Through the Eyes of Mad Patent Translator: Third IAPTI Conference in Bordeaux, France, September 3rd ~ 7th, 2015

 
I’ve often been told that I need to get out more. In the 28 years that I’ve been an independent technical translator, I’ve been to three translators’ conferences: in 1991 it was the Second IJET Conference in San Francisco and in 1997 the 38th ATA Conference, also in San Francisco. For those who don’t know, IJET stands for International Japanese-English Translation Conference, and ATA stands for American Translators Association.

Truth be told, I participated in those two conferences mostly because back then I lived in San Francisco, or 45 minutes away at the time of the ATA conference. This time around, I decided to give a presentation at the Third IAPTI Conference, held September 3-7 in Bordeaux, France.

What are the chances that your airplane will be diverted to a different airport, the guy sitting next to you will barf on you and once you arrive to your destination after a day’s delay, your luggage will be lost, all during the same trip? For most people, probably only slightly higher than winning a lottery. But if you are me, the chances are much better as described in my previous post.

IAPTI stands for International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters. It’s a young association, established on September 30, 2009 (St. Jerome’s day), in Buenos Aires, Argentina, “… as a vehicle for promoting ethical practices in translation and interpretation and providing a forum for discussing problems typical of the globalized world, such as crowdsourcing, outsourcing, bad rates and other abuse” (Wikipedia). The First IAPTI Conference was held in 2013 in London, England and the Second IAPTI Conference in Greece, Athens last year.

Typical of a young association, the conference attendees were also young, much younger than me. I saw perhaps only two other people who might have been in my age group (I am 63). The rest of the attendees were a much younger crowd. I like being around young people as one of my goals in life is to never really grow up. Translators came to Bordeaux from every continent except Antarctica: from South and North America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia.

I Missed Some Presentations because I Arrived Late

Because I arrived one day late, I unfortunately missed some of the presentations that I wanted to see, and my own presentation had to be moved to the next day (thank you so much, Marta Stelmaszak, for graciously agreeing to swap your time slot for mine). It was also not easy for me to concentrate on the presentations I did attend because there were so many people there in the lobby of the Mercure Chateau Chartrons Hotel that I wanted to talk to, some of whom I have been talking to regularly on Facebook and through e-mail for several years although we never met in person up until the conference in Bordeaux, and there were some who I met for the first time at the conference.

Arriving late one day made me miss Kevin Lossner’s presentation on how to use new technology to increase productivity, which could not have been about post-processing of machine translation detritus, which is what the so-called translation industry often means by the term “language technology”. I missed Sameh Ragab’s session on how to be prepared for computer disasters and data loss. My own system is based on simply having several completely interchangeable workstations in two different rooms and saving all data on storage devices, but maybe I could have learned a few new tricks.

I also missed Tony Rosado’s talk about how to set one’s fees. I don’t know how I could have done that – I must have been so engrossed in passionate discussions with other translators in the lobby of the hotel that I forgot about the time.

But I was able to listen to several other very interesting presentations, such as the entertaining talk by Joao Roque Dias titled “Welcome to scammers’ world: Where nothing is what it seems”. I now have a much better picture in my mind of how the scams involving translators work.

Another interesting presentation, by Lukasz Gos, was titled “Contracts with agencies – outsourcing translation or outsourcing risk?” and the presentation by Felicia Negru (from European Union’s Directorate General for Translation) about bidding on “Contracts for Translation Services and EU Institutions” was also very interesting, although having heard the presentation, I decided to stick to bidding on patents for patent law firms and not to bid on EU contracts (too much red tape for my taste).

Two Japanese Translators Gave a Presentation at IAPTI III in Bordeaux

Because I mostly translate Japanese, for me the most interesting talk was given by Warren Smith, a fellow Japanese translator who called his presentation “Multimillion-dollar freelancing: Efficiency engineering in translation”. Since I was able to talk to Warren prior to his session in the hotel lobby, I know that the presentation that he gave at the Third IAPTI Conference was only a small part of a much bigger presentation that he had given at an IJET Conferences for Japanese translators. He had to tailor his presentation in Bordeaux to make it suitable for a different audience. I also understand Warren submitted a proposal to give this presentation at the ATA Conference to be held in November in Miami and that his proposal was turned down.

I would really like to know why it was turned down, because although his method is not suitable for my purposes, it is a very ingenious one that many translators may want to duplicate.

Warren’s method is geared toward doubling or tripling the amount of words that most experienced translators can generally produce per day, which tends to be around three thousand words (in my case). I have days when I can translate up to about five thousand words, but only when I am under the gun, and I am usually exhausted the next day.

Warren dictates his translation using specialized software and hardware, while walking around, or sitting or lying down in a specially constructed chair that looks more like a hammock on wheels than a chair. He uses a special mouse and a number of other special gizmos to speed up the translating process.

My Own Presentation Was Pretty Long, But Hopefully Not Too Boring

I called my own presentation “Threats, challenges and opportunities for translators in the modern version of corporatized translation industry”.

