Taking the trash out of trashlation in translation

Let’s be real, people. We need to start using the word trashlation to describe what too often passes for professional activity in the language services sector these days.

I’m looking at all of you DeepL fans among others.   And especially the LSPs who try to sell that garbage or other post-edited spew as translation. Such nonsense is seldom fit for purpose, and when I am not bent over the Porcelain God in “prayer”, I am always reminded of Mark Twain’s comment that the difference between something “close” to the right word and the right word itself is akin to the difference between a lightning bug and lightning. I would suggest that in some cases the consequential difference could be compared to being strapped to the electric chair for execution as opposed to watching the Natural magnificence of a lightning storm.

Recently, a German publisher sent me a very interesting file containing a table with the original German text in the first column, a post-edited DeepL result by a German who has lived abroad for some decades in the second column, in a third the post-edited result from an American living in Germany, and in the fourth column the results of some beta program called DeepL Write, yet another iteration of all of this AI trash the fanboys and -girls all declare will replace human writing efforts. Although I prefer to be left out of any discussions whatsoever involving the linguistic quality of MT output, the submitter seemed pleased by what he saw and insisted on having my opinion. So I gave it to him. Unfiltered.   I suggested leaving me alone with that nonsense, and said I considered all of it to be hopeless trash. Actually, I might have been harsher than that, as I don't consider that sort of “writing“ acceptable or in any way fit for purpose, any purpose with which I'll be associated. It is physically painful for me to look at verbal garbage like that. I would rather stick my nose in a garbage can full of rotting meat and inhale deeply. The original German text was not bad, and it deserved real translation like someone I recommended could provide for that subject matter.

In a long consulting gig in the second half of 2022, which ended only in April of this year, I had a very close look at how badly the commercial models of translation service offered by most agencies are broken, badly, badly broken. Years of social engineering propaganda by unscrupulous promotors of machine translation and artificial "intelligence" have skewed expectations badly so that if the buyer is lucky the "best" service might be "good enough", though barely.

Project managers at agencies tell me of their soul-crushing duty to force ever lower rates on those external providers of translation services who typically do the real work sold as the agency's deceptive product. All the while, charts and graphs and other "quality metrics" tell the fairy story of superior delivery.

It's time for individuals providing independent services to take a different approach. Let the linguistic sausage providers (aka LSPs) eat their own product. Take the trash out of trashlation.

Of course there has been a lot of talk for years about the need to find more direct clients. Most conferences for translators have at least one presentation on this topic. But many of the recommended practices are dated or have become less effective as LSPs providing trashlation have increasingly gamed the search algorithms to make their pages appear to be those of independent individual providers, and then once there the buyer is treated to lies and distortions suggesting that they may be better off with the superior "full service" of the agency. Very few of the claims on such pages reflect actual practice, something I know very well as an insider providing technical assistance to companies for a very long time.

I have also read suggestions recently that search engine optimization (SEO) strategies may soon be a dead letter. Why? Companies developing search engines are rushing to implement large language model (LLM) functionality, such as that found in ChatGPT, any many expect that to blow the algorithm gaming strategy to Hell, negating much of the investments companies and individuals have made to increase the visibility of their web sites and the services offered there.

I don't know, really, what disintermediation strategies might be most effective these days, but at the very least individual traders should examine alternative representation strategies. I saw an interesting one recently on Fiverr, a platform I remembered only for the idiotic idea that every service should cost $5. Well, that has apparently changed.

Although their presentations were often far from a perfect, translators offering services on those platforms are able to structure the "gigs" in such a way that buyers can easily specify relevant conditions, such as project scope, urgency, etc. And service providers can avoid overbooking by applying various kinds of throttles based on order volume. Extra services, such as multiple revisions, project glossaries and many other extras I have marketing over the years are a snap to set up.

In fact, I was so impressed by what I saw that I am considering to create special services for some of the routine technical services I provide for translation workflow training videos, custom import filters, regex tools to translation and text QA, etc. Frequently, more of my time is spent gathering information on a client's requirements than I actually spend providing the implementable result. The flexible FAQ functions, intake questionnaire, portfolio and communication tools look like they can be a huge time-saver.

Compared to what I saw on Fiverr and a few similar, huge volume platforms, the structure of platforms like ProZ-dot-com and Translator's Café definitely look "last century". The times they are a-changin' and maybe we should be too in the platforms we use to promote services that our potential clients need.

What evil lurks in the results from your language service provider?

Let me start by disclosing that although I have a registered limited company through which I provide translation, training and technical consulting services for translation processes, I am essentially a sole trader who is not unreasonably, though not correctly, referred to as a freelancer much of the time. I have a long history of friendship and consulting support with the honorable owners of quite a few small and medium language service companies and of a few large ones. I vigorously dispute any foolish claims that there is no such need for such companies, and I see a natural alliance and many shared interests between the best of them and the best of independent professionals in the same sector.

But as Sturgeon's Law states so well, "ninety percent of everything is crap", and that would apply in equal measure to translation brokers and translators I suspect, though of course this is influenced by context. But what context can justify this translation of a data privacy statement from German to English? Only the section headers are shown here to protect against sensory overload and blown mental circuits:

The rest of the text is actually worse. This is the kind of thing some unscrupulous agencies take money for these days.

Why, pray tell, was the section numbering translated so variously into English? Well, if you know anything about the mix-and-match statistical crapshoot that is SMpT (statistical machine pseudotranslation) and its not-as-good-as-you-think wannabe alternatives, it's easy to guess the frequency of certain correlations in English with German numbers followed by a period.

And clearly, the agency could not even be bothered to make corrections, and the robotic webmaster put the text up, noticing nothing, where it remained for about a year to embarrass a rather good company which I hold in high esteem.

What's the moral of this story? Take your pick from the many reasonable options. "Reasonable" does not include doing business with the liars and thieves who will try to sell you on the "value proposition" of machine translation to cut costs.

A skilled translator knowledgeable in the subject matter and trained in dictation techniques paired with a good speech recognition solution or transcriptionist can beat any human post-edited machine translation process for both volume and quality. And a skilled summarizer reading source texts and dictating summaries in another language can blow them both away as a "value proposition".

One thing that is too often forgotten in the fool's gold rush to cheap language (dis)service solutions is - as noted by Bevan et alia - exposure to machine-translated output over any significant period of time has unfortunate effects one the language skills (reading, writing and comprehension) of the victims working with it. This has been confirmed time and again by translation company owners, slavelancers and other word workers. Serious occupational health measures are called for, but to date little or nothing has been done in this regard.

And when human intelligence is taken out of play or impaired by an automated linguistic lobotomy, the results inevitable gall in the lower quartile of the aforementioned 90%. Really crappy crap.

As another of my favorite fiction authors used to comment: TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And trust is always good, but these days you need to verify that your service providers really give you what you have paid for and don't pass off crap like you see in the example above.

Drunken monkey needs German to English translator to translate from medieval Czech!

You can always count on ProZ.com, The Translators' Workhouse, for a good laugh. Here is yet another #FAIL by staff to screen job postings properly, with a clueless agency desperately seeking a German to English translator to work on a 9th century Czech document. Best rates only, please!

Such competence speaks for itself and further makes the case for disintermediation. If you want a job done right, go straight to a qualified translator; don't put a put a monkey in the middle.

Time-saving tip: the DELETE key!

