“Can’t you do that with a bit more effort?”
“Sorry, I’m trying.”
“Yes you are, very!”
(Boom, boom!)

But humans make mistakes too. Consider, for instance, a site to which I was recently referred, in the “languagering”, offering ” Training in writting”, and telling us that “writing can be a tedious tasks”.  It would appear that for that writer, checking spelling and proofreading were just too tedious by far!

And here is another, although the author of this one can be perhaps forgiven, as the text was submitted for proofreading and correction.  I will not name the source, as it is a client who pays me. It illustrates the mistake that can be made by some Germans (and no doubt those with other native tongues) who plan to save money by doing the “translation” themselves, then paying a native of the target for the proofreading only.  The problem is, of course, that the difficulties created by this process mean that the “proofreading and correction” may demand more time and money than simply translating in the first place.  The source text was “Bei Werkstattmontage gebohrt”. For those who don’t know German, “bei” is related to the English “by”, and carries meanings like “in association with” or “at the same time as”, as well as “next to” and so on.  It is not used, however, to convey agency in the same way as in “I was knocked down by a car”. “Werkstattmontage” is a simple example of a German compound noun, and can uncontroversially be translated as “workshop assembly”. “Bohren” is to make a hole, as into “bore into a piece of leather”; in engineering contexts it is most often translatable as to “drill”, and a “Bohrung” is a drilled hole.  So our phrase is a comment on a hole, and tells us that it is “Drilled during workshop assembly“. Our German “translator”, however, had rendered it as (wait for it…): “Bored by workshop assembly“.  They probably were!

Disclaimer: having criticised the spelling and command of language of others it is a cosmic law (WIP – Wilding’s Inevitability Principle) that I have made at least one silly mistake in this article.  Don’t blame me!

On the other hand, I have known companies who have at least invested the necessary effort in the preparation of preferred vocabulary lists, and who are keen to provide translators with access to these lists and to ensure that they are used to bring more consistent results. I should stress that this is only a tiny part of “authoring for translation”, but it is certainly a positive step even if it is only a small one.

After some repeated difficulty with GIC, I pointed out to them that if they have a preferred vocabulary list, and if they want me to use it, perhaps they could give me, their translator, access to it. You can perhaps imagine my disappointment when, instead of the large Excel file that I expected, I was told where I can buy their dictionary. Hmmm.

Until now I simply had a system in which unknown posters have to have their first post approved by me. Once I have approved a post from you, you are then able to post without further checks. This works automatically, it’s simple and easy.  So far I’ve only had one human idiot whose posts I rejected.

It’s the non-human idiots that are the problem; every day I have to mark a large number of spam posts as such, and then delete them. It is to be believed that the vast majority of these – perhaps all – are machine-generated: spambots! I’ve therefore just added a “captcha” system. Most readers will be familiar with this kind of thing – you have to recognize an oddly written sequence of letters or numbers, perhaps a word. This is very hard to program a machine to do, so mostly only humans will get past.

I think I have set it so that it is only if you are an unknown user that this will appear. Like the freedom to add messages without me having to check them that known users, with a history of at least one approved comment, already have, it’s only the first time that you should have to face this small hurdle. If you have any problems with it – please let me know!

Fritz D. had written a letter, and ordered a translation from Angela E.; when the translation was supplied, Fritz noticed that “danke schön” had been translated as “thank you”. He told Angela that he was not happy about paying, and asked her which word corresponded to “danke” and which word to ”schön”; the translation must be mistaken, he told Angela, as there was no “beautiful” to match the “schön”.

Yes, this is apocryphal, but similar things happen in real life.

The company that offers its help in this process (a company not of “consultants”, one may note, but of “resultants”) will be useful to you, because they will shorten the time needed to get to the “go-live”. 

I reasearching this I also found the noun “hire” being used in the sense of an employee. New hires have to be onboarded, it would appear.

Spit, foam and stab is all that I can say.

• expensive
• hard to get used to
• buggy
• often slow
• aimed at those who manage large translation projects rather than individual translators.

I can offer no opinion of my own, other than not being surprised, but I shall certainly be in no hurry to upgrade.

