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

Terence McKenna

I don’t know what the translation business was like before computers, back when translators could use only typewriters, snail mail, and Federal Express.

I am pretty old, but not that old.

But I do remember what the translation business was like before the Internet, because Internet is only about 25 years old now, although most people did not really start using it until about the year 2000.

And I have been doing what I am doing for more than a quarter century now.

I remember cheap IBM clone PCs (“cheap” at 1,000 dollars for a CPU with two floppy drives, a 20 MB hard disk was 200 dollars extra), dot matrix printers that worked only with a heavy box of a special, perforated paper, and most of all, the wonder of new translation jobs from Japan, when they started falling like falling stars in slow motion out of my noisy and slow fax machine on curly thermal paper.

I remember how modem-to-modem connections with translation agencies, each of which seemed to be using an incompatible “handshaking protocol” with funny names like Kermit, were gradually replaced by something called BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), which existed somewhere in this strange space that I kept reading about in the newspaper called “the Internet”.

When I finally figured out what the Internet was really about, and it took me a while, I remember that I was expecting big changes coming soon down the road, although like most people, I could not imagine how many and how big these changes would be. I could not have imagined that whole industries would be so quickly wiped out, or pushed toward the edge of extinction.

I do remember that I did come to a startling realization about the Internet back around the end of the last century relating directly to my own job. I realized that what I needed to do was to try to use the Internet to replace translation agencies by direct clients.

I had a few direct clients already because since about 1991, I started offering my services directly to patent law firms instead of only to translation agencies.

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But at the beginning of this century, I realized that I too can use the power of Internet to create a direct link with new clients through my website. And eventually, it worked, although it took several years before I started seeing concrete results as I wrote in this post.

I thought that the new medium of Internet would be “a game changer”, something that would make it possible for many translators to start working mostly directly for the real clients instead of for translation agencies.

It is true that many people are using the Internet now to sell translation services to direct clients. But most of them are not translators. Most of them are still translation agencies. But unlike in the old days when a translation agency was typically run by a translator who had an entrepreneurial streak and understood translation because he or she often knew several languages, the new breed of translation agency entrepreneurs is proudly monolingual and blissfully ignorant about anything that has something to do with a foreign language.

New “managers”, who came from part-time employment agencies and other types of backgrounds that have nothing to do with languages or translation, have now fearlessly joined the translation agency game. If you don’t need to know anything about foreign languages or translation, what is to stop even the most ignorant person from starting a translation agency based on the innovative and incredibly clever business method of “buy low and sell high”?

These new, along with some of the old “translation business specialists”, keep pushing the rates at which they are buying translations from people who actually produce them lower and lower. They keep creating new cool buzzwords for “translation technologies” that they are selling to their clients, although these fabulous buzzwords have absolutely nothing to do with actual translations.

It is not the translator who is now in the center of the translation process in the new model for “translation business”. In fact, the translators seem to have completely disappeared from the picture as they have been replaced by something that is called “technology”.

Instead of using real humans called translators who create real translations, this technology “provides integrated solutions, and “delivers tangible business benefits” by using “a crowd of more than 100,000 crowd workers”, who have suddenly appeared out of nowhere to establish residence in a big cloud in the sky in order to replace humans who used to study for many years languages and dozens of complicated and arcane subjects to be able to finally call themselves translators after a couple of decades of mere apprenticeship.

In one part of the so called translation industry, these formerly human translators of old times are now being replaced by almost-human “MT post-processors”, namely human worker bees who diligently go over the detritus of machine translation to try to make sense out of it, and by crowd-workers.

These almost-human worker bees and unknowable crowd-workers are supposedly creating translations, although they are not translators. Nobody really knows who these crowd-workers are, where they live, whether they have something to eat, or whether they in fact need to eat all, given that they are paid either nothing or next to nothing for whatever it is that they do. But why should anybody care about them? They just shadows, lost in a crowd of other anonymous shadows, like unimportant, cheap extras in a big budget Hollywood movie.

Thanks to the miracle of Internet, the role of the crowd-workers will be, in the great scheme of things, to eventually completely replace people who used to call themselves translators, for the greater glory and sky-high profits of monolingual translation industry entrepreneurs, reaching all the way to the cloud where the shadow crowd-workers reside.

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So it turned out that although the Internet was a game changer, it was not exactly the kind of the game changer for translators that I was contemplating at the end of the last century.

Some translators were able to use Internet to establish and cultivate a relationship with direct clients, and for the most part replace translation agencies by these direct clients. It has been working for me quite well. I received 15 tax forms (1099s) for 2013: 2 of them were from translation agencies, the rest was from direct clients, mostly patent law firms.

I am not sure, but I think that relatively few translators are using the Internet to liberate themselves from ignorant bottom feeders who have infected a large portion of what is now called the translation business – although absolutely nothing is stopping them from doing just that, except perhaps for laziness and lack of imagination.