As one who clings stubbornly to the notion of value in a "personal touch" for business communication, I found this colleague's suggestion that using the name of your target might indeed be important. In this age of HAMPsTr'ized workflows in the Bulk Market Bog inhabited by Luigi & Co., when flexibility for bottom-feeding agencies means suggesting yoga lessons so translators can bend over farther, I do agree that if you ask people to work for peanuts you should at least ask them using their actual names.

I do, however, appreciate very much the consideration shown in many of these inquiries, which ask me to quote my best rate. As a memory aid, I have put the highest rate I have been paid onto a Post-It note on my auxiliary monitor to remind myself that I can certainly do better than that. So each time one of these silly requests comes along now, I up the ante and double down... or just hit DELETE and spend my time instead on the numerous serious business partners in the queue.

Games agencies play, part 3: blind commitments

Many of us know this late-afternoon scenario:

Dear Mr. Lossner,
We have a translation request for 3 PDF documents with a total of 2500 words to be translated into English. Please let me know quickly whether you can deliver by noon tomorrow.

My response to something like this is usually something to the effect of "What the Hell are you actually asking?" I always smell a trap of some kind, because usually there is one. I've been there many times with this particular project manager. You would think that after several years he would understand after several years of playing this game together that I do need to know what the task really is before I can respond in any reasonable way. But unlike other business partners of mine whom I can trust to make a reasonable assessment of effort and work out reasonable conditions in advance with an end client, this guy is one of those who lives on a wing and a prayer and the hope that some sucker will promise the unreasonable. My response?

That would depend on the text and its format. Would you mind letting me have a look so I can answer your question?

Shortly thereafter I received the three documents. I've dealt with some idiots who will declare something to be too confidential to assign without a commitment, but I tell those jokers to go straight to the Hot Place where they belong. This one will at least trust me to look at something before I can tell him if I can translate it. And what did I see? A nightmare of sorts.

Document #1: a certificate with graphics and a complex layout, perhaps 30 words in total.

Document #2: an extremely complex tabular form with a cell structure that would take me perhaps an hour or two or more to reproduce the single page. No OCR program will deal adequately with that form, which included strange nested borders I don't even want to try to describe. The text in the form comprised perhaps 100 words, maybe a bit more.

Document #3: seven pages of reasonably complex layout on letterhead, with tables, footnotes and a lot of formatting in the body text. The least bad of the three, but probably at least an extra hour of editing and checking due to the formatting.

Oh yes... all of these were scanned documents with a few "shadows" and artifacts of the kind known to be troublesome for OCR.

I replied that feasibility would depend, of course, on the customer's willingness to pay the rush rate given that we were at the end of a long business day as well as the willingness to compensate me for the full effort of layout, which could possibly exceed the actual translation costs. I know from past exchanges that layout and graphics inclusion would be wanted.

The expected response arrived soon after: the inquiry had "taken care of itself". I expected as much; indeed, I guaranteed that response by mentioning rush charges, because this particular client has a policy of never applying rush charges no matter how unreasonable a deadline. Their problem, not mine - natural selection will deal with such policies in due course. I really like these people as people, but like too many "service providers" in the translation sector, they stubbornly refuse to accept principles of responsibility and sustainability, so when they tell me they have assigned a staff member to devote three months of full-time effort to a data processing task which could be accomplished in somewhat under an hour if the software and the task were properly understood, I accept their wise contradiction of my suggestion to do otherwise and just smile. And I watch the sand running in the hourglass.

I remember a Heinrich Böll story I read in high school about a crazy office manager who ran around exclaiming Es muss was geschehen! Eventually something did happen. He dropped dead at work. The unthinking, often panicked way that people like the PM with the three PDFs often do business so often reminds me of Böll's story.

"Partners" like this may be very nice people, but with their persistent refusal to provide those with whom they do business the basic, obvious information to do that business properly, they are a dangerous contagion, a risk to the health of your business. They are themselves walking dead, wandering blindly in search of an inevitable final resting place.

Games agencies play, part 2: "word counts"

Last week a colleague called me up, very worried because her count of a rather tricky and somewhat long chemical text differed from the translation agency's count by more than 10%. I had only recently introduced her to that company and was vastly relieved to have competent backup for a recent flood of chemical manufacturing procedures, so the thought this might escalate into a serious misunderstanding put a sick feeling in my gut.

Fortunately, I had noticed some similar issues recently and had a conversation with the project manager involved about the unusual issues for her customer's texts and some of the technical challenges we face in overcoming legacy trash (format trash in this case, not content thank God) and making fair and accurate estimates of the work involved not only for fair compensation but also to plan some increasingly stressful schedules.

I discovered in the chat that the PMs at the agency were "in transition" with their working tools, and although they had SDL Trados Studio around for years, it was only being used about half the time for analysis and costing; the other half of the time the now-discontinued SDL Trados 2007 was used.

I spit my coffee in surprise. Well, I shouldn't have been surprised.

The old Trados tool generally gives much lower word counts, especially for the kinds of scientific texts I often do, with a good portion of dates and numbers to be dealt with. In addition to that, there are considerable differences in "leverage" (presumed matches from a translation memory, which is the case of the customer mentioned above are often useless and incorrect because of bad segmentation issues and massive crap in the TM from 10 years of failure to define appropriate segmentation exceptions). And then there are the tags, which are another matter as well: I love three or four words embedded in 20 or so tags in a segment. Whoever thinks something like that should be charged at a word rate with a count of 3 or 4 is a fool or a fiend or both.

But mostly these are just matters of ignorance and/or reluctance to understand the problem and consider it in costing and compensation.

Paul Filkin of SDL has an excellent presentation which I saw last year at TM Europe in Warsaw in which he showed systematic differences in text counts between tools. I suspect that information is available in some form somewhere, because it's also important for individuals and companies using Trados or other tools to understand just how pointless and arbitrary this focus on word counts actually is. (So far I've avoided bringing up the problem of graphics and embedded objects so frequently found in certain document types and how few of the tools in common use are able to count the text in these, much less the effort to access, translate and re-integrate that text. I've talked about that enough on other occasions, so not now.)

So what's the agency game here? Well, in the case of my friend's concern, no more than an unconsidered resort to the wrong tool by a project manager under pressure and in a hurry, and once they talked about it, it became clear that matters would get sorted out to nobody's disadvantage most likely. Word counts, and the tools chosen to make those counts, can have a huge impact on translator compensation. This can be exploited systematically by unscrupulous agencies to screw their service providers thoroughly, and I suppose there are a few out there beside Pam the Evil PM in the Mox comics who plot such moves carefully.

However, I think it's usually a matter of ignorance, where a bit of education is all that is needed. Sometimes it's fear: I have heard some silly skirts tell me that they are aware of the problem but that quoting with accurate methods would inflate job costs to a level their price-sensitive customer cannot accept. Usually, though, this means that this person or those in her organization responsible for sales lack the communication skills to deal maturely with clients and help them understand what is reasonable and sustainable for a good business relationship. I seldom argue with such people. I note them on the list of Linguistic Sausage Producers and cross them off the list of viable partners for work, and when I hear later how they are circling ever nearer to that drain to the sewers I might offer a sad smile of understanding, but I have nothing more to give.

