Is the Damage Inflicted upon Our Profession by the Translation Industry Reversible?

As I wrote in my previous post, it was about 15 years ago when I realized for the first time that major and possibly irreversible changes were taking place in the translation business environment. My solution was to stop working for what is now called the “translation industry”, and I was able to do that mostly thanks to my stubborn perseverance combined with a few lucky circumstances that I described in that post.

I believe that many translators should still be able to use the same method that I was and still am using, while others may be able to use very different methods to protect themselves and their profession from the clutches of the rapacious “translation industry”, although all of the different potential methods will be based on staying independent of the industry and being able to work mostly or only for direct clients, perhaps with a few small translation agencies included in the mix.

But since the larger question asked in the title of my silly post today has not been answered in that post, I will try to do so, from my perspective, today.

I think that the short answer is “probably not.” At least not in the short run, the damage cannot be reversed for the thousands of far-flung translators working on the translation industry’s plantation without any representation.

For one thing, we translators have nobody to speak for us, let alone work on our behalf to actively promote our interests. The government obviously does not give a damn about translators. Since unlike for example the drug industry, or the gun industry, we have no lobbyists paying millions of dollars to politicians to maintain our earnings even at a level enabling economic survival, the government becomes aware that we exist only when it comes to paying taxes, regardless of in which country we happen to live in. This is true not only about translators, but about many other professions and we should not be surprised by that.

What should be surprising, although some translators may not be realizing it, is that our so-called professional associations are actively working for the “translation industry” and thus against our interests, although nominally they are supposed to be working for us, as they are financed mostly by financial contributions from individual translators.

But the problem is, the “translators’ associations” are also funded by the “translation industry” if they and other industries, as well as the governmental organizations, are allowed to be members of the same association as translators working in the trenches of the modern translation business. And compared to the power wielded by these non-translating members who are also members of same presumably happy family, poor individual translators obviously have no power at all.

Translators have no friends, only enemies, or at best only frenemies who only pretend to be our friends.

One piece of evidence of the fact that for example the American Translators Association is working for the “translation industry” and against translators, is the current content of the ATA Chronicle, the association’s almost-monthly magazine.

Although I was able to publish two or three articles that were somewhat critical of the practices of translation agencies in the ATA Chronicle at the beginning of this century, before the term “translation industry” came into common use, times have changed since then.

I offered relatively recently several articles for publication in the “Voice of Translators and Interpreters”, partly because several readers of my blog suggested (despite my skepticism) that it was a good idea and naively thought that the ATA Chronicle would mostly likely have a positive response.

Frosty silence was the only answer. Who am I to dare to ask something like that?

The American Translators Association, and probably also other associations nominally of, for and by translators, are not interested in a dialogue between the translators and the “translation industry.” They prefer to pretend that we are all a big happy family.

Well, if it is a family, it is one in which the weaker members are abused by much more powerful members and ultimately slated for extinction.

That is not my kind of family … except perhaps as a fictional family featured in a Netflix series in which one weak member is gruesomely murdered every now and then, preferably no less than every other episode or so.

One reason why I stubbornly keep posting on my blog articles that are very critical of the propaganda and practices of the “translation industry” is that to my knowledge, the ATA Chronicle has never published anything even slightly critical of the “translation industry”, at least not in the last two decades, as it has been successfully co-opted by the industry into its machinery as simply another tool for disseminating the propaganda of an industry whose ultimate goal is basically to eliminate our profession by turning as many of us as possible into grossly underpaid, slave-like “machine translation post-processors”, a vulgar caricature of what our profession used to be and should be.

While there have been many articles in the ATA Chronicle (which calls itself “the Voice of Translators and Interpreters”) written by representatives of the industry, celebrating the advances of what is called language technology, not a single article has been published in it questioning the elephant in the room – the proposition that the present kind of mechanization and industrialization of translation is a healthy and desirable way forward for what is now called the “translation industry”.

The translation industry is blindly and furiously destroying the previous ecosystem of an ancient profession, a profession that in the case of written translation is as old as the invention of writing.

The industry does not realize that we translators are the creators of all of the industry’s profits and that if you eliminate us and replace us by algorithms, newbies and people who are being paid a fraction of what would be required to pay the bills and taxes in Western countries in order to maximize the profits of the industry, the best educated and the most experienced translators will be eliminated from the ranks of people who will still be able and willing to work for the industry.

It is only logical that one inevitable result of the current approach of the “translation industry” to what translation is all about is inferior quality of translations that are produced by the industry, especially when we include under the term translation also the new kind of pseudo-translations that are originally produced by algorithms and then picked over by rushed, underpaid and unqualified human “post-processors” to remove the most glaring and most obvious mistakes and make them look like real translations.

While I am pessimistic about our prospects in the short run, I don’t know what is going to happen to us and to the industry in the long run.

Nobody really knows that. But there may be a silver lining on these dark, gathering clouds.

Although it may take a very long time before some clients of the industry realize that they are paying good money for inferior translations that may turn out to be useless or even counterproductive, at some point they may realize that one solution would be to ditch ignorant and arrogant large translation agencies and try to replace them by small, highly specialized and highly knowledgeable translation agencies that actually understand what translation is, and by individual translators who, unlike those of us who feel that they have no choice but to work for the big and hungry dinosaurs, are able to proudly stand by their work.

But to be able to take advantage of the opportunities inherent in the mostly unfortunate development over the last two decades, translators would need to stop endlessly complaining about the bad, bad agencies who pay low, low rates (if they pay at all), and they would need to figure out how to identify direct clients that would be a good match for what it is that they do for a living and offer their experience and skills directly to the actual clients, instead of being dependent on the middleman.

Some will hopefully be able to do just that. But if past experience is an indicator of things to come, probably not too many.