“la parole exportée”

It’s not back to work, because I was never really idle, I’ve had a string of projects, some small, some large, this summer. It’s more like back on line.

For this kind of business, offline is where things really happen. I answer the phone and e-mails (to me, a mere substitute to paper mail). Get translation jobs. Do them. Redecorate my office, a fairly small room, so doing anything to it means taking everything out (a good opportunity to throw away all those old piles of paper), and letting everything stand in everyone’s way, while the job is waiting to be completed. This time it was just the floor, and some paint here and there. Plus, shifting every piece of furniture around. I’ve been talking about it for weeks, but I got interrupted so many times! As I write, I still have some shelves to which I need to apply paint.

The interesting part of this small vacation offline is that it’s helped me reflect upon the last 12 months, about what my experience online has taught me so far.

That has been a very positive experience: Just ‘listening’ to a variety of business coaches has helped me begin to re-define my sense of my business in ways that I’d never thought possible before. Just as I’m re-organizing my office, I’m also re-organizing my processes. This means, in a way, going back to basics. And it works.

More on that in the coming weeks. So how was your summer?

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I’ve just answered to a LinkedIn question. What a great way to start the day?

The question is here.

Here is my answer:

Some translators, and some of them not necessarily as bad as you might think, are lured into thinking that they will get more work by accepting these low rates. What they get is more stress, and less money to pay their bills. What will happen to them in an age of recession?

This kind of treatment goes beyond the problem of ensuring quality. If I was accepting these rates, for whatever reason, I would deliver the same quality as I would do for 10 times the amount. But it’s a matter of how you value yourself and your work in the world. For me, 0.02 cent per word is not pay, it’s slavery that tries to pass off for pay.

Editing machine-translated copy raises the same kind of problems. Some of the mistakes produced by translation software can be very subtle and require exactly the same level of proficiency and skills as if the translator was doing the job him/herself.

So you have my answer: I never accept, and indeed would never even consider looking at this kind of rate, and translators (I mean real, professional translators) are doing themselves a disservice by encouraging this practice and putting themselves on an equal level with machines.

Honestly!

A translator’s post I’ve just read strangely reminded me of an anecdote that happened to J., many years ago. J. was a fellow translator (who died before her time, sadly) who was much involved in literary translation, and she was asked to check the Spanish to French translation of an interview with one of the best Spanish writers. The French publisher was worried because the translation was visibly shorter than the original. J. set out to check it, and realized that the translator had summarized some parts of the interview. When challenged to explain why, the translator said she felt the author was being repetitive.

This illustrates the tight rope we translators have to walk. Even when we feel the source copy is badly written, our job is to provide a correct yet faithful rendering of it. God was not a translator, obviously.

I mentioned in an earlier post the challenges encountered with a monthly translation project I have with a client.

Space limits.

Good news. For the last two months or so, the space limits have been eased up. Whether this was because of translators’ complaints (I can’t begin to imagine how the German or Russian translators were able to accommodate these rules without dropping much of the source copy, writing in telegraphic style or using lots of abbreviations - in marketing-style copy???), or simply because the client needed more breathing space, but that’s the happy fact.

Translation Completeness.

One of my main areas of discomfort was that I frequently had to drop model descriptions from the translations, keeping only model numbers. Although my choice wasn’t taking anything away from the message itself, I didn’t like the idea of making choices on the client’s behalf.

Translation Style.

Now, not only the translators have more room to breathe/work, but translation quality should also be improved considerably by availing of this extra space. Correct translation into French, even with minimum stylistic rendering, still involves a higher word count; for instance, although the simplest forms of the verbs ‘to be’ or ‘to do’ do exist in French, translating them by richer, yet NOT literary verbal phrases provides a simple and inexpensive way in terms of brain cells, of adding a true French ‘ring’ to a copy. This is something French natives normally absorb in their younger years. And the idea of this translation project is, after all, to guide end-customers to more of the marketing material. This in itself should be an incentive to make sure that these chunks of information delivered to them are meaningful and attractive. Too many space restrictions ended up in so-so copy.

What next?

Now hoping that the US copywriters don’t take advantage of the new rules to expand their own copy! Or we’d be back to square one…