Professional pride

From the user’s point of view, it is essential to be able to rely on translation – not only on the text, but on the translator as well and generally on the entire translation process. Because this is important to the people who pay the bills, it will be important to the translator as well; the pragmatic considerations of keeping your job (for in–house people) or continuing to get offered jobs (for free–lancers) will mandate a willingness to satisfy an employer’s or client’s needs.

But for the translator or interpreter a higher consideration than money or continued employability is professional pride, professional integrity, and professional self–esteem. We all want to feel that the job we are doing is important, that we do it well, and that the people we do it for appreciate our work. Most people, in fact, would rather take professional pride in a job that pays less than get rich doing things they don’t believe in. Despite the high value placed on making a lot of money, a high salary gives little pleasure without pride in the work.

The areas in and through which translators typically take professional pride are reliability, involvement in the profession, and ethics.

1. Reliability in translation is largely a matter of meeting the user’s needs: translating the texts the user needs translated, in the way the user wants them translated, by the user’s deadline. The demands placed on the translator by the attempt to be reliable from the user’s point of view are sometimes impossible; sometimes disruptive to the translator’s private life; sometimes morally repugnant; often physically and mentally exhausting. If demands are at all possible, however, in many or even most cases the translator’s desire to take professional pride in reliability will override these other considerations, and s/he will stay up all night doing a rush job, cancel a pleasant evening outing with a friend, or translate a text reliably that s/he finds morally or politically loathsome.

Professional pride in reliability is the main reason we will spend hours hunting down a single term. What is our pay for that time? Virtually nothing. But it feels enormously important to get it right: to find exactly the right term, the right spelling, the right phrasing, the right register. Not just because the client expects it; also because if you didn’t do it right, your professional pride and job satisfaction would be diminished.

2. Involvement in the profession is quite a new phenomenon in our Ukrainian reality. It is a matter of little or no concern to translation users, but of great importance to translators, what translator associations or unions we belong to, what translation conferences we go to, what courses we take in the field, how we network with other translators in our region and language pairs. These “involvements” sometimes help translators translate better. More crucially, however, they help us feel better about being translator; they enhance our professional self–esteem, which will often sustain us emotionally through boring and repetitive and low–paid jobs. Reading about translation, talking about translation with other translators, taking classes on translation, attending translator conferences, keeping up with technological developments in the field, buying and learning to use new software and hardware – all this gives us the strong sense that we are not isolated underpaid flunkies but professionals sounded by other professionals who share our concerns. Involvement in the translation profession may even give us the intellectual tools and professional courage to stand up to unreasonable demands, to educate clients and employers. Involvement in the profession helps us realize that translation users need us as much as we need them: they have the money we need; we have the skills they need. And will sell those skills to them, not abjectly, submissively, and wholly on their terms, but from a position of professional confidence and strength.

3. The professional ethics of translation have traditionally been defined very narrowly: it is unethical for the translator to distort the meaning of the source text. This conception of translator ethics is far too narrow even from the user's point of view: there are many cases when the translator is explicitly asked to “distort” the meaning of the source text in specific ways, as when adapting a text for television, a children's book, or an advertising campaign.

From the translator's point of view, the ethics of translation are more complicated still. What is the translator to do, for example, when asked to translate a text that s/he finds offensive? Or, to put that differently, how does the translator proceed when professional ethics (loyalty to the person paying for the translation) clash with personal ethics (one's own political and moral beliefs)? What does the feminist translator do when asked to translate a blatantly sexist text? What does the liberal translator do when asked to translate a neo–Nazi text? What does the environmentalist translator do when asked to translate an advertising campaign for an environmentally irresponsible chemical company?

The translator translates whatever texts s/he is asked to translate, and does so in a way that satisfies the user's needs. The translator has no personal point of view that has any relevance at all to the act of translation.

Translators are human beings, with opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. Translators who are regularly required to translate texts that they find abhorrent may be able to suppress their revulsion for a few weeks, or months, possibly even years; but they will not be able to continue suppressing those negative feelings forever. Translators, like all professionals, want to take pride in what they do; if a serious clash between their personal ethics and an externally defined professional ethics makes it difficult or impossible to feel that pride, they will eventually be forced to make dramatic decisions about where and under what conditions they want to work.

Income

Professionals do their work because they enjoy it, because they take pride in it – and also, of course, to earn a living. Professional translators translate for money. And most professional translators (like most professionals of any field) feel that they don't make enough money, and would like to make more. There are at least three ways to do this, two of them short–term strategies, the third long–term: translate faster (especially but not exclusively if you are a freelancer); create your own agency and farm translation jobs out to other freelancers (take a cut for project management); and (the long–term strategy) work to educate clients and the general public about the importance of translation, so that money managers will be more willing to pay premium fees for translation.

Income in translation, particularly freelance translation, varies over a considerable range. At the lower end, a freelance translator can have negative income, a result of spending more for business purposes than earning from translation in a given year. The upper end of the range is filled with rumors, with stories of individuals earning over $150,000 per year. Few translators ever make over $60,000 per year, and you should be very skeptical of claims of income above $75,000. Of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part translators can expect to make between $35,000 and $45,000 per year. If you hear stories about income levels much higher than that, just smile and bear in mind that most people exaggerate their income, consciously or unconsciously, at least to some extent.

