Translation as a Profession 25 страница

No one really knows what lies in store for the translator, but in all likelihood, this is just the beginning of a major revolution in the profession and in the way translators actually go about translating. The amount of translation done by, or assisted by, MT systems will necessarily increase as will the volume of work done by human translators. The effort put into developing machine translation will carry on apace and so will the amount of investment: no country or R&D community can afford to be seen to give up the quest. None of the economically developed countries wants to be left behind in the race to develop and improve viable Human Language Technology systems, and in particular machine translation systems. Major advances have been made over the past fifty years, and particularly in the last fifteen years: translation between multiple language pairs is now possible thanks to the use of pivot languages; equivalent term substitution is now (almost) infallible; algorithms have been written to deal with source material devoid of meaning ambiguity and cultural idiosyncrasies; realistic, gradually attainable objectives are now being set and have replaced the utopian aims of fifty years ago. In any case, the moment translators find out whether MT should be seen as an ally or a rival, it will be too late to do anything about it.

But the real question is not whether translators should fear automation: this has already brought the profession major benefits in terms of productivity gains and eliminating repetitive and tedious task. The question is: where will the process of automation stop? The answer, as already noted, will give the measure of what will be left to human translators.

3.3 Where will it all end?

Still, when it comes to the crunch, machine translation systems are perhaps a lesser evil than mad scientists... A team of scientists has apparently set out to develop a system which will be capable of finding everything that has already been translated on the Web, obviously with a view to re-using the material. Everyone knows that translations published on Web sites are not necessarily 100% reliable, but the person responsible for this project (if responsible is the word) works under the assumption (did anyone say delusion?) that even a very poor translation is better than no translation at all. Considering that any research project that is liable to attract funding and publicity for its initiators is deemed to be scientifically valid, translators may well have qualms.

Plainly: anyone taking a cold hard look at the scene cannot but reach the conclusion that all efforts are undertaken to get rid of as much of the human component as possible in the translation process and the fact that this is also true of many other processes is rather poor solace.

chapter 15

From craft to industry

Introduction

Reality has finally caught up with the myth of the 'language industries'. Clearly, translation has started going industrial and the 'industrial' segments of the trans­lation market are essential because (a) they account for a significant share of the global market and (b) this is where new operating models and procedures as well as professional tools emerge before spreading down to other sectors of the market and then to individual translators. Industrialisation being closely inter­twined with technological innovation, many of its signs and effects refer primarily to technologization which, as far as translation and localisation are concerned, is prominent.

1. Markers of industrialisation

Translation now bears all the hallmarks of an industrial activity, i.e.:

- the volumes for translation have been 'massified',

- digitisation makes mass-processing possible, if not mandatory,

- documentation is produced to standards and therefore more easily 'workable' by industrial means,

- industrial methods, procedures and work organisations are being developed, leading to more rational procedures and processes,

- the translation process itself is being standardised, mostly through the use of translation templates of various kinds,

- specific tools and technologies are being developed and implemented,

- quality management is the word,

- as any other activity (and possibly more so than most) translation is being internationalised, globalised, off-shored,

- outsourcing has become common practice,

- translation companies and agencies are developing fast,

- concentration and capitalisation increase rapidly and accelerate,

- a specialist salaried labour force (above board or hidden) is developing,

- productivity gains have become the absolute driving force,

- division of labour and job specialisation are spreading,

- 'supervisors' are coming into play in the shape of project or translation managers,

- 'distance' working is on the increase,

- competition is getting ever fiercer.

- everyone is striving to get a foothold in the market 'niches', 1.1 Massification

There is obviously a very strong correlation between the exponential growth in global demand for translation and the industrialisation of the processes involved as industrialisation does not make sense unless huge volumes of production are required.

It is difficult to determine whether it is the increase in the volume of materials requiring translation that has prompted the move towards industrialisation or whether it worked the other way round. In all probability, both propositions are true: as volumes increased, industrialisation became possible and, once the industrial processing systems and forces came into existence, the available capacity and new cost conditions fuelled new demand.

