THE PROBLEMS
"Good translators may leave the market"
50% of professionals earn less than $20,000 p.a...gross!
THE PROBLEMS
"Good translators may leave the market"
50% of professionals earn less than $20,000 p.a...gross!
A perfect storm is on the way!
In the early 2000s, the sky was clear: translation work was being done by a few tens of thousands of people and clients were struggling to find translators.
In 2010, however, the first clouds began to gather: in a study published in 2011, the European Commission warned that supply had now reached and exceeded 330,000 units (if not 700,000 units according to a CSA study) and was bound for crisis if the professionalism reporting systems did not adapt to the changed scenario.
At the beginning of 2020, the sky appeared to be completely covered by ominous clouds: nothing that should have been done had been done and so more and more people had been able to freely enter the market, flooding supply and dragging down rates. So much so that a survey published by CSA in January 2020 revealed that the majority of translators today earn less than USD 20,000 gross p.a. – and, of these, 21% earn even less than USD 5,000 gross p.a.!
And that’s how 2021 began, with the storm clouds gathering: the ongoing pandemic has generated a gigantic economic crisis that will surely push a part of the 2.1 billion adult bilingual population in search of new jobs to pour themselves into the translator market – which, let’s not forget, is totally open and unregulated: all you have to do is open a profile in a social media/marketplace, fill in a few fields and sell yourself to the market as a “translator with 30 years of experience” – much to the annoyance of those who really do have 30 years of experience and are unable to monetize them.
The main problems to be addressed
Let’s start this quick overview by listening to the voices of translators themselves, recently collected by Common Sense Advisory:
– It’s a declining business. I still make decent money because I am a specialist (finance, tech, agriculture).
– I am setting up a new, completely unrelated business and hope to stop translating as this business replaces my current income.
– It’s no longer a profession that allows you to live well.
– With such low salary, it is hard not to have another job on the side.
– It is nearly impossible to break into this market. I know I am good, and the demand is out there, but trying to break into it is more difficult than ever.
These words paint a less than comforting scenario and unfortunately confirm the analysis made 10 years ago by the EC study: without tools to adequately differentiate supply (“signals of status”), professional translators are pushed out of the market.
When the signals of status are weak or confusing,[…] market disorder results, and good translators may leave themarket.
And if, at some point, the market were to be limited to those who were just starting out and/or making ends meet, this would bring about the much-feared extinction of the translation profession, but not – as has always been thought – because of the “machines”, but because (professional) translators have not reacted in time to the changing market.
To avert this risk, therefore, we must take on the challenge of creating more favorable market conditions, reforming the systems of supply and demand interfaces (we discuss this in no. 2) and introducing tools to differentiate supply that are capable of stemming the systemic drop in tariffs (we discuss this in no. 3). But that’s not enough!
The CHALLENGE to be faced also consists in maximizing the “time to sell”, recovering as much as possible from the “time lost” in the many secondary activities, which are still functional to the provision of the translation service, given that the translator – like any other professional – has only 8 hours a day (max 10!) to sell. Therefore, it is necessary to find ways to perform in the shortest possible time activities such as:
- Invoicing
- Accounting
- Translatable source preproduction
- Study of reference material
- Management of customer data (especially less frequent customers)
- Marketing (e.g., constantly updating/sending CVs, compiling agency databases, creating often useless quotes, social activities, etc.)
- Interaction with dozens of different agency portals
- Training
- …tbc
The current marketplace platforms (Proz, TranslatorCafé etc.) were conceived at the dawn of the Web, when filling out a two-field online form was the most you could ask of a Web user. At that time, the need was “to be online” and the goal of these platforms was to put translators and clients in touch with each other, something that not even associations of translators could do.
This objective has been achieved and largely exceeded, given that Proz today claims to have over 2 million active profiles, when the EC study (with a complex analysis set out on page 137 cont.) had established that there could be no more than 330,000 professional translators in the world. It is therefore evident that for over 20 years, these platforms have been used as an easy access point for anyone wishing to enter the translation market, by opening a profile in which they can freely declare that they have Xyears of experience, know Xlanguages, know Xsectors and have the ability to translate any subject.
This problem was authoritatively – and, unfortunately, unsuccessfully – pointed out 10 years ago by the European Commission’s Study:
They all advertise huge numbers of “registered translators” who have signed on for free, thus creating a kind of zero-degree status (many people say they are translators but may have no training or qualification as such).
Obviously, the IT architecture and the business model of these platforms tend to maintain the status quo of 20 years ago, still effectuating the meeting between supply and demand with dynamics that might have been fine when the translators’ market was made up of a few tens of thousands of professionals, but turn out to be completely inadequate – and, alas, also tremendously harmful – now that the Web is filled with profiles of self-styled translators and the imperative has shifted from “having to be online” to “having to stand out online”.
That’s what the EC study said 10 years ago about this system’s ability to signal translator professionalism:
As the databases of translators on ProZ becomes very large and the prices of translations are thus driven down, the general quality of the translations declines, unhappy clients no longer trust the signal, and the size itself threatens to close down the entire system.
The CHALLENGE is therefore to be able to implement a radical reform of the system of matching supply and demand in marketplaces, to allow the value to stand out and be “appreciated”.
