THE ALLURE OF PRICE AND TIME

One of the chief problems facing translators when they must bid on projects today is the monumental ignorance at large in the globalized world about precisely what goes into the translating process. Let me just restate that: The problem is monumental ignorance about what goes into the translating process when it is done properly and with excellence.

The advent of electronic translators, such as they are, has done a great deal to add to that ignorance, giving the lesser informed among potential customers the illusion that translation can be executed “at the touch of a button”. And this false sense of instantaneity is further underscored by ruthless, cut-throat, business-to-business wholesalers, who will go to any lengths to land a major project, even promising deadlines for jobs of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words for within a matter of days more than weeks or months, at the same or lower rates than those that a team of proper professionals would charge for carrying out the same job over a much longer period of time.

Everything from Soup to Nuts

The truth is that outstanding translators simply can't compete, price-wise or time-wise, with bulk wholesalers, who sell "words translated" as if they were a commodity. These were once fly-by-night individuals or companies that would bid on the translation of anything from a car radio manual to the complete works of Tolstoy applying the same criterion to all. Today they are still doing the same thing, but by exploiting the unskilled, the inexperienced, the mediocre or the desperate, some of them have become increasingly wealthy and have thus been able to buy themselves a corporate veneer in the world of B2B suppliers.

Their modus operandi is to bid equal to or just under what an excellent translator will charge and then to pay mediocre or poor translators miniscule rates to do the job. Why, you may ask, would a client go for this? Ignorance and convenience are the only answers.

Typically, the clients who accept working with translation wholesalers instead of an individual professional or a team of independent professionals who create semi-formal consortia in order to take on major projects:

a) Have no expertise in the target language so have no idea regarding the quality-level of the product they receive.

b) Believe that "business to business" is the safest bet when outsourcing work (since it ostensibly “solves all of the headaches” a client firm would otherwise have to deal with itself) and would thus rather work with a wholesaler that has a corporate profile than with an individual or group of professionals, no matter how highly recommended they might come.

c) Take translation as a “necessary evil” and “an unavoidable cost” for a certain area of business and thus consider only price and time factors in contracting this service.

d) See as “relative advantages” aspects of wholesale translations that, in terms of actual end-quality, are definite drawbacks (namely, the possibility of having an entire "stable of translators" at their disposal through the wholesaler and the assurance of “a quick turnaround”).

What this B2B approach really means is that the translators working on such jobs are usually inexpert, are being paid a pittance, have no time for research or revision and are probably each only doing a few thousand words of a much larger translation job, which signifies that the translation comes out as a sloppy, amorphous, patchwork quilt of varying quality levels and styles. If clients ask the wholesaler about this last aspect, they will usually be told not to worry, that copy and style editors will revise and rewrite the entire translation before it is delivered, but, in effect this seldom happens or is cursory at best: usually a quick once over and a spell-check, if that, are made to suffice.

Wholesalers typically take a huge chunk of the pie. Where a professional forming a team to take on a major assignment will, if honest, do part of the work him/herself and take a small finder’s fee (no more than 15% depending on the rate negotiated) for the task of bringing the client to the table, exploitative wholesalers will keep a major portion (anywhere from 60% to 85%) of the end-fee for themselves and, thus, will only take on translators who are willing to scramble for what’s left, as if the people doing the actual work were getting the finder’s fee and the wholesaler were getting the translator’s rate.

Corporate Blinders

This is the part of the mix that corporate clients simply fail to understand. Reared in a corporate culture, they tend to believe that corporate to corporate is the way to supply themselves and to outsource if they want to avoid trouble and inconvenience. But they forget that buying a translation is not like buying spare parts, raw materials or office supplies. It is more akin to buying craftsmanship, entrepreneurship or creative intellect. It’s about individual and team talents, not bulk commodities or supply and demand. What they don’t know and what corporate translation wholesalers take pains to conceal from them – pulling the wool over their eyes with videos and brochures showing their “corporate offices” full of “staff professionals” busy cranking out end-quality translations – is that wholesalers will generally only have a small, poorly paid in-house staff and, for major jobs, will have to outsource. Outsourcing is precisely what independent professionals will do as well…with one major and crucial difference: Real professionals will outsource to colleagues at a proper rate and will thus be able to attract sound professionals with the knowledge and experience to do an excellent job. At the miserable rates that they offer, wholesalers, meanwhile, must scrape the dregs at the bottom of the translation barrel for their outsourcing needs.

What this means, then, is that while the lone translator can’t compete in price, B2B profile or deadline considerations, the wholesaler can, in no way, begin to approach the quality level of a truly professional translator’s work. And furthermore, if corporate clients could only learn to see past their B2B prejudices, they would see that dealing with teams of independent professionals or true professional agencies (meaning ones that select translators according to their skills and pay them properly for the use of those skills), they would gain in quality whatever they might forfeit in ridiculous deadline demands. (If a wholesaler claims it can put out a high-quality 150,000-word translation over the weekend, it’s lying…period).

Translation Connoisseurs

Quality clients know that translating is a craft and an art that can't be mass-produced. That's why so many great writers, who are bi- or multi-lingual have always insisted on choosing their own translators (rather than leaving it up to publishers who are usually better informed than the usual corporate clients, but are, nevertheless, wont to opt for price and speed over quality and thoroughness). Examples I can think of include Günter Grass, who once called his translators "the author's best readers", Isaac B. Singer, who worked shoulder to shoulder with those who translated his works from Yiddish to English, Mario Vargas Llosa, one of whose translators I have met personally and know from whence I speak, and, of course, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, who were, themselves, meticulous translators and polyglots.

Last year I had the pleasure of working with an author who understood quality. We had originally set a six-month deadline for the translation of his 560-page work, but the complicated nature of the subject – the history of the world's major religions, their message of peace and their nefarious influence on war – ended up signifying that, in order to translate it properly, I had to do several hours of research for every hour that I actually translated. It also meant that, in the course of that research, questions arose that prompted me to debate certain points with the author, points that, in some cases, led to minor revisions of the Spanish original, as well as of the translation. In other words, in order to translate the book properly, I had to learn almost as much about the subject as the author did. Because of this, although I am sure it complicated his life to reschedule the production and promotion goals he had set, the author ended up extending the deadline to a year, rather than six months, in order to ensure that we got the translation right.

This, then, is the true nature of excellent translation. The rest is all about greed, exploitation, sleight of hand, and smoke and mirrors.