Is translation still a service or has it become a commodity?
In the annals of management science, it is well understood that making the best choice at each stage of a process may not yield the best global solution. This principle is aptly illustrated by Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future(New York: HarperBusiness, 1997), where Dilbert reports to his pointy-haired boss: “You saved one million dollars by having programmers in Elbonia write software for us. But we wasted four million dollars trying to debug the software.” Replace “programming” with “translating,” “debugging” with “editing,” and we get the big picture. هیچ مشکلی با اقدامات صرفه جویی در هزینه منطقی وجود دارد, اما صرفه جویی در هزینه ترجمه بیفکری اغلب به معنی پرداخت اضافی برای هزینه های ویرایش پنهان در نهایت. یکی از علل ممکن است در بر داشت زیر:
ترجمه عزیز,
ما به تازگی توسط یک مشتری تماس گرفته شد برای انجام یک ترجمه ثبت اختراع از انگلیسی به اندونزی. ما نیاز به یک مترجم فنی این است که راحت [SIC] ترجمه اطلاعات سیستم های اطلاعاتی [SIC]. بودجه ما این است که برای این کار محدود است و بنابراین ما می خواهم برای پیدا کردن که چقدر شما برای این نوع از کار شارژ. این کار در حدود [XX,XXX] words. لطفا به ما اطلاع دهید اگر این چیزی است که شما علاقه مند خواهد بود در است, و قیمت های خود را. لطفا رزومه کاری خود را ارسال و همچنین.
| امروز, به معنای واقعی کلمه هر کسی با یک کامپیوتر و دسترسی به اینترنت می توانید فورا راه اندازی یک شرکت ترجمه, access the many online translator databases, get a list of translators for all language combinations, and then act as an e-broker for potential translation projects. |
This typical e-mail was sent to a long list of translators; the message is transparent, the Freudian slip apparent. Anyone ready to quote the lowest, bargain basement, dirt cheap price, will most likely get the job. The e-mail implies that critical factors to ensure translation quality are not that important. The sender does not care much about the prospective translators’ comfort level in handling the job, professional experiences and qualifications. Simply note the request for prices precedes that for resumes or qualifications. Such e-mails, unfortunately, seem to be the norm these days. Within the last year, من به پنج نفر از این ایمیل ها در هفته دریافت کرده اند تا.
امروز, به معنای واقعی کلمه هر کسی با یک کامپیوتر و دسترسی به اینترنت (و چه کسی است که این روزها سیمی نیست?) فورا می توانید راه اندازی یک شرکت ترجمه (TC), access the many online translator databases (برج دلو, ATA, NCTA, etc.), get a list of translators for all language combinations, and then act as an e-broker for potential translation projects. تخصص ترجمه, دانش های زبانی و تعهد به کیفیت اختیاری هستند. به طور طبیعی, بسیاری از این E-کارگزاران نمی فهمم, مراقبت بسیار کمتر در مورد, تفاوت بین مترجمان حرفه ای و آماتور. کلمه آماتور, در معنای کلاسیک آن, کند حقارت معنا نیست; آن متضاد حرفه ای است و اشاره به کسانی که دنبال تلاش برای عشق و شور و نه برای پاداش های پولی. با این حال تفاوت بین یک آماتور وجود دارد (غیر حرفه ای) و آماتور (غیر حرفه ای), دومی اشاره و نه به نادانی فرد, بی کفایتی, و کیفیت کار عام.
The basic economics behind the pursuit of the cheapest translation cost is a no-brainer. In a typical car showroom, cars that yield the largest commission for the smooth-talking salesman, rather than cars with the best value, will most likely be pitched to ill-prepared and uninformed prospective customers. Likewise, the lowest price quoted by the cheapest translator financially translates into the highest commission for the broker. Clearly this car salesman mentality undercuts professional translators—who continuously invest more resources to ensure total quality control in self-editing time, up-to-date encyclopedias, dictionaries and self-improvement efforts—and undermines reputable translation companies who conscientiously adhere to the highest industry standards and operate on fixed overhead costs.
The lowest price or the best value?