The increase in volume is particularly noticeable in terms of job size (e.g. just think of the volume of the documentation generated by a new computer equipment or software or by the construction of, say, a natural gas liquefaction plant), and also in terms of the number of languages involved (documents are now frequently translated into 10 or 20 languages, or even more in some cases).

The exponential growth in the volumes of translation is a result of the com­puterisation of the documentation chain. The effect has been felt from major company clients (those who now require translations into a wide range of lan­guages) down to the ordinary occasional client. Office software and, in particular, desk-top publishing packages, now mean that anyone, or almost anyone, can pro­duce high quality materials, burn CDs, set up a Web site and publish hundreds of Web pages or create a company DVD at negligible cost. The fact that such mate­rials are so common and so easy and cheap to produce has, in turn, fuelled the tremendous expansion in demand for translation: anything promotional in any way has to be globalised and globalisation is the mother of translation. Signifi­cantly too, this rise in volume concerns all kinds of source materials, from text to discourse, from audiovisual to multimedia materials, from software code to Web content, and so on.

1.2 Processability of materials requiring translation

Any material (text, voice or sound, images or animated graphics) can now be made available in digital format: the creation or conversion equipment exists and the cost is negligible. It can thus be processed (including by translation) using a range of automatic or semi-automatic processes and processors.

1.3 Standardisation of source material (and documentation)

Obviously, any kind of industrial-scale production tends to generate as much standardisation as possible. The same rule applies to documentation, and all the more so as the documentation is usually expected to be systematically updated or expanded. Standard specifications (DTDs, graphic charters, style sheets, style guides, formatting standards, etc.) naturally apply to all documentation and, when translation is expected or likely, additional specific standards in terms of clarity, readability, terminology and phraseology or registers, etc. will come into play to facilitate automatic processing of the material, which, incidentally, also helps to make life a lot easier for the human translator, albeit at the expense of creativity and freedom. Content and form are standardised or 'controlled' so as to speed up any industrial-type processing that might be called for.

1.4 Industrial methods, processes and work organisation

The increase in overall volume as well as in individual job volume requires well organised processes replicating industrial-type models that include:

- job specifications,

- teamwork under a team lead and project manager,

- the anticipation, identification and elimination of bottlenecks, inefficiencies and downtime, the optimisation of resource consumption, etc.

- efficient work scheduling and workload planning and smoothing,

- efficient sub-contractor management,

- quality assurance and quality control,

- rework and correction procedures,

- systematic product validation or qualification.

As in any production process (and a technical or specialist translation is, to all intents and purposes, a product) protocols or procedures are established to:

- specify each task;

- define the raw material input at each production phase;

- specify what stage the product should have reached at the end of each phase in the process or what component should then be made available;

- specify who the operators will be for each task to be performed (i.e. specify the qualifications required for the tasks to be performed and the nature of such tasks);

- incorporate all the standard quality assurance principles.

Such protocols are designed to improve the quality/productivity ratio and tend to standardise the source material (i.e. the material for translation), the procedures, and the end product (i.e. the translation itself).

Large-scale translations require a critical path analysis process, involving a high degree of planning (task analysis, scheduling, sequencing, task and re­source allocation and distribution, etc.) in order to increase efficiency and cost- effectiveness and reduce time to market, while ultimately aiming for 'fault-free quality' and maximum productivity gains.

1.5 Process and product standardisation

The procedures designed to achieve a more rational translation process and en­hance quality assurance lead to increased standardisation of the way different op­erators deal with the source material. In the more extreme cases, this can actually mean translators apply patterns or 'templates', with the work provider supplying the terminology, the phraseology models, the structures and 'information maps' to be applied to presentations and argumentation and, more generally, a style guide, a graphics charter, and whatever detailed procedures the translator is expected to follow to the letter for fear of disqualification. The aim is to achieve some degree of industrial standardisation of all translators' deliverables. To that end, in-house translators are fed all the necessary resources and mandatory specifications (i.e. procedures) via the intranet and outside translators are fed the same via specialised extranets.

1.6 Development and use of productivity-enhancing tools

Software tools are the primum mobile of the industrialisation process in the area of translation. Word processors, desk-top publishing packages, editors, localisation or captioning software, voice recognition software, and many more have helped extend industrial type processing and productivity gains.

