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.

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.

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.

*********

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.

*************

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?

“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.

I found the following message a few days ago on one of the “translation portals” where translators are asked to compete among themselves by bidding on projects and providing their best [read: rock bottom] prices.

 Dear Translator,

At the present moment we are looking for translators who can translate/review PATENT materials from JAPANESE to ENGLISH.

We have the following requirements for this work.

Translator Requirements

Mandatory:

1.         Native-level proficiency in ENGLISH

2.         At least 5 years of professional PATENT translation/review experience

3.         Bachelors degree [sic] or equivalent

4.         Contact with target-language speakers on a very frequent and regular basis

5.         Willingness to use Our Agency’s translation tool, as well as Our Agency’s dictionaries [bolding added by mad patent translator].

A closer look at the mandatory requirements tells me that only one of these five requirements is really mandatory.

So let us take a closer look at the requirements.

1.         Native-level proficiency in ENGLISH

What is that? Most people who I call zombie translators, who grew up speaking another language than English and live in countries where English is a foreign language, are firmly convinced that they are perfectly fluent in English.

And in comparison to people around them who speak no English at all, they definitely are!

The problem is, they are usually perfectly fluent only in a hilarious version of this language – also known as the most useful language in the world at this point in human history – namely BAD ENGLISH.

If this requirement is evaluated based on the exacting standards of the same person who does not know that the proper spelling for the requirement in item 3 is bachelor’s degree rather than “bachelors degree”, the chances are that a zombie translator whose English is not completely ridiculous will pass the muster in this case just fine, with flying colors, no problemo.

2.         At least 5 years of professional PATENT translation/review experience

OK, that sounds like a criterion that makes sense. But if I say that I have been translating patents for 5 years …. who is going to prove me wrong? And if I did in fact translate or attempted to translate a few patents over the last 5 years, in addition to translating mostly “not patents”, I would still qualify, would I not?

3.         “Bachelors degree” or equivalent

This criterion does make sense. Education is really important if you want to be a good translator, in particular, in my opinion, if you want to translate patents.

But what is an equivalent of a “bachelors degree”? Well, probably just about anything, as far as I can tell. The life experience of a 60-year-old parking lot attendant or bridge toll collector is at least equivalent to a bachelor’s degree, especially when no major (for instance Japanese language or engineering) is specified.

4.         Contact with target-language speakers on a very frequent and regular basis

What the hell does this mean? Does going to a Japanese restaurant twice a week, or having amazing sex with a native Japanese speaker, or with a native English speaker if you happen to be Japanese, on a very frequent and regular basis count?

The way this requirement is formulated, it definitely does.

5.         Willingness to use Our Agency’s translation tool, as well as Our Agency’s dictionaries

We have finally come to the crux of the matter.

This is clearly the only conditio sine qua non in the list of 5 mandatory requirements because it is not open to a subjective evaluation of a person who may or may not be really qualified to evaluate the credentials of a would-be translator, and also because it cannot be faked. You either use the Computer-Assisted Tool, or you do not qualify.

Conversely, if you are willing to use their CAT, you are very likely to pass the other 4 requirements.

And here is why [an enticing promise found on the website of the agency]:

“Our Agency’s “translation memory” tool”  ….  “will save [you, the customer] between 20-70 percent in translation cost and time, depending on the amount of repetitive text.”

This means that translators who can be forced to use this proprietary tool, so generously and selflessly supplied by the translation agency, will be also forced to automatically provide a discount for “repetitive text” of between 20 to 70 percent to the agency.

If you are a zombie translator who cannot find work because you have no experience, or because you don’t really know English that well, or Japanese for that matter, I would encourage you to apply for this position.

As long as you are willing to accept the CAT in the translation agency’s bag of tricks, you will probably pass the test.