Instead of using the Internet to offer their services directly to their clients, they keep complaining on Internet about perfidious “platforms for translators” such as Proz and TranslatorsCafé, “platforms” that work very well for the people who own them and make a nice profit from them, but not for translators,  because the main effect of these blind auction sites where too many people are fighting for a few jobs is that they will keep pushing the rates paid to translators lower, and lower, and still lower, no matter how much noise translators are making on social media.

“When will somebody finally create a platform for translators that is fair to us?”, translators are asking, in vain, on their beloved social media.

They don’t seem to realize that although nobody is interested in creating “a fair platform for translators”, the platform that is equally fair to anybody, including translators, is already there.

The platform is called the Internet. But if you can’t figure out how to use this platform so that it works for you, it is only natural that somebody will figure out how to use it against you.

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I was going only to buy a new toner cartridge for my HP Laserjet P 1006 printer which I bought about 10 years ago, a good, cheap printer that I was using as a backup printer in one of the rooms that I use as an office now (it used to be my son’s room).

But the problem with the HP P 1006 is that the cartridges are expensive, and even if you buy one of the cheaper, remanufactured ones, they run out of the toner very quickly because they put a chip in it limiting the number of pages that can be printed with the cartridge even though there may be still enough of toner in them for hundreds of pages.

This is how they get us these days. They use chips for spying even on how many pages we are allowed to print. Isn’t technology wonderful?

Next thing they’ll do, they will put chips in rolls of toilet paper.

But then I decided to replace the old HP printer with a new printer, mostly because the P 1006 can be connected to a computer only through a USB connection, which means that it can be used only with one computer. And also because the cartridges are so expensive, as I said already.

I looked online at several brands of multifunctional printers with Wifi connectability, including HP, Brother, and Epson, but in the end I decided to buy a Samsung printer, SCX-300 series, mostly because it was the cheapest printer with all the functions that I was looking for. The printer cost me 105 dollars, which is almost exactly what a new cartridge for my old HP printer would cost.

It took me a while to connect the printer to my Wifi network and I was only able to do that after talking to support for about 10 minutes. But Samsung support kept me on hold only for a few minutes, and to my surprise, I was not talking to a very nice but somewhat clueless lady in the Philippines, which would probably happen had I called HP, but to a guy in Savannah, South Carolina. Once I talked to him, I was able to connect the printer to all of my 5 computers (3 desktops and 2 laptops), as well as to my iPhone and iPad, without any problems.

The Samsung printer is multifunctional, which means that in addition to printing, it can be also used as a fax and a scanner. Like most people, I don’t really need the fax function (I already have a standalone fax although it is rarely used), but I was really interested in the scanning function.

And I must say, I was really impressed by the scanning software that came with this inexpensive printer because the scanning function of the printer can be used not only to scan images with Microsoft Paint that can be then easily copied and pasted into documents in MS Word, but also to create PDF files and to convert PDF files created in different languages to MS Word documents in the corresponding language.

Although I already have a paid online account with Adobe which allows me to convert PDF files created in several languages to MS Word files in the same language, the Adobe software supports only conversion to 6 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.

The software which comes free with the Samsung printer works for 27 languages: including Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, UK and US English, Japanese, Kazakh, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, traditional and simplified Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian and Uzbek.

It is obviously much better to be able to convert documents in 27 languages than in just 6 languages. I know that there are many translators who use ABBY FineReader for these conversions, but why bother buying and learning new software when you don’t have to do that?

I tested the scanning and converting function with a number of languages: German, French, Polish, Czech, Russian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese.

It worked about as well as the subscription to Adobe conversion software. But the Adobe document conversion function has one big problem: since the converted documents are stored in the Cloud, how do I know that they will not be read by unauthorized eyes, or that my account will not be hacked?

Most of the documents that I receive from patent law firms, such as patent publication that have been already published, are in public domain and confidentiality is therefore not an issue. But since some of the documents that I receive, often first just to quote a price for translation, have on every page in the bottom left corner the warning: CONFIDENTIAL – FOR ATTORNEY’S EYES ONLY, I can’t really store these documents in the Cloud as I have no idea who could gain access to them.

I used to estimate the word count for these types of documents by trying to estimate the word count on each page manually and then adding it up with a calculator. But that can take a very long time when you have a document with more than a hundred of pages, and it is very easy to make a mistake.

If you underestimate the word count, it looks like you are cheating to get the job, if you overestimate it, you may lose the job to competition.

That is why I really love this printer. I don’t have to estimate the word count on dozens or hundreds of pages manually, and I don’t have to worry about confidentiality when the documents are stored only on my computer. True, somebody could still hack into my computer, but I have some control over that as I can take measures to prevent it.

With documents stored in the Cloud, I have no control whatsoever.

The results of my test of conversion of PDF files to different languages were about the same or slightly worse than what I came to expect from the Adobe conversion software. Unless the legibility of the original PDF file is very good, the result of the conversion is not very good either, and sometime a glitch in the Samsung software causes it to misinterpret the language and the result is garbage. But this occurs relatively infrequently and it can be easily remedied because the wrong conversion is clearly visible.

One problem that the Samsung printer has, which I find quite annoying, is that the printed pages have a slight curl on both ends of the page. This is what used to happen with older type of HP and Brother printers, while the newer printers of these brands print out beautifully straight pages.

