Juggling formats

Juggling formats has probably been an issue for translators since ancient days when the various media of stone, clay and papyrus required different tools and sets of skills. And the Babel of formats has only gotten worse over the millenia as any practicing translator knows instinctively. It often seems that the portion of time spent on actual translation diminishes as customers submit documents with insane mark-up schemes that require graduate studies in formal logic to sort out. Some time ago, I published a little PDF guide on preparing MS Word and PDF files with content to exclude, i.e. cases like when a customer asks you to "translate only the green text, proofread the hot pink text, pray for the red text and ignore the rest". I thought I had pretty much covered all the cases when last night I received a help request from a charming colleague who had read the instructions but still couldn't sort out what to do with her particular project. It was actually a scenario I had described - copying text to translate from one column into another and hiding the original source column - but in her case, only the green text in the source column had to be copied over for translation with a translation environment tool. Minor variation on an old theme.

But there are sooooo many of these variations. I had one yesterday that had me baffled. Three simple Excel spreadsheets that refused to import into memoQ. I was really baffled by this one until Kilgray's support department offered the following explanation and workaround:

Hi Kevin,

As far as I know this error message occurs when embedded tables are present in the Excel document. At the moment unfortunately memoQ cannot import the files you have sent us in this format. I can suggest two workarounds in this case:

- You can convert the embedded tables to ranges, please check out the following guide:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/convert-an-excel-table-to-a-range-of-data-HA010067555.aspx

- You can save the XLS file as Excel 2003 XML format in Excel, then this XML file can be imported to memoQ with the Excel2003 filter. After you have exported this XML file you can save it as XLS in Excel.

These suggestions work, but by the time I got the timely response I had already gone another way copying table content into MS Word, the re-importing it to Excel via OpenOffice to avoid getting messed up by line breaks in the cells. All a bit complex and time consuming, all of it an unwanted distraction from what I would much rather do: concentrate on producing the best translated text I can.

I have about 38 years of IT experience of various kinds, though for much of that time computers played a supporting role for other interests. But still I'm reasonable good at sorting out data migration puzzles, format nightmares and the like give a little time to ponder matters (though, alas, in our profession, time is one element that is often missing). However, lately I am often hard put to find solutions for some of the crazy format challenges presented. And if I find things a bit nightmarish, what must others with less geeky histories be experiencing? Something is definitely wrong with this picture. More than webinars, training courses and dummy books is called for, but I can't say what. And the high priests of complexity, the witch doctors who make a good living as consultants from other people's confusion, see the problem as a opportunity... and perhaps that is part of the problem.

Alex Eames saves a life

Alex saved a fox tonight; I was so engrossed in reading a draft of the new version of his advice book for translators that I didn't see Meister Reinecke until he had finished off the tasty stink bait and was headed for the bushes to get out of the rain. Taking a netbook to the raised blind isn't conducive to hunting success it would seem.

The new themes of the book are found to some extent in the material of his recently revived tranfree newsletter, but there was a lot of other useful new content as well as interesting online media statistics. Although I suppose I could almost be counted as an "old pro" by now (well, "old" at least), I finished the book with a nice little to-do list of changes I need to make in my business marketing. Like earlier versions of his book, this one doesn't make any enormously surprising points if you are blessed with a little basic common sense, but it offers a nice, digestible summary and reminder list that can help brush the dust off the glasses of "old pros" whose vision of the profession has gotten a bit obscured. And the book is as useful as ever for those starting out in the profession. An earlier version was probably the best general advice I received on getting started and was worth in practice about two orders of magnitude more than I paid for it.

There are so many good points in the book that caused me to make a note to myself that I wanted to write a blog post on the subject. Simple, powerful stuff like the discussion of client acquisition costs and the high value of repeat business. Sure, it's "obvious". But how well have some of us learned that lesson if we are still inclined to turn the cannons on customers in difficult situations which, if handled with a bit of grace and intelligence, could be used as opportunities to reinforce one's professional reputation and increase customer loyalty? I've earned a few demerits there this year as I've dealt with reorganization stresses and other issues, and reading Alex's clear exposition on the subject was a fine and necessary mental Kur in a very real sense. The discussion of translator CVs (résumés) is another point which is discussed often, but the guidance of his clear examples will be a great help to many I think. It also reminded me that I need to trim half a dozen pages or so from mine... something I have been aware of and intended to do for a decade now as soon as things slow down a bit :-)

No idea when this year the book is scheduled for release, and some important additions and revisions of the content are apparently still under consideration. But the structure of what I've seen and the updates to the content make this book as relevant to survival as a freelance translator in today's market as the original editions were when I started translating full time. The markets for translation are indeed changing in some interesting ways now, and I think that this new edition of the book will be a valuable mixture of timeless good advice and strategies for staying of top of a rapidly evolving global situation that affects many translators. If you aren't already a tranfree subscriber, I recommend signing up for the free newsletter so you won't miss the release announcement later this year.

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?