Industrialisation is usually synonymous with automation, and translation is just like any other activity in this respect. Automation has made particular progress in the following areas:

- terminology extraction,

- targeted phraseology extraction,

- text re-processing prior to machine translation (i.e. clarifying ambiguity, extracting unknown elements, etc.),

- automatic or semi-automatic terminology embedding,

- automatic or semi-automatic phraseology embedding,

- spell checking,

- grammar checking,

- automatic formatting (use of DTDs, style sheets, compiling/decompiling),

- indexing (including for video material or software),

- retrieval and re-use of previously translated material, via translation memo­ries,

- conversion, back-conversion, formatting and reformatting, including printing- related operations,

- use of macro commands, and, most notably,

- machine translation itself.

The trend is even more noticeable if we include the large-scale terminology and phraseology resources that are being mass-produced by the language industries and, last but not least, the translation industry is now, for the first time, using industrial process tools designed to manage production and workflow.

Indeed, the ultimate in productivity and quality management is workflow management in conjunction with all kinds of process management tools. When this is in effect, the translator's work is prepared, monitored, and checked au­tomatically. The material to be translated is fed from the control room into the translator's workstation (which may happen to be next door or thousands of miles away). All the terminology, phraseology, previously translated segments, direc­tions, specifications, and suggestions for translation are already in place. All tags have been taken care of. All necessary conversions, extractions, additions, etc. have been made. Once the translation gets under way, the translator gets whatever is needed at the moment it is needed. Progress is plotted against the agreed or spec­ified schedule. If need be, the translator gets warning of falling back on schedule. Translated material is automatically forwarded to checkers and revisers who, in turn, are taken over by the workflow management system.

1.7 Quality management

As any other process undergoing industrialisation, translation has to face up to the question of quality assurance and quality control if only because this seems to be the last line of defence in the face of competition (on the generally mistaken assumption that the competition is somehow always unfair and of poor quality).

Obviously, translators and their clients (and everyone else involved) have been concerned with quality since time immemorial, but the difference is now in the way quality assurance and quality control are implemented in what has become some sort of a mass production industry. It is precisely because the materials, tools, work organisation and processes used in the translation business are increasingly those of a bona fide 'industry' that major companies that buy heavy volumes of translation are increasingly putting translation contracts under the supervision and control of engineers, who quite naturally apply to translation the same process management methods and standards that they use in any industrial engineering contract. This has deeply modified the whole approach to translation and has led, in particular, to the application of quality assurance methods to the global service provision activities (including translation) to the translation process (the translating) and to the validation of the end result (the translation). Incidentally, engineers involved in translation management usually approach it as they would any other industrial activity, i.e. professionally, as a highly technical process requiring specific professional skills and competences.

1.8 Internationalisation, globalisation, off-shoring, anglicisation

Like any other industry, translation has been affected by internationalisation (increasing geographical dispersion of economic activities across national borders) in the sense that work providers can now look for translation service providers anywhere in the world and by globalisation (growing interdependence of countries world-wide).

Translation is now a 24/7 business where anyone needing a job done at any time of day or night can find a translation company or translator at work some­where. A businessman in Paris can easily send a document to Australia for urgent translation from French into English at midnight and download the translation the next morning. The translation is ready for whatever purpose, without anyone having lost any sleep or been charged extra for night work. And anyone fearing that the Australian company would not produce the right variety of English may be quite satisfied to learn that there are quite a few truly British (or American) translators down under. The next step will almost certainly be shift-based systems with teams of translators working round the clock to make maximum use of equipment and reduce time to market while offering a 24/7 service. This is how translation companies already work on a one-off basis when faced with a particu­larly urgent or large-scale contract and some companies have already made it a permanent feature of their operation.

Translation supply used to be more or less at the national level, with trans­lation service providers concentrated in a few major centres. Then, under the influence of decentralisation, it became regional or local. Now, thanks to the Inter­net, supply (as well as demand) is potentially global. Any client can shop around the Web and compare prices, then choose a translator literally on the other side of the world. Many translation agencies already indulge in this kind of sometimes ac­robatic practice and farm out their work to 'off-shore' translators. Off-shoring can be based on the need to have translations done in the 'target language' countries, but it is generally seen purely as a cost-cutting exercise.