But if this is where Samsung decided to cut corners on the design of this printer, I guess I can live with that, especially since it is only my backup printer.

My main printer is a multifunctional Canon printer (ImageClass D480) which works with all of my computers, except for my iPad.

It has a lot of really good features and a few drawbacks: printed pages are beautifully straight, but the scanning function is a joke!

But I am not going to bore readers of my blog with any more printer talk.

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It has been known for several years now that bilingualism and multilingualism delays the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. This undeniable fact has been borne out in several studies in Canada, India and elsewhere.

Unfortunately, scientists have overlooked what could be called a side effect of this positive and highly desirable development in a bilingual or multilingual brain, namely that at the same time, bilingualism and multilingualism may cause early onset of a special kind of dementia that occurs only among translators, called translator’s dementia (TD, dementia translatoris).

Some of these largely undetected symptoms are in full evidence in useless and counterproductive complaints encountered daily on social media and sometime also on blogs of translators.

Here is a taste of some of these complaints, which clearly represent additional symptoms of translator’s dementia.

1.         The Bastards Want To Pay Us Peanuts – How Dare They To Offer Us Such Low Rates?

Every day, translators are bitterly complaining on social media (especially on LinkedIn) that yet another dirty agency is looking for translators willing to accept payment in the amount of 3 cents, or 2 cents, or even 1 cent per word as remuneration for their hard work.

Really? So what else is new? By publicizing the names of these agencies in this manner on social media, translators are in fact advertising these agencies to hungry people all over the world, hungry people who think that they can translate and who will jump at the chance to make 15 Euros a day. Which is exactly the kind of free advertising that these agencies are looking for.

2.         Rates Offered on “Portals for Translators” Are Ridiculously Low – How Dare They To Offer Us Such Low Rates?

While it would be evident to any non-translator that when you have an auction site where great multitudes of people who are hungry for work are competing for a few jobs, the compensation for this work will inevitably tend to be exceedingly low, people suffering from translator’s dementia somehow never seem to arrive at this logical conclusion as TD has a strong hold on the reasoning powers of their multilingual brains.

Instead of ignoring these “portals for translators” and trying to look for direct clients who would be in fact willing and able to pay for good work several times what the going rate is on these blind auction sites, translators again spend all of their energy looking for higher rates on the same blind auction sites and then bitterly complaining about the injustice of it all when, once again, they are offered peanuts.

3.         Translators’ Associations Represent the Interests of Agencies, Not of Translators – How Dare They?

This is another relatively frequent complaint of translators. Well, there is an explanation for this. The interests of translators and translation agencies are not exactly identical. In fact, it would probably be fair to say that they are often diametrically opposed.

Translators want to be paid high rates for their work, while translation agencies obviously want to be able to pay them as little as possible to make as much profit as possible.

While translators want to be visible to direct clients, one clause that is generally always present in contracts between a translation agency and a translator is that the translator may never, ever contact the client directly, unless specifically authorized to do so by the agency, (namely, if the client has a question that the translation agency is unable to answer because it has something to do with a foreign language).

I don’t know how it works in translators’ associations in other countries, but here in US, both translators and translation agencies are members of the same organization (American Translators Association), and the agencies are basically running the association.

All you need to do is read the ATA Chronicle to see who is really in charge of the ship.

I have been a member of the ATA for 27 years, but I have never seen the complaints that are so frequently expressed by translators on social media and blogs mentioned in the ATA Chronicle, a monthly publication of the association of translation agencies, (I mean, of translators).

In all those 27 years, not once have I been contacted by a direct client based on the information listed in the ATA database of translators. Translators are so well hidden in the database by whoever designed the database that you basically have to know how it works to be able to find what you are looking for.

Not one direct client has found me through the database in 27 years. Good job, ATA!

Most of the articles in the Chronicle have a pro-agency slant, although it is sometime cleverly masked as good advice to beginning translators: (MT goooood, criticizing MT baaaaad, MT post-processing – wonderful job with a bright future, discounts for fuzzy matches, full matches and other atrocities committed by Trados and the like are necessary and good for translators, etc., and so on, and so forth).

I never see opposing opinions in the Chronicle, which is why I usually just scan it within a few minutes.

It is a well known fact that the American Medical Association admits doctors, but not greedy insurance companies, that membership in the American Bar Association is open only to lawyers, not to giant law firms, and that the Writers Guild of America allows only writers to join, not powerful Hollywood studios, etc.

That is why these associations are still able to represent the interests of individual members, which frequently clash with the interests of insurance companies, law firms, and Hollywood studios.

Sane people whose reasoning powers are undiminished by an insidious disease would see the split personality of an association of translators right away as a conflict of interest. But, sadly, translators who are affected by translator’s dementia don’t seem to be able to see simple truths that doctors, lawyers, and Hollywood script writers have discovered decades ago.

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I do, sometime, but not as much as I used to now that I started using again WordPerfect on the sly, namely WordPerfect X6.

