Hyperpolyglots or Unscrupulous Translators?

Last week, the New York Times profiled a New York high school student whose hobby was to learn a large number of different languages. The student, Timothy Doner, now creates You Tube videos of himself speaking in various languages, making him a minor Internet celebrity. By his own admission, he is not striving for near-native fluency in any of these languages, but rather attempts to learn the basics of as many languages as possible.

Doner is part of a select group of individuals who know dozens or more, often very dissimilar, languages, so-called "hyperpolyglots". They collect linguistic knowledge the way others collect porcelain figurines or autographed baseballs. It certainly takes quite a talent to learn foreign languages that quickly and it also helps to start that hobby young.

I'm not sure whether the e-mails I have seen advertising translation services from and into a dozen or more languages provided by a single person were from such hyperpolyglots or from unscrupulous translators. I could see people with a relatively basic (but not rudimentary) command of a language attempting to translate simple general texts, such as an invitation to an event, from that language.

Most documents handled by professional translators, however, are much more complex and/or specialized. So even if the person advertising such services were a talented linguist who collects languages, I doubt he or she would be able to accurately translate, say, a technical whitepaper for a new type of construction machinery into half a dozen languages.

As always, the challenge is to explain to end clients why they are unlikely to receive a translation of acceptable quality from such a super-multilingual translator and why that matters.

Language Learners as Translators?

The recent newsletter of the American Translators Society contained a summary of an article published by New Scientist (Great Britain) about a free language learning website called Duolingo (Learn a Language, Translate the Web). At this point, it only teaches German and Spanish. So far, so good.

But Duolingo not only teaches its users a new language, it has them translate from that language and check translations provided by other learners of that language. This is not just a learning exercise (incidentally, apparently not supervised by a teacher), but Duolingo uses these efforts to build paid-for translations of websites.

Not to disparage talented language learners, but I wouldn't dream of translating from a language I hadn't thoroughly mastered. Unless the website in question consists entirely of short subject-verb-object sentences, maybe with an occasional adjective thrown in, I doubt very much that such a translation would adequately grasp the subtleties inherent in the original.

Granted, the initial translation is reviewed by other amateurs before being accepted. But simply having several people who are just learning a language deem a particular translation correct does not make it so. I have edited text translated by professionals who had mistaken a subject for an object in a long German sentence. How much more likely is such a mistake for someone who is not fully fluent in the language?

Duolingo seems to be another step in the continuing decline of linguistic quality, both for translations and text written in the author's native language (to wit: typos, grammatical errors and repeated text in books printed by large publishers). Can we stop that decline? Is it even worth trying?

Feast or Famine: the Freelancer's Eternal Lament

Last week, I wrote about trying to market myself. This week, I wish fewer clients wanted my services. Earlier this week I was working on three projects simultaneously while a fourth one was waiting in the wings. Now I'm down to two projects and had to decline two more because I can work only so many hours in a week. Besides, sometime this weekend I have to catch up on invoicing and following up with people I met lately at a couple of networking events.

That dilemma of too much work one week, none the other, is, of course, familiar to any freelancer. But the problem seems to be exacerbated in the translation industry where many projects have extremely tight deadlines. Even if a project were large enough to keep one translator busy for a few weeks, it usually needs to be done so quickly that it is divided up between different translators rather than spread out over time. Not only does this worsen each individual translator's uneven cycle of work, it opens a whole other host of problems in terms of different writing styles and terminology.

This brings me back to the fact that translation is frequently an afterthought at the end of a production cycle, rather than a planned step with appropriate deadlines. I have written about this before, but it bears repeating: end clients need to learn that the translator needs time to provide a quality product and that they therefore must build that time into their project plans. But as long as end clients can get 24-hour turnaround on translating 10,000 words, they won't learn. So language service providers -- agencies, but also translators -- must educate them about the time involved and refuse to do rushed, low-quality jobs.

That, unfortunately, does not appear to be where the profession is headed. I, for one, am looking for direct clients where I can negotiate terms and deadlines in advance. That, however, only works for the precious few companies that don't already have a contract with an agency and don't need their text in 20 different languages. It remains to be seen whether I can actually find -- and convince to hire me -- enough such clients so I can get out of the rat race translation has become. Stay tuned for updates ...

Be Organized and Keep Your Translator Happy

Quite a while back, I wrote about issues to note when writing for translation. During a recent large translation project, I realized that clients may also need to be educated on potential organizational issues related to translation. So here are some dos and don'ts for clients preparing for a translation:

1. If there is a glossary, provide it up front, not a week into the assignment. This means scheduling enough time to develop the glossary before assigning the translation.
   
2. If you want the translator(s) to develop a glossary in the course of the translation, tell him/her up front. Accept a format that can be exported from common translation (CAT) tools -- usually a tab- or comma-delimited file.
   
3. If you absolutely need a glossary in a different format, expect to compensate the translator for the extra time spent preparing it.
   
4. Proofread the original (source) text, paying particular attention to missing text, garbled sentences and similar problems that impede understanding.
   
5. Remember, the translator is not a member of your staff. He/she is therefore not familiar with company-internal acronyms, such as abbreviations for names of departments or specific jobs. If you use these, provide the translator with a list (incl. the meaning/full wording of each acronym).
   

If you are a translator, are there any other issues to be added to this list?

If you are a translation buyer, what else do you provide the translator to ensure a smooth project?