After an introduction, I started talking about how different the translation industry was when I was starting out as an independent translator in the mid 1980s in San Francisco. It was a very different world for translators back then, the Internet did not really exist yet and there were no big translation agencies. Most agencies were very small, and unlike with mega-agencies today, they were usually run by people who themselves were translators and who, unlike the brokers of today, understood foreign languages and potential problems hiding in most translations. They also generally paid translators well because their business strategy depended on finding the best translators and making sure that they would continue working for their translation agency.

After that, I briefly talked about Donald Phillipi, a well known Japanese translator and early pioneer of technical translation from Japanese whom I met in San Francisco in 1986 and whose example I later tried to follow by becoming an independent translator myself.

The Incredible Changes in So-Called Translation Industry Are Evident from “Non-Disclosure Agreements”

After that, I tried to illustrate the incredible changes in the so-called translation industry by citing examples of recent clauses from so-called Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) of some translation agencies, which nowadays can run to seven thousand words and can include clauses such as these:

1. A clause forcing the translator to acknowledge that no payment will be provided for a translation unless the translation agency deems in its wisdom the translation to be “satisfactory”, whatever that may mean.

2. A clause forcing transfer of materials subject to copyright protection from the translator to the translation agency, i.e. to the broker, rather than to the actual client who pays for the translation.

3. A clause stipulating that the translator, who is on paper an independent contractor, must agree not to discuss any negotiated compensation received from a translation agency with anybody else, including other translators, lest she be in breach of contract.

4. A clause that says that a translation agency has the right to conduct “unannounced audits” of translator’s premises (i.e. illegal raids on a private house), perhaps to make sure that the translator is not spending too much time with her family, or on Facebook, or eating the wrong kind of food.

5. Or even a clause that stipulates that the translator must provide remote access to her computer so that the translation agency could spy on her, ostensible to check whether “security software has been installed correctly” on the translator’s computer. Such spying capability would obviously be very useful if the translation agency wants to know who the translator’s other clients are, how much they pay, what kind of projects she works on, etc. Moreover, all other NDAs with all the translator’s other customers would be instantly invalidated if a translator agrees to such a clause because the agency insisting on such a clause could be also be privy to confidential information of the translator’s other clients, both direct clients and translation agencies.

When one translator in the audience asked me whether such clauses and conditions would be even legal in most countries, my answer was that to my knowledge there is only one country where these clauses would be perfectly legal: North Korea.

My Own Strategy Has Been to Let the Internet Work for Me Instead of Against Me Since the Year 2000

Toward the end of my speech I talked about my own strategy for staying in business and maximizing income, which is a little different from Warren Smith’s strategy for maximizing output as an independent translator. Since the early 90s, my own strategy has been based on becoming less and less dependent on translation agencies and working mostly for direct clients (although I still work regularly for a few translation agencies).

Up until about ten years ago, I was finding new clients mostly by sending direct mail to prospective leads at patent law firms. I must have sent thousands of letters in this manner to patent lawyers, starting with California and then basically broadening my mailing campaigns and applying them to every state in the United States, whenever I had free time to do so.

That was how I found my first direct clients in the 90s, and some of them are still sending me patents to translate to this day. Since the year 2000, I switched to a different strategy by making sure that prospective clients who need patents translated into English would be able to find out about my services through the Internet and Google.

The first step to that end was securing a suitable Internet URL for my business. I didn’t even know how to do something like that 15 years ago, but back in the year 2000, my Internet Service Provider was a tiny company in Silicon Valley that was run by two young guys. So I called one of them, his name was Tracy and he sounded like a teenager, and he told me how to secure several suitable domain names for my business, in particular my main domain name, http://www.patenttranslators.com. I then asked a neighbor, who was a young website designer living just across the street, to create a business website to my specifications.

Nothing really happened for the first few years with my website, but from about the year 2003, Google started noticing my service and I started receiving offers to quote on patent translation projects from various sources, mostly patent law firms. I started tracking how much I made only from these new customers every year during the first ten years (it was a pretty nice bundle but I am not going to tell you how much it was here – you should have gone to the Bordeaux Conference).

This is how I am dealing with the threat posed by mega translation agencies to what used to be a very enjoyable and interesting profession and a fairly comfortable lifestyle before the greed and ruthlessness of some of these translation agencies changed the conditions under which many translators are living now.

Instead of allowing other people to use the Internet against me, which would be happening for instance if I had to bid against many other translators on projects from anonymous cheapskate clients on “marketplaces for translators”, I let the Internet, and in particular Google and other search engines, bring prospective clients directly to my website.

This is just one of several methods that translators can use to find new clients, especially direct clients. It may not work for everybody, but since it has been and still is working for me, it just could work for you too.

The alternative may be to simply learn how to live under the miserable conditions that have been created for translators mostly by mega-agencies in the so-called translation industry.

P.S. I would like to thank Danielle Gehrmann from Linguawise in Australia for allowing me to use her picture of my presentation in Bordeaux and to Louis Ortiz Lopez for allowing me to use his video covering the two days of the conference and gala dinner.