Regular readers of my silly blog will know that my heart has been recently broken when my son took his dog Lucy away from me and moved with her to California. Yes, I have a thing for dogs. Lucy was the sixth dog whose company I was able enjoy so far during my own lifetime (the other five dogs have in the meantime gone on to happy hunting grounds in the sky).

I admire how dogs tamed and trained humans to do everything for them, including picking up their poop, by pretending to be too stupid to clean after themselves or learn how to use the damn toilet.

But just because I never had a cat does not mean that I have something against cats. I just like dogs better. I think they are more fun. And just because I don’t use CATs does not mean that I harbor an irrational hatred of Computer-Assisted Translation tools, as some commenters on my blog have erroneously claimed.

I don’t hate CATs, I just don’t use them because I don’t find them very useful in my line of work (patent translation). I am sure that these tools are very suitable for some types of translation. In a moment of weakness I even downloaded a free trial copy of Wordfast and looked at it for about 5 minutes before I decided that trying to learn it would be a monumental waste of my time.

But I do hate what these tools are doing to our profession. In other words, I hate how these tools are being used by some people, by which I mean translation agencies.

Some translation agencies will only work with translators who use the same tools that they are using, often, but not always, Trados. This means that they care more about which software the translator is using than about how good this translator is. It makes very good sense from their perspective, because translators who use a certain tool can be better controlled, forced to use the terms that the agency thinks are appropriate (because they were used on a previous occasion) and to charge very little if anything for repeated occurrences of the same words (so called “full matches” or “fuzzy matches”).

This approach may be valid when it is applied to repeated updates of printer or software manuals, but you are likely to massacre quite a few patent translations when this principle is universally applied to patents.

Every now and then I need to find a new translator when a client who usually sends me patents in languages that I translate myself (Japanese, German, French, Russian, etc.) asks me to translate a patent in a language that I don’t know. I usually go to the ATA database and find a couple of prospective translators within a few minutes, as I did just two days ago.

Invariably, I am surprised how little these translators charge as I was just two days ago. Because I charge a somewhat higher rate for languages that I can’t translate myself, my profit margin is usually quite high on these translations because most translators, even the highly educated and experienced ones, charge only what I was charging when I was still working only for translation agencies more than 20 years ago.

So my conclusion is that while it appears that translation rates being paid to translators have been (on the surface) frozen for the last 20 years, in reality they are much lower now because prices of everything else: fuel, food, healthcare, housing, etc., have been increased dramatically.

If on top of that translators are also asked to provide fabulous discounts for repeated portions of the text, this means that with all these wonderful tools that are supposed to be of assistance with translation, translators now make considerably less than they used to 20 years ago, taking into account inflation.

I also hate how CATs are turning people who used to call themselves freelance translators into mere word merchants.  They are no longer considered freelancers who can determine how much they will charge for their work. They simply supply word units, so that some of these units are purchased at full cost, while other words units are heavily discounted.

The amount of the discount per the word unit is no longer determined by the translator when it is predetermined by a software tool.

I see this as an attempt at enslavement of translators. The decision whether to provide a discount, and how much of a discount, if any, should be provided, must be with the translator, not with a software program which is used by a middleman inserted between the translator and the customer.

Some  agencies may pass the discounts extracted from translators on to the customer, some may give the customer a much smaller discount than what they are able to wring out from the translator, and obviously, quite a few will keep all of the extra profit for themselves.

The number of words, lines, or pages, is just a simple quantifier that is traditionally used in the translation industry instead of an hourly rate, which is typically used by other freelance professionals such as website designers, graphic artists, private detectives, etc.

I believe that CATs have been exerting a downward pressure on translation rates for quite some time because many translation agencies now believe that most or all translators now use these tools, and most or all translators will automatically agree to obligatory discounts. Just about every week I receive a translation job offer from an agency specifying the exact percentage of “full matches” and “fuzzy matches” ahead of time.

Since I am in a position to ignore these offers of heavily discounted work, I simply ignore them.