As a case in point, the European single currency has bluntly highlighted price differentials between translators in various EU countries, with the effect that pressure is put on those in the more prosperous parts of the Union to reduce their prices. Strangely enough, this never works the other way round, with the people in the 'cheaper' countries being paid more in line with what people get in 'more expensive' countries.

In fact, globalisation is simply confirming and accelerating a trend that many professionals have been aware of for a number of years, i.e. that translation volumes for a given language tend to increase in countries where translation into that language is relatively cheap and vice-versa.

Some work providers are literally 'off-shoring' their translation to low-cost countries, which, in turn, leads some translators to go and work in low-cost environments as is the case with the Madeira-based translators working into Portuguese. And it often so happens that an agency that has landed a contract in its own country sub-contracts it to another agency in a 'cheaper' country, both taking equal shares in the price differential. Sub-contracting is unquestionably motivated by the lower rates being paid in some parts of the world: the work provider in, say, Seattle, contracts to a broker in Belgium (who has all the EU contacts), who might for example sub-contract to a translating company in Barcelona for Spanish and Portuguese (because Spain is cheaper) another company in Budapest for French and one in Paris for German, with the actual German translators possibly living in Turkey.

The same process is responsible for the supremacy of varieties of English. Everyone wants to be 'visible' the world over via the Internet and that means being present or represented in English (and no doubt in Chinese in years to come). So, everything has to be put up in English, either directly or through translation. For that reason, any native English speaker with an inclination to become a translator and able to show some degree of proficiency, can find work abroad in a few days, and translators who are not native English speakers need to seriously increase their proficiency in that language if they do not want to get left behind. As already stated, it used to be considered unnatural and unprofessional to translate into a foreign language, but principles are now often going by the board as market pressures increase and translating into one or more foreign languages has become a matter of economic survival in some places.

1.9 Outsourcing

The translation industry has both benefited from, and been affected by, the general move towards outsourcing. Over the past ten to fifteen years, more and more companies and other large organisations requiring huge volumes of translation have come to the conclusion that 'all things considered, they are not in the translation business', and have consequently decided to shut down their in-house translation departments and outsource all their translations.

The outsourcing of translation jobs is one factor behind the big rise in the overall translation sales figures. This, in turn, has led to the simultaneous rise in the number of both freelance and salaried translators across the world. The mechanism works as follows:

- businesses and organisations with translation needs outsource their transla­tions to language service companies;

- the language service companies take care of the most profitable part of the contracts in-house and contract out the parts that they are not able or willing to deal with, even operating as brokers in some cases;

- the translation service companies sub-contract the translating to freelance translators, giving top priority to their regular vendors. If they must, they call on newcomers.

In fact, most freelance translators primarily give top priority to their own regular direct clients and only turn to the translation agencies if they are short of work and those starting out in the translation business squeeze in, hoping to win larger contracts.

And, naturally enough, everyone strives to optimise workloads while securing regular clients and maximising profit.

1.10 The rise of translation companies and agencies Concentration of supply and of processing capacity

One of the most striking worldwide trends in the translation industry over the past ten years has been the development of translation companies both in terms of numbers of companies, and - still more spectacularly - in terms of numbers of employees.

The increase in the numbers of both translation companies proper, and trans­lation brokerage companies and agencies has allowed businesses with translation requirements to concentrate on their own core activities and to outsource any­thing having to do with multilingualism, and, more particularly, their translation needs - unless it worked the other way round and it is the increase in demand for translation services which prompted the increase in supply, but the latter is less likely.

This in turn has accelerated the trend towards the industrialisation of trans­lation by concentrating the human resources, the capital, the technology and the special skills required to deal with large-scale translation projects on a rational, industrial basis. Simultaneously, agencies and brokerage companies have concen­trated demand on the sub-contracting side of the market and it is a fact that the rise of brokers and agencies as demand concentrators and managers of translation projects has been the most marked evolution in recent years.