An agency that offers piece-rate quotation but does not even try to estimate the "pieces" and their relationship to time required very likely does not have a sustainable business model. But that is probably no more unsustainable than all the panting bilge one sees from all those acolytes in the MT temple who don't realize they are brought into the rituals to be relieved of their cash and goods by a greedy IT priesthood eager for another great scam to live off like the old Y2K scare.

What do word counts matter when words will be free or nearly so, given to us by Machines of Ever Loving Grace in LQA-blessed near-perfection, requiring just a bit of post-editing time to be fit for purpose?

Ah, time. That's really the crux of the problem, isn't it? How much time will something take? Proper project management in which the inputs are measured and assessed correctly is critical to understand this regardless of whatever piece rates may or may not be applied. An agency owner recently mentioned a job he had to "translate" date formats into something like 14 different local flavors. He pointed out, quite correctly, that any word count, even an accurate one, was meaningless there. (And he revealed himself as a user of the old Trados by saying that the word count was "zero" anyway, which brings us back to the stupid logic of SDL Trados which began this discourse.)

I'm not an advocate of billing strictly by time. Yes, attorneys do that, but it's not really a viable model all the time anyway for all services, and one could a library with volumes of true tales on the abuse of the billable hour by law firms. Sometimes hourly rates make sense, sometimes the value, an intangible requiring some judgment and risk to estimate, matters more.

Time, value or meaningless commodity units (word, lines, pages or pounds of sausage): these will surely still be sources of consideration and dispute in the translation profession long after we are all dead. Until then, it really does pay to become more aware of current practice and its implication and remain alert so that it does not work to your disadvantage, even if the other parties are not deliberately playing a game.

Games agencies play, Part 1: "basic information" for Google searches

The other day a fellow freelancer called me up, irate to learn that a translation agency owner in her country had appropriated one of her ideas and literally taken her words from an online interview to represent his services as something they probably are not.

This started quite a discussion about some of the tactics we and others have observed in the trench warfare being waged for business in some segments of the market. It's not often I see egregious cases of plagiarism like the one I was shown two days ago, but there are plenty of sneaky moves and not-so-sneaky ones employed to try to get those little prospect fish in a world wide net online.

So I've decided to offer a little "series" featuring a few of these tactics and how freelancers might respond appropriately to them to promote their own business and support the real interests of translation consumers in an ethical way. And maybe we'll find a few candidates for the Hall of Shame on our tour.

In Twitspace and in my YouTube content research, I have encountered quite a number of pages, video clips and other material describing basic concepts of translation technology or translation processes, such as translation memory, terminology mining and management, etc. Rarely these are quite good presentations of academic value, which are prepared by knowledgeable colleagues or university instructors, and which are so clearly presented that I am pleased to share them with my clients and others when they are needed. More often these are superficial overviews stuffed with keywords, which communicate too little of the real information needed to assess a technology and its relevance to certain types of problems. Some of the self-serving crap I've seen on YouTube by agency representatives pushing their services is so bad that I'm sure their competitors must smile. What are they trying to accomplish?

Quite a number of different things most likely. Being noticed first by potential prospects searching for information is certainly high on the list for some. Influencing the discussion of certain technologies and approaches to translation is probably another goal of the more clever content presenters and one which freelance service providers should consider.

I am not going to give links to any of these pages I've found. Today's gem - "Guide to Translation Memory (TM)" - found on a US agency site, is fairly typical. It's superficial, but not particularly toxic, but it really makes no useful contribution to helping clients understand the advantages and limits of translation memories. The description of fuzzy matching is actually wrong in some contexts and by no means describes what a fuzzy match might be in some major translation environment tools.

But as more translators discuss their tools and working methods (which may or may not interest translation buyers and consumers), a lot of jargon gets used without adequate definition or appropriate references to consult for more information. And important concepts related to the limitations and risks of these technologies or their most appropriate uses are also very often missing.

A good response to this on our own freelance business web pages would be to present such information on secondary pages of our own sites or provide links to balanced, reputable information sources that can help our clients deal confidently with the concepts if they have an interest in them and avoid some of the traps. Linking good information pages on association web sites, university information pages or even Wikipedia may also help to raise the ranking of these pages and bury the SEO spammers in agencies or propaganda organizations like TAUS or the CSA in the far-back pages of a search where they belong. If an agency like Lionbridge, TransPerfect, thepigturd and others offers such "infopages", for God's sake don't be stupid enough to link them or tweet them; there are more ethical alternatives to be found for sharing such information.

I'm not calling for a boycott of any page associated with a translation agency. There are plenty of good ones out there with highly knowledgeable people who should be the first stop to find information on some topics. There was a guide to preparing source documents for optimal translation prepared by a small agency in Australia years ago; its original link is dead now unfortunately, but I would add the new one to a page of mine without hesitation, and if the author draws in a little extra business for that, I consider it a well-earned reward for sharing his hard-won expertise. But pages like the Guide cited above offer no real expertise; they are just more spam in a too-polluted online world.

Would you certify sewage?

Good afternoon, Mr. Lossner,
   We have received the attached document from a patent attorney. An English translation of it has already been prepared by the attorney's office, but it must be certified. Thus in this case it would be necessary to check it in order to issue the certification.
  Could you please inform us of the cost and time required to certify this translation? The customer has also informed us that there will be further translations in the future, particularly for patents. Thus we would be interested in working together long-term. Thank you for your consideration of this matter.

Best regards,

Your Expert Translation Agency

I always get a sinking feeling when the customer thinks he's able to translate a document himself and get me or some other court-sworn translator to rubber-stamp it as "true and correct". Any certification would require a very careful word-for-word review of the translation, comparing it against the source text. Anything else would be unethical. Of course there are colleagues who don't care about such niceties and send stacks of pre-stamped paper to their agency customers for use with God-only-knows-what-translations. On their heads be it. My stamp and signature put my reputation, such as it is, at stake, and I don't see the need to do that in support of work by King Louie & Co.

In twelve years of commercial translation work, I have yet to see a single patent translation submitted to me for review that could pass without heavy editing. Even the best translators can have a bad day, but it seems that the patent translators some of my clients and prospects use never have a good one. I assume that the translator who did this particular piece of work had just had his dog run over by a steam roller.

The first line gave me a bad premonition of things to come. It started out like this:

Huh? A quick look at the original text revealed the monkey's tail:

OK... well, anyone can substitute a word by accident when distracted, but... the rest of the first paragraph wasn't much better. It read a bit like Tarzan's first, painstaking steps with the English language, learning from picture books and guessing at words. The second paragraph continued the tour de farce:

I'll let you, Dear Reader, take a wild guess at that one. A quick scan at the remaining 13 pages showed the same level of expertise in every paragraph my unfortunate eyes glanced upon.

My response to the inquiry was perhaps less patient than it could have been, but the day was rather a hectic one, and if I am to embark on a long-term collaboration with a service broker, I expect this broker to be able to tell liquid manure from drinking water. I figured it was time for a lesson in colloquial American English, so I opened with

No way, José!

(in normal font color and at ordinary size for courtesy) and suggested that a retranslation of the patent might be advisable, as there was not a single sentence I saw worth recycling as text. Alas, I fear the client prefers British colloquialisms or insists on "saving" money with his fine translation skills, for I heard not a further word in response to my proposal.

I feel sorry for the inventor. The poor fellow put his trust in an attorney who surely is not cheap, and said attorney probably charged him a fortune for that dog's breakfast "translation". In this case, it's obvious that machine translation played no role; Google Translate would have offered an improvement of the mess I was given.