The proliferation of e-brokers and have-website-will-translate bilinguals may have significantly increased the number of editing assignments on previously-translated documents. It is a vicious cycle: the explosion of the translation business over the internet may have caused a shortage of bona fide translation companies, competent project managers and qualified translators. The Peter principle applies: quite a few players have been promoted to their levels of incompetence. These incompetent players can afford to focus only on low prices (thus higher commission) and fast turnaround times (thus higher volume)—instead of on translation quality and culture-sensitive considerations—thanks to the anonymity and instancy of the Internet culture. Some do not even hesitate to make a killing, disappear in the darkness of cyberspace, and then reincarnate with a new name.
The degradation of average translation quality—due to mix-ups between the cheapest price and best value—generates an even higher demand for experienced translators and professional editors to debug poor translations. In order to accommodate these debugging assignments, professional translators are sometimes compelled to decline their fair share of regular translation work which is then assigned by hapless and unsuspecting project managers to mediocre or incompetent translators. Eventually these poor translations will haunt those professionals in the form of even more debugging assignments with pressing deadlines demanded by indignant clients who feel they were shortchanged by unscrupulous service providers.
The lowest price at all costs is exactly that
There are at least three main reasons for the proliferation of poor translations. First, there is the myopic penny-wise-dollar-foolish drive to get the lowest price in the fastest turnaround time at all costs. Second, there is the increasing role of amateurish-translators-cum-bilinguals who fancy themselves as qualified professional translators. Last but not least, there is the trivialization of internationalization.
In 1999, a TC inundated me with a flurry of calls and e-mails to translate a well-known organization’s flagship book of about 220,000 words in 3 weeks. Actually, the client had directly contacted me before, so I knew about the project but was reluctant to get involved. When I was eventually compelled to respond, I told them that the turnaround time was just impossible. But they confidently argued that the book could be simultaneously translated by five different translators (for which I was expected to recruit three fellow translators within that time frame!) because in previous years the client had translated the same book in the same time frame and under the same circumstances into other languages. Still giving the TC the benefit of doubt, I quixotically expressed concerns about quality and consistency issues: If the book was to be translated by five translators—even well-qualified professionals—the tight deadline would still not allow even minimal editing for the sake of terminological consistency. “The book needs not be consistent,” was the casual reply, “it just needs to be translated as soon as possible.” These words, after all, from people who called themselves a translation company.
“Make Sexual Harassment Your Business”
This subhead, for example, is a back-translation of a brochure’s headline, the incompetent translator having confused the semantic meaning of “business” with “concern” in Indonesian. The result is a strict literal translation of a seriously flawed misinterpretation, hence: “Make Sexual Harassment Your Business.” Other examples which have crossed my desk: mix-ups of “security” with “securities”, “mean” with “median”, “court” with “trial”, “authority” with “authorization” and so on. Recently, the simple phrase of “20-story plunge” in a safety poster for a famous worldwide elevator manufacturer was recklessly rendered with embellishments as “elevator counterweight of a 20-floor building.” Unfortunately, that’s not the end of the story. When I alerted the TC that we had another case of traduttori traditori, and offered to correct the error, the casual response was: “That’s not necessary; it had been translated and edited anyway—just proofread it!”
The most common mistake made by amateurish translators is their stubborn inclination toward word-for-word, verbatim translation without any respect for semantics, logic or context. Obviously this approach generates most of the problems, especially between two languages with different grammatical and syntactical properties. While professional translators work methodically in a conceptual framework approach—thought first, execution afterward—amateurish translators are trigger-happy to perform blind verbatim translations as fast as possible in a McTranslate sweatshop fashion. Caveat emptor: translation is among the few services where clients literally do not understand what they are paying for.