But I have a feeling that many translators have already accepted these discounts as necessary, without even realizing that their acceptance of this new status quo means that they have now lost control over how much they can charge if this determination is made for them by a software program in the hands of a middleman.

“Does your company have a FaceBook fan page?

I can send 500 to 1MM “Likes” within a few days.

We can add “Likes” to build your online following.

Consumers assume that a company with lots of “Likes” is established and reputable.

Call me so we can discuss the benefits. Results 100% Guaranteed!

Frank B.

FaceBook “Likes” Expert

[toll free phone number] 

P.S. – We can also help with YouTube Views, Twitter Followers and Mass Emails. Call us…” 

This was an e-mail that I received a few days ago. I wonder how many people received the same e-mail from Frank B. Thousands, for sure, if not millions.

Social media, including blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like, is becoming so important that companies pay their employees to maintain a company blog, or use people like Frank B. to manufacture fake followers.

You can usually tell quite easily corporate blog posts from posts on real blogs about issues written by people who have something to say as I wrote in this post more than two years ago. They always have a bland, uninspired, transparently self-serving post about how wonderful their company is with a few hundred words once or twice a week, most of the time with absolutely no response from readers.

Now, these fake blogs can have hundreds of followers and thousands of likes just like real bloggers thanks to people like Frank B.

It is becoming increasingly more and more difficult to distinguish the real thing from a fake in just about anything these days, including social media. There are 143 fake blog comments in my spam queue right now and my Dashboard tells me that a utility called Akismet blocked 56,199 spam comments so far. Sometime, the spam gets through the utility and I spend a few seconds reading it before I realize what it is. And sometime Akismet blocks real comments from people who have something to say, usually when they praise my blog because that is one distinguishing feature of fake comments. So if you wonder why I  failed to respond to your lavish praise at some point, the chances are that Akismet sent your comment to the spam folder.

Of course, if you are really, really good at faking, there is a bright future for you, young man or woman, in politics. As George Burns used to say, “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made”.

Based on what he was saying a few years ago, candidate Obama had absolutely nothing in common with president Obama. My explanation for what happened is that president Obama must be an evil twin of candidate Obama, and the real Obama, the one who was promising us real healthcare reform (not a bailout of the private health insurance industry) and transparent government (not vicious prosecutions of whistle blowers) and all the other things that sounded so wonderful in 2008, is imprisoned somewhere in an undisclosed location, sort of like The Man in the Iron Mask, who was supposedly the legitimate heir to French throne, was allegedly held imprisoned in the Bastille and other prisons by Louis XVI.

The fakers on the social media sometime send me fake e-mails under names that I am bound to recognize so that I would click on attached links. I can usually tell quite easily that these are fake e-mails because, for example, I am called “Steve” in fake e-mails purporting to be from my kids. Obviously, my kids would never call me “Steve”!

 I wonder how these cheats got their e-mail addresses. From Faceboook? Or is my e-mail being monitored by some geeky hacker somewhere? It is quite likely because I used to receive fake e-mails from a translator who passed away several years ago who only had an e-mail address on AOL.

 Cheating and faking is an important skill now, very much in demand in the 21st century.

 If you don’t have this skill in your skill set, you are unlikely to find good employment and prosper.

 You will probably end up writing a bitter blog that nobody will bother reading, and at some point you may become so desperate that you will decide to engage the services of somebody like Frank B. who will get you hundreds or thousands of fake likes on Facebook and fake tweets on Twitter.

There was a time, many moons ago, when translators working for translation agencies (before these agencies started calling themselves “LSPs”) were treated with respect. As an old timer who has been in this business for over 26 years now, I remember those days fondly.

I felt that the people at the agencies that I used to work for back then were my colleagues and friends, we could joke together and complain about unreasonable customers, partly because a decade or two ago, I was still able to communicate with translation agencies through the phone rather than only through e-mail.