These days, it doesn't take a lot of effort to find a qualified translator to translate a text like this. Professional associations like the BDÜ, ITI, SFT and the ATA offer directories of translators and their special skills or qualifications, including those able to prepare sworn translations. Or there's always Google and relevant keywords. Often, the worst thing that can happen is to put your trust in an attorney or other agent who in turn passes the text elsewhere, and from there on further it goes and ends up with a cranky guy like me who is likely to have a stroke trying to patch the holes in that moldy Swiss cheese.

Those who need translations for important purposes should do themselves a favor by hiring a professional to to a professional job. It's almost always cheaper to get it right the first time.

We are the wind beneath their wings

I've been translating now for some 35 years, though the first two decades and a bit more I did so to support my personal interests and research rather than to pay my way. But I've had a close eye on many developments in the profession since my student days, when I dabbled in Russian to German translation and a bit of Sumerian, and later, when I was married to a sometime translator, I watched as technology began to have a greater impact on the profession. I can even plead guilty to having introduced modern computer-aided translation technology to an unsuspecting corporate translation department, which was dissolved about a year later as the company realized that outsourcing kept the translators on their toes and prevented some too-frequent abuses.

There are many advantages to having an in-house translation team. Those who are part of one or who have one in their organization can likely cite these better than I can. One of the greatest advantages I see is continuity: the translators and editors know the products and the people who create them and usually use terminology more appropriately and represent product characteristics more accurately. Let's not talk about the horrors of L2 translation (into one's second, third or fourth language) imposed by management that often does not understand linguistic competence and how best to use it in the corporate interest.

Some understand these matters, at least in principle, and rely on experts to guide and support them. For a very long time, translation agencies have been part of this network of experts. There are good ones and bad ones, and I have known very many good ones, and I continue to support some of these as a translator and consultant. But the raw truth is that most of the time, using a translation agency is a poor substitute for the relationship needed to sustain or even enhance one's foreign language communication. And many of my experiences in the past few years lead me to the conclusion that even the best agencies as they are now operated are not in their clients' best interests.

I think that Once Upon A Time the translation business was relatively straightforward and did not challenge the business skills of many translators and agency operators much. There were - and continue to be - great inefficiencies, but in the manure of that inefficiency a good amount of healthy expertise flourished and nourished those who called on our profession for assistance. Expectations were perhaps often lower (at least with regard to schedules) and I imagine they were often exceeded. Perhaps not; old hands can enlighten me.

Now, however, one sees a commoditization of our "product" - expression in other languages and cultural contexts - and a widening gap between the linguistic "haves" and "have nots". Experienced agencies whose management has usually long since ceased to live from their personal labor of words have jettisoned in-house translation competence and rely on a juggled network of external language service providers (often referred to as freelancers) to do the work as young, inexperienced clerks shuffle schedules, quote projects by outdated and/or inaccurate means and off-load anything requiring technical competence to other "departments" or the external translators themselves.

It's a dirty secret that the pool of truly good translators and revisers is very limited in many specialties, even in the most common language pairs. Or at least the pool from which dozens or hundreds or even thousands of agencies draw is very small. Many of us have been asked to revise our own work by an agency which was not contracted for the original translation. Conversations with agency owners and product managers in organizations with high standards reveal time and again that they use the same list of a half dozen or fewer people for their best work involving law and science. So even if you, the corporate translation consumer or private individual with translation needs, choose the best agencies around, there is absolutely no guarantee that they will get the best translators for you. In fact, very often your work will be auctioned off on public sites like human exports from Africa used to be about two centuries ago, or it is pandered in mass mailings and given to "first response linguists" who might be good at some things but not at yours.

What can be done about this? A lot actually. Most of us wouldn't think of relying on streetwalkers for our social support and personal health, and building a relationship with linguists who will loyally and competently provide you with the best service you can hope for is easier than you might imagine. It starts by finding and connecting with the right people. And understanding the fair value for the services you require.

The mangled words in the picture above were photographed on the wall of an exhibitor's booth at the recent Security trade fair in Essen. I had my camera with me and, as I walked the floor with my copywriting partner, I could have taken similarly appalling photos at nearly every display in nine full exhibition halls. Some of these were the result of in-house "expertise"; many were the unhappy result of being serviced by agencies and their outcall "translators". Imagine the damage to corporate images!

There is a reason why premium freelance language service providers like Chris Durban have long passed cent per word benchmarks for piece rate translation that many of the better agencies consider unachievable and why others I know charge on a schedule similar to a good attorney. This is because smart companies and individuals understand that good communication is critical to surviving a difficult market.

After the day at the trade fair, I talked to an agency friend who told me how happy his end client (who exhibited there) was with recent work I had provided, how much better the service was than anything the company had received before. Small mis-steps like giving earlier projects to a cheaper, less experienced translator after I had helped to acquire the client in the first place (and been promised the business into English) were forgotten. And I imagine that future relations with this valuable manufacturer of high quality safety equipment will soar as they should with a competent team. When I spoke to a freelance copywriter later and told her how, in the current market, I often have a picture in my head of many good translation agencies as biplanes, trailing a bit of smoke and losing altitude, coming close to the trees or to crashing into a hillside. Then they are borne up suddenly with an updraft of air, a competent translation or revision from a skilled linguist with an understanding of the field and a sensitivity to the psychological nuances of words. They rise and fly safely for a while until once again that saving wind is needed. She thought about that image, and about her future, and told me "This draught of air isn't drafting any more."

Spamalot: desperate translation agencies

Soon after I started this blog in 2008 I found it necessary to take various measures to protect against spam comments. In the early days, the spam was a lot of the same that somehow makes its way to my e-mail inbox, usually real estate scams, offers of wondrous herbal mixtures to supersize various anatomical parts or God-knows-what in Chinese. Spam filters have become sophisticated enough to catch most of that now, so that the trash encountered most of the time now appears to have a bit more human intelligence behind it. That is, if you associate bottom-feeding translation agencies with human intelligence in some misguided way.

I have a definite impression that the competition in the race to the bottom for low prices and garbage quality has led some of these agencies to think they can improve their position in the global dog race by getting backlinks on popular translation blogs. This is done in comments on blog posts, sometimes as a link embedded in the rather vacuous text (as Rosetta once did to a New York agency rival's blog below) or in the link associated with the poster's name (as "Cassy" - surely not its real name - tried above on behalf of "LanguageTran"). What started out as the practice of a few sleazy Pakistani agencies years ago seems to have become routine for a number of UK and US bottom-feeders.

I've seen this happen on almost every translation blog I read. There are so many attempts made on my blog that I make it a point to check the name link on every comment that seems a bit "vacant", and a very large number get flushed to where they belong.

I'm not against comments from agency owners or personnel - quite the contrary. These people are a legitimate part of our business and have a lot to contribute to discussions - and many do. I love it when they or others have something interesting to say in a post discussion, particularly if they can point out an error on my part or add some useful point. But if the point of the visit is simply to post drivel in the hopes of getting a link to drive traffic to your agency's site or improve its search engine ranking, y'all can save yourselves the trouble because you will most likely not be getting through.