I know quite a few people who hate MS Word with passion, all of them translators who call it primitive, stupid, and worse on their blogs and on social media. I understand where these feelings are coming from: MS Word does mean things to us, apparently for no particular reason, just because it can, which is one telling characteristics of a psychopathic personality.

For instance, sometime when I write a blog post in MS Word, everything look fine and dandy while I am still writing in the word processor or even in the “Add New Post” screen in WordPress, but after I click on the “Publish” button, the post is published in an incredibly ugly font that hurts my eyes and looks like something that was vomited by a high school kid who got drunk for the first time in his life.

But since it does not happen all the time, how can I possibly figure out what the problem is?

There are many other mean things that the psychopathic king of word processors likes to do to me, for instance sometimes it messes up pagination, and when it’s messed up on page 1, it simply will not let me fix it!

The problem is, of course, that unlike WordPerfect and presumably also other lesser kings of word processors who want to ingratiate themselves to us any way they can, MS Word does not have a “reveal codes” function, which would make it possible to fix anything easily within a couple of seconds.

Since I bought WordpPerfect X6 8 months ago as I wrote in this post, I was able to put it to good use. Although I still use MS Word (Office 2003) for just about anything that requires me to write, I often start writing in WordPerfect first to make sure that there will be no nasty surprises later, like messed up pagination, or a nasty font on my blog once the thing is posted. I also sometime use it to remove a problem from MS Word which is invisible and unfixable by design within the MS Word software, but which can be fixed easily once the codes are revealed when the file is imported into WordPerfect.

MS Word has its good days too, and I really like some things about it. For example, I can easily switch to a virtual Japanese or Russian keyboard in it, which is very helpful for my purposes and something that I can’t do in WordPerfect.

There are also many nice things about WordPerfect X6 Office Student Edition which I bought for 48 dollars. In addition to the low price and the fact that you actually own it (unlike Microsoft Word), you can install it on a number of computers. The box that it came in said “up to 3″, but I installed it on 5 computers in my 2 home offices, and once you specify to WordPerfect that you need a seamless conversion to MS Word, it does just that and it even automatically saves the file in MS Word.

I don’t understand why people should not be allowed to install software that they legally purchased on several computers, since so many people use several computers these days, especially those of us who are freelancers. Incidentally, I remember that this is something that the Microsoft Corporation came up with first about 20 years ago. Up until the very important invention of Microsoft called “Internet validation”, once we bought a software package, we owned it and we were able to use it.

Now we own software, only temporarily, if Microsoft says that we own it. Once I had to junk a computer because after I restored Windows to an earlier date to get rid of a problem, Microsoft hit me with its infamous blue screen of death displaying a message claiming that the copy of Windows was illegal, which was a damn lie.

I am also using frequently scanning software called “Paper Port SE” which comes with the WordPerfect X6 Office, mostly to create PDF files from my scanners. This means that I don’t need to buy Adobe Writer software at 3 or 4 hundred dollars.

Microsoft originally said that by purchasing the new Microsoft Office, indentured Microsoft servants (they call them sarcastically “Microsoft Office customers”) were really just buying a license to use this particular software on 1 computer for 1 year for about 100 dollars. These are handy numbers because they make it easy to calculate the enormous profits that software manufacturer with a psychopathic personality would be making, but only if Microsoft could make these indentured servants obediently follow instructions. There must have been some backlash already because I now see that Microsoft Office can be installed on “up to 3 computers” again.

But since I would probably still have to buy it over and over again every year, until Bill Gates and the rest of the Microsoft millionaires are even more disgustingly rich than they are now, I plan on using my 2003 version of Microsoft Office for at least another 12 years.

If my 2003 version of Microsoft Office somehow stops working, I will either switch back to WordPerfect completely and keep converting the files to MS Office if files in Microsoft Word is still what my customers want, or learn how to use one of the two MS Word compatible free office suites that I have also installed on all of my computers, just in case.

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How many passwords do you have? Can you even count them?

I can’t. Nobody can, not anymore. I have them written down on a piece of paper and there are about two dozen entries on that list.

We are forced to create a password for the newspapers that we read online, for the blogs that we write, for our iPod, iPad, and iPhone (although one Apple password for all of these overpriced gadgets will do), for all the social media where we like to frequently embarrass ourselves, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, for PayPal and our bank accounts (Do not use your ATM code for your banking password!), our Meetup profiles, our computers, cell phones,  reading devices (like Kindle), PDF files, Skype, Tumblr, Reddit, and anything else that can be viewed and managed on Internet, which means just about everything these days, except perhaps for our dogs and cats.

Fortunately for those of us who have a cat or a dog, our pets still trust us completely, unconditionally and without a password, and all they want from us are three simple things: water, food and affection. Animals are too smart to fall into the password trap.

Every time when we create a new password on a computer, the computer asks us whether we want it to remember the password. I never know how to respond. I feel like I am Laurence Olivier drilling Dustin Hoffman’s teeth in the movie Marathon Runner, while asking over and over the same question:“Is it safe?”