But then the agencies discovered that if they start treating translators who do the actual work, namely translating, as easily replaceable and interchangeable zombie units, they can pay them half as much as they used to, and they can also let them wait for the paltry payment twice as long and generally treat them as indentured servants, which is obviously a very efficient way to run a business, almost as efficient as moving a factory from America or Europe to China, India of Bangladesh.

If one defines a real translation agency (and there are still a few left out there) as a business that values the work of translators, and a zombie farm as a business that does not give a damn about the zombies working for the farm, what are the typical characteristics of a zombie farm?

I would like to propose the following Eleven Characteristic Signs of Zombie Farms in the modern translation industry.

1.         Zombie farms are absolutely not interested in you as a person or in your “professional background and experience”

You are just another zombie to them – that is why zombie farm operators do not want to even bother looking at your resume. It is understandable that they don’t really have time to look at resumes of all those zombies who want to work for them! All they really need to know is your rate! Zombie translator applicants are simply asked to go to an online database and fill in each entry for zombie translator hopefuls. This makes it much easier to harvest suitable zombie profiles for potential jobs, which is called “finding a good match” in the zombie farm industry.

2.         Zombie translators who don’t use Trados need not apply

Zombie translators must use expensive translation memory tools that they are ordered to buy, for about eight hundred dollars, usually Trados. The reason for this is again efficiency -  translators using Trados or another preapproved computer memory tool are expected by zombie farm to gladly cough up major discounts for what is called in the industry “full and fuzzy matches” for which they will be paid nothing or next to nothing. While the translators thus make very little money after obligatory discounts have been deducted from payment, much more of the compensation for the work from the client will end up in the bottomless pockets of the zombie farm, which is again very efficient.

3.         Zombie translators who are not ready to sign even the most demeaning “confidentiality agreement” need not apply

 A zombie farm typically asks a prospective zombie translator to sign a long “Nondisclosure Agreement” even before a job is offered, specifying numerous and onerous duties and obligations of zombie translators who must among other things agree to clauses such as these:

4.         Zombie translators must wait 60 days or more to be paid for zombie work

 This is one reason why zombie translators are usually very hungry. The actual length of the waiting-to-be-fed period is usually disguised in the agreement in nearly impenetrable English (as in “we pay 30 day after this or that date of this or that month”), which translates into English as “we pay when we pay – take it or leave it, zombies!”.

5.         Zombie translators must agree to work for free if necessary

Zombie translators must agree not to be fully compensated, or not to be compensated at all, should the wise heads at the zombie farm decide in their infinite wisdom that the translation is somehow defective and thus no money needs to be paid for days or weeks of zombie work.

6.         Zombie translators must agree to pay “reasonable attorney’s fees”

…. namely should a zombie farm operator decide in his infinite wisdom to sue a zombie translator for any reason at all. Fortunately, this is very unlikely to occur because most translators, and zombie translators in particular, have no money and a reasonable (or even sane) attorney would thus be unlikely to sue them. However, this clause is always used in these contracts because the zombie translator is thus clearly expressing his or her near total submission to the zombie farm owner, which could potentially include also sacrificing the firstborn son should this be requested.

7.         Prospective zombie translators must also agree to “transfer any and all intellectual property” to the zombie farm

… this would be intellectual property created while a zombie translator was working on a project through a zombie farm for an end customer. This clause again does not make a whole lot of sense because zombie translators are simply not very intellectual, and thus do not create much intellectual property, not to mention of course that it is also outrageous (and probably illegal) when a middleman wants to own a product that was created by an ostensibly freelance zombie and not an actual employee of the zombie farm during the zombie farm working hours.

8.         Prospective zombie translators must also agree never to contact the end customer

Zombies may not do so for any reason at all, unless a written permission is obtained first from the zombie farm. This clause actually does make sense because if the end customer knew who the actual translator was, the customer might decide to circumvent the zombie farm and work directly with the translator.