In fact so far I have not seen one single comment to the effect that it would have any value at all for me. Anybody want to make one here?

I had come to the conclusion that rates really have been falling for one, simple reason – one agency for whom I have done a lot of work over a number of years simply stopped contacting me. After around four months I wrote to them, asking if everything was ok. After all, bankruptcies happen, company principals die or get taken ill – there are all sorts of reasons why a source of work might suddenly dry up. Their answer was very simple and very clear: although (they were kind enough to say that) I am “certainly one of their best translators”, my rates were simply too high. When they ask their own customers for the same money that they use to charge, they simply no longer get orders. They would only be able to make use of me, they said, if I could restructure my charges in such a way that I would be getting only something like 75% of my former rate. My relationship with this trusted customer is a good one, and the circumstances make it quite clear that this was not a “try on”. I should point out that I had been charging this client the same as I charge everybody else. On the other hand, I don’t know what their own margin is, and I therefore don’t know how their charges to end-customers compare with those made by other agencies.

The implication was clear enough to prompt me to write to all the clients for whom I have done jobs in the last two years, bluntly asking them whether my current price is a problem. Every single one was kind enough to reply, and every single one said that no, my prices are perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable. All of them but one said that they were simply finding that there is, at present, much less work about, and that companies who need translations done are trying to reduce the amount, postpone the work, or in some other way put less translation out onto the market. The only one who claimed to be as busy as ever is quite a small concern, and focused primarily on French rather than German, so perhaps not typical of my other clients.

There does seem to be still plenty of support for the old wisdom that if people will not pay a decent price, they may indeed get translations, but that he quality will be very poor. If a bargain-basement approach were to become a trend that characterised the whole market, good translators would eventually become altogether hard to find.

Conclusion? I don’t know, but it’s food for thought.

Some of it is promising, there can be no doubt. But some of it is appalling. The translation business, like shopping for gifts, is largely unregulated. There is good quality material available, but it is up to the shopper to find it. As I looked at some of these sites I felt as if I had wandered off the street of high-quality department stores, where carefully selected perfumes, clothes and other desirables are displayed under favourable lighting behind polished glass prior to being sold, gift wrapped and paid for by credit card. Somehow I had found my way into back-alleys where the cheapest tat, knocked-off copies and toys made in the correctional institutions of China were being touted at the lowest possible prices – just don’t bother going back and trying to find the stall again when it turns out that your toy is covered in poisonous paint, is broken, and wouldn’t be likely to work even if it were in one piece. Two examples may illustrate what I mean.

Some time ago I joined twitter, but somehow never quite grasped what the point of it was. (I’m “wildingtranslat”, by the way.) So I recently invested an hour finding some people to “follow”. One of them, going under the name of LyricLabs, was generating a huge number of tweets about translation jobs involving every thinkable language combination. I clicked on one or two, to see what the deal was, but in every case I found no details about the job, but was just led instead to the company’s main website. I held out no hope, but for the sake of being annoying I mailed them to ask why this was. To my surprise I got no less than two answers:

Dear alex
Twitter is to get keyword listing in SE. Have told my office to be in touch with you
Rgds

and

Dear Mr. Alex
Thanks for contacting us. We have rooted our twitter links to our website only
Pl. send your updated CV
Thanks & Regards,

You will realize that I have cut-and-pasted these messages, so there is no need to put (sic) all over them to assure you that the mistakes are theirs. In other words

• although the site is run in English, they are not very good at the language
• they are too lazy to press all the necessary keys

and they are willing to admit that

• the job offers are all fakes, and they are simply pumping them out on to twitter in the hope that the links to their own website, included in each tweet, will improve their ranking on Google.

Needless to say, I am not following them on twitter any longer.

