operate according to a different model. Instead of asking translators to fill out a very detailed questionnaire online, some agency operators are in fact able to tell based on a translator’s résumé whether he or she looks like a suitable person for the task at hand because they themselves know a few languages and understand the underlying problems and issues.

As a translator/translation agency hybrid myself, I am deluged by résumés from translators every day. For every 100 e-mails from translators that I delete without reading them, I probably look at 1 of them quite carefully and sometime I even save it, because as we know, a good translator is hard to find.

Translation agencies are not a monolithic, evil beast.

In my role as a translator, I noticed that some agencies pay much faster than within the standard 30 or even 60 day period, which is what we have come to expect from a typical translation agency. And of course, whether I use or don’t use a CAT is of interest only to the kind of translation agency that I avoid like a plague (regular readers of my blog will know that I am quite allergic to CATs).

Over the years I myself have received a lot of work from many types of non-agencies, such as individual translators who are not really translation agencies at all. I remember that I used to translate Japanese patents for quite a few years for a German patent translator, his name was Hans, who once said these surprising words to me: “I never had to work for translation agencies”. He must be retired by now because Google does not know anything about him. A Russian interpreter told me the same thing when I asked her which agencies she worked for.

There are different organizations regularly needing translators, such as departments of universities, government organizations, NGOs and other organizations with people in them who are smart enough to look for individual translators instead of going to an agency website when they need to have something translated.

Of course, since I mostly translate patents, most of my customers are patent law firms. But I also frequently work for sole practitioners who happen to be patent agents or patent lawyers, inventors, investors (people who buy and sell patent portfolios), law librarians.

It is of course in the interest of the large translation agencies to perpetuate the myth that their model is the only legitimate business model in what is called “translation industry”, although nothing can be farther from the truth. Their business model is only one of many possible and existing business models for delivery of translation services.

There are many other models as well. While their model may be suitable for some types of translations, it often delivers horrible quality at a very high cost as the corporate model will always try to squeeze more and more work out of translators at lower and lower rates in the name of higher profits for the boss. The new name for this old concept is “higher productivity”.

While I wholeheartedly endorse complaints and objections of oppressed translators on blogs and social media as a healthy activity, what is perhaps missing here is an awareness that freelance workers don’t have to work for people in this industry who do not treat them well.

The myth of the so called “translation industry” is just that, a myth that is often propagated by people who usually have their own agenda. The real translation industry has many segments and it is in our power to work only for one or a few of the segments of this industry, namely for people who treat us with respect and pay us well and on time, and not to work for people who operate based on the extremely predatory business model practiced by some translation agencies.

If we fail to realize this simple truth, we can only blame ourselves for putting up with the many injustices of the modern corporate business model of a certain segment of the translation industry that we love to moan and groan about on our blogs.

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Well, I am not sure about the three days, but everything else in the title of this historic post is true.

I am pretty sure that 333 is some kind of a magic number since it is exactly a half of 666, which as everybody knows is the Devil’s number, and 3 x 333 is almost a thousand, which is a lot.

There is a Czech tongue twister which goes like this: Třista třiatřicet stříbrných stříkaček stříkalo přes třista třiatřicet stříbrných střech. It means “Three hundred and thirty three silver water cannons were squirting over three hundred and thirty three silver roofs”.

The sentence does not really mean what it says (although it is kind of interesting to try to visualize it), it is more like the English sentence containing all the letters of the English alphabet (the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog), which is also fun to visualize, but possibly not as much as the Czech one. The English sentence is used to practice typing, and the Czech sentence is used to test foreigners’ pronunciation of Czech. If you paste it into Google translate and then click on the speaker icon, you will see why: it has the unpronounceable sound ř in 12 positions which no foreigner can possibly pronounce, at least not in these positions.

Google translate says that “stříkaček” means “syringes”, but trust me, it means water cannons, because “syringes” would be “injekce” in Czech. Besides, no syringe could possibly squirt over even a single silver roof, let alone three hundred and thirty three of them, which would make the tongue twister kind of defective.

If you click on the speaker icon in the English translation, you will be able to appreciate the difference not only between the different sounds of both languages, but also between the different attitudes of the Czech and the American woman who recorded these words.

The Czech woman sounds highly concentrated on the job at hand and kind of nervous and pedantic, like an old schoolmarm. The American woman sounds more like she is in a hurry to finish the damn job and get paid. But she probably sounds that way because it is not a tongue twister in English.