The problem of an accurate translation
دلیل سوم جهل مترجمان آماتور از تفاوت های بین فرهنگی است, از معمولیسازی بین المللی و سفارشی سازی و یا محلی سازی. حتی اگر مترجمان حرفه ای به ندرت هر چیزی در مورد بین المللی و سفارشی سازی ذکر, این دو فرایند مراحل انتگرال و ذاتی در یک فرایند ترجمه با کیفیت هستند; برای معیار یک ترجمه خوب است که باید آن را به راحتی به عنوان یک ترجمه به رسمیت شناخته نشده. یک بار, به جای انجام یک ماموریت ویرایش به طور منظم به عنوان برنامه ریزی, من به پایان رسید تا retranslating یک بروشور طیف ترویج شیوه زندگی سالم که شده بی پروا ترجمه کرده بود کلمه به کلمه و با این خط باز آغاز شده: "در سراسر کشور, جداول صبحانه مصرف در یک نگاه جدید. رفته اند تخم مرغ, بیکن, سوسیس, کرم و کره نان تست شما ممکن است به عادت کرده اند. خوب "در واقع ترجمه اندونزیایی بود" ", حتی دقیق, اما در واقعیت این است که دقت دقیقا مشکل! گذشته از این موضوع که بسیاری از مردم اندونزی صبحانه متفاوت, تصور کنید که داد و بیداد بالقوه اگر ترجمه کلمه به کلمه از این خط باز کردن در یک کشور که در آن منتشر شده بود 86.9% از جمعیت مسلمان, که می شود توهین اگر کسی پیشنهاد کرد که آنها دست زدن به بیکن چه رسد به اینکه به خوردن آن عادت کرده اند!
طیف سنجی NMR, هر کسی?
بسیاری از مترجمان حرفه ای و قابل احترام TC ها هنوز هم معتقدم که ترجمه یک سرویس است که به جای یک کالا. در پایگاه داده من در مورد 700 TC ها حداقل وجود دارد 135 TC ها که ترکیب کلمه "خدمات" یا "خدمات" در نام کسب و کار خود. Nevertheless the Internet—where almost everything is supposed to be a bargain or downloadable for free—has put this assumption to the ultimate test. Nowadays the most common first question in this business seems to be: “What is your rate?” instead of, “Are you comfortable translating a document about the application of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in molecular studies?” It is as if after our names, language combinations and telephone numbers our business cards should flash our rates in bold typeface. The lower, the better.
Jack Reznicki, a famous advertising photographer, wrote in his book Illustration Photography (New York: Amphoto, 1987), that when someone asks him out of the blue, “How much do you charge for a photograph?” he likes to answer, "اقیانوس چقدر عمیق است?"سوال لود, Reznicki می گوید, دریافت پاسخ لود. هر TC قابل احترام می داند که نرخ، اگر "استاندارد" یک مترجم حرفه ای در هر سختی یک نرخ پتو که تمام شرایط را پوشش می دهد. به طور خلاصه قضاوت مترجمان با توجه به نرخ های خود را به عنوان ساده انگارانه است که به قضاوت یک کتاب توسط پوشش آن. نرخ ترجمه در متغیرهای مستقل از قبیل اشکال از موضوع بستگی دارد, طول سند, زمان چرخش, حجم کار فعلی ترجمه و سایر عوامل فنی (نیاز به فرمت های, تبدیل بیش از حد متریک, منبع خوانایی سند, etc.). Translating a 6,000-word brochure about an automatic external defibrilator with biphasic waveform technology over the weekend is a completely different game than translating a newspaper clipping on a regular business day.
The hidden costs
The pursuit of the cheapest translation cost at all costs highlights the mentality of Dilbert’s boss and the “Elbonian” syndrome as illustrated by Scott Adams. Responsible linguistic project management comprises much more than simplistically maximizing profits and minimizing costs, as sooner or later such conduct will tarnish the industry’s overall reputation. We have witnessed HMOs becoming the target of Jay Leno and David Letterman’s late-night jokes as financially-obsessed and medically-untrained claim reviewers are allowed to make critical medical decisions. Likewise, if monolingual bean counters are allowed to make critical linguistic and cultural decisions, the translation industry may be the next laughing stock. For a client, the bitterness of poor quality will be remembered long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten. For most of those who read texts poorly translated into their native language, a ridiculous translation will always corrupt their first impression of a brand image, or a corporate image, regardless of subsequent corrective actions.
Selling translation services does not have to mean selling out. Whether translation is a service or a commodity depends on the practitioner’s personal attitude, conduct and ethics. Translation is a commodity for those who succumb to the temptation of selling out, for the sake of volume and short-term gains. It is a service for those who consistently adhere to the most rigorous standards and follow their conscience for the sake of quality and long-term professional relationships.
© Copyright Translation Journal and the Authors 1999
URL: http://accurapid.com/journal/13xlation.htm