As a second illustration, I found what did seem to be an actual job offer on another site. The Word file was available, so I downloaded it and estimated that at my standard rate I would have wanted about EUR 190 for the job, say USD 250. Perhaps I would have been willing to negotiate down, let’s say $200. The potential client was offering between $10 (yes, ten) and $20 (yes, twenty). One respondent had offered to do it for $10, adding (again, I cut and paste – all errors of spelling and puctuation are the message author’s):
“Please allow us to do you a accurate and professional work.”
Someone else, offering to do it for $20, asserted:
“I completed my work. Your document is ready. i already completely translated your file. now tell me where to send you this file. thanks.”
A third respondent, perhaps feeling that $20 really was too little, and perhaps therefore capable of a higher quality, offered to do it for $60, supplementing the offer with the message:
“Hello, I hace checked your text completelly. At my price I can provide Native German Translation and Proofreading by Native English. My service is perfect,check my reviews. Best Regards.”

I now just need a little video of myself walking away, shaking my head in disbelief.

It’s local vs national that makes the difference. A local business can get its leads by networking locally. But a national business benefits from the extra reach and randomness that online working gives you.

The comment I send back was that “In many cases, no doubt. But in my case, it’s hard to be more international, yet I am entirely supply-limited. Once I’m booked, I’m booked, and outsourcing would be extremely unprofessional”, to which Alan replied (tongue in cheek, I assume) that I am therefore officially a “gifted amateur”.

By implication, freelance translators in general are “gifted amateurs”, a label that we might not all be happy with. (Yes, yes, I could say “a label with which we might not all be happy”. But I won’t.)

It struck me that this kind of misjudgement happens most easily when we try to analyze a field by sheer conceptual juggling, rather than referring to the phenomena that are out there. As the word “phenomenological” crossed my mind, I was further struck by the parallel with the shift from “comparative religion” to “phenomenology of religion”. Those of you who are not familiar with the field may think that “comparative religion” is an innocuous enough term. It might suggest an earnest, open-minded seeker with a clipboard and a checklist (with the results stored, no doubt, in an Excel file), noting that the Woobalists believe in Blongtarraby, while the breakaway Darishnymites assert that Blongtarraby should really be called Longbartnabing. Interesting stuff, eh? The fact is, however, that “comparative religion” got a bad name as it came to be associated with the almost Victorian notion that one could begin with a preconceived hierarchy, into which discoveries could be fitted as they were made. And yes, the top of the pyramid was monotheism, even “triune monotheism” – wouldn’t you just know it! The “phenomenology of religion” was intended to counter this thinking by putting the central focus on religious phenomena, whatever they may be, and only on that basis proceeding to look for underlying patterns or structures.

Well, academics have to make their living out of this, so the whole field is of course complex and subtle, but I am asking Alan to comment on my suggestion that the problem with his chart is a result of working from preconceived notions rather than from business phenomena.

I am more interested in the kind of Australianisms that a reasonably well-educated person would use when speaking more or less formally and perhaps not realize that an English (or for that matter Scots, American or what have you) English-speaker would find the expression odd, and perhaps detect that the speaker was Australian. As an example from elsewhere, I noticed in Ireland how the word “avail” was used in an extremely un-English way. For a start, the Irish say “avail” quite commonly, where in English English it is relatively rare, and rather more formal than Irish usage. What grated on my sensitivities when I first heard it, until I realized that it simply is the normal Irish way of speaking English, is that they do not use it reflexively. So where the English person might be judged to be pompous, but correct, to say “I availed myself of the opportunity to enter the dwelling”, an Irish grocer might put up a notice saying “Just collect coupons to avail of our half-price offer”. To see “to avail yourself of” in that context would be a surprise.

Inevitably I have now forgotten most of the subtle Australianisms that I have noticed until now, so this post is an opportunity to collect them over time. So far I have these:

• Trifecta – something like a hat-trick. Scarcely known in English English (well I, at least, had never heard it before) but not at all uncommon here.
• Identity – used in a context where English English might say “figure”: one hears, for instance of “underworld identity Bruce Smith” rather than ” underworld figure Bruce Smith”.
• Bash – whereas I would think of this as a somewhat colloquial word for a blow or series of blows, as when one bashes a nail into the woodwork, or even bashes somebody in the eye, in Australian English a bashing is used quite formally (again, I’m thinking of television news, for instance) to refer to somebody being mugged, beaten up or seriously assaulted. In the 19th century the word was sometimes used for a flogging – perhaps that is the origin of this usage?

And I know that I’ve noticed more, but what were they?