Numerous privacy experts are telling us that using one password for everything is extremely dangerous, that the passwords that we use should have at least 8 alphanumeric characters, the more, the better, including at least one capital letter and things like asterisk. When we create a password, the computer even tells us whether our newly created password is “strong” or “weak” and if it is deemed to be “weak” by the computer, the computer will wisely reject it.

Since things are really complicated now and the world is full of unexpected dangers, we need to write down all the different passwords somewhere because nobody can remember all of them. But we can’t store the list on a computer or our phone because somebody could hack into it!

Like most people, I have several e-mails (6 in my case, although I really use only 3 of them), and maybe two dozen different passwords. Every time I want to order something from Internet, toner for my printer, for example, I am asked to create an account and a safe password (at least 8 alphanumeric characters, including at least one capital letter and things like asterisk).

But why should I need a password to buy everything, including toner for my printer? What is so secret about that?

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There are still occasions when I am ordering something in our highly secretive and extremely dangerous world and I am not asked to create a password – for example when I order pizza (both by phone and by Internet).

But this is because when I order pizza, they automatically create an account for me – without asking me first, with or without a password, I have no way of telling. Every pizza joint creates an account for everyone who orders a pizza based on the phone number. The account has our telephone number, our address on the map, the kind of pizza we like, and probably also what kind of tip can be expected.

When I go to have my hair cut, they also have my account already, in both places that I visit when the strange person staring back at me in the mirror looks too wild and disheveled even for my taste. Based on my telephone number, they know my name, when I had my hair cut last time, who did the deed, and the way I told her to cut it.

I don’t need to create a password there because my telephone number is my password.

The truth is, these passwords have nothing to do with protection of our privacy. On the contrary, the people who force us to create passwords do that in order to invade our privacy. Once we are uniquely identified by the combination of an e-mail and a password, the computer will automatically remember every single transaction that is connected with that unique combination – namely us.

This information is then used for aggressive advertising of the type that is practiced for example by Google. Google is throwing so much advertising at me every time when I ask it about anything, in big, garish ads jumping up and down on every page of everything I read on the Internet like an angry spirit from the netherworld that I mostly use DuckDuckGo these days. It is almost as good as Google, and the Duck does not hit me with stupid ads everywhere I go. I want to be able to read in peace.

There is a Russian proverb that says that free cheese is only in a mousetrap. None of these free services like e-mail, Internet search, or even the wonderful free “apps” on our iPhone is free. On the contrary, we are paying for them dearly, with information about our lives.

And the main reason why we need a password for everything is that the people who want to own our lives need to know exactly which life is being bought and sold at any given moment, and for how much.

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Once a month I try to practice my French at meetings of people who want to speak or who actually do speak French at “meetups” organized here by Alliance Française. Alliance Française is very active here in Eastern Virginia because they have meetings not only in Chesapeake where I live, but also in the neighboring cities including Virginia Beach, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Newport News, and Williamsburg. I could drive also at least to the meetings in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, it takes about twenty minutes most of the time, but I hate driving during rush hour, so I go only to the local one.

One meets all kinds of people there. This week I was sitting next to an older gentleman whose name I don’t remember now. I don’t remember it because it was an Armenian first name, and I am not very good with Armenian first names. He told me that he was 87 years old, born in Egypt where he attended lycée Français. This was many years ago, of course, but he still speaks very good French (better than mine), except that just like me, he has nobody to practice it with.

He told me that he speaks 5 languages: Armenian, French, Italian, Arabic, and English. I am pretty sure that he really does speak all those languages because he lived and worked in a number of countries where he was able to practice speaking them to his heart’s content. His favorite language is Italian, he told me, and he goes to Italy every year because he has friends there. At home he speak English because his wife is American and that is the only language that she speaks. He still drives, he gave up smoking 40 years ago, but he does like to drink: wine, beer or whiskey. “Every now and then, but not every day”, he said.

He also said that he exercises on a stationary bike and with some weights at home. I must try to remember all of that. If it works for him, it could work for me too.

He did not look 87 at all. I would have guessed maybe 75, if that much.

The ladies sitting next to us immediately started asking him how long he has been married, and then they immediately started going:“oooh”, and “aaah”, when he told them the number, I think it was sixty something. Being married for many decades to the same person is considered a real prize for some reason. I was going to say something like “Oh, well, after the first thirty years or so, most people simply give up”, but fortunately for me, we were speaking French and I could not come up quickly enough with the right way to make it sound funny in French.

There were exactly 20 people in that restaurant, ranging in age from 16 to 87. There were two 17-year-old high school students who looked like high school sweethearts. The boy spoke pretty good French (for an American teenager). One woman in her early forties was there with her 16-year-old daughter, so the daughter was the youngest person there. The rest of them were in their forties, fifties, sixties, and about three people were probably in their seventies.

Immigrants are usually well represented at meetings here where people go to practice a foreign language. Across the table was a woman from Montreal, next to her a woman who was born in Haiti and used to live in Virgin Islands, and then there was also a man from Vietnam. This was my third meeting and so far I saw only 2 French people at these meetings. We don’t seem to have a lot of French people here.