Put on de Red Pee fo da agency

When I received a message from a colleague that ProZ had begun "certifying" translation agencies with the dreaded red Plob, I thought she was joking. There are real certifications for serious businesses, verifying that their documented procedures are orderly and traceable among other things. These include ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and the more ambitious agencies usually seek these because they are required for business with some large clients or RFPs. Surely no serious translation agency would feel the need to be "certified" by The Translation Workhouse with its increasingly debased standards. Well, once again, I have learned that human greed and folly have depths which even my cynicism cannot plumb. If one goes to the ProZ home page but is not logged in, the link to these "certified" proZtitution agencies is visible. I followed it and found a list of corporate members, some well known, some with the Plob.

What, I wonder, is being certified here? I am familiar with ISO 9001 and EN 15038, and I can't really imagine a lot of value that would be added here. But perhapZ the SiteStaff have developed important and relevant criteria, such as testing the timeliness of bank transfers for a specified amount. Both end customers and freelance translators would benefit from knowing that an agency using ProZ has been verified as a registered business with a working bank account.

So KudoZ to the phoax at Ze Zite for distinguishing such select translation service resellers (TSRs) as:

Are professional organizations worth the bother?

There are two broad categories of professional organizations potentially of interest to language professionals such as interpreters and translators: those which are intended specifically for providers of language services, such as freelance translator and interpreters, and those which are not. The latter, which would include chambers of commerce, business clubs, technical societies such as the American Chemical Society and so on are clearly of great value. They are a means to stay abreast of new developments in areas of interest (perhaps an earlier profession) and perhaps to meet potential direct clients.

What about the other kind, professional associations for editors, translators, interpreters, terminologists and other language-slinging rabble? Well, as one reader from Putinland commented on my post about finding good translators, she saw no single benefit to her membership in that country's largest translators' association. She was aghast at the idea that someone might cancel a ProZ membership, because she assumed that corporate clients would not look for professionals but instead would only work with agencies, and these agencies in turn would cast their nets at The Translators Workhouse. (I looked up Cravy's profile at The Workhouse and when I saw the wealth of information there, it was hard to imagine how agencies would not be dueling each other for the opportunity to offer her work. But that is not the right profile - see the comments. That is an ongoing problem with ProZ and other portals - anyone can set up a profile under nearly any name or pseudonym, with no verification that the person behind the registered e-mail address is real. This is why the portals are often playgrounds for scamsters.)

Fortunately, the real world isn't quite as Dickensian as that, though perhaps a bit darker and more Satanic at the wordface in some parts of the world. But King Henry's sockpuppet is partly right: all organizations are not created equal. They exist in a particular social context of the countries in which their members live or do business, and they are very much dependent on the efforts of their members.

The professional translators' organization of which I am a member, the German BDÜ, can be a real mixed bag at times; one fellow I know who places enormous value on professional conduct quit his local chapter in disgust a few years ago, referring to it as the Hessian Housewives' Association. Since then, however, he has come back and contributed to the serious business focus of his state chapter, and across Germany the organization offers first-rate continuing education seminars, free legal counseling, affordable liability insurance, an excellent private forum for members to exchange information and job requests, a superb online search tool for translators and their specialties and more. To say that I get my money's worth out of membership would be a huge understatement. I don't have to like everything the BDÜ does, but I applaud a great deal of it.

As I was compiling the list of professional organizations for freelance translators and interpreters which provide online search tools for potential clients to find a service provider, I was a little shocked at how parochial and unprofessional some of these venerable organizations appear on the Internet sites. In a discussion of that list on a private site, one colleague commented that it is a shame there isn't some sort of meta search engine to serve up the data from a great number of professional sites around the globe. I'm not really sure that would be a good thing if it were possible, and a quick look at the search tools for a few of the association sites quickly makes it clear that a programmer attempting such a task would soon turn to the bottle. There is no consistency at all in the lists of specialties used; some organizations simply list members in a given region with no statement of the types of text they feel they are fit to translate. Appalling.

I think that attracting an international clientele is important to many translators in this age; for those living in countries with developing economies, this is one of the keys to the best rates. But in order to do that, it is necessary to offer the site in languages which are probably understood by potential international clients. The Germans do it. So do the French. The Swiss and Italian associations I looked at failed this test. If you are a member of a professional association for language service providers, has your association given due attention to this point? If not, get out the thumbscrews or find and organization that does. (That's called "voting with your feet", an option familiar enough to some who live in parts of the world where that is the only effective vote.)

Linking online search engines for the associations would require using the same list of specialties or at least subsets thereof to be effective. But what chance of that is there with an organization that feels it is important to list beekeeping but nothing to do with chemistry or chemical technology? Quite a lot, I'm sure. Unifying and merging search tools might be a good project for groups like the Canadian umbrella organization I listed. I was not happy to see that I would have to go to each individual state organization to do my search. Really!

This is the 21st century, but some organizations for language specialists seem to be stuck in the 19th. The disorganization one can see in some areas, even in developed countries where one might expect better, make it obvious why even a highly flawed commercial portal that many serious professionals avoid like herpes can be a "success". But fortunately, there are some organizations, big ones, that get it and offer a hunting ground that is generally happier than the portalZ with their spotty or non-existent identity verifications for members and silly aliases. Mind you, I eventually adopted an alias myself on ProZ, but that was to avoid having information I wanted to present about myself or my business get buried in spammy pages repeating my commentary for Tamil, Swahili, Tagalog, Urdu and other languages at the center of the world stage.

So are these professional organizations for language service providers such as freelance translators, interpreters and editors worthwhile? Definitely. If you choose the right one.

Heads in the Cloud? Or somewhere else?

As noted in my last post, concerns are growing over the trend toward "Cloud-based" translation management solutions and the potential negative impact on interoperability between TEnT systems with the wrong approach. As Jost Zetsche noted, there is a need to push solution providers such as SDL, Kilgray, Atril, Wordfast et alia to develop working, open interfaces so various clients can be used with a given server solution in online projects.

From a somewhat different perspective, Hungarian translator Csaba Bán noted that bits and dribbles of text translated via project management tools in the Cloud, while perhaps offering some efficiencies for an LSP or other company, too often unnecessarily fragment and waste the translator's time for inadequate compensation under most current schemes. I've heard a number of my clients talk about developing web-based "instant interfaces" for quickie translation service, and I know of a number of companies who have had something like this for years, but it all seems a bit like a sleazy back alley encounter on the fringes of a Red Light district with too great a chance of the translator's business suffering ill health from such indulgence. Cloud solutions which do not cleanly integrate with a translator's working environment tools but which require copying and pasting in various fields and windows are simply inefficient (despite some tools offering Clipboard integrations) and not very attractive. And appropriate minimum charges and premiums to offset the disruptions caused by too many dribbles during the day are called for. This requires some thought, and I can't pretend to offer any brilliant solutions to the dilemma, as I think each situation will have to be considered individually until a good set of general principles for best practice emerge. I have one such case I'm puzzling over myself right now: how to charge for "tweet translation" for a long-term client who runs a PR agency. So far I haven't, because the volume has been modest and fits well enough into the ordinary flow of our business discussions, but the case has me thinking.

As readers of this blog probably know, I am also involved in other types of Cloud-based project management for translation. When I began to encounter the first web-based administration interfaces with my agency clientele a decade ago, I hated them. In fact, I have dumped several otherwise rather good clients, some paying rates on par with decent direct clients, because I found their systems too cumbersome and prone to fault. One of the worst was a custom mess from an international LSP whose Swiss branch was a frequent customer; half the time, secure deliveries via their portal were simply impossible and I had to resort to insecure e-mail attachments. (Yes, these can be passworded, but that involves additional trouble.)