(As these “Confidentiality Agreements” usually have about 3 thousand words, I am unfortunately able to list only some of the absurd and demeaning clause in a relatively short blog post).

9.         Zombie translators are not allowed to submit their own invoices

Instead, they must submit “payment requests” by using software that has been specially prepared for them courtesy of the zombie farm. This is used to further reinforce the dependence of zombie translators on zombie farm procedures, for instance so that “payment requests” can be submitted (in lieu of invoices) only on certain dates, etc., which is again very efficient as the “wait-to-be-fed” time period can be further extended.

10.       Zombie translators are always referred to as “vendors”, never as translators

This is a handy term used by zombie farms in impersonal e-mails specifying new requirements, rules, regulations and updated instructions for multitudes of “vendors”. The latest rules and restrictions must be followed to the letter if a zombie translator wants to eventually be paid. Ignorance of the latest zombie farm rules on the part of a zombie translator is no excuse and can result in further extension of the waiting period. The use of this term also shows that to a zombie agency, the main difference between ice cream and hot dog vendors and translators is that unlike translators, people selling ice cream and hot dogs cannot be forced to discount their products based on fuzzy and full matches.

11.       Zombie translators are quick first responders happily competing among themselves to underbid each other

Zombie farm operators enjoy sending e-mails with one job offer to a whole bunch of zombies so that the zombies could start fighting among themselves to come up with the lowest price and shortest turnaround time. This is again very efficient because most zombie translators typically check their e-mail every couple of minutes, and since they know that they are bidding against the bids of other zombies, they always bid very low while offering to meet incredibly brutal deadlines.

Now that you are armed with a list of some of the most important characteristics of modern zombie farms, it should be quite easy to tell whether you are you working for a traditional translation agency, or whether you are working for a modern zombie farm.

If at least 6 of these characteristics are applicable to your “LSP” or “translation agency”, you are working for a zombie farm and the chances are that even if you have not been fully zombiefied yet, it is only a matter of time before an efficient zombiefication program will turn you into a full-fledged zombie.

The concept of work and compensation for the product of this work has evolved over time.

Only two short centuries ago, most people did not have a job that they would have to commute to in order to make money. That is a relatively recent invention. Not so long ago, when most people were working as farmers, people called serfs had to work for free a certain part of the year for their feudal lords, while the rest of the year they were allowed to work for themselves so that they would not die of hunger.

The trading of work measured in working hours for money was gradually invented because industrial revolution needed urgently new workers, which turned former serfs into laborers to be exploited, perhaps slightly less ruthlessly, by people with the means to build a factory and to pay for the labor of workers providing the necessary work.

This model, later further perfected to include a punch clock with time cards, has been in place for so long now that most people assume that the traditional type of 9-to-5 employment is something that is natural and desirable.

But this natural and desirable model of employment has very deep cracks in it now, only about two short centuries after it has been invented. The 9-to-5 employment model would still be quite desirable if it were the same model that existed in this and other countries only a few decades ago.

But it is not the same model, not any more. Although as an entry level employee, I had a relatively low salary 30 years ago, the salary was automatically increased every year and the job came with a number of substantial benefits, including medical, dental, and vision benefits, life insurance, vacation, sick days, and a pension as a reward for loyalty. Most of these benefits have been eliminated now for most employees with the exception of top level managers whose perks are now much better than 30 years ago.

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The concept of a craftsman, a person who has a specialized trade, predates the concept of a 9-to-5 job. A few centuries ago, when butchers were cutting meat, bakers were baking bread and candlestick makers were making candlesticks, nobody cared about how many hours they spent on the job. They were simply paid for the products that they were creating – if they could sell them.

Which is exactly how most freelance workers are being paid now. Website designers may base their cost on the number of hours they will need to create a website, and freelance translators may charge for their translations based on the number of words or pages to be translated, but the number of words or pages is only used as a rather simplistic quantifier, as convenient as the number of loaves of bread or candlesticks.