We were sitting at two long tables, the first table was occupied by “beginners”, namely people who would like to learn the language, but don’t speak it yet. There were about 10 people at that table, all of them Americans born in this country, mostly in their fifties and sixties. The only French I heard from that table was from a “prof de français”.

My table was more colorful, as I already mentioned, at least as far as different age groups and nationalities are concerned.

The big problem with foreign languages in United States is that they are so damn useless here. If you live in Europe, the next country where another language is spoken is usually only no more than a couple of hundred kilometers away. But here, you would have to get on a plane, unless you live near the Mexican or Canadian border.

Unless you happen to be a translator, there are not too many jobs here where one would need a foreign language. Unlike in translators’ associations in other countries, most members of the American Translators Association are in fact native speakers of another language than English.

Most people who were born here simply don’t bother learning a foreign language. They don’t know what they’re missing. They don’t know, for example, that being bilingual or multilingual helps to prevent or at least to postpone the onset of Alzheimer’s disease.

Scientists have finally discovered that a good way to make sure that your brain will be in perfectly good working order by the time you are 87 is to learn a few languages in addition to your native one. Two languages is a good start, but four or five would be a really good number, the more the better.

It is also best if you exercise your body as well as your mind, not too much, but frequently, and also, do not neglect drinking either: beer, wine, or whiskey is best if you want to be able to drive well into your nineties.

But remember: no drinking when driving, and you should probably also not drink every day, that would not be good for you either.

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On surface, it would seem that unlike translation quality, translation quantity can be measured quite easily: you can measure it based on the number of words, lines, or pages.

From the viewpoint of the corporate translation agency model, translation is just another commodity that can be bought and then sold at a higher price, for example based on a unit called word count. It is important to keep the price of these words low at the point when they are purchased from workers called translators, and high at the point when they are sold to clients.

Among new tricks in the arsenal of ploys used by some translation agencies are computer-assisted  translation tools (CATs), which instead of being used to facilitate processing of largely mechanical and routine operations can now be used also to deny payment to translators for what is called in the industry “full matches” and “fuzzy matches”, i.e. similar or identical words.

Because the world is seemingly full of translators, and translation is a largely an unregulated business activity in many countries, some translation agencies became experts at finding would-be translators, often in third world countries, whose main if not only strength is that they are much, much cheaper than their more qualified and experienced colleagues.

These translation agencies then ask qualified and experienced translators to “edit” at a low hourly rates the disastrous results of the work of such would-be translators. I started calling them zombie translators in my posts, and to my delight, this new term is now popping up on blogs and in discussions of translators on social media.

Some agencies believe that machine translation, which can be used to obtain a rough simile of human translation at an even lower price first, namely usually for free, can then be then edited and licked into shape by a human processor of words “translated” by a machine.

All of this is just a natural result of the concept according to which translation is just another commodity that can be easily measured in units called words, words that can be bought at a low price, the lower, the better, and then sold at a higher price. The greater the margin between the price at which this commodity is purchased and the price at which it is sold to a user, the better, of course, for businesses selling these words.

It is easy to measure commodities, such as bananas or sausages. All you have to do is weigh them in kilograms or pounds.

But translation is a very different type of commodity, if we want to call it that, because translation represents a type of a particular commodity called information. Information is something that may not be easily measured based on the number of words or lines contained in it. One could also say that information is the most important commodity in the world, because it is the lifeblood of our civilization. That is why information is being hoarded, usually in secret, because an unlimited amount of information provides an almost unlimited power to those who possess this information. Cardinal Richelieu said it best almost four centuries ago:”Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find a reason in them to hang him“.

Everywhere we go, we are surrounded by trivial and mostly useless information, often in the form of advertising that is packaged as information by our wonderful media. Mistranslated and incomprehensible information is like blood that is infected with a virus that will eventually kill us.

There are no full or fuzzy matches in translation, because translation is not about words. Words, lines, or pages are just a convenient quantifier that can be used to simplify the buying and selling process.

Some people think that as a profession, translation is doomed because most or possibly all translators will be eventually replaced by computers, which is something that happened to many professions in the last few decades. If it was possible to replace most human bank clerks and travel agents by machines and computers, the same fate must inevitably await also translators.

But machines and software can only replace humans who perform routine, repetitive operations that can be broken down into many individual steps and replicated by a software programmer who can then write a software package seamlessly simulating these operations.

Human thinking includes many operations that can be described as routine and repetitive. But the result of human thinking at the point where things actually make sense is never a routine. For some reason, new information is often discovered at the end as a result of human thinking when two contradictory ideas are being considered. At end of the processing of two contradictory instructions by a computer, the computer crashes instead of arriving at new information.

This new information is something that cannot be easily quantified, for instance in words, lines, or pages, or replicated by software.

In fact, it is one of those ephemeral things that cannot be really measured at all.

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You can’t make stuff like this up.

Below are a few e-mails that were exchanged recently between a certain translation agency and mad patent translator.

E-mail No. 1 from Expert Translations (the name of the agency has been changed to protect poor Hayley and her translation agency).

