Page 8 - Encounters - Issue 1, Volume 1
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8
Texas Association of Healthcare Interpreters and Translators
F E AT U R E
The answer is always:
No.
Our industry is changing.
No doubt.
• The size of our markets has dramatically changed.
This has good consequences -- we can and do
work for clients around the world -- and
bad -- competition from everywhere has also
risen dramatically.
• The size of some clients, the complexity of some
projects, and the natural market forces of a
maturing industry have led to the growth and
formation of some very large language service
providers -- with all their benefits and drawbacks.
• Technology has become an integral part of our
everyday work lives, making it more and more
unlikely to “opt out” (though I have a strong
feeling that those who have chosen not to use any
technology beyond a word processor and email
and are making a good living so far will still be
able to do this for a long time to come).
• The ever-growing presence of machine translation
has led to a different set of expectations for
many customers.
• Workflow models like crowdsourcing have come
out into the open (they’ve been around for a long
time!), accompanied by the participation of
untrained translators in certain translation projects.
• Portals like ProZ have furthered a segmentation
of our industry into lower-wage and
higher-wage workers.
And I could go on and on (or ask any of you to
continue this list).
But here is what I know: my wife and kids are still
frustrated about me working too much, I have been
able to slowly raise my rates, and some of the projects
I do are really boring and dull while others are a
lot of fun -- all pretty much the same as it was 10 or 15
years ago.
Do you remember when Google announced
Google Translator Toolkit
? Or when Lionbridge
announced its
Translation Workspace
product? The
world seemed to come to a halt. Well, not quite,
but many of us assumed that these products would
make a tremendous impression on our industry. The
truth is that these products really had no or very little
impact. If you work for Lionbridge you might be using
the
Workspace
product; otherwise it’s very unlikely,
despite Lionbridge’s many efforts to make this a game
changer. And Google’s
Toolkit
product? To their credit,
they never really marketed it to professional translators
-- and that’s good, because I think that very, very few
are using it.
Big companies or companies that think of themselves
as big make big announcements. Many times all that is
left is just that: the announcement.
And while I’m as guilty as anyone in using the
catch-all term “translation industry,” we need to remind
ourselves that we are a very diverse group of folks who
work on incredibly varied projects with very different
kinds of requirements. So, yes, things have changed for
many of us to some degree, but overall we’re still doing
essentially the same job we did 10 or 20 years ago. As
will those who come after us.
With excerpts from the Tool Box newsletter
(
)
...would be a good appellation for quite a few of us. Every few weeks when
there is another announcement heralding an industry-changing technology or
product, I receive a good number of emails from colleagues asking me what
I make of this and whether this could be the
deathblow
to our profession
that we all had
feared
all along.
THE
PANIC-STRICKEN
TRANSLATOR...
By JOST ZETZSCHE
