I know, it isn’t anything new, really: times are changing. They always do, have always done.

Translators who were in the business 20 years ago or more, remember how the work was completely different then, with better payment and longer deadlines, more time to spend with dictionaries and other reference material, most often with a focus on making the best possible translation. Now, on the contrary, payments are low, deadlines are short, and there’s no time to fiddle with books and other slow media, at most a few searches on the Internet throughout the whole task, or otherwise it will be impossible to deliver within the time and price constraints.

But some more disruptive elements have appeared: First, the translation software that evolved into online services, and then the machine translation, now integrated everywhere, in almost every translation process out there. But lately, even machine translation has been pushed aside by AI, which is providing more fluent and seemingly creative target texts, and often without any linguistically inclined people taking part in the process.

Things are moving fast. Very fast! Just within the last two years, I have personally seen a situation in the market going from having enough of work to fill out my time, even if some of it was paid below a reasonable minimum, to now seeing several weeks pass without any tasks at all. This means, realistically, that I am no longer living from translating, and soon I will have to give it up completely, taking on some other work instead of reserving time for the translation tasks.

During those last two years, prices have been at a standstill, at best, or been reduced. Most often, they are simply frozen at the levels I agreed on with the clients (mostly translation agencies) about eight years ago, when I started doing this for a living. Attempts to increase the prices along the way have mostly failed, as any request for a change is met with silence, followed by fewer tasks than before.

There was an agency recently, who agreed to increase the rates. They even had some new kinds of tasks, a new language pair for me to work with, and it sounded good and prosperous, since they had a new client with this need, and I was so far the only translator who could do it.

But since we agreed on the new rate and the extra language pair, I have seen close to no tasks from them.

Another agency went too far, in my opinion, with their demand for free afterwork, when I had delivered the fifth round of additional “corrections”, including the implementation of some new preferred translations for common phrases, they had found and decided upon after I had initially done the work – plus several other new elements of work that were not in the original contract. As they came back with the sixth round of “QA”, as they called it, even though it had nothing to do with fixing errors, and as I had already spent at least three times as many hours as I had been paid for, I said stop. My claim was that they had already got much more than they had paid for, and if they wanted anything further, it would cost extra.

I haven’t heard from them since. It was several months ago. That is, a task was offered, I said yes, and then I heard nothing more. And later, again the same. A couple of weeks ago, they offered me a larger task, with work every day during a period, to start “in two days” – but no purchase order appeared, and when I asked them after the two days, by email, what happened to the task – I got no response.

And this is a pattern I see more often now, also from other agencies. More demands for less money, and fewer tasks altogether.

I do get emails with requests, and I do send estimates, prices, CVs, etc., as they ask for, but then I hear nothing more. One agency sent me a general collaboration contract, not long ago, after we had talked about a specific task, and I signed it and sent it back. I still haven’t heard from them, never got a copy with their signature.

One more significant change is, as mentioned, that AI has entered. Two years ago, I don’t think it was mentioned by the translation agencies at all. Now, at least half of them have announced some kind of activity in the area, and several tasks for correcting AI output have been offered (but without follow-up when I say yes).

It has long been a common topic on social media, amongst translators, that the business is in a decline. Some have blamed the cheap workforce of the East, now available through the online translation tools, and others have blamed the loss of quality sense, or the focus on price rather than quality, or something else. Many have declared the translation business, as we have known it so far, for dead. But now, honestly, it really does look like it is close to being dead.

Most translators I know see similar problems as those I have described, plus, a more and more common phenomenon: the request for work to be done for free. Not many translators ever experience any appreciation of their skills and enthusiasm, their wish and will to make every translation perfect and work with it until it is.

In fact, most translators seem to see the same as I do: that it is impossible to live from it anymore. It can, at best, be a hobby that is being exercised a couple of times per month, perhaps for a symbolic payment.

So, while the society is moving towards letting AI do everything that has to do with words, skipping all human activities, the humans – the translators – will just have to move somewhere else.

We no longer fit into the society. We have reached the end of our journey.

Translation happens all the time, all over the world. We have so many different languages that the need occurs for a large part of everything written — and that’s a lot.

But how does it happen? Or more precise, what steps do you go through when managing a translation project?

People who work in the industry knows this, of course, and yet they sometimes behave as if they don’t. For instance, when hiring a freelance translator for doing the translation, and then expecting that all kinds of additional tasks will be done on top, most often for free.

