Translation – A Most Misunderstood Profession

Somebody from a patent law firm, possibly a paralegal, sent me an e-mail through the quote request link on my website because he was looking for a highly qualified translator.

Dear Sir/Madam,

 

I am looking to have a Japanese patent publication translated to English by a translator having:

 

1.      A technical degree in computer science

            a. Ph.D. preferred but will consider other candidates

 

2.      Experience with network security and caches

a.       This criteria is preferred but not required

 

3.      Experience translating from Japanese to English as well as English to Japanese

 

Do you have any translators that meet this criteria?

Because I was not really interested in working for this person, I allowed myself to say in my response to him this: “Incidentally, criteria is plural”. I could also have said that “that” should have been “who”, but I didn’t.

I mean, how can you evaluate the qualifications and the suitability of a translator if you don’t even seem to know basic things such as the difference between singular and plural in your own language?

Personally, I don’t want to work for people like that …. people who are very demanding, but who don’t really know what it is that they want.

The criteria reveal interesting misconceptions that some of our clients often seem to have about the translating profession.

Let’s briefly consider the expected criteria designed to ensure that the best possible candidate will be selected for the job at hand.

1.  A technical degree in computer science, a Ph.D. preferred

Just because you have a Ph.D. in something does not mean that you are automatically a better translator than somebody who only has a master’s degree, or a diploma from a community college.

Moreover, if you are a medical doctor, or a lawyer, for example, why would you want to work as a translator when most doctors and lawyers generally make more money (if they are any good), usually much more money, than most translators, unless they are not very good at their own profession?

There are people who are good translators specializing in a given field of translation instead of working in that field, but they are often retired, or they consider translating more a hobby than a real career and a real profession. If you studied medicine or law, and don’t practice medicine or law, the chances are that you were probably not a very good doctor or lawyer, which is why you decided to become a translator.

Many people who eventually become translators joined our unappreciated and misunderstood profession from various fields of human knowledge. The more you know about the subject that you translate, the better, of course. But contrary to popular belief, there is no direct relationship between a Ph.D. and the quality of one’s translation as a degree does not automatically make you a better translator.

I’ll take an experienced translator over a medical doctor any time as I wrote in an article for the ATA (American Translators Association) Chronicle 11 years ago. But so many clients seem to think that the most important qualification for a translator is that it should not really be an experienced translator but a person armed with a title who is somehow, mysteriously, perfectly fluent in a number of languages and thus obviously able and eminently qualified to translate.

2.      Experience with network security and caches

 

Are we talking practical experience on the level of an Edward Snowden here, or what are we talking about? Practical experience is invaluable for a translator, of course, but that again does not a translator make. People who have tons of practical experience in the field but are not excellent writers, or who don’t know the grammar of their own language very well, or who are not really fluent in the foreign language are not really translator material at all, are they?

Also, Snowden was a high school dropout, wasn’t he? That would seem to clash with point 1 in the required criteria mentioned above.

Education and practical experience are really important, but they per se do not guarantee that the quality of the translation will be excellent. A combination of a number of different factors usually determines whether a translator will be good, but these are not necessarily the factors that were mentioned in the e-mail.

3.      Experience translating from Japanese to English as well as English to Japanese

This shows a level of misunderstanding of what translation is really about that is very common among some of our clients, although it is not probably that surprising the person who did not know that “criteria” is plural would also fail to understand that people generally translate only into their native language, and based on the etymology of the word “native”, (a cognate of the Latin word “natus” meaning “born”), most of us are really native only in one language because most of us have been born only once.

It is true that some translators are truly bilingual to the point that they may be able to translate very competently into two languages. I know translators who translate between German and English, Spanish and English, and French and English in both directions.

None of them is a native speaker of English, but they write very good English. For example, they would certainly know the difference between singular and latinized plural of English words.

But I don’t know any native English speakers who translate into Japanese. Japanese is so complicated and so different from any European language that essentially only native Japanese speakers can translate in both directions … and the problem is, very few native Japanese speakers can write good English, although there are a few people like that on this planet.

So the potential customer basically eliminated all native speakers of English as unsuitable for the job at hand, probably without even realizing it, although a native speaker of the target language would be most likely his best bet for the kind of translator that he was interested in.

Judging from the salutation, he must have sent his query to a number of translation agencies, and he probably found somebody who on paper appeared to be the best suitable candidate for translating a complicated Japanese patent. There must be a hundred translation agencies ready to enthusiastically declare that they absolutely “have” the best candidate for this job!!!

I am sorry I was not the chosen one, as I think that I too would have done a very good job, although I only have a master’s degree (in languages, not in computer science), I have no practical experience as a system administrator (although I must have translated hundreds of patents on the subject of caches and network security over the last 27 years), and I do not translate into Japanese (only from Japanese and five other languages into English).

But as I got blog post number 407 out of this brief exchange of e-mails, this lost opportunity on my part to make some money was at least good for something.