Report From the FIT Congress -- Part I

Last week, I listed six sessions as highlights of the congress of the International Federation of Translators, which I attended last week in San Francisco. Here are summaries of the first three of these sessions. I will summarize the remaining three next week.

• Maggey Oplinger"Hybrid Careers: Atypical Translation Skills in the Workplace"
  
  
• Nataly Kelly "Translation Market Trends: What Freelancers Need to Know"
  
  
• Panel discussion "Creating a Lasting Partnership: Working with LSPs in the Age of Post-Editing"
  

Maggey Oplinger "Hybrid Careers: Atypical Translation Skills in the Workplace"

When working in such hybrid professions, the translator does not simply render the source text accurately in the target language, but rather re-writes it to better fit the target culture and customs. This means there is no complete source text against which to proofread the translated text. Johnson Controls, where Ms. Oplinger works, has an information storage system in multiple languages where text is tagged, so that information can be retrieved independent of the language in which the source text was written. Many of the hybrid jobs described are in-house positions, although some tasks (e.g., reviewing/editing) are sometimes outsourced. When managing an atypical workflow in house, it is important to plan all facets of the project (e.g., linguistic difficulties likely to be encountered in the target market), to clearly manage the project, to include all involved parties (e.g., monolingual subject-matter experts) in the project team, to clearly define the workflow and to plan for production (e.g., printing, shipping) after the translation/transcreation phase of the project has been completed. Monolingual teams must frequently also be educated about the need for translation/transcreation work on a specific project.

Nataly Kelly "Translation Market Trends: What Freelancers Need to Know"

There is a growing market for outsourced (i.e., provided by freelancers rather than staff, not necessarily outside the U.S.) language services, but most of that growth is in multimedia localization and similar work, rather than traditional translation. The U.S. market is fragmented into many language service providers and buyers. The buyers may even include different departments within the same large company. Most of these use multi-language vendors (i.e., translation agencies), but over half the large buyers of translation services use freelancers directly. Ms. Kelly's employer, Common Sense Advisory, publishes annual pricing surveys. In the U.S., end clients pay agencies US$0.26-US$0.28 per source word for German to English translations. Other trends include movement towards transcreation (i.e., re-writing, rather than translating, the source text), crowdsourcing (i.e., non-professional bilingual volunteers providing translations), machine translation, faster turnaround times and globalization of products and markets. Ms. Kelly noted that the buyers of crowd-sourced translations are generally not the same as those buying traditional translation services and that machine translation is often used to disseminate information internally or to provide fast customer support, rather than to update marketing materials or similar text. An audience member also noted that agencies increasingly use automated project management systems, where the translator and computerized system also take on aspects of the project manager's traditional role.

Panel discussion "Creating a Lasting Partnership: Working with LSPs in the Age of Post-Editing"

The panelists were Kåre Lindahl of venga corporation, Michel Lopez of e2f translations and Uwe Muegge of CSOFT. All three agencies work in the technology sector, with e2f translations specializing in post-editing of English<->French machine translations. At venga corporation, the translation tools are built into an Agile software development environment. Agile development means that individual portions of the overall product are being translated as the project moves along, rather than having the entire help system translated at the end of the software development cycle. While this guarantees a steady workflow for the translator, this setup requires translators to work remotely on the agency's own system. However, agencies using such a setup do not always provide training on their own specific tools. Since in an Agile environment source text is still being developed, translators can -- and are expected to -- provide feedback on that text. Either an hourly rate or a combination of hourly and word rates was proposed to compensate translators for the extra time required to provide feedback on the source text. It seems to me that that hourly rate should also be paid for the time it takes a translator to learn the agency-specific tools/environment, if no training is provided. During the discussion period, I noted that remote work on the client's servers can cause problems if that server is located in a different time zone and crashes during that time zone's off hours, but during the translator's working hours. I have encountered that problem before and found there was nothing I could do except to wait for the client's IT department to get into the office the next morning (while I was asleep in the U.S.).

A Brief Dispatch From the FIT Congress

As noted last week, I am attending the congress of the International Federation of Translators (Federation Internationale des Traducteurs - FIT) in San Francisco. Despite a good number of cancelled sessions (some of which were offset by last-minute additions), I found at least one presentation to attend during each of the 5 one-hour slots per day over the last three days. Taking in that quantity of information in such a short time does get tiring after a while, however. Two more keynote speeches tomorrow and the congress will be over.
A few highlights so far:

• Maggey Oplinger discussed "hybrid careers": jobs that include, but go well beyond, translation, such as bilingual writers, localization specialists or post-editors for machine-translated text.
• Nataly Kelly spoke about trends in the translation market, noting that while the volume of translation services has declined over the last year, multimedia localization services have increased.
• A panel discussion on translators' relationship with language service providers emphasized long-term relationships with freelancers willing to use the client's own tools remotely on the client's servers.
• Nicholas Hartmann noted "educated German disease," the tendency of German third-party reviewers to believe that their English is superior to that of the translator.
• Rosana Wolochwianski explained the various levels at which machine-translated text can be edited and what qualities are needed in a successful post-editor.
• David Rumsey advocated that translators talk to end clients so as to better understand the client's own processes.

I will report more fully on these sessions next week.

Are Conferences Worth the Price?

In the past, I've attended conferences organized by professional organizations, such as the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and the American Translators Association (ATA), the online community ProZ.com, the German technical communications organization tekom and a Portuguese translation agency, Tradulinguas. Only one of these, the regional ProZ conference in Vienna in late 2009, directly led to actual translation jobs. On the other hand, I met a number of people at these events and eventually signed up with new agencies whose representatives I met at the conference.

With many conferences becoming ever pricier and the fact that I also have to cover airfare and lodging myself -- not to mention the time it takes away from potential translation assignments -- I have to carefully evaluate the potential benefits of attending out-of-town events. I decided against this year's STC conference because of its fairly steep admissions fee, but I kept vacillating about the conference hosted by the International Federation of Translators. It's only held every three years and this year it's in the U.S. -- in California, but that's still a lot cheaper for me than flying to, say, Shanghai. After looking at the conference program, I initially decided that there weren't enough sessions relating to my particular interests and specialization to be worth the money I'd have to spend.

But on Monday I did, in fact, register for the conference and book a flight and hotel, as well. The conference program hasn't really changed, but conferences are not just about the lectures, but also about meeting other attendees, presenters and exhibitors. I already received two responses to last week's post about a potential bilingual ghostwriters' network, so I reasoned that it would be helpful to meet other translators from around the world. And what better way to do that than at an international translation conference?

So I'll be out of the office (although possibly posting to this blog) from July 31 through August 5. I also plan to attend the ATA conference in Boston in late October, so that will be another 4 days or so not accepting translation jobs. And then there is my actual vacation, from July 9-16 in Harrisburg and York, PA; Baltimore, MD; and Washington, DC. Let's hope all these "out-of-office experiences" won't dent my workload (and income) for the year too much ...