Gradually, decent standard solutions emerged. A number of my clients are happy with the German Plunet solution; I favor LSP.net's OTM, not because I localize the English interface but because it's comprehensive, legally secure, provides robust processes and archiving, is software as a service (SaaS) at modest cost, and I don't have to screw around with the infrastructure at my dilapidated country estate with its lousy bandwidth availability; and there are other acceptable alternatives beside the rather nightmarish mess of the Open Source solution I once tortured myself with for several months (Project ]open[ Translation). A good online administrative solution like this has many advantages over desktop or LAN solutions, and I have discussed many of these benefits in previous posts about OTM. Even the best solutions I have seen, however, have one glaring weakness: login management!!!

This is a big problem with many online applications. We all have too many damned passwords to juggle. When suddenly I have another dozen or two dozen logins to translation project administration systems for my agency and big corporate clients, things begin to get dicey if cookies, utilities like KePass or other methods are not applied. Personally, I would like to see options for OpenID and other integrations as one is beginning to see with some of the social media. Despite the hassles sometimes involved here, I think Cloud-based tools of this kind are among the most useful for managing translation-related processes and making them secure. I use my OTM for encrypted deliveries of confidential files and for providing clients with full access to their project backup archives. This is a blessing if I'm off somewhere taking a break and someone desperately needs a copy of a translation I did last year which has gone missing.

How not to seduce good translators

Last Saturday I received the following missive from a translation agency located in a town near Düsseldorf, Germany:

Sehr geehrter Herr Lossner,

über das Verzeichnis proz.com sind wir auf Sie aufmerksam geworden. Bottomfeeders Sprachenservice GmbH ist ein etabliertes Übersetzungsbüro, das qualifizierte Fachübersetzungen in fast alle Sprachen der Welt erstellt. Zu unseren Kunden zählen namhafte Wirtschaftsunternehmen, wissenschaftliche Institute und Einrichtungen des öffentlichen Dienstes. Gerne würden wir auch Sie zu unserem Übersetzerstamm zählen und langfristig mit Ihnen zusammenarbeiten.

Gerade Ihre Sprachkombination mit Ihren Fachgebieten ist für uns sehr ansprechend.

Wie Sie sicher verstehen, müssen wir unseren Kunden attraktive Preise anbieten, um eine hohe Auftragsquote zu erreichen. Dies ist natürlich nur dann möglich, wenn auch unsere freiberuflichen Mitarbeiter günstige Tarife anbieten. Nur so können wir eine gute Auftragsauslastung realisieren, von der wiederum unsere Übersetzer profitieren.

Wie hoch ist Ihr Wortpreis im Ausgangstext? Bieten Sie ab einer bestimmten Textlänge Rabatte an und wenn ja, in welchem Umfang?

Sobald wir uns preislich einig geworden sind, würden wir Sie gerne noch mit einer kurzen Probeübersetzung (ca. 20 Zeilen) beauftragen. Dies ist eine im Rahmen des Qualitätsmanagements festgelegte Vorgehensweise.

Wir hoffen auf eine positive Rückmeldung und würden uns sehr freuen, langfristig mit Ihnen zusammenzuarbeiten.

For those of you who can't read German or prefer not to, the compelling message is:

We found you in the ProZ.com directory. Bottomfeeders Sprachenservice GmbH is a well-established translation agency producing professional translations in nearly all the world's languages. Our clientele includes well-known commercial enterprises, scientific  institutes and public agencies. We would like to count you too among our regular team of translators and work with you long-term.   

Your language combination and specialties are particularly appealing to us.

As you surely understand, we must offer our customers attractive rates in order to achieve a high order volume. This is, of course, only possible if our freelance collaborators offer low rates as well. Only in this manner can we achieve a good volume, which in turn benefits our translators.
How high is your source text word price? Do you offer discounts as of a certain text length and, if yes, to what extent?

As soon as we have agreed on rates, we would like to assign you a small test translation (of approximately 20 lines). This is part of a defined quality management procedure.

We hope for a positive response and would be very pleased to work with you long-term.

My rather spontaneous response to this honor was

Sehr geehrte Frau B,

es tut mir leid, aber auf eine solche Ansprache kann ich leider nicht positiv reagieren. Wenn Sie Dumpingpreise benötigen, suchen Sie bitte in Bangladesch. Die Ziele meiner Kunden sind vorrangig gute Kommunikation und rechtssichere Arbeit sowie geeignete technologische Umsetzung und zügige Abwicklung. Preis ist ziemlich nachrangig, und Ihre alleinige Betonung des Preises lässt vermuten, daß Qualität und Fachqualifikation eher eine Nebenrolle spielen. So ist das jedenfalls der Eindruck Ihrer Worte.

Ich bin stets soweit ausgelastet, wie ich sein will, und zwar mit interessanten Projekte meiner Wahl bzw. langfristigen Kundenpflegearbeiten für zuverlässige Partner. Geeignete Projekte haben immer die Chance, Interesse zu wecken, aber so 'ne Geiz-ist-geil-Philosophie kommt bei mir einfach nicht an.

For the non-Teutonophiles:

Dear Ms. B,

I'm sorry, but unfortunately I cannot react positively to such an approach. If you need price dumping, please look in Bangladesh. My customers' goals are primarily good communication and legally secure results as well as appropriate application of technology and timely processing. Price is rather secondary, and your sole emphasis on price leads one to suspect that quality and professional qualification play more of an ancillary role. That is, in any case, the impression made by your words.

I am always as busy as I choose to be with interesting projects of my choice or long-term work to support customers for reliable partners. Suitable projects always have a chance of interesting me, but this "cheap is cool" philosophy simply doesn't work.

I found it particularly amusing that these bottom feeders are in Germany, a country where most of my contacts with agencies emphasize better values. Even when my contacts are with cheapskates who don't give a fig about quality, they at least talk a better game. This particular "vendor manager" in the virtual sweatshop reeks of amateurism.

Recruiting is a bit like seduction, maybe a lot like it. I have it on good authority that if one wants to attract a partner worth having, it's best not to talk too much about oneself, at least not in an opening line.

Hey baby, I found your number in the telephone book. I'm a well-established professional who can translate almost anything your little mind can imagine (except fashion). My customers include famous companies and scientific institutes as well a whole lotta government gigs. Whatcha say? Wanna crawl under the covers with me and make some beautiful words? (Long-term, of course, since we all know a relationship with someone as Heaven-sent as me is forever).

Does that work for you? Probably not. And if it does, I want to see the results of your AIDS test first. Anyone who falls for a line like Ms. B delivers must be desperate to the point of extreme incaution.

My correspondent, having established what she perceives me to be, thinks that all that is now necessary is to haggle over the price. But unlike the tired, old joke, she fails to show a modicum of respect by asking if I would work for her for some appallingly high price. I'm still waiting for someone to offer me a million euros for a quickie translation; I have a great response prepared for the first one who does.

I shared the inquiry and my response with a few colleagues to ask them if they felt I had been to harsh. Apparently not. If one soft-spoken respondent had given the advice I received to that wimp General Sherman, the United States would not be burdened with its troublesome Southern politicians today. He, too, has no big problem with translation work being "exported" to the developing world by companies who care little for communication quality and customer safety, but like me he wishes they would go quickly and directly there and not bother us by ringing our doorbells like so many delinquent children.

