How CATs, MT and Chindia Created a New Bermuda Triangle for Translators

The Bermuda Triangle is an imaginary region near Florida, Bermuda and Cuba in the Western part of Atlantic Ocean where hundreds or even thousands of ships and airplanes are alleged to have disappeared under mysterious circumstances and for unexplained reasons.

The term Bermuda Triangle has been popularized in many books and movies. Of interest to translators is that Charles Berlitz, the creator of a popular series of language courses, believed that the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle is somehow connected to the disappeared continent of Atlantis which is using its “crystal energies” to sink ships and crash planes.

I don’t have any theories about the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle. But while I think that the reasons why rates paid to translators by the so called translation industry have remained stubbornly low over the last decade or so are not really a mystery, I liken them to the Bermuda Triangle in this post.

The triangle that is sucking in, sinking and keeping at the bottom of the bottomless ocean rates paid to translators consists of three equilateral parts: CATs, MT and Chindia. Many other reasons may be easily found as well, of course, such as the never-ending “global recession”, the predatory nature of the greed-driven, corporate translation business model, but I see the three reasons identified above as particularly poignant.

1. CATs – A Familiar Story of Broken Promises to Translators

CATs (computer-assisted translation tools) have been initially sold to translators as nifty tools that will dramatically increase their productivity and thus also their income with claims like these:

“I just completed a 34,501 word project in 10 hours thanks to AutoSuggest, Context Match and the other nifty time-saving features within SDL Trados Studio 2009 SP1. That’s without having much of anything in the pre-existing TM!”

I don’t use any CATs, partly because I believe that CATs would disrupt and slow down my thinking process, kill my creativity and that there is not enough repetition anyway in the types of patents that I translate from several languages, and partly because to those of us who deal mostly with PDF files, often of poor quality, the requirement to convert the files first renders a CAT very time-consuming and counterproductive.

Incidentally, CAT believers will find it difficult to accept this, but most translators in fact do not use CATs, some for reasons similar to mine, and many because some of these wonderful tools are so damn expensive and require frequent pricy upgrades. Some translation agencies require translators to use Trados, but that does not mean that all translators use Trados, it just means that only certain types of translators use it, namely those who are willing to accept work from agencies requiring the use of this particular CAT.

What has been the real result of the use of CATs by translators so far? When I read comments of translators on social media and blogs, it is clear to me that while some translators seem to love these computer tools, most admit that they have been used by translation agencies to lower rates by refusing to pay translators for “matches”, “fuzzy matches” and “repeated words”.

Instead of a tool designed to increase translators’ productivity and income, tools like Trados are used by agencies as a convenient blunt tool to hammer down translators and force them to work for miserably low rates.

2. Machine Translation Is Also Used as an Effective Scarecrow Tactic for Controlling Translators’ Rates

No matter how low your rates are, machine translation (MT) is even cheaper because it is generally free, as well as ubiquitous. Although MT is unusable for most purposes in my line of work (patent translation), the world is full of penny-wise and pound-foolish idiots who use it to save money. If you travel, for example, you will know that restaurant and hotel owners use it to advertise their esteemed establishment on the Internet in breathtakingly and sometime hilariously stupid MT gibberish. Just a few days ago I read in Washington Post that the geniuses in US government who designed Obamacare used MT to translate instructions for prospective enrollees into Spanish.

Some translation agencies came up with a novel although not very ingenious approach to keeping translation cost down (and their own profits up) by first running a text through an MT program and then asking a translator to “edit” the garbage at a low rate before selling it to an unsuspecting client as a real translation.

The real utility of MT is that it can be used to “translate” materials that are unlikely to be translated by humans due to the cost, such as my blog, and give a reader some idea about materials that may need to be translated by humans, but that is not the only way MT is used these days.

The scarecrow effect of free machine translation is thus another factor depressing translation rates, although in my opinion, the widespread use of MT is much more likely to result in more work rather than less work for human translators, at least in my field (patent translation), because MT identifies materials that would probably never be discovered without it.

3. Chindia on My Mind

I keep receiving e-mails from China and India asking me to quote my rates for translating Japanese, German, Chinese and Korean patents. For some reason, the people who keep sending me these e-mails usually sound bossy, almost angry, maybe because they think that this will scare translators into quoting a really low rate.

Although I ignore them, there must be translators, even in developed countries, who are desperate enough to work for outfits in third world countries who will pay a pittance to translators living in countries with a high cost of living and high taxes.

As I wrote in this post, Chindia is thus another factor that is effectively pushing down rates paid to translators.

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 So what does this all mean? Does it mean that all translators have to adjust their rates in the downward direction?

I don’t think so. I think that the real meaning of the development outlined in this post is that the famously fragmented translation business will become even more fragmented and further divided into more and more very different segments.

On the low quality side of the range of translation services will be the segment which is based on cheap labor, namely the segment dominated by voracious translation agencies working with compliant translators who meekly accept obligatory discounts for CATs on top of very low rates, and who are even desperate enough to work for the emerging players in Chindia.

In this segment, the rates will keep going down because no matter how low the rates in this segment of so called translation business are at this point, as new people will be entering the market, both as translation agencies and as new, inexperienced and often unqualified translators, the only way to win in this kind environment, both for the translation agencies and the translators, will be to offer to do the work for even less in the future.

But in another important segment of the translation business, highly specialized translations will continue to be provided mostly by small, specialized agencies with experience in a given field, and by highly educated, highly experienced and specialized individual translators who work mostly or only for direct clients.

I believe that staying away from the dangers of the Bermuda Triangle of the modern translation business model, avoiding it altogether and trying to find your own way to run a translation business as a business that does not accept the insidious rules designed to keep translators at the bottom of the profit pyramid is the only viable alternative that makes it possible for translators to live a normal life and even to thrive in the challenging and rapidly changing environment.