Dear Linguist,

My company found your contact details through the ATA Database and is wanting to reach out to see if you would be interested in a potential upcoming large patent translation project from Russian to English. The documents would generally be highly technical in Cyrillic. If you are interested, can you please send me the following information:

1)  Your resume

2)  Brief summary of your experience translating Chemical Engineering type documents

3)  Your rates for translation and editing (in USD).

I look forward to hearing from you.

Kind regards,

Hayley, Project Coordinator

Expert Translations, Anytown, USA

My response to e-mail No. 1:

Dear Hayley:

Are you sure it’s in Cyrillic rather than in Chinese characters?

I thought that’s what they were using in Russia.

Best regards,

Steve

E-mail No. 2 from Hayley:

Hello Steve,

Thank you for your prompt response. The information that we have received has stated Cyrillic. I will double check on this for you.

Kind regards,

Hayley,

Project Coordinator

My response to e-mail No. 2 from Hayley:

Dear Hayley:

I was obviously making fun of your e-mail, no need to double check anything.

But I don’t think that this line of work is suitable for you (since you don’t seem to know anything about languages).

Sorry, but I would definitely not want to work for you.

Best regards,

Steve

E-mail No. 3 from Hayley:

Hello Steve,

Thank you very much for your kind response. I did realise you sarcasm [sic] and responded likewise.

Based on the rude comments and unprofessional attitude, it seems it is in the best interest of both parties not to work together. Best of luck with your future endeavors.

Kind regards,

Hayley,

Project Coordinator,  Expert Translations, Anytown, USA

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

The question is, did Hayley indeed realize that I was making fun of her and was that why she offered to double check whether Russian is written in Cyrillic or with Chinese characters? Or was she really going to double check? If she knew that Russian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet, why would she feel the need to specify something like this as a significant fact in her initial e-mail? Wouldn’t she assume that people who translate from Russian are actually aware of this particular bit of information?

Based on my experience from dealing with translation agency coordinators over the last 27 years, I am not sure. I really can’t tell. What do you think?

I really don’t know because the ignorance of project coordinators who work for translation agencies these days is to me quite astounding. They must be hiring them really young, and not very smart. Some do seem to be quite intelligent, although not that many, but very few of them seem to know anything about languages.

For example, when I translate Japanese to English, they often ask me this:

“There is one word missing in your translation of the Japanese text after the formula on page 3.”

Without wanting to sound like Bill Clinton, I swear that the “one word missing” here is the verb “is” (“de aru” in Japanese). And since unlike in German, you can’t put the verb “is” at the end of a sentence in English, except perhaps when you are making a fine but crucial legal distinction, the word “is” is included in my translation before the formula on page 3, right after the subject.

I also had to answer many times the same question about “something missing at the end” in the case of a translation from German.

Another frequent question from translation agency project coordinators goes like this: “Why is the name of the person in the Czech divorce decree spelled “Novák” on line 3, “Novákovi” on line 5, and “Novákem” on line 17.

What is the correct spelling here?”

Well, dear project coordinator, that’s what they do in that particular language and many other languages with things called nouns and names.

How come you don’t know that, Ms. project coordinator? And since that is the case, how can you possibly coordinate anything that has anything to with foreign languages, a subject that you are so woefully ignorant about?

Personally, I think that you should be looking for a different kind job. You could make an excellent toll collector on Golden Gate Bridge, for example, if you happen to live near San Francisco. Toll collectors on Golden Gate Bridge don’t really need to know anything about foreign languages.

On second thought, there are probably a few things that a bridge toll collector needs to know to be fully qualified for the demanding job.

But if you are a project coordinator working for a translation agency, you don’t really need to know anything about anything.

If you want to make sure that a prospective translator is the real thing, all you have to do is send him a standard translation test that your agency sends to every prospective translator.

If the translation that comes back looks exactly like the translation thingie that your agency already has, it must be a good translator.

If it does not look exactly the same, it must be a bad translation and thus also a bad translator.

Which is basically all that a good translation agency coordinator needs to know.

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Most translators and would-be translators have no clue how to find new clients. The best evidence of this is the fact that they keep buying useless lists of translation agencies from peddlers of useless lists of translation agencies and then fire off hundreds or thousands of e-mails with a generic cover letter to these agencies.

Many of these translators are so dumb that they even include the same idiotic cover letter that the peddlers of useless lists of translation agencies also helpfully include in their offering for a mere 150 Euros or so.

Imagine how a translation agency coordinator or an owner of a small translation agency must feel about having to delete these e-mails, every day, day after day. Although I am not really an agency, I receive these e-mails as well, usually in duplicate because I am listed under two different names in several of those useless lists, and there is no way to get me out of those damn lists.

Obviously, most people would angrily delete this kind spam within a split second. And let’s face it, these e-mails are the very definition of spam, especially when you are stupid enough to even use the same idiotic cover letter that thousands of other people have been using.

So, there, I had to get it out of my system. I see that two more such e-mails appeared in my mail while I was writing these words.

More than two decades ago, I used to do basically the same thing, except that since this was in the pre-Internet era (which many of the people reading my blog don’t even remember), I was mailing my résumés to addresses of translation agencies listed mostly in Yellow Pages.