It is really not our problem that bottom feeding agencies like this one have proliferated like rats on a garbage heap and are now gnawing at the cables in more respectable establishments and invading corporate boardrooms. When the food supply of clients where purchasing clerks are the key decision-makers for quality-critical elements such as translation grows scarce, the rats will turn on each other (as they have done) and eat each others' flesh. The red ink at Lionbridge for so many years in the past decade is just one example of this. I would think no more of stepping into the price wars between these lowball losers than I would of involving myself in the drug wars of the gangs in the areas of Southern California where I grew up.

I would like to contrast Ms. B's failed seduction with a successful one some eight years ago. The agency principal called me one day to chat, sounded me out about my specialties, work experience and general philosophy. He said he wanted to try me out with the idea of working together long-term if we were both satisfied. He offered a paid assignment, and when early in the relationship, his British reviewer had a fit about my work, calling it literal Germanic crap or some such thing, we discussed the matter at length, and when I challenged him to ask the customer which worked better for a US audience, he passed on both my original translation and the revision and never questioned my competence again after that. And the price? Oh yes, we did agree on one. It was OK at the time, now it's actually at the very bottom of my rates, but I've been so thoroughly seduced by excellent project management, reliable payment practices, respect and mutual support in many matters that I not only don't care, I actively help recruit new clients (for languages I don't do) and refuse to charge for doing so most of the time, because I get a great feeling from helping a friend and his team succeed in a tough, competitive environment.

I suspect there might not have been much difference between what Ms. B was willing to pay and what I take from this other agency. But the latter knew all the right dance steps, when to lead and when to be led. I have a great time working with them, and I never feel used. And when something warrants a special charge, I say so, and there isn't a problem. My other partners offering double and triple the rates of my old partner are often as fun or respectful, but while they might now take up most of my schedule, they cannot break the loyalty I feel to a partner who underpromised (never spoke of big volumes or any of that horsefeathers) and overdelivered with a truly productive long-term relationship.

Who's afraid of the big, bad MT post-editing job?

Still somewhat groggy without my third double espresso eggnog latté of the morning, I was woken up quickly by an interesting tweet from Andrew Bell, curator of the translator's social network The Watercooler. It pointed to a PDF file with eight slides summarizing the results of a global TAUS survey on MT post-editing by translation agencies.

The data are interesting and could be spun quite a number of ways. There were altogether 75 respondents out of God-and-TAUS-know-how-many-approached. I presume the latter figure was mentioned in the live presentation. About half of these actually provide such services to their clientele. Given all the talk about MT and "our" post-editing future, what fraction of business do you expect this activity to represent among the respondents? For 86% it was less than 10% of current revenue. I'm guessing much less. A mere 1.8% reported in the 26 to 50% range and none above that. Reality Check #1. The tsunami of MT hasn't hit the profession, nor do the waters appear to be retreating at the beaches. So don't head for the hills just yet. I assume that a certain company which MT'd and post-edited some fifty kazillion Wikipedia articles into Thai was among the respondents, and even that visionary firm didn't break 50% for MT-postedit revenues. So, people, there probably is other work out there in at least the near future.

Reality Check #2: The majority of respondents also reported little or no increase in such business in the past year. Most (75%) of the "post-editors" are in fact part of the regular stables of translators at these agencies, but I suspect these workhorses are those unable to digest better feed and make more than horseshit out of it. Or they are starving. Or a bit adventurously masochistic and can't find where they left the cuffs and leather whip.

If you want to surf the MT-postedit wavelet, do so by all means. It could be an interesting diversion, and as in with any path taken in life, I expect you'll meet some people, possibly even ones worth knowing. But if this isn't your sport, don't think you're doomed to starvation and oblivion.

I don't know how large the total market is for my German to English translation pair, much less for any other combination. An estimate of 100 million euros would be far too low based on a quick napkin calculation of how many translators it supports and what they probably earn on average. Some billions I expect. In any case, even in a relatively small "market" for a common language, a translator would need to capture only a miniscule fraction of the business to make a moderate to good living. I suspect that even our blogging overworked American translator serves somewhat less than 0.001% of the German to English market. The line between starvation and survival and between survival and prosperity is not drawn by the available volumes in the FIGES markets nor even really by the average rates charged in them. Nor by skill as a translator beyond a certain reasonable standard to be expected in a particular discipline.

If you want to earn "enough" as a freelance translator in major language pairs and avoid the ball-and-chain future of an MT posteditor, and you have sufficient linguistic and personal skills to avoid embarrassing yourself or anyone who recommends you, getting "there" is mostly a matter of organization, discipline, initiative and a good service attitude. My attitude is mostly bad, and I still do OK. And I strive to improve that attitude by shooting and skinning pigs instead of customers that may appear to share some of their characteristics. Find a way to get the message of fair service to those who need it and you'll have the freedom to worry about other things, like if the apple grafts in the garden will take. If you're clueless as to what to do, I can't help you. But I can offer you a link to 25 things translators should never do.

Subprime

One of the links in my blogroll - Patenttranslator's Blog - is becoming a favorite for its strangeness and irreverent insights. I don't remember where I found it, but as patent translation is one of those activities that I usually pursue recreationally, I probably bookmarked it thinking I would learn the occasional interesting, new thing about patents. Instead I've enjoyed music video links with each post which often have no discernible bearing on the matter discussed but which make good background music as I read the text. Yesterday's interesting post was about agencies who send out silly sign-up forms for folks like you and me to become part of the great feed lot of translating cattle waiting to be slaughtered by translation consumers hungry for low rates.

I see this time-wasting nonsense a few times a week. Mostly I ignore it , though on rare occasions I might bite if the letter is from a specialist agency with subject matter of great interest. Such agencies are relatively rare, however. The sheer inefficiency of most of this is appalling; too few use web technology for collecting their data, and those that do usually have horribly designed forms and databases. (I speak here as a user of these forms and as a former developer of database-backed web applications.) Even the better ones like I know from outsourcers using OTM (see the form on the demo site here) can be exhausting if you deal with all the subject area specialties (and try to navigate the categories), though the basic input is straightforward.

Patenttranslator (PT) suggested that the PMs that send out these cattle call information requests have way too much time on their hands. I would add that some of them are not too bright or not entirely honest. I had a request from one fellow in the US last week who said that he had seen my resume and might be interested in services for a patent project and wanted me to sign an NDA and provide him with a bunch of information including my resume, which he claimed to have read. Smooth move Ex-Lax!

How you deal with these inquiries is a matter of confidence between you and your priest. Those of us who have been around a while can usually sense when it's worthwhile to acknowledge this form of spam and when to ignore it (most of the time). Why would I give a rat's tail about the database of some bunch I don't know and don't have any particular reason to know as they beg for my data and please-don't-forget-to-include-your rates? You show me a specific project that interests me and I'll show you a relevant rate that fits the project's parameters. Most anything else is a waste of time.