Also, it so happens that I usually try to make at least 333 dollars a day when I am translating, even at my non-rush rate, and even when I am not translating the whole day, as was the case today. I have days when I feel lazy, and if I can make 333 bucks on a lazy day while spending most of my time reading a book and watching me a little teevee, I picked a pretty good job for myself, wouldn’t you say?

If I write another 333 posts about translation (although many would say that they are mostly about nothing), it will be the number which corresponds to “the mark of Beast”, mentioned in the Bible, Revelation, 13:16-18.

With such an interesting number, it should be an interesting post, but you would have to stick around for quite a while to be able to read it, and it is probably not going to be worth it.

Another 333 silly posts after the number of “the mark of the Best” would then make it post number 999, and the next number would be the magic number 1000, which is a pretty solid number when it comes to number of blog posts that most people have.

Will my blog last that long? Who knows? Will I last that long? Who knows ……..

But thanks to my desire to entertain the world and in particular you, my dear readers and commenters, this blog did last the first 333 posts, which were almost entirely troll-free and quite enjoyable.

Onward and upward, sic itur ad astra (“thus one goes to the stars”), etc., and so on and so forth.

I am now ending this post while visualizing three hundred and thirty three silver water cannons squirting over three hundred and thirty three silver roofs.

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Obviously, they will mean different things to different people.

To most people living in Western countries, it means being rich, the richer, the better. As the saying goes, you can never be too rich or too thin in the current version of our world.

To Mother Theresa, it meant taking care of people with leprosy, AIDS and other diseases. Somehow she managed to be quite happy in her poverty stricken world, while also being very thin and poor. People like this seem to have died out about two decades ago.

To a chief of a tiny tribe in the Amazon jungle, nonchalantly chewing a mind-altering plant while lost in his thoughts swinging in his hammock on a sunny day and enjoying the colors, sounds and scents of the jungle and his peaceful village, living the good life and being happy probably means good weather and enough food for him and everyone in his little village.

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What does living a good life mean to this mad patent translator?

Well, I know that I will never be rich, except perhaps in comparison to a few hundred thousand seamstresses in Bangladesh. But I I do enjoy a good hunt for inexpensive but very good wines in my price range, a challenge that puts some much needed excitement in my otherwise bland and boring life, and I just discovered Argentinian wines fit this description, and I prefer cheap watches to expensive ones anyway, as long as they keep correct time. It is much safer to have a cheap watch these days – you don’t get mugged for a Timex.

I also know that I will never join the world of incredibly greedy and not terribly bright people who are running our world without seeming to notice or care that they are running it into the ground, and I am quite happy about that.

Since I am no Mother Theresa either, that would perhaps leave the Amazon Indian chief as a model worth following.

But I have  my own definition of what living the good life means to me.

Living the good life means having most of the time just enough work and just enough money to do the things that I want to do with the rest of my life, provided that I enjoy, at least for the most part, the work I am doing.

Living good life also means being able to enjoy the sounds, colors and scents of my world, although it is a different kind of jungle than the one the chief in his hammock knows so intimately.

Since I graduated with a degree in Japanese studies 33 years ago, I was able to put Japanese and other languages that I have been studying for more than 4 decades now to good use in a number of interesting jobs.

And since I am putting everything that I have learned and keep learning just about every day to good use now as a freelance patent translator, and hopefully will be able to do so for as long as my brain can process my thoughts and my fingers can find the right words by clicking on the keys on my computer’s keyboard, I harbor no envy for the serenity the man in the hammock must feel as he is watching the sunset and spitting a glob of reddish, greenish or bluish saliva into the green grass on the village green.

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Living the good life to me means having the power to say yes when I agree with something, and to say no when I want to say no. Not that many people have this power, but this power is mine, or yours, when you really are a freelance translator in every sense of the word freelance.

The word is composed of two words: free + lance. I will use my lance and fight for anybody (freely, but not for free – I am quite the mercenary when it comes to putting my lance to a fight) who wants me to translate information that could be important for the direction the jungle of our world is likely to follow today or tomorrow. The fights for which I have been using my lance as a freelance translator since 1987 mostly have to do with technology.

When I started my translating career, a portable telephone was a huge, heavy brick that could be used only for making calls. Today, my tiny cell phone can be used to take pictures and make movies, read newspapers, watch TV, find a restaurant and many other things in addition to making a phone call.