The paradox is that this type of business actually thrives in part on the fragmentation of supply and demand. They give work providers access to 'virtual' translation companies, i.e. the network of freelance translators working for them and, at the same time, they allow the freelancers to carry on working on large scale contracts that would normally require the kind of equipment, software and specialised skills that would be beyond the scope of an isolated freelance translator. Some agencies even train their sub-contractors in the use of new software tools. Some buy those tools and lend or hire them to their subcontractors. In most cases, agencies have started putting up 'distributed' virtual teams including translators, ICT specialists, information system engineers, infographics specialists, and so on.

In this sense, freelance translators play an active part in the development of companies (and agencies), albeit on a temporary basis. And the most remarkable thing about this trend towards increased industrialisation is the fact that the concentration of supply and demand is taking place alongside, and in conjunction with, a system in which many freelancers still feel they are able to maintain some degree of independence since personal contact with their clients remains possible within extremely fragmented markets with everyone trying to build some degree of consistency by using the translation companies, agencies and brokers on an ad hoc basis to concentrate demand and to structure their own business.

1.11 Business concentration, mergers and capitalisation

Industrialisation implies a sufficient number of viable production units and via­bility (in terms of sufficient turnover, return on investment, workload, workforce specialisation and economies of scale, etc.) in turn implies concentration. It is no surprise, therefore, to find ever-larger groups emerging via takeovers and merg­ers, with small-scale operations or 'cells' being kept in place to drain local business and maintain good close business relationships. These small local units put for­ward their local roots and their flexibility while stressing that they are backed up by the strength of a large, and preferably multinational, group. All the usual modes of business concentration are to be found, i.e. minority interest, mergers, subsidiaries, joint ventures, franchises, etc.

The move towards an industrial-type of organisation has aroused particu­lar interest among investors who have been buying up translation companies and more especially the language engineering companies that produce the tools and resources designed for translators, technical writers and other language pro­fessionals.

Freelance translators have also been affected by the concentration process, in the sense that virtual pools of particularly effective freelance translators are now emerging: these are particularly sought after by translation companies and agencies for the quality of their work and the fact that they require very little or no revision.

The concentration process is particularly visible in the large-scale agency sec­tor, because such agencies have a worldwide customer base and can farm out contracts to a vast network of sub-contractors generally closely supervised by in- house project managers and whom they provide with the source material, the terminology, the translation memories, and all the necessary ICT tools (generally proprietary software) designed to rationalise, facilitate and improve the translation process, while making it more cost-effective. In many cases, the sub-contracting is divided into the various tasks making up the overall service (i.e. translation or proof-reading or disassembly or re-assembly). Interestingly enough, terminol­ogy management systems, translation memory management systems, workflow management systems and others were originally developed by such big service companies for their own needs and they then decided to get some return on that investment by selling the systems at large.

Incidentally, for what it's worth, there is a close analogy to be drawn between this model and the one developed, say, in the field of industrial poultry or pig farming, where the animals, feed, buildings, machinery and processes are provided and strictly controlled by the integrating company which pays only for the end products and the operators' skills.

1.12 The rise (and fall?) of the salaried translator

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in the number of salaried trans­lators both in-house and in translation companies and agencies. There was an increase in the number of employers and in the average number of employees.

This was due to the sheer increase in demand for translations but also to the necessity of hiring staff that would cope with editing (quality control of outsourced translations) and management tasks. At the same time, the development of more sophisticated and extended services and of new professional areas and skills fuelled the creation of in-house jobs: the software engineering side of localisation, for instance, is still (for the time being) usually carried out 'in-house' rather than outsourced.

Another powerful reason was that outsourcing and sub-contracting require qualified personnel: someone has to take care of the whole process and make sure everything works out the way it should. Admittedly, the jobs are more on the management side (including project management) and on the quality control side. But such jobs are translation-related and are rightly classified as 'translation industry jobs'. There was an increase in salaried positions directly or indirectly related to translation (pre-translators, terminologists, editors and revisers, and all kinds of managers). Demand for managers (pre-sales managers, project managers, terminology managers, translation-resource managers, human resources managers, quality managers) keeps growing in-house in response to the vast increase in the numbers of sub-contractors. And special mention must be made of freelance translators who are actually salaried translators 'in disguise' in that they have chosen to work for umbrella companies.

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