Another Article in the ATA Chronicle for Translators with an IQ Below 70

 

I am talking about an article by Enas Ibrahim, who has been a project manager for a translation agency since 2008 and who is also a translator from Arabic, titled “11 Tips for Freelance Translators from a Project Manager”. It was published on pp. 12 – 13 in the May 2014 issue of the ATA (American Translators Association) Chronicle magazine.

Here are the 11 helpful tips for clueless translators, each of which is bolded in the article and then followed by a short explanatory paragraph for translators who may be particularly dense or mentally challenged.

1. It is absolutely OK to say “no” if you are uncomfortable with the subject matter of the document or the delivery date/time.

2. Read the work order every time you receive one.

3. Examine the source files as soon as you receive them.

4. Always use the files you received with the work order and not the files that you were sent to you with initial inquiry detailing the assignment.

5. Ask as many questions as you feel necessary.

6. Please check the work order to make sure you understand what you are expected to deliver, including the acceptable file format.

7. Please make sure that the invoice number is not a duplicate.

8. Do not forget to include your company name on the invoice.

9. Include the project manager’s name on the invoice.

10. Include your address on every invoice if you are asking to be paid by check.

11. Include all of your payment methods, if you have more than one, on the invoice and indicate which one you prefer.

The concluding paragraph reads:

“These are just some general guidelines, but other companies have other preferences. It is usually okay to check with you project manager if you have any doubts concerning anything related to an assignment.”

(Oh, so can we look forward to more general guidelines for important things that obtuse and slothful translators need to keep in mind from another project manager of another translation agency in the next issue of the ATA Chronicle)?

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Each of these helpful tips makes sense, and I am sure that some translators sometime forget to include on their invoice information that should be there.

For example, once I typed the wrong number for my bank account number on the invoice (somehow I managed to skip one digit) and instead of waiting 30 days to be paid, which is a very long time already, I had to wait an additional month before the money finally arrived.

Needless to say, I was cursing my own carelessness and stupidity for the whole additional four weeks.

As I was scanning the article – and most of the time I only scan articles in the ATA Chronicle because most of the time I can’t find much in it that would be worth a more careful reading – I was asking myself: Who is the target readership for this esteemed monthly magazine which bills itself as “The Voice of Interpreters and Translators”?

Probably not experienced translators who are generally smart enough to create an invoice without these helpful tips, because most people who are smart enough to tie their shoelaces on their own and brush their teeth without any instructions (Don’t forget to put toothpaste on your toothbrush!) will probably need no reassurance that it is OK to say no to a job that one is not qualified to do, or admonishments that one should read the work order, look at the files, include one’s address on the invoice, etc.

Things like that would be kind of obvious even to persons of average or slightly below-average intelligence, such as person who have an IQ of about 70 or even slightly less.

But evidently not to members of the American Translators Association who find similar articles offering advice to slightly retarded ATA Members in their Chronicle just about every month.

Although these 11 stern Admonishments (and why 11 when there are only Ten (10) Commandments in the Bible?) to wayward and mentally challenged translators do make sense, the one piece of advice in the article that should be taken with a big grain of salt is “Ask as many questions as you feel necessary”. I almost never ask any questions, even if I have them, because project managers usually don’t know much about anything and there is no need to make them even more nervous than they are already. Typically, they don’t even know for sure what is in the text for translation because it is usually in a language that they don’t understand.

So the article is clearly aimed at translators who are mildly retarded, which seems to be the target audience for the ATA Chronicle magazine.

I have noticed that some things have improved, from my perspective, at the ATA recently.

For example, as of last year, I think, translators can take the ATA’s own accreditation test while typing on a computer’s keyboard, although for the last 5 decades or so they had to write their translations by hand. Which is really not that bad considering that the Catholic church finally allowed the mass to be celebrated in other languages than Latin (which nobody could understand, often not even the person who was doing the speaking in Latin) for more than 15 centuries.

The ATA is clearly more open to change than the Catholic church has been so far!

Also, the search function on the ATA database enabling potential clients to look for suitable translators has been redesigned and greatly simplified so that it is now accessible even to potential clients who may not be project managers of translation agencies, including possibly also direct clients.

But articles like this, articles that talk down to translators as if they were slightly retarded and obstinate children, make my blood boil.

Dear ATA, we translators are typically not total morons. Some of us are so smart that we even know two or more languages. Sometime we may forget to put something on our invoice, but cases like that can be easily remedied with a short e-mail. (Or would that be too much to ask from a project manager)?

If the ATA Chronicle really wants to be The Voice of Interpreters and Translators, instead of publishing articles that seem to be aimed at people who probably can’t figure out how to tie their own shoelaces in the morning, it could try writing about things that interpreters and translators with an IQ above 70 might be also interested in reading.