Please Don’t Shoot The Translator, She Is Doing Her Best

 

“Please don’t shoot the piano player, he is doing his best” was a sign that was frequently encountered in western saloons and later made famous by Oscar Wilde when he saw the sign somewhere on a saloon in Colorado in the late 19th century.

This is how people were expressing their displeasure with piano players back then, and maybe that was why piano players were eventually replaced by music-playing machines. People will generally not shoot at machines, not even when they are playing pretty awful honky-tonk music, and not even in the Wild West, because people are much more fun to shoot at.

Shooting the translator, figuratively speaking, has been a popular sport in the “translation industry” for quite some time now. If something goes wrong with a translation, or even if nothing is wrong with it but the client does not like it for one reason or another, it’s always the translator’s and nobody else’s fault.

The fact is that a translation, and thus also a translator, even a really good one, can be shot down for a number of reasons that may or may not be related to the quality of the translation. This danger is inherent in the method that generic translation agencies who specialize in every subject known to man, (which would be a great majority of them), use to “ensure” what in agency lingo is called QC (quality control).

Because most of the time the people handling translation projectg at translation agencies cannot even read the documents in foreign languages that they are assigning to translators who may not be very well known to them, they often use a proofreader who in theory, or at least according to what the agencies are advertising on their websites, is an equally qualified translator.

I already blogged about the unreliability of this method, also referred to as “The Four-Eyes Principle”, in this post.

In practice, however, the second translator is often not much of a translator because payment for proofreading of this kind is usually based on a low hourly fee (and the number of hours allotted for proofreading is fixed ahead of time), or no more than 3 cents per word, which means that the “second translator” cannot afford to waste a lot of time on the proofreading job.

Due mostly to the low rates, I have not accepted a proofreading job of this kind in something like a quarter century, although I used to do that as a beginner if there was nothing else to do.

Translation agencies like to boast that their method ensures a high quality of translations, but nothing could be further from the truth. Knowing who the best translators are in a given field and paying them good rates and on time is the best method to ensure good quality, but this method is probably used by relatively few agencies. Most of them try to spend as little as possible on translators and proofreaders because they can then spend more money on much, much more important things such as online advertising, money for sales people, owner’s salary, etc.

So if there really is a problem with a translation, an inexperienced proofer (“2nd translator”) may or may not even notice what the problem is, and when the client finally notices that something is wrong with the translation – it will be obviously the translator’s fault.

It is the translation agency’s coordinator who hired the wrong translator for the job, for example because the project manager (PM) assigned a highly technical translation to a translator who mostly translates non-technical texts and who really needed money to pay the bills that month. But if a client complains that the translation makes no sense, everything will be blamed on the translator – the PM, who may not even be able to read the original document, let alone understand the technical concepts involved, is completely blameless.

The translator will simply not be paid for her work, which to me is the equivalent of being shot on the spot. Because these situations occur frequently, some translation agencies even put in their contracts a clause stipulating that the translator will be paid only if the agency finds in its infinite wisdom that the translation was of good quality, and some translators do sign such a contract, ensuring that they will not be paid if somebody does not like their translation.

However, translators can be also shot on the spot when a very good translation is proofread by a dishonest proofreader who happens to be a translator who at the moment does not have enough work.

It’s very easy for a proofreader to spill a lot of red ink on a good translation in order to pronounce the first translator incompetent. The temptation is always there because if you do that, the chances are that the translation agency will start sending new translations to you instead, especially since the PM is in no position to evaluate independently whether the changes recommended by the proofreader are warranted as she does not understand the source document and/or the field in question.

A very good translation, and thus also the translator, can be also shot on the spot when it is reviewed by an ambitious and somewhat vicious bilingual specialist who knows the company’s preferred terms for words used in the translation because he works at the end client’s company.

The translator is supposed to know all the preferred terms in advance without being told by the client what the company’s preferences are. If she does not know that, it is her fault and thus deserves to be shot on the spot.

Some translation agencies understand that every translation involves a relatively long learning process during which every translator, who always starts from zero with a new client, gets better and better with every new job, but many don’t even understand this simple fact.

A good translation agency will try to mediate between the client in order to let the translator simply replace the terms that the client does not like by terms preferred by the client. But many will instead use the old method that was so popular in the saloons of the Wild West when somebody did not like the piano player’s music – they will shoot the translator who may not be paid for many days of hard work because “she used the wrong terms” (i.e. she was not a perfect mind reader).

The poor translator will be simply shot the way a poor piano player was shot by drunk cowboys in the Wild West if he was playing the wrong tune as far as they were concerned.

It is unlikely that the translator will complain in such a situation. And if she does, for example in a discussion online, all you have to do is call the translation unsatisfactory, poor, shoddy, pedestrian, whatever comes to mind, and the translator incompetent and shoot her down a second time.

Works like magic, every time.