Checking Out Potential Clients

A recent question in the Translators Worldwide group on LinkedIn prompted me to write this post. An English-Spanish translator was describing a potential job offer she received by e-mail which raised a few flags for her. She wanted to know whether that e-mail might be a scam, rather than a real translation project.

As small-scale businesses providing services to far-flung (sometimes international) clients, we face this situation not infrequently. How do we know that a potential client will, in fact, pay us after we deliver the translation? Worse yet, how do we make sure the bank account information we may provide on our invoice for purposes of direct payment is not abused to hack into our account digitally and syphon off our money?

The short answer is: we can't make sure. But we can take a few precautions. When I get a request from a new client, I check a few things:

• I google their company name and look for:
  
  
  
  1. a professional-looking company website with physical address information (i.e., a house number and street, not just a PO box)
     
  2. other websites/forums referencing this company
     
  
  
• For U.S. companies, I use whitepages.com's reverse lookup function to check the name and address connected to the phone number. If the phone number is unlisted, it's probably not a real company.
  

For agencies I also:

• check the ProZ.com blue board for other translators' experiences with that company.
  
• check paymentpractices.net for other translators' experiences with that company's payment practices.
  

If there are no references at all on the web to this company and/or the company has no website, I assume it's not a real company -- at least not one that would work internationally and therefore need translation services.

I have sometimes taken calculated risks with jobs for which I wasn't sure I'd get paid, but I generally only do that with small jobs.

If the client looks like a potential payment problem, I ask for 50% of the estimated cost up front by PayPal. That way the potential client has no bank information. I transfer incoming PayPal payments to my bank account, so if anyone could get at my PayPal account, I wouldn't lose much money.

Granted, there are legitimate potential clients out there who are just not good at marketing their business -- or don't need to market it on the web, e.g., because they have enough word-of-mouth referrals. My brother's niche business manufacturing high-end musical instruments is such a case, for example. But how do I know this is not just someone who thinks they have a great idea the world will pay for, but then finds out that the world is not interested and consequently has no money to pay their suppliers (including me)?

In the end, I generally trust my instincts. If it looks fishy, it probably is. I may have lost out on some potential assignments, but in the end I have gotten paid most of the time -- even by private individuals in Australia.

Language Swapping Site

A blog posting featured in MultiLingual News' weekly newsletter alerted me to an interesting website, called lingomatch. It is intended to help people who want to learn a foreign language find a speaker of that language to practice with. In exchange, they'd teach their partner their own language. My daughter used a similar system run by the University of Leipzig's (Germany) foreign language department for its students to learn rudimentary French while studying there.

The site seems to be still fairly small, with fewer than 50 ads listed in New York City, for example. As the blogger noted, it's also currently limited to large cities. While this service may not be necessary in very small towns where people know each other, it would be particularly helpful in smaller cities, where there may not be as many bilingual people as, say, in New York City.

Such a swap of linguistic knowledge is, of course, no substitute for an actual language teacher, who not only speaks the language in question, but also knows how to teach it (not to mention being familiar with its grammatical structure, rather than simply taking grammatical constructs as given). It is, however, a great supplement to a language course or a good way to practice a language that was once learned formally, but has remained dormant since.

The ads list only one "speaks" language, presumably the person's dominant language -- which, however, raises the question of how truly bilingual people could list both languages as options for teaching others. Particularly in places like New York City, where many people do grow up with English plus one or two other languages, such a situation is easily imaginable. Note to lingomatch's developers: please allow multiple selections (limited to two or three maximum, however) in the "Language I Speak" drop-down menu of the "Post Ad" screen.

I just posted an ad to find someone to help me revive my Spanish skills. (I used to live in Mexico City, but that was a long time ago.) I'll report in future posts on how that search works out. (Some of my friends are Spanish speakers, but having a dedicated time, place and person for learning a language seems a better way to stay on track.)

Client Education & Translation Processes

Yesterday I went to the Barnes & Nobles text book store on 5th Ave. and 18th Street in Manhattan (New York City). The store bills itself as "the largest bookstore in the world" on some of its windows facing 18th Street. Not finding any books on translation theory or practice in likely sections (Foreign Language, Linguistics, Reference), I asked a store clerk. After looking my request up on a computer, he announced that the store didn't carry a single book on translation.