But these days it seems that only some translators can be considered craftsmen. Those who agree to discounts that they must give for what is called in the industry “full and fuzzy matches” agree to have the worst of both worlds: on the one hand, they are being paid on a piecemeal basis, namely based on the number of words, which means that in theory it does not matter how much time they would need to translate for example 500 words.

But at the same time, if the text contains similar or identical passages, the time factor is then used to reduce the translator’s earning potential by some translation agencies. If it is easier for you, translator, to translate 500 words per a certain number of minutes or hours, then you shall be paid less for those words, and the basic, non-discounted per-word rate will be applicable only to the parts of the translation that are more difficult to translate because they are completely new and thus take significantly longer than the easier passages.

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I can’t think of a single example of another profession that would agree to such a rule, with the possible exception of serfs in good old feudalism.

I have been with my tax accountant for 26 years. Every year I send him the same information and he probably spends about 20 minutes, quite possibly less than that, to prepare my taxes.

Then he sends me a bill for several hundred dollars, which means that he probably makes about a thousand dollars an hour on clients like me. But as long as he does not charge too much, why should I care how much he makes by the hour? If he can do it faster than anybody else without making a single mistake, good for him, and good for me.

If you compared my tax returns over the years, something like 90% of the information that I send to my accountant would quite justifiably qualify as “fuzzy and full matches”. After all, the same fields are filled in on a computer screen every year, and the information I supply to my accountant is very similar every year, the differences are mostly in the numbers because some years are good and some not so good.

But I don’t pay my accountant based on the number of minutes spent on my tax return or the number of words produced. I pay him because I myself don’t want to keep track of all the changes in the tax code, which is hundreds of thousands pages thick and getting thicker every year. I pay him for his expertise, which is something that cannot be easily quantified in terms of minutes or words.

If I asked him for a discount based on the full and fuzzy matches contained in the highly repetitive information that he is processing for me, he would think I’m crazy. And rightly so.

But it is not crazy when some translation agencies demand deep discounts for what is called by some operators in the industry full and fuzzy matches from translators.

The inescapable conclusion is that unlike accountants, translators are simply not professionals. They are basically low level data entry operators who don’t really have any expertise.

So get over it already you greedy translators! Fuzzy and full matches are here to stay!

Be glad that you have any work at all, and that you can still eke out a living after the steep discounts …. before you are completely replaced by software and machine translation.

Fuzzy logic is a term that has been used for decades now to describe a branch of logic designed to allow degrees of imprecision in reasoning and knowledge, typified by terms such as `very’, `quite possibly’, and `unlikely’, to be represented in such a way that the information can be processed by computer.

It is a very useful method because it allows computers to make a decision when the information presented to them is not quite clear (i.e. not a simple choice between two alternatives). Most humans have the ability to make such decision quite easily, but since machines can only respond to a clear command, they have to be instructed what to do in case of uncertainty.

Fuzzy logic thus makes it possible to prevent or reduce occurrences of the status known as “freezing”, which is what happens when a computer does not know what to do.

The term “fuzzy matches” is much younger. I came across this term for the first time when a translation agency sent me a “Confidentiality Agreement” that specified the pitiful, fractional payments for “full matches” and “fuzzy matches” about five years ago. Because I had no idea what “fuzzy” and “full matches” meant, I called the company. “Oh, it’s for people who use Trados or other CATs”, was the response. Since I did not then and do not  now use any computer memory tools, I was told not worry about it.

We are always told not to worry about the fuzziness of the one-way communication between the very important people who run everything and the rest of us who have to do the real work, such as the fuzziness of methods used to calculate statistical data.

