Industrialization of Translation and What Can a Translator Do About It

As I keep liquidating and recycling old documents, mostly invoices and correspondence with clients and translation agencies (I am printing on the other side of the documents to save a few trees), I found a letter I received in 2008 from a small translation agency that kept me busy at that time for a few years.

The letter was announcing the sale of this tiny agency to a much bigger translation agency located in a different city. The small agency was run by a husband and a wife team – a common occurrence for decades before translation, something that used to be understood to mean an occupation or a small business, became what is now called the translation industry.

This is how the letter begins:

“As you may recall, in January 2007 we conveyed to you the news that we were actively pursuing the sale of [our translation agency] with the eventual goal of retirement. We have arrived at the successful completion of our efforts, and with mixed feelings we announce that our last day as owners of this company is March 20, 2007”.

I saw that in one of the invoices I sent them on September 3^rd, and which they paid on September 20^th, I charged them $1,971.36 for 8,214 words for a translation of medical device test results from Japanese to English at 24 cents per word.

It was a rush translation and back in 2007, better agencies still paid freelance translators for rush work the same as employers used to have to pay by law to employees in the United States for work on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, which is to say time and a half of the usual rate.

I did not know it then, but I do know now that the year 2007 or 2008 was the beginning of the demise of an era when many translation agencies were still very civilized businesses, an era when small and tiny translation agencies would team up with translators they considered top in their respective niches and the translators would then stay with them for decades because they were paid well and treated like professionals by people who understood the profession and valued their work.

So for me personally, 2007 marked the beginning of the end of the civilized era and the beginning of the new era of “translation industry” – a term that I usually put in quotation marks, because I still see translation as a profession rather than an industry that is based on buying and selling.

Although I probably should see it is an industry.

When everything is an industry, including war, religion, music, and art, it’s only logical that intellectual activities, including translation, represent just another industry, and the only purpose of all of these industries is to maximize the profit for the people on the top of the pyramid, the people who are rightfully called owners because they more or less own the people working for them and are doing the dirty work called translation in various layers of the industry.

Since the beginning of the era of industrialization of translation, which in my case started with the letter excerpted above, I lost pretty much all the decent translation agencies that used to keep me busy for many years in the pre-industrialized phase.

It took me a while to realize it, but I now understand that most of these agencies really did not have much choice but to adopt the cutthroat techniques of the translation industry, lowering rates paid to translators as much as possible to remain competitive in the new industrialized era. This was and still is a key ingredient of the business strategy in the “translation industry”.

Which meant that the agencies of the now bygone civilized era eventually either had to replace their most experienced translators by newbies in countries like China or India, or go bankrupt … or retire.

Fortunately for me, I have been working mostly for direct clients for many years, and it took a few more years before some of my direct clients started imitating what was going on in the “translation industry”, but eventually I lost quite a few of them to greener pastures of cheaper labor as well.

Capital always follows cheaper labor, and since we translators are basically seen as mere laborers, there is not much we can do about it, is there?

Well, I believe that there is something that mere translators can do about it. Although we have to compete with the new form of industrialized translation industry, we don’t really have to work for it at all if we are able to devise a strategy that works well for our businesses – using business models that are completely independent of the translation industry.

The strategy that has been and still is working for me personally can be best described as a three-pronged strategy that is based on the following principles.

1. To save myself a lot of headaches and not to be forced to work for peanuts, I completely stopped working for large corporate translation agencies about a decade ago. It was really a no-brainer: the big agencies now pay such low rates that it really made no sense for me to continue working for them.

I still work for a few small translation agencies, but generally only on small projects, and at higher rates than what large corporate agencies would generally want to pay me.

2. Because the Japanese patent translation market was very severely affected by outsourcing translations to China, I switched to translating mostly German patents.

Although Japanese is very different from Chinese, unlike translators in western countries or the United States, translators in China can read Japanese characters without any problem and they are now translating Japanese patents into English, which was what I used to do for more than 20 years. There must be thousands of people like that who can create usable translations with the help of machine translation programs.

These translations from translators in China probably contain many mistakes if the Chinese translators don’t really understand Japanese as well as they should, which is almost certainly the case, while their English is limited too. But they are cheap and that is basically the only thing that matters to the translation industry, because cheap translations can be bought at a low price and then sold for a high profit margin.

Fortunately for me, German is quite a complicated language and since it is not widely spoken or understood in countries with an abundance of cheap labor, the rates for German patent translations have not been ruined, at least not yet, by competition from such countries.

3. Because my ancient website still works quite well and is pretty high up in search engine rankings for key words specific to my type of work, namely patent translations, every now and then I land a few direct clients who still pay much better rates than translation agencies, and these new direct clients sometime stay with me for quite a few years, although some of them eventually also defect to greener (read cheaper) pastures.

I believe the third prong of my business strategy, a website designed for a very narrow translation niche so that it could be found by search engines, is crucially important for every translator who wants to become independent of the translation industry.

So after three or four years of steadily falling income, I am happy to say that this year has been very good for me again.

I think that my experience proves an old truth, namely that if you can deliver a product at a much higher quality level than what your cheap competition is offering, you don’t have to lower your prices.

I also think that in the highly industrialized environment of the translation industry, translators, no matter how good they are and how hard they work, will be able to live in relative comfort and enjoy their demanding but rewarding work only if they can become independent of the toxic environment of the translation industry.

Otherwise, they will be relegated to the role of cheap, easily replaceable, anonymous and insignificant cogs in a machine designed to maximize the profit of whoever owns the big bad machine, including all of the easily replaceable cogs that make the machine work.