In the March 2010 ATA Chronicle (the American Translators Association's magazine), Howard Clark calls the U.S. "an immigrant-based, yet largely language-ignorant society" in his opinion piece "Clients, Freelancers & Translation Agencies: Productive Partnership or Missed Opportunities?" It seems to me his assessment is spot-on. Mr. Clark then continues that, given this fact, "client education is critical".

Right again, but how do we, as translators, educate an end client whose identity we may not even know? This should be the translation agency's responsibility, but in my experience in the real world of short deadlines and tough competition for large projects that education is frequently given short shrift. If we work directly for end clients, our chances of explaining how translation works and what is required for a sucessful, high-quality product, are much better.

One resource for doing so is the American Translators Association's Client Outreach Kit. Another is a page on our workflow, either posted on our website or sent to prospective clients along with other promotional literature. The advantage of such a page (which agencies sometimes already have) is not only client education, but also a way for translators to learn best practices from each other. Maybe another translator has already found a solution to an issue I am still struggling with. If he/she has posted his/her translation process, I can profit from his/her experience, rather than having to re-invent the solution.

While each of us works a little differently, much of the process is likely the same -- or at least very similar -- for all of us. Through sharing our own workflows, we may be able to define a relatively standard process for non-agency projects. Such a standard process would, in turn, simplify client education. End clients would have a better idea what to expect when hiring a translator and may therefore be more likely to actually provide the resources and time we need to produce a high-quality translation.

Based on Linda L. Gaus's "Top 10 Pet Peeves of a Technical Translator" (ATA Chronicle, February 2009), here are some items to be incorporated in educating clients about translation processes:

• Provide context
  
• Provide reference materials
  
• Provide specialized terminology
  
• Have time for questions
  
• Don't assume you speak the target language better than the translator
  
• Proofread/edit the source documents
  
• Finalize the text before translation begins
  
• Provide diagrams/illustrations where appropriate
  
• Empower one person to decide translation questions
  
• Schedule sufficient time for the translation
  

Look for a future post on my own workflow and ideal translation process.

The Translation Industry's Fee Structure

One of the comments about my last post on machine translation (The Changing Role of the Translator) was that while post-editing machine translations pays less, it also takes less time. That's true -- if the machine translation was a reasonable understandable rendering of the source text in the target language. This is sometimes the case, but not always. I have worked on some translations (even ones purportedly performed by humans) where the effort to "fix" an incoherent -- or just plain wrong -- translation didn't take significantly less time than translating the document from scratch.

That's why, in the context of becoming post-editors of machine-translated texts, we need to change the current fee structure in the translation industry. We should be charging by the hour, not by the word -- at least for editing work. This would be fairer to both sides. If the translation being edited is in reasonably good shape to begin with, the client pays a lower rate than he/she would if paying per word. And if the translation performed by the machine (or another human) is really bad, the translator doesn't lose money by spending hours fixing it and being paid only for a fraction of that time.

Many other service professionals charge by the hour - lawyers and accountants, for example. If I hand my accountant a well-organized set of records already in digital form, he/she spends less time producing my tax return and I pay less for that service. If I hand him/her a shoe box full of receipts, I have to pay for the time it takes the accountant to sort through the mess -- at accountant rates. This should provide an incentive for me to keep decent records in the first place. (For the record: I use accounting software compatible with my accountant's and send her the digital file at the end of the year.)

Similarly, a per-hour charge for post-editing would provide an incentive for end clients to use translation software that may not be free, but will produce reasonable-quality results, rather than using rules-based online freeware. And if the end client insists on using the free online service, the translator at least gets paid for the extra time he/she has to spend to fix that translation.

Look, for example, at Joanne Moss Design's Bloopers page for bad translations. The shoe tag she shows needs to be re-written from scratch to be comprehensible. The text about Ludwigshafen, on the other hand, doesn't need much work to make it flow smoothly in English. On a per-word basis, however, editing the Ludwigshafen text would cost the client much more then the shorter shoe label, while taking the post-editor much less time. If post-editing per-word rates were based on the time it took to "fix" the Ludwigshafen text, the translator/editor would lose money when confronted with the shoe tag. If the rates were based on the time required to edit the shoe tag (we should be so lucky!), the client would overpay for the Ludwigshafen text. A per-hour fee, on the other hand, would do justice to both types of text.