But then I realized, after 5 years of trying to make myself visible to agencies, that it might be a better idea to go after direct clients instead. That is what I have been doing since the early nineties, and that is what I would also recommend to translators who have acquired enough experience at this point and who have had it with the way translators are now being treated in the new, corporate translation agency model.

Although each of us needs to have a different strategy because we all have different strengths and weaknesses, the starting point will be the same for every translator: First, we have to figure out who our likely clients are depending on the type of translation that we want to specialize in.

If you have been translating for a few years, this should not be that difficult because this decision will depend mostly on two factors:

1. The type of work that you enjoy the most, and

2. The type of work that you have been receiving most of the time from translation agencies, because that is probably where the demand is.

More than 20 years ago, I realized that I really enjoy translation of patents and technical articles from Japanese, partly because it pays better than other types of translation – so that was going to be my specialization. A friend told me that I can buy a list of patent lawyers from the US government for about 50 dollars – so that was what I did (this was still in the pre-Internet era, there were no databases on Internet), and I started mailing my letters to patent law firms instead  of to translation agencies.

I must have mailed at least a couple of thousand letters since about 1990. I was mailing them, year after year, every time when the infamous feast or famine seesaw hit the famine point, which will happen a few times a year to every freelancer, no matter how long we have been in business.

I stopped doing these periodic mailing campaigns for good about 7 years ago. The postage rates have been steadily increasing so quickly that I really had no choice.

As I started to realize around the year 2000 that the Internet will be the most important way for me to market my services, I registered several domain names and I paid a freelance website designer to put together my business website, which can be found at http://www.PatentTranslators.com, http://www.JapaneseTranslators.com, http://www.Pattran.com, and a few other domains.

If you want to make it possible for potential customers to find you on the Internet, it is very important to find a good URL for your website.

Unfortunately, it is much more difficult for new translators to do so now than 14 years ago because just about all the good and short ones have been taken. But while it can still be done at this point, 14 from now it will probably be an impossibility if we are talking about .com sites, namely the ones that Google and other search engines go to first.

Out of curiosity, I went to Network Solution to find out how much would such a short, meaningful URL ending with the .com extension cost now (you can still buy it for example from Network Solutions or from hoarders of potentially good domains who now make a living in this manner), and the number they gave me was 38 thousand dollars. I don’t know whether this number is realistic, but the domains that I have now are definitely worth something, and they will be probably worth even more if I decide to retire in 14 years, if I play my cards well.

Once your professional website is up and running on a good domain name and indexed by major search engines, there is not that much that you still need to do about it, other than updating it once or twice a year, or submitting your URL and relevant key words through an SEO (search engine optimization) specialist to search engines, which is not very expensive.

In addition to having the right kind of URL, your website must be obviously well designed and relevant to whatever it is that clients who are looking for the kind of service that you are selling need.

Although so far I have not been advertising on Google AdSense or other marketing services due to the cost, my website keeps delivering new clients every year. Every year, the website generates between 10 to 40 percent of my revenues by finding new clients for my services.

While I saw no real results from my website during the first three years or so, from about 2004, the website started working really well for me – in the initial years, about 20 to 40 percent of my revenues would be generated every year from new clients. These days it is more like 10 to 20 percent.

So far this year, for example, four new clients found me in this manner and sent me work:

1. a US government agency on January 3

2. a CEO of a tech company in US on January 10

3. a large patent law firm in Canada on January 14

4. a small patent law firm in Europe on February 11.

In fact, most of the direct clients who send me work regularly at this points found out about my services by discovering my website during a search for a certain type of translation service several years ago.

Other translators may find a completely different approach to looking for direct clients, or use a multifaceted approach that is more suitable based on their location, the type of service that they are providing, and their personal preferences.

Also, there is no need to stop working for translation agencies who pay good rates and on time just because you work mostly for direct clients. I still work regularly for 2 specialized translation agencies, and once in a while for several other agencies who usually find out about my services from the ATA (American Translators Association) database of translators. That is also a good way to advertise one’s services, but only to translation agencies as the ATA is making no effort to make translators easily discoverable by direct clients.

When I see what is happening in “the translation industry” these days, I am so glad that I had the good sense to make the switch from working only for agencies to working mostly for direct clients.

I believe that as large translation agencies are insisting on paying lower and lower rates to translators, this will result in lower and lower quality of the translations that they are selling to their clients.

I also believe that the greed and the ruthlessness of the large translation agency business model creates new opportunities for translators who want to cut out the middleman and start working for direct clients who at some point are likely to start looking for a better service – if these translators are only able to make a connection with these clients.

Translators can continue buying lists containing thousands of generic translation agencies and mindlessly spamming them with incessant e-mails the way they have been doing it for at least a decade now.

Or they can start thinking about a long-term strategy that would actually work for them, the way my strategy has been working for me. It can be a very different strategy from what I have tried to outline in this post, or a similar one.

There are many choices that can be made – and the choice is theirs.

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Somebody from a patent law firm, probably 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?

There are people like that, 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.