Professional translation industry

From My Wiki

Ed: An overview of how the traditional translation industry works.

Gunner: Dave, doing notes again - WHAT A GUY!

Ed: Before I joined dotSUB, I was in the translation industry for 20 years, very corporate. "vendor manager for (a region)". We had USA office, Latin America offices, one in Canada. I had to find resources for translators. it as very different to the translation communities here. Its a 12 billion dollar industry, booming and just keeps growing. of all the content in the world, less than 1% is professionally translated. there is a huge amount out there that isn't translated, and yet its a 12 billion dollar industry. its a very fragmented industry too.

The largest company is LionBridge, they have around $400 million revenues. 2nd largest is $150 million, then after that, about 50 companies who are $50-100 million. then 100s of companies with revenues from $100,000 to a million, and then many many mom-n-pop shops who do a book a lot less. LionBridge can compete with a single free-lancer running his own business for a job - thats how fragmented the industry is.

most translations companies don't do translations; they don't have a guy in a room waiting for a bit of Zulu content to come in. at least 80% of work is farmed out, and the split is about 50/50 between the company and the translator. they used to be more for the companies, and its changing, and changing fast - new tools, and translators charging more and customers becoming more educated and paying less..

everything from Microsoft is localised into 42 languages, and their main things are put into 60-70 languages. Adobe, same thing. Google is a big client, LionBridge works on all their Google translate stuff. Google do great machine translation, and they are a very smart company and they are doing a lot of work there.

the licensing doesn't effect the translator, or the company, the client owns all the copyrights. its very private and confidential, all they do is translate it and return it.

translation is done in Microsoft word. whatever the end product is. its extracted from whatever, put into word, and emailed as an attachment. a lot of translators know about HTML and use a text editor, but there's always an engineer checking things.

i personally think all this web based stuff means the translation industry is fucked.

so its project management, editing and proofreading, and some linguists are in house and do terminologies and ensure consistency. these are the "lead editors". so we have teams of translators, editors and proofreaders. T.E.P. Translating, editing, proofreading. any text goes through these 3 eyes, and then it goes to a project manager and quality control. say with medical stuff, its INCREDIBLY important that its done right.

so that's a lot of people, and with 60 languages, that's like 180 people minimum. and there are multiple versions of everything, and a good editor can go crazy with this stuff. these many files go out in word, they get translated, an t

Q: editor and proofreading?

A: Style and consistency, a prose heavy text, and editor makes it more consistent. can anyone be a good translator? no, not for me, you need to be able to write, to understand material, and to have domain expertise. medical translators, technology translators, mechanics, etc. translate a manual on how to construct a turbine engine, is not something every speaker of a language can do. a good translation company puts good teams together. if you are paying someone to edit something, the editor will want to pull it apart, "i walked down the street yesterday" into "yesterday i walked down the street" but this is really bullshit busywork. a good editor puts a good team together and goes as little as possible - of course if they get a file and do no changes it looks kinda bad for them, like they did nothing, but they did something before it got to them. A proofreader will check all the dates are correct and that kind of thing.

so the industry is booming, its one of the oldest professions; people always needed to communicate across cultures, and so its a traditional professional, there are schools and ways of working that are ossified, its an art form, and one of the first things to learn is "respect the artist" - a good freelancer makes a LOT of model; today they are paid by the word, and a good translator can do 3,000 words a day. if they have 70,000 words and its due by Friday, that's divided by 3k each and that's how many freelancers you need, and you split it up and ship it out. and free software is a lot of material, its amazing how it all gets translated - and without much money!

Dave: software freedom is a strong motivator

ed: so a good translation reads the same as the source. if the source sucks, the translator can't do much with it. many thing need to be translated by law, medicines and so on, and translators find typos and small problems in that stuff ALL THE TIME, because no one really reads it. so if we found a typo, we'd tell them, we wouldn't sent corrections.

q; do you do English-English translations?

ed: sure, gas to petrol, all that stuff. USA, Africa, Australia, UK, many of them.

Also, the end user is a lot different; people pay for translation to sell their product. its advertising, finance legal documents, or product manuals, etc, its a lot of work in advertising because taking a Nike shoes campaign, posters, radio, etc. the hardest thing is a tag line or slogan, "just do it" is very hard to translate. A funny one in the USA was "big apple goes bananas" - how does that work in Chinese? so that's very creative and exciting. and bread and butter work, user manuals say, where they are not works of art, and many translators make a game and an art of it, to do it as fast as possible.

machine translations are a tool for translators; its a way to communicate for most people, but for translators its a tool that makes it quicker and they can do more work and make more money from more volume.

q: isn't the volume fatiguing?

ed: well yeah but its your job. if you can do 3,000 words a day by hand, and 10,000 with a machine, you'll make more money even if you get less per word. so you translate it by machine and edit it by hand.