End-clients who hire a translation agency for the translation will often be met by some questions about what exactly is needed. A corresponding price list may then help understand how the project actually consists of many different tasks. Each of these will take some time, therefore cost some money.

The possible steps

Projects are different — that’s why they are projects and not just “operation”. But a translation could involve several or all of the following, and in some cases even more different tasks:

1. Project management

2. Translation

3. Proofreading

4. Second proofreading

5. Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA/QA)

6. Desktop Publishing (DtP)

7. Post Layout Review (PLR) / Linguistic Sign-Off (LSO)

Additionally, to make these activities work, there will be parallel tasks such as:

8. Sourcing or creation of termbases / glossaries

9. Creation and administration of translation memories

10. Questionnaires and processes for translators etc. to evaluate each other

11. Administration

Obviously, when hiring a freelance translator or a translation agency to “simply do a translation”, it will mean much more than just that.

Let’s look at the individual tasks.

Project management

For an agency translation project manager, there is typically an initial step of qualifying an incoming request from a client, and to see if there are any translators and other relevant parties available — then determine a possible deadline for delivering the translated text, and making an agreement with the client. Along this process, agreements with translators, reviewers, and others will need to be made as well, so there is a lot of purchase order writing and price calculations involved.

It varies between agencies if they have their own staff or depend fully on freelancers for translation, proofreading, and some other tasks, but mostly they have in-house people for project management, QA, DTP and administration. Still, with in-house resources, it is needed to assure the availability of these when they are needed. So dates and times of day must be planned and coordinated with quite many parties — often within a very short timespan, as the client will expect a reply to their request within a few hours.

During the project, all the normal project management activities, like for projects in other businesses, will be done, but with the typical addition of also working with the translation tools to some extent, for creating projects and files to be sent, importing and exporting files, etc., for all the relevant parties to get what they each need.

Most translation projects will make use of a Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) tool, which is a clever construction that can split the text into segments (basically everything between two end points), present these segments in a list for the translator with space next to it for writing the translation. The tool will keep track of all formatting and can create a similar document after the translation, as was loaded from the start. So a PDF original can end up as a PDF target, in the new language, as an example.

It requires some skills by the project manager to operate this tool, plus often several other tools for task/project management and QA.

Translation

The core activity, but still just one of many. Sometimes a project is too big for one translator to do it at the required time, and it can then be split into several parts, each translated by their own translator. Later, the project manager will gather all the parts into one project again.

The translator will often be given a relevant translation memory and termbase for the project, included in the CAT project file package, but not always. Very often, these are missing, and the translator will then need to spend time on research — to find out what this particular client usually translates a certain term into, or what translation the specific business area most often use.

The terms can vary a lot — many nuts and bolts and other technical details have very many different names, and each specialised business, or their customers, will typically use their own set of them. Hence, the research for terminology can be quite time demanding, especially if the business is unusual for the translator or if the source document is less well written.

For translation agencies, it is often a hallmark of quality that their translations are “consistent”. This sounds like common sense, but isn’t. A certain word in one language may be translatable into a certain word in another language - but there can be situations where that will not fit, because it cannot be said that way in the target language. So, if the agency insists that a term is translated the same each time it occurs, it can lead to clumsy or outright wrong translation.

A requirement of this kind often comes from the end-client, and the agency is just the messenger.

The translator will often have to use the correct CAT tool, as decided by the agency or dictated by the specific projects needs. In some cases, the tool is free for the translator to use, but it happens that no CAT tool is used - that the agency or end-client want the translation to be done in-line in such as a Word document.

All of this requires from the translator to know, own, and maintain a large toolbox of different software and skills. It has a price too: the most popular CAT tools are quite expensive.

There will often be communication with the project manager and QA, but rarely with other parties in the project. At times, some additional information about the translation, the involved products or services or whatever is the topic of the translation, or about the end-client will be provided to the translator, but not always. In fact, the lack of context and relevant information can be a big problem when trying to do the best possible translation.

Proofreading 1 + 2

Even though this step is often omitted, as it costs extra time and money, a proofreader most often will be able to find different kinds of non-trivial errors in the text, an occasionally some trivial ones as well. The text can become better with proofreading, and if the highest quality is required, doing it twice after each other by different proofreaders will help.

The non-trivial errors are often a matter of preference, but they can include such as what “sounds better” or “is more typical for the target group” or similar. There can be logical errors as well, where the meaning becomes wrong due to the use of double negations or other complexities of the language, and a proofreader can simply stop whenever something is not clear and think about how this may need to be adjusted.

The trivial errors are such as the lack of capitalization of a word where it should have been, or a list with a mix of commas and semicolons after each line in the list, rather than a consistent formatting.

Some texts can be quite complex, especially if they have a complex layout, so that even the formatting tags and similar can be subject for proofreading.

Linguistic Quality Assurance

The LQA may consist of several different activities, but most often it is about using a dedicated QA tool for checking the translation. Some CAT tools have this built-in, but there are several external tools that can be used as well - or, indeed, the QA tool from another CAT tool, which is quite common.

The QA person will load the project that contains both the original text and the translated one into the QA tool — it will then analyse the translation and the target text in regard to several chosen areas of linguistic quality. Spelling, punctuation, and similar are obvious, but also consistency both ways, so that identical source segments are translated the same each time and different source segments are not translated into the same target text. There are very many possible checks, including the verification that no non-translatable terms have been translated, and that the required termbase has been used. The QA tool will also find excessive spaces or duplicated words, among many other typing errors.

A report will then be made and typically, it will be fed back to the translator unconditionally. Such a report can contain very many false positives, and the QA person will then bi in a dialogue with the translator to find out what needs to be corrected, and what not.

Finally, the QA person will often have to apply the changes specified by the translator to the project files.

Desktop Publishing

While not always needed, some translation projects are required to deliver a ready-to-use document in the correct format.

DtP is the process of setting up the text correctly. The process was once known as page-setting, but with increased features in PC programs, the process became bigger and a DtP person can do everything from raw input text and images to the ready document in one application on the computer.

However, it can take some time to puzzle everything in place - especially, because languages do not take up the same amount of space. Some languages will have longer phrases than others for the same meaning, but it can vary, so even a “short language” can have some longer phrases than the source language. Whatever the case, even with an original document that has been formatted correctly, it is most often not possible to simply replace the source text with the target text - some adjustments are needed.

Often, there will be text in images, and this requires new images to be made.

There will often be questions and communication back and forth to clarify what is correct to do, as the DtP person often doesn’t know the target language. Such as word splitting typically causes problems, and the same when, e.g., words to be placed in the header line of a table are too long - how can they then be shortened?

The project manager may be able to help, but often, the translator will be needed to assist as well.

Post Layout Review

On top of the first round of DtP work, there will be a need for a linguist, perhaps the original translator, the proofreader or someone else with similar language skills, to visually check the document for wrong word splits, missing commas, or other things that can be fixed by the DtP person.

As the end-client often want a textual translation back as well as the formatted document, the linguist will need to update the original project file or give input to the project manager in another way, typically through editing a bilingual file in Word with track changes switched on. Then the project manager will key in the changes into the project file.

In a PLR process, the linguist will, hence, typically have the original document, the draft translated document, and a project or a bilingual file open, all at the same time, cross-checking and updating, making notes in the translated document (for instance as comments and highlighting in a PDF document) — and providing additional comments separately, for instance by email, to the project manager.

All the additional tasks

Apart from the administration that the involved parties will need to do, such as reading tasks descriptions, registering time, managing files, etc., there translation memories and termbases are also — most often — needed. But an end-client having many translation tasks, or an agency that often works for the same client, may have such files ready.

It is very rare for agencies to provide termbases that were bought by third-parties, even though these do exist in the market. Such carefully made termbases are more often used by translators who work directly with end-clients, are managing the projects themselves, and can see an advantage in buying these, rather than creating them.

But it is perfectly possible for a translator to create a termbase, and those who mostly work with clients in a specific business area will often do that. It can save them time and increase the quality of every project.

What this all means

Knowing what happens when you push the button on a translion agency’s webpage, requesting a translation to be done, may help in understanding how a certain amount of time is needed, and also why the cost isn’t just a function of the number of words.

First of all, the more activities, the more time will be consumed. Secondly, the higher the requirements, the more complex will the project be - which will add time and costs to the project.

If you work directly with a freelance translator, they may need to do several of the described tasks.

It is best to let all of this happen at a reasonable speed without trying to push the limits, especially if you are looking for a high-quality translation, and it is best to not try to bargain