In a few years we should be able to use our phone as a portable shower, and who knows, in a few decades we may be able to use our phones for time travel if new technologies keep being developed at such a breakneck speed. Admittedly, much better broadband would be needed for both of these new applications, nothing like the current broadband cemetery sold at inflated prices throughout these United States where Youtube videos go to die.

My contribution to all of these pretty incredible changes, however small it might have been, would be another definition of what the words “living the good life” mean to me.

What do they mean to you?

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“It would be nice if all of the data which sociologists require could be enumerated because then we could run them through IBM machines and draw charts as the economists do. However, not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.“

William Bruce Cameron, “Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking”, 1963.

It would also be nice if everything that has been translated could be measured so that a numerical or digital translation quality index would be created wherein points could be assigned for quality of translation. For instance, if the translation is understandable, it would be assigned 50 points because that is the most important aspect  of any translation.

Most machine translation system have been trying, mostly in vain, to reach this fabulous goal for about the last 70 years, so it should be worth at least 50 points. Additional points could then be assigned for things like correct grammar, original and highly idiomatic expressions, consistent terminology, or even formatting, up to a maximum of 100 points.

There is something called ISO Certification Standard, then there is also something called the EN-15038 European Quality Standard and there are probably also several other “translation quality standards” out there. But I believe that none of these standards can possibly be based on an objective evaluation of translation quality.

The fact is that the concept of translation quality will invariably mean different things to different people. A writer whose book is being translated into a foreign language will have standards for translation quality that will be very different from, for example, a patent lawyer who is using my translation to litigate a case in court or to write a new patent application.

And what is the most important additional criterion in both cases mentioned above, provided that the translation already has 50 points if it is understandable? Well, the most important criterion will be whether the client, whoever it is, likes the translation.

Some may like it, and some may not, for a number of reasons, and as some of us have learned a long time ago in Latin classes: De gustibus non disputandum est (there can be no disputes when it comes to tastes).

Which is not to say that translators should not have their own quality standards and quality metrics. They definitely should, and they should try to apply them as much as possible. But to pretend that there is an objective quality standard, or a method that can be applied to every translation, such as the “Four Eyes Principle” discussed in this post, or the misguided attempts to apply industrial standards to translation mentioned above, is in my opinion a folly. Incidentally, the word folly is a cognate of the words fool and foolish, and it is defined by the dictionary as a lack of good sense and understanding.

One should attempt to apply an objective quality standard for example to the way pharmaceuticals or parachutes are manufactured. If we don’t do that, people will die unnecessarily.

But translation is a different kind of animal, while yet another problem is that the quality of translation is often judged by people who are unable to tell a good translation from a bad one.

My customers will most of the time be able to evaluate the quality of my translation, even if they don’t read Japanese or German, because if something in the translated information does not make sense to them, it is a pretty clear indication that it is a mistranslation.

But for instance the kids who work as coordinators for translation agencies have no way of telling a good translation from a bad one – unless they understand both languages and the technical subject, which in my experience is almost never the case.

I am not an objective judge of translation quality either. Once in a long while I am simply blown away by a really beautifully done translation. But most of the time, my first impression, when I see a translation which was done by another translator for me, is negative. But I know that my subjective perception of what a translation should look like is just that, an evaluation that is by its nature very subjective.

And although I have sometime received a translation that I thought was pretty bad and I had to try to resurrect it as best as I could, I have always paid the translator the full amount of the invoice. The way I see it, I am not paying for my subjective evaluation of quality, but for the objective amount of work that the translator had to perform, regardless of what I think of the result.

One should also not forget that translators are not magicians. It is very easy to blame the translator for every problem. But it is a fact that for instance the patent applications that I have to translate are often written in a very ambiguous language that does not make a lot of sense, and although they may be even sometime riddled with mistakes in the original language, as a patent translator, I am not at liberty to rewrite the text in my translation.

As far as I can tell, the only objective metric of quality of translation is whether or not the client was satisfied with it. When I receive a check for my last translation, this counts on my subjective evaluation scale as somewhere between 50 to 100 points (I usually know whether it was closer to 50 points or 100 points, and the client probably knows it too).

And I also know that in spite of years of specialized education followed by decades of specialized translating experience in my particular field of translation, I am only as good as my last translation, just like a singer is only as good as his last song, and an actor is only as good as his last role.