So with dotSUB, I'm looking for volunteer translators, and getting hired professionals to improve it, and then giving that feedback to the volunteers, and if they get to a high standard then I can start paying them too. dotSUB is not a translation company, its a tool company and we offer translation as a service.

There's an interesting thing with Esperanto, where people will translate into that language just for the practice!

And we are seeing less and less of the really bad "Engrish" style manuals. legal industry is a bread and butter industry; boxes and boxes and boxes of documents. business transactions. banks leaflets are all translated and done professionally. so its a big industry that's kinda invisible.

i went to clients and said "you HAVE to make the

65% of Microsoft's revenue is not form the USA. a lot of American companies were like "if they don't speak English, fuck them" up to the late 90s. now that's changed a lot.

things happen so fast on the web, its changing the industry a lot. the 99% of industry that wasn't being translated is now a opportunity for everyone here as well as that industry, and many people there see it as a big threat.

i think there are people who'd like to translate things and do it a lot cheaper. dotSUB it looking to do things really inexpensively or zero price.

Dave: i think its important to distinguish Free As In Freedom and Free As In Beer.

ed: sure, and that freedom to fork and continue changing things is important, but the economic effects are important too with regard to the existing industry. many TV shows aren't available at all in other language communities, and now they can be subbed with tools like dotSUB, and that's a big revenue opportunity.

Andy: how important is timing with video? is it like karaoke?

ed: well, if this conference was videotaped, it could be close and that would be okay, you'd get the gist of it. but a Hollywood system need to be timed pretty perfectly.

Also, languages expand/contact. this effect print layout a lot, for example. so a translator can edit things so it explained shorter, and you can change the font size and stuff. but if you have 37 seconds of Spanish for a 30 second English ad, that's a problem. I've done a lot of lip syncing work and voice over work; the timing is very important there. lip syncing is almost impossible. but its getting better.

training videos in companies are a big thing here. "UN" style is where the original starts and then the translation fades in over the top. you get that bit at the beginning so you are prepared and know that its not lip-synced. Ive worked with actors who are just brilliant, and there is an actor who does the Italian voice for Dustin Hoffman. if Dustin isn't working, this guy is pissed off because he's out of work too.

cultural localisation is also part of this; the layout might change in a print design if the language is longer, but the design might change in other ways too - colours mean different things, and so on. Eg, we had an American company using a bicycle messenger as a metaphor in their ad, and we had an Italian and french consultant advise the company

its not just translating words, its very difficult to write in non-native language. people who speak many languages are not translators in many languages. yes Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and french are quite similar, and people can do all of them into English, but its so rare to find people who can do more than that. its a real art form, and as the too worlds meet of professionals and on line communities, as they come together, the translation world will freak out, but the quality will change. many people who never thought about how hard it is to translate something now face it.

its a big deal when you learn a new language well enough to make a joke in it. it like that, being able to do translation is a big milestone.

Anas: In Arabic, we read right to left, so if you have 1 2 3, 1 a sad person, 2 a person using a product, and 3 a happy person, and you show that comic in an Arabic country, then the ad says "they were happy and used the product and were sad" - and companies run these ads and have their sales plummet! Also, Google have AdWords so they think they can make money from ads on machine translation pages.

Ed: right, everyone uses Google 4-5 times a day. if you're speaking Spanish, and you do a search, you can translate web pages so you can understand it. and you'll use Google and not a local search engine with that feature.

Andy: Google doesn't interact with people much, they think its all totally automate-able.

Ed: Google is an amazing company

Andy: Yahoo does use people a lot, and their stock sucks. So whose to say Google isn't doing the right thing by fully automating things. Yahoo may go out of business or be bought by Microsoft or something. Google is hard to measure because their revenue isn't related to their work; Google does good work, and they have a high stock price, but their work is really hobby work. They do they best Arabic in the world, but they never earn any money directly from that. its amazing.

Ed: ITA, American translator institution, certifies translators. there are many certification programs. many firms don't require it specifically, but they look for it and prefer it, sure. certificates of accuracy are important for legal and medical documents. if there's a mistake, the translation company is liable. there are mostly free-lance translators, there's very few in house staff, and the test is 2-500 words, the test is graded, and then the person is graded. its 1 to 5, 1 is poor, 3 is a good one, 5 is a god.

Andy: is there a risk that people come in, grade high, and then subcontract to lower people.

ed: no, its easy to spot that kind of thing, its such a personal art form. So with dotSUB, The linguistic lead will be paid, and they will give feedback and direction to the other non-paid volunteers, and it will hang together, I hope.