For instance, unemployment statistics do not count as unemployed people who work part-time because there is no full-time work for them, or who no longer bother to contact the unemployment office because they have not been able to find employment for a long time, and inflation statistics do not include prices of food, medicine, and fuel (because they are “too volatile”!), etc. Actually, they are not volatile at all. Volatile means that they may frequently go up or down, but these price go over time basically only in one direction. Or have you noticed that the price of any of items such as milk, bread, meat, rice or potatoes at your store, or the price of gas at your gas pump, has gone down over the years? I have noticed the opposite.

The real reason why these prices are excluded from statistics is to prevent people from knowing what the real inflation numbers are.

But let’s get back to the interesting subject of fuzzy matches.

I received an e-mail this morning which said:

Dear Steve:

This is XYZ, a project manager at ABC Company, a US-based LSP.  I am currently putting a team together for our client. The project consists of translating a manual for [insert the name of the gizmo]. We have some Trados translation memory matching – there are 5,868 new words, 8,232 100% matches, 573 repetitions, and 2534 fuzzy matches.

I’m afraid I was quite rude in my response to this project manager, although not nearly as rude as the project manager was to me, without even realizing it, by assuming that my price per word is only a springboard to fabulous discounts that I would be glad to give to this agency (excuse me, I meant LSP) for the privilege of finally having some work.

Based on what I discovered mostly by reading comments on my blog and blogs of other translators, I am hardly the only translator who does not use Trados or any other computer memory tool. At least 40% of translators and probably more do not use these tools, because although they may be very suitable for example for translating repetitive updates of software or computer manuals, they would be mostly or completely useless in other translation fields, namely fields that require creativity, experience and good writing skills, while other translators will probably not acknowledge that they do use them even if they do … because they don’t want to be forced to give discounts.

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 It so happens that a few days ago I translated two very similar long patents, each about 13 thousand words. One described a device or an apparatus to manufacture a product, while the other one described the method used with this apparatus to manufacture said product.

I don’t use computer memory tools because I don’t need them. As long as I remember what it is that I am translating, I can always find repetitive passages in my translation of the first patent quite easily, cut and paste them into my second translation, and then carefully proofread everything to make sure that I did not miss anything.

And I did give the client, not a translation agency, but a scientist working for the manufacturer, my standard discount of 10% because the cutting and pasting technique does save time. I have been giving discounts like this to my clients for years if not decades before the first computer memory tools appeared on the market.

But in this case it is up to me, not up to a translation agency, to decide whether I will in fact provide a discount, and how much of a discount it will be. Had I decided not to offer a discount, it would still be OK because the agreement between myself and my client is based on the actual number of words in my translation, not on a fuzzy concept of “full, partial, and fuzzy matches” that some translation agencies are trying to wield like a mighty sword beating down any hopes that translators might be able to make a decent living if they accept the Shylockian logic of this concept.

According to this logic, if you just spent half an hour researching on the Internet a very complicated term that may be crucial for your translation, you get paid whatever few cents you were supposed to get paid for that one word once you know beyond any doubt the author of the text did not make a mistake and that you indeed have the right term.

But you would get those few cents only for the first occurrence of this word.

After that, “Trados translation memory matching” would reduce your remuneration based on “5,868 new words, 8,232 100% matches, 573 repetitions, and 2534 fuzzy matches” to …. a fraction of what it would be based on normal human logic.

As I said in the introduction, fuzzy matches have nothing to do with fuzzy logic, these are two completely different things.

Instead, the logic of “fuzzy matches” is really the logic of getting something for nothing, a very old concept also known as stealing.

UPDATE

Note how protective of “fuzzy matches” are most of the translators in the Proz discussion group linked in the comments. They no longer seem to understand the concept of a world in which a translator is a well paid professional who is translating complicated texts for direct clients, and who would simply never agree to be controlled by CATs counting “fuzzy matches” or “full matches” to generate automatic discounts, even though these complicated text may have many repetitions in them.

To me, this is very similar to what is known as Stockholm syndrome.

Hostages under the influence of Stockholm syndrome also no longer understand the concept of not cooperating with their captors.