The Changing Role of the Translator

I just read an interesting op-ed by David Bellos in last weekend's New York Times. In "I, Translator", the director of the Princeton translation program offers a brief overview of machine translation, from its infancy in the U.S. at the start of the Cold War to its current Google Translate iteration and concludes that machine translation cannot replace human literary translation.

A point well taken, but literary translators constitute a fraction of the translation community. Most of us don't work on War and Peace but on such prosaic texts as legal contracts, medical documents or technical manuals. Quite a bit of these documents consist of "boilerplate" or otherwise at least semi-standard text -- that's why translation memory tools have become so useful to human translators. Because of this standardization and repetition, such technical text does lend itself to machine translation, just as the original text is a prime candidate for standard content management systems. This move towards further automation may put both translators and technical writers out of business -- unless we adapt.

As Google Translate and similar systems parse ever-increasing quantities of multi-lingual web content -- including my own bilingual website -- their translation engines approximate human translation ever more closely, at least in relatively common language combinations, such as German-English. But while a business contract doesn't need to be good prose, it does need to be extremely accurate -- approximation just isn't good enough. That's also true for medical and technical texts. So while Google Translate can provide a basic idea of what the parties to a contract agreed upon or how to operate a particular piece of machinery, humans still need to ensure that nothing has been mistranslated and that the end result flows smoothly and is easy to understand.

That's where we human translators come in: as editors to verify and refine the somewhat crude machine translation. To some extent we are already performing this role when we edit the "fuzzy matches" provided by our translation memory tools. Post-editing machine-translated text would be similar, just with a much larger translation memory. The question now becomes: how do we come up with a compensation model where we can still make a living, even though this editing will garner a much lower per-word rate than traditional translation?

Native Language vs. Dominant Language

Your native language - that's the language(s) you grew up with, of course, you might say. That's also what most translation agencies and sites mean when they ask about a translator's native language(s). Frequently, more than once choice is permitted in the "native language" field, acknowledging bi-lingual childhoods. But what about bi-lingual adulthoods?

The German word for native language is "Muttersprache" -- mother's tongue. I have met German translators who insist that one's native language is, indeed, one's mother's language, even when one grows up in a household where the father speaks a different language. That seems to me only true if the mother provides most -- if not all -- childcare during a child's first 2 or 3 years of life. While that is still relatively common in many German-speaking countries (where maternity leave is generally longer), in the U.S. it's often the nanny or daycare provider who teaches a child his or her first words. Some parents even deliberately hire a caregiver speaking a different language, so that their children can grow up bilingual, even if both parents are monolingual.

A friend of mine was born in Argentina, spent his toddler/preschool years in Israel and started school in Austria, where he remained until adulthood. Through all these moves, the language at home was German. He did attend preschool in Israel and hence learned Hebrew as his second native language, but didn't use that language again after age 5. When he returned to Israel as an adult, he found that some of his forgotten Hebrew came back, but with the vocabulary of a 4-year-old.

I, on the other hand, grew up in an entirely monolingual family (albeit with the more ex- and intensive foreign language study required in Austrian public schools). Many agencies and translator sites would therefore consider German to be my native language. However, my entire professional education and most of my adult life were conducted in English, and that continues to be my language of daily discourse. I therefore find it much easier to translate into English, and the results tend to be more idiomatic, as well.

This is particularly true in my specialization, IT. When I left Austria more than 25 years ago, I had never actually used a personal computer. Here in the U.S., I learned not only to use computers, but also to repair, maintain and document them. While I can understand computer texts written in German, I am much more fluent in English "computerese", and therefore translate from German to English, rather than the other way around.

There are any number of circumstances in which someone might initially grow up with a particular language, but be immersed in an entirely different language community as an adult, eventually acquiring a better facility with that new language than he/she had with their initial one. This happens to native peoples and migrants around the globe, if they move to a place where their childhood language is not spoken.

