Is It Possible To Predict Future Trends in the Translation Business?

One reason why the movie “Three Days of the Condor” became something of a cult classic is that it predicted the invasion of Iraq in 1975, 28 years before this horrible war in fact happened. The film tells the story of a CIA analyst (played by Robert Redford) who reads books, all kinds of really strange books, and then feeds plots from these books into a computer to look for information about future conflicts that may be about to happen anywhere in the world. (Incidentally, isn’t it interesting how the description of the job of a freelance assassin, who is played in the film by Max von Sydow, could be easily applied to the job of a freelance translator? (mutatis mutandis, of course).

As the movie shows, trying to predict the future can be a dangerous thing. But not to try to do that would be probably even more dangerous. Could somebody have predicted for instance the influence that Internet would eventually have on the economy in general and on the job market in particular 25 years ago? I think so. Some people who did just that created brand new businesses that are thriving today (for example Google and Netflix). And many companies that could see only the present went out of business (for example Blockbuster and Borders).

I don’t have a crystal ball and I can’t see the future any more than anybody else can. But because I have been in the freelance translation business for close to 25 years now, I can try to propose some ideas on the future of technical translation on this blog.

I think I can “predict”, for example, which languages will be very much in demand in the field of technical translation to English. Although only a few years ago, I was translating almost exclusively Japanese patents to English, I am now translating at least as many German patents every month as Japanese patents. In other words, if I did not know German, I would have a lot of free time on my hands, which would not be that bad, but I would probably not have enough money to pay my bills, which would be really bad.

I think that technical German will continue to be very much in demand in the future. Although the demand for technical translations from Japanese is not as strong as it has been a few years ago, I don’t think that a relatively strong demand for translation from Japanese will disappear any time soon. For one thing, while it is possible to become really fluent in a European language such as German in about 3 to 5 years, you should plan on studying the language for at least twice as long if your first language is English and your chosen language is Japanese.

I also see a very strong demand for technical translation from Chinese and Korean. While I know a few translators from Chinese who are native English speakers because along with Japanese, this is a language that the English speaking world has been interested in for many years, there are very few Korean translators out there whose first language is English. I think that the strong demand for competent technical translators from Korean to English that I see now will continue for a long time.

I could also try to speculate about other languages and other translation fields, but it would be pure speculation and conjecture. All I really know is technical translation because that is what I am doing. But I wonder, was financial translation affected by the crisis on Wall Street, which grew into a worldwide crisis, and if it was affected, in what way? And what will be the effect of the Occupy movements on financial translation? Now that the whole world seems to hate the banksters – and for good reason, they did steal our money to pay themselves record bonuses and now it’s back to business for them as usual – will the bankers now need more or fewer translations?

I think I predicted correctly 36 years ago when I changed the language combination that I was studying from Latin-French to Japanese-English that it would be easier to make a living with my new combination of languages. That was not a very difficult guess to make, although obviously, I had no idea back then that one day, I would be translating patents for a living.

While many people are predicting now that patent translators will become extinct very soon because patents can be translated with machine translation, the people who make these prediction don’t really know anything about technical translation.

As just about anything that is on Internet becomes accessible on tablets and cell phones, more patents will be translated with machine translation. In fact, I think that machine translation of patents will become a routine for paralegals, patent agents and patent lawyers. But this routine will only weed out patents that do not really warrant a real translation that can be obtained only from a human translator.

My prediction is that the net result of instant availability of Internet on current and future portable devices, coupled with instant availability of machine translation, will be an increased demand for translation of patents by experienced human translators who charge a lot of money for what they do.

And why is that most people seem to be saying the opposite of what I am saying?

Well, I don’t know why. Probably because these people don’t really know much about translation. But I do know that they are wrong. As Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” And the future is not unknowable. Only really hard to predict. And usually, most people who are trying to do just that are completely wrong.