In his commentary, PT introduced the concept of the subprime translator as a target group that should and probably does take an interest in these cattle calls, because they have time on their hands and no more profitable way to spend it. "Subprime" doesn't necessarily mean bad translators. But I find the term interesting in this context, and some of PT's associated comments got me to thinking that there is potential in that word to describe some of the high-risk behavior of LSPs who package and resell services from way down the food chain like others packaged and passed on junk loans until banks and other institutions started suffering a bit of a melt-down a few years ago. The sort of melt-down I've seen in the historical slag of past translations from a few major direct clients who used to deal with Top Ten Volume LSPs.

Some of these LSPs who make elaborate marketing promises for multiple levels of review and other crap they probably never bother with in reality probably have a lot in common with the sharks who sold subprime loans to borrowers who never understood the hook that was being set. Translation consumers (individuals, companies and organizations who pay the ultimate bill for the work) are too often unaware of what really goes on with their projects. Some are unaware that the databases (translation memories) with their company's data may pass through more hands in the course of a year than an "entertainer" at a busy Hamburg port brothel and that the hygiene practiced at such places probably exceeds that being practiced with their critical technical and marketing text.

Time and again I am amused by the purveyors of subprime translation projects who contact me here in Germany expecting me to embrace offers that good Indian translators I know (yes, there are good ones in my pair!) would not consider. Well above the three cents a word that everyone likes to bitch about, but marginal at best for generalist work and an utter joke for a project that requires the special scientific knowledge one can usually find only with a qualified engineer or chemist. Even if they do find a hungry engineer with the language and writing skills one almost never finds with engineers and that person is eager to do skilled work at a receptionist's pay, this is no more a relationship with a future than the encounters in the aforementioned Hamburg establishment.

So if the translators and the end customers are getting screwed in these subprime relationships, cui bono? The pimps as usual.

Fortunately, in my experience, this does not describe all of the MLV landscape, which is usually populated by diverse and interesting people, at least among SMEs. The serious ones worth working with add real value and can educate their customers to understand how this works so that they pay the rates needed to support viable results. One interesting organization that I know even follows a strategy of basing its offers to translators on a share of the gross rate from which the known overhead and target profit share are deducted, so depending on the particular deal negotiated with an end customer a translator's proposed compensation may vary widely. The intention behind that is certainly honorable and reflects good business planning at the MLV level, but I do wonder whether the translators taking everything that comes their way at whatever price are keeping an eye on their fixed overhead costs. I personally find it tiring to see fixed rate offers for which I have to calculate constantly whether it's worth getting out of bed and putting on the coffee. The MLV relationships that really work for me are the superprime ones where my target rate is respected and I don't care if the agency has a 300% markup, but where my time and effort is clearly respected and appropriate surcharges are offered for anything rushed or unreasonable before I have to bring those matters up. I've also noticed over the years that these MLVs usually practice the best hygiene with their customers' data, and even over years I see little unacceptable content infecting the TMs.

But how shall the translation consumer tell the pimps from these princes?

The end of agencies?

I had an interesting conversation with an agency owner tonight. He described how representatives of various agencies in a certain non-European country have been making the rounds here lately with larger agencies and companies offering technical manual translations with two rounds of proofreading for about half of what I typically charge for translation alone and about a third of what this agency typically charges. The frustration in his voice was clear as he talked about one project after another with 20,000 page volumes that get sucked up by these rajahs of translation who have armies of highly skilled translators working night and day at their keyboards for about 80 euros per month. "Really?" I asked. "Where do they get the skills to do this?" "Over here," he said. Now I'll admit that I haven't spent much time on German college campuses lately, and I only occasionally visit German software and engineering companies in person these days, but when I have had occasion to do so I haven't noticed a lot of people from this magical land of Fearsome Cheap Translators acquiring the skills here that would be necessary to make sense of the average crappy source text that I see from a German patent lawyer, a Swabian automotive engineer or a Frisian wood-burning stove specialist. Perhaps my old eyes can't penetrate their clever disguises of body paint in European skin tones and those ever-so-clever Kaiser Wilhelm false moustaches. Perhaps I am just in deep denial; a spectre must indeed be haunting the halls of agencies as one after another talks of contracts and opportunities lost on a scale that I with my modest earnings can scarcely imagine.

Perhaps, I thought, it's time to go to law school. There is surely a great future for litigators when those Boeing repair manuals translated by moonlighting elephant trainers for one cent per word show their worth and tons of metal rain from the sky.

In the past few years I have heard from many cherished agency customers that for their customers price is all that matters and they must play the "emerging country outsourcing game" to survive. I'm sure that's why I haven't seen any translations for the Maybach line from Daimler in a while. Some guy in Laos is surely doing those German marketing texts better and faster.

Despite all I've heard and the well-grounded commercial reasoning to explain this "inevitable" trend, the words "live by the sword, die by the sword" keep coming to mind. Substitute price for sword. Feed the beast with Trados-inspired discount scales that bear no real relationship to real effort in most cases and it only gets hungrier. Fail to communicate what real value you may add and don't be surprised if it isn't appreciated. Deal with people who are unable to appreciate the qualities of languages they haven't mastered and at the same time fail to build relationships of trust, real partnerships, and you might as well be casting pearls you-know-where.

I asked if this Fabled Land also had a stable of superior translators for Czech. Apparently not. Yet. I suppose the Lithuanians are safe for a while too, though they should watch those Cambodian tourists carefully. They might be on a mission of linguistic espionage.

I think one of my friends from this country will be in town in the next week or two, and I'll have to ask him if I've missed something. If there is in fact a gold rush in his country I hope he gets a few good pans full at least.

But these apocalyptic tidings reminded me of another prediction I heard some months ago regarding the End of Agencies, and I think that there is indeed something to this particular forecast, at least for the long term. It would go nicely with trends I have observed with larger companies and insourcing of translation project management functions again.

With the growth of online networks and databases for translators, editors, occasionally project managers, it is becoming easier for companies of all sizes to make direct contact with service providers for the language and skill combinations they need. Portals like ProZ or Translators' Café have serious disadvantages, of course, because it is often hard to determine the reliability of those advertising services until one has tried them, and sometimes there simply isn't enough time available to do a thorough evaluation. However, the growth of quality-evaluated networks promises to change that perhaps. ProZ has made some fitful efforts in this direction, but at each stage the usually reasonable efforts of the site have been met with howls of protest from the trees. More promising, perhaps, for companies looking for reliable service are evaluated networks intended primarily for agencies, such as the Quality Translation Network from LSP.net. I've seen this system from the inside for several months now as I've worked with the company on documentation, localization and administration issues. I've used the evaluation system for service providers myself a few times and see how the ranking system works. And it occurred to me that an "end customer" with a regular need for translations might just as well join such a network with an inexpensive SaaS account and directly access quality-evaluated data on all the roles needed and build a team dynamically for specific projects. Take provider X for one role, provider Y for another and specific freelance editors or translators for other roles. Feedback from satisfied or dissatisfied customers on a project manager's performance in complex multi-lingual projects might avoid many expensive mistakes.

Far fetched? Not really. When it comes to top quality, often the agencies are competing for the same small pool of service providers. I don't get sent the same specialist text by more than one agency every week, but it's happened a few times over the years, and more than once I've heard from someone who is asked by agency Y to edit his translation done for agency X. And that in common language pairs. It really is a small world.

Give the premise of a small pool of truly top individual service providers in a free market, a reliable quality evaluation system is a potential gold mine for quality- and cost-conscious corporate translation buyers. Will such systems arise and evolve to the point that the translation agency as we know it will be as dead as the dodo in our lifetimes?