It seems to me a much better term would be "dominant language", meaning the language one is most fluent in. "Native language" suggests something one is born with -- a fact that doesn't change later in life. "Dominant language" acknowledges that for some people the language in which they are most fluent may change during their lifetime.

Translators, in particular, frequently end up in that profession precisely because their linguistic environment changed over the course of their lives. Some people continue to conduct their daily lives in their language of origin, and feel more comfortable in that language. But some switch languages more thoroughly, even writing literature in that new language. (Full disclosure: I write children's and young adult stories in English.) If one can be a novelist in a language one didn't initially grow up with, one can surely translate into such a language, as well.

Wordfast Professional Training

Last week I attended a training for Wordfast Pro, the newest version of the Wordfast translation support software. The training was arranged by the New York Circle of Translators (the New York branch of the American Translators Association) and held by Wordfast, whose Director of Sales & Marketing, Kristyna Marrero, also attended. The trainer was John Di Rico of Apex Traduction. Wordfast Pro is basically the Wordfast version of the new Trados Studio, whereas Wordfast Classic is the Wordfast version of the old Trados.

For those of you new to translation, translation support software automatically stores the translated sentences in memory as you work and shows you previously translated sentences or sentence fragments if they are similar to the current sentence/fragment. In addition, such software lets you create and re-use custom glossaries and shows the translator if a word in the source text is fund in such a custom glossary. Depending on the specific software and version used, other features -- such as project management options, text analysis in terms of word count and repetitions, online dictionary searches, etc. -- may be available.

Wordfast Pro works very differently from the previous version of the software, Wordfast Classic. Classic was an add-in to MS Word, while Pro has its own separate interface. The obvious advantage is that Pro can be used with many more file formats, such as Excel spreadsheets, HTML files, Powerpoint presentations, InDesign files, etc. On the other hand, the learning curve is steeper since the translator must get used to an entirely new interface.

This is the initial, rather new, version of WF Pro. While I normally avoid getting version 1.0 of any software, I did so here because: a. I can run both the old and new versions concurrently on my computer, b. the new version is free if you have a license for the old version (which I do), and c. it does PowerPoint and Excel, both formats I had to translate without the aid of a translation memory in the past. Excel files for IT projects often contain the text strings displayed on screen when a software is run. As you might imagine, many of these strings are fairly repetitive, so being able to use translation-support software on these files can be quite a time-saver.

One of the main disadvantages of WF Pro for me is the fact that after I have completed a translation I cannot turn off the source text and only see the target text. I used to do this routinely to make sure the translated version flowed smoothly. In WF Pro's interface, the two languages are shown either side-by-side (in table view) or -- similar to WF Classic -- one below the other (in text view). Unlike WF Classic, however, the source text cannot be hidden, so it distracts when trying to edit only the translated text. Ms. Marrero said that this capability of hiding source text would be added in future version of the software.

Another annoyance is the fact that "placeables" need to be copied manually from the source to the target text unless you copy the entire source text segment to the target text area and then overwrite it with the translation. Placeables are codes Wordfast adds to hold formatting information, so that the software can then format the translated text as similar to the original as possible. Compared to the old version, there seem to be rather a lot of these codes even in fairly straightforward text. While that means WF Pro can, for example, make part of a segment bold and leave the rest regular (which didn't work in WF Classic), it does make for a lot more copying of these codes. Out of the box, the software warns you every time you go to a new segment, if any of these placeables weren't copied. I'll need to experiment with turning that warning off and adding the codes in later during a second pass. But what I'd really like to see is a feature where WF Pro could be set to only copy the codes as I move to a segment, so that I can then fill in the translated text between them.

Still, there are a number of additional features here that WF Classic didn't provide, such as the ability to use multiple translation memories (and even write to all of them, if you so choose) and to save the set of translation memories and glossaries used for each project, rather than having to re-create that setup each time you switch projects. At this point, I am still running both versions and, depending on what version of Wordfast or Trados the client has, use one or the other. A new release of WF Pro is supposed to be issued soon, so we'll see what improvements that brings ...

Until next time,

Barbara