So if you are asked if you make a lot of money as a translator, your answer will probably be no, though that does depend on what you consider a lot of money. And it also depends on what month or year you are in, as translation, like all businesses, is not perfectly stable or predictable.

To be more specific, translators are almost always paid by the word in the United States (between $0.04 and $0.25, though sometimes higher) or by the line or page in other countries, particularly in Ukraine. Few translators can do more than about 3,000 words per day, though some do achieve far higher levels of productivity. If you are charging $0.20 per word and are doing 2,500 words per day, six days a week, 52 weeks per year, you’d earn $156,000. An impressive sum, to be sure, but let’s examine what you’d have to do to reach that level of earnings.

First, you’d have to find all your own clients, since no agency is going to pay you $0.20 per word. Even direct clients rarely pay that much these days, unless you are providing desktop publishing and other ancillary services, which themselves can take a lot of time and require expensive software and other technology. And direct clients generally expect a completed translation, one that has been edited, proof–read, and perhaps even prepared for printing. So you either have to do all of that yourself, or you have to pay someone else to do it. Either way, your overall income will fall.

Second, you’d have to be very fast and efficient to maintain that level of productivity over a year’s time. There are people who do it. There are even people who claim to do in excess of 7,000 words per day regularly, some of whom simply dictate their translation into a tape recorder, then pay others to transcribe and edit their work. As above though, your income will fall as you pay some of your gross earnings to the people who do this work for you.

Third, you’d spend a great deal of your time working, probably in excess of ninety hours per week. For every hour of translation you do, you will likely have five to ten minutes worth of other office work, including marketing, invoicing, accounts receivable and payable, banking, purchasing office supplies and equipment, maintaining and upgrading your computer system, evaluating and acquiring new dictionaries and other language resources, and doing taxes, to name a few possibilities. This is a part of running a business, and you can certainly pay other people to do this work for you, but again, what you pay others comes out of your income.

Starting freelance translators can reasonably expect to make $25,000 in their first year, perhaps more, sometimes even considerably more, depending on their language combination and subject specialization. The average in the industry seems to be around $40,000 per year, with some people making in excess of $100,000 per year. But those that do rarely have time for little else but eating and sleeping. There are far easier, faster, and more humane ways to get rich. With the right education, such as in international law or finance, and a few languages, one can go very far and very high in industry.

So if you think $35,000 to $45,000 a year is enough to live on, to raise your family, and to prepare for retirement, then you’ll be fine financially in translation.

Translation is a very fickle industry, subject to the vagaries of politics and economics like few other professions are. In 2005, the demand for translators into Ukrainian was high due to “Pomarancheva” revolution and was growing steadily as the most countries got interested in our country. Now, the demand is not that high again, but it will likely start growing due to the 2012 Football Championship.. Before the fall of the Soviet Union, most Eastern European languages saw low demand, but now, the demand is much higher and growing.

Never forget that the suite of abilities which translators possess can be applied productively to numerous related fields. Translators are often quite capable copy editors, proofreaders, and desktop publishers. Translators can readily make the transition to writing manuals for computer companies, articles for local papers or magazines, and even short stories or books. Translators can also teach the languages they know or prepare reference or educational materials. Some translators even make the move into interpretation, but be warned: interpretation is a very different animal from translation and requires thorough schooling in the techniques of consecutive and simultaneous interpretation.

Speed

A translator's translating speed is controlled by a number of factors:

1. typing speed;

2. the level of text difficulty;

3. familiarity with this sort of text;

4. translation memory software;

5. personal preferences or style;

6. job stress, general mental state.

(1–3) should be obvious: the faster one types, the faster one will be able to translate; the harder and less familiar the text, the slower it will be to translate. (6) is also relatively straightforward: if you work under great pressure, with minimum reward or praise, your general state of mind may begin to erode your motivation, which may in turn slow you down.

(5) is perhaps less obvious. Who would “prefer” to translate slowly? Don't all translators want to translate as rapidly as possible? After all, isn't that what our clients want?

In most areas of professional translation, speed is a major virtue. Once a freelancer told a gathering of student translators, “If you're fast, go freelance; if you're slow, get an in–house job.” But translation divisions in large corporations are not havens for slow translators either. The instruction would be more realistic like this: “If you're fast, get an in–house job; if you're really fast, so your fingers are a blur on the keyboard, go freelance. If you're slow, get a day job and translate in the evenings.”

Above all, work to increase your speed. How? The simplest step is to improve your typing skills. If you're not using all ten fingers, teach yourself to, or take a typing class, if you're using all ten fingers but looking at the keyboard rather than the screen while you type, train yourself to type without looking at the keys. Take time out from translating to practice typing faster.

The other factors governing translating speed are harder to change. The speed with which you process difficult vocabulary and syntactic structures depends partly on practice and experience. The more you translate, the more well–trodden synaptic pathways are laid in your brain from the source to the target language, and the target–language equivalent practically leaps through your fingers to the screen. Partly also it depends on subliminal reconstruction.

The hardest thing to change is a personal preference for slow translation. Translating faster than feels comfortable increases stress, decreases enjoyment, and speeds up translator burnout. It is therefore more beneficial to let translating speeds increase slowly, and as naturally as possible, growing out of practice and experience rather than a determination to translate as fast as possible right now.