Do You Have a Secondary Career Path as a Plan B (Just in Case?)

Translation blogs these days are chock-full of posts about how important it is for translators to specialize in a highly valued translation niche.

And I agree with these blog posts. For the most part.

One way to escape the quagmire, defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “a soft wet area of low-lying land that sinks underfoot”, of what is now called the “translation industry”, as opposed to translation as a profession, is to become an established expert in a lucrative niche and thus be able to simply ignore offers of work from translation agencies in what I call translation industry 2.0, exemplified by so many venal “LSPs” such as those that have been lovingly nicknamed by translators as Crapita, thepigturd, the Lying Bridge”, etc.

There are still some translation agencies that pay decent rates, quickly and without suffocating translators with demeaning and often illegal “Confidentiality Agreements”, because they are run by people who really appreciate the translators who do the hard work for them, and do it well.

But it is an uphill struggle for these agencies as they have to compete with the numerous Crapitas and thepigturds of this world.

Another advantage of specializing in a relatively narrow field is that when you are a specialist and really know your stuff, you are in a much better position to identify and target direct customers, who are generally able and willing to pay much better fees than even the most decent translation agencies that have (so far) managed to survive the dog-eat-dog reality of translation industry 2.0.

Join us, magnificent elite translators, and become a recognized professional in a specialized field. Be like us – we’ll tell you how to do it (usually in a paid-seminar).

Do it quickly or you will have to accept low rates and toxic conditions of the so-called translation industry. That is what some bloggers are saying, many of whom know so much about so little, as I wrote in this post three years ago.

And I have to agree with them again … for the most part.

This is in fact what I have been trying to do in my field of patent translation (without the paid seminar part) for most of the last three decades. Although I did not use to think about it in these terms, because for a long time I assumed that most translators were doing more or less the same thing, namely trying to specialize and target direct clients … which, unfortunately, is not really true, as only some translators bother to do that.

On the other hand, as every translator has different strengths and weaknesses, “moving upmarket in a specialized niche” as the slogan goes cannot possibly be a panacea in any case for each and every one of us.

Clearly, not everybody can be a member of a super-smart and exceptional elite, since the very concept of “elite” is based on the premise that only a few chosen ones among us can reach the exalted position on the top of the pyramid of translation rates.

Although I agree to a certain extent with the strategy that places so much emphasis on specialization, I also believe that the old proverb about not putting all of one’s eggs into one basket is as true today as it was centuries ago.

Even as we specialize in relatively lucrative, but usually by definition relatively narrow fields, at the same time we have to keep our eyes open and our ears fine-tuned to other options – because we never know when the bottom is going to fall out from our precious niche market.

My own work experience over the last three adventure-filled decades in the la-la land of “translation business” proves, at least to me, that a narrow focus on a lucrative specialization may not be the best policy.

For a long time I thought I had such a brilliant idea when I decided in my early twenties to learn Japanese, which I eventually did, to the extent possible for a foreigner.

Japanese has a reputation for being one of the languages that are so maddeningly difficult to learn that St. Francis Xavier, a missionary who was tasked with introducing Christianity to Japan, famously declared in the mid 16th century that Japanese was invented by the Devil to prevent the spread of Christianity in Japan (although at first he actually thought it would be an easy language to learn, probably because the phonetic structure of the melodic language is quite simple, at least compared to Chinese.)

He might have had a point – to this day, there are not many Christians in Japan. Incidentally, St. Francis Xavier also said this about the Japanese opinion of foreigners:

“They are very polite to each other, but not to foreigners, whom they utterly despise” (the Life and Letters of  St. Francis Xavier). This xenophobic attitude did change over the centuries to some extent – although the Japanese still for the most part utterly despise foreigners, especially those who want to settle in Japan, they are usually outwardly polite to foreigners now, often exceedingly so.

But I should probably get back to the main topic of my post today before I drown in peripatetic and completely unfounded speculation about Japanese, Chinese and other languages or cultures.

Inspired by the example of another Japanese technical translator I met in San Francisco, in the 1980s I started translating technical Japanese, mostly Japanese patents, and I was able to make a pretty good living in this way for about 25 years.

I was able to support a family of four, including my wife and two children, on a single income of a freelance translator for more than two decades.

But about five years ago, for a reason I don’t quite understand, at least not completely, I started receiving fewer and fewer Japanese patents for translation, until they all but disappeared. For example, this month so far I have only received two requests for Japanese patent translations (but no orders so far), and last month I only translated one Japanese patent.

Fortunately for me, although translating is basically the only thing that I am moderately good at and my specialization is relatively narrow, not all of my eggs were placed in one basket when the bottom fell out of it.

As the demand for Japanese patents decreased, it was suddenly replaced by a high demand for Chinese and Korean patents, Chinese patents in particular, about five years ago.

At this point in my life, I am a little too old to start learning Chinese or Korean. But since I know several excellent Chinese translators, I became a translation agency, handling a lot of Chinese translations through translators specializing in Chinese patents, in addition to my own translation. Fortunately for me, instead of relying only on Japanese patents, I was able to also translate German, French and Russian patents and started taking on projects involving translations from English into these languages, mostly involving patents again.

Although I think of myself as a translator rather than an intermediary, some months I made more money as an agency than as a translator.

The Chinese market seems to have cooled off a bit compared to the situation about five years ago, probably because low-cost competition in mainland China drove the rates so low that my fees, that I need to split with the actual translators, were no longer competitive enough.

I still mostly translate patents, but instead of translating them from Japanese to English, which is something that I do myself, I now also translate them from and into other languages, sometimes by myself, sometimes through other translators.

And now that I am a small translation agency, I translate not only patents, but basically any materials in fields that I think that I can handle well, while I stay away from fields that I don’t think I can handle well, such as financial translation, literary translation, or even some types of patents, such as complicated biochemistry patents …

As Clint Eastwood put it in his role as Dirty Harry, “A man’s got to know his limitations”.

For the last two or three years, I have been translating German patents, as the demand for Japanese patents was replaced by a strong demand for German patents. I do most of the work myself, although at times I find myself in the role of a translation agency intermediary.

But I believe I can do a much better job as a proofreader of patent translations done by other translators than a typical project manager working for a typical translation agency.

It is quite possible that on the seesaw of languages in high demand, and translation of foreign languages is the only thing that I am moderately good at, another language will replace German on top in a few years again.

But in any case, as I am getting ready to finally retire, or at least work much less than I have been for the last three decades, I don’t really care that much anymore what might happen in a few years.

Now that the kids are out of the house and on their own, I don’t need to make that much money anyway. It’s nice to be what is called ‘an empty-nester’ in this country.

But before this empty-nester slows down his somewhat frantic pace when it comes to translating patents basically every day, mostly from German instead of from Japanese as used to be the case, he will still try to make as much money in his secondary career path, which does not have much to do with Japanese, at least not at this point.

Oh, and before I forget, I should probably mention that this year, I will almost certainly make in my secondary career that does not have much to do with the Japanese language, namely translation of German patents, at least as much money as I used to make before the market fell out of the red hot Japanese patent market, probably even a little bit more.