The presence of low-cost supply is somewhat physiological in any market, but in ours it becomes pathological, mainly for two reasons:
1) Because it is unrestricted and unregulated – Since there are no barriers to entry, any of the 2 billion bilingual people in the world can start selling translations any way they want and at any price they want, self-defining as a professional translator. As a result, buyers are confused by an undifferentiated mass of offers and – as is well known – the price drops proportionally as the offer increases (the more people who sell a certain good/service, the more chances the buyer has to get a lower price, taking advantage of competition between sellers).
As more and more translators become available, and often with very cheap prices, how are purchasers of these services able to judge what they are paying for?
2) Because it is not containable/manageable – The ineffectiveness of current differentiation tools (of which more will be said in number 3 below) proves spectacular in an industry where the customer mostly ignores the value of what they are buying so – while it is clear that there is not much to be done with customers who do not have sufficient budget to buy the value they are offered – the fact remains that even those who have the ability to spend more cannot see the reason to do so. The EC Study effectively explains the phenomenon:
Almost by definition, someone who needs a translator cannot judge objectively how well that translator performs. Translations are among the products and services, perhaps along with used cars and legal services, where the buyer does not have direct knowledge of what they are buying.
The current consequences of this are clearly seen in the Common Sense Advisory report. The vast majority of translators (58%) find it difficult to cope with an overabundance of low-cost competition and, lacking adequate tools to defend their position, suffer from strong pressure to reduce rates (50%) for fear of losing clients (41%):
What are your biggest challenges?
What are the biggest challenges when negotiating rates with your clients?
The CHALLENGE, therefore, is to find innovative solutions that effectively communicate the value offered by individual translators. In other words, we need to create a new system that makes it possible for clients to understand the value they can receive from one translator (and not another) and, consequently, to appreciate it – both substantively and economically. As long as we remain in the current system, which delivers to customers a disproportionate amount of undifferentiated offers, it is natural that the choice will tend to be oriented towards the lowest price by default.
The problem of differentiation in details...
In order to be “appreciated”, quality must be noticeable – that is, it must “stand out”. As mentioned above, customers with greater spending power willing to adequately compensate for quality need signals that differentiate the available translation offerings and allow them to identify the one worth choosing. In the words of the CE study:
In an ideal world, we would be able to test the objective expertise of all translators, then rank and reward them accordingly.
In the world we live in, however, most employers and users of translations have to rely on the various signals of status.
Without those signals, the users of translations would be involved in an endless process of trial-and-error, as can indeed happen when buying a used car or trusting a lawyer.
From the perspective of the individual translator, status is something that must be acquired, in addition to actual translation skills. You should be able to translate, but you also need some way of signalling your skills to your clients or employers.
Unfortunately, the differentiation system has long since broken down due to a lack of efficient signals. Try it yourself. Put yourself in the shoes of a Resource Manager who has been given a large budget to find the best translators in the world to assign to a translation project. Shortly after you begin recruiting, you’ll find that the tools you and the translators have to recognize (you) and report (them) professional value are ultimately inefficient.
Below we try to point out the most obvious problems behind each of the current professional status signals:
CURRICULM VITAE
Mere self-declarations
Besides, it's not like I can just ask each of them to send me a copy of their degree or the jobs they say they've done.
SAMPLE TEST
Unreliable & Expensive
Who can guarantee me that I won't waste the money spent on test reviews, since reviewers often make mistakes flunking tests for a variety of reasons (ignorance, overzealousness, fear of favoring competitors, etc.)?
REFERENCES
Not impartial
ASSOCIATIONS
Way too many
And yet, even the most emblazoned ones always rely on the usual test to select associates.
CERTIFICATIONS
Unreliable
Mostly these are symbols that you get by participating in an online course, buying a membership or - again - by passing the usual (unreliable) test system.
DIPLOMAS
Unworkable
And in any case it would be useless: 50% of professionals do not have a degree in translation.
WEB PROFILE
Mere self-declarations
SOCIAL MEDIA
Little use
MARKETPLACE
Misleading
CURRICULM VITAE
Mere self-declarations
Besides, it's not like I can just ask each of them to send me a copy of their degree or the jobs they say they've done.
SAMPLE TEST
Unreliable & Expensive
Who can guarantee me that I won't waste the money spent on test reviews, since reviewers often make mistakes flunking tests for a variety of reasons (ignorance, overzealousness, fear of favoring competitors, etc.)?
CERTIFICATIONS
Unreliable
Mostly these are symbols that you get by participating in an online course, buying a membership or - again - by passing the usual (unreliable) test system.
REFERENCES
Not impartial
WEB PROFILE
Mere self-declarations
DIPLOMAS
Unworkable
And in any case it would be useless: 50% of professionals do not have a degree in translation.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Little use
ASSOCIATIONS
Way too many
And yet, even the most emblazoned ones always rely on the usual test to select associates.
MARKETPLACE
Misleading
Let's all design a way out of these problems together...
To tackle these problems and hopefully solve them, the TranslatorSpace project is proposing something completely new: a “crowdsourcing of ideas”! Why doesn’t everyone have a say on how to resolve the issues mentioned on this page? The Project promotoer group will then think through every single contribution, synthesize and – if possible translate everything into practical Solutions. Go to the Way Out page and contribute your ideas!
This page has been translated (from Italian) into English by:
Rachel Zara Taylor
Professional language service provider based in Lazio, Italy and qualified with the Chartered Institute Of Linguists (UK) to translate from Italian to English (science, technology). I also provide Hebrew to English translations, and language lessons in Hebrew and English.
BSc (Health Sciences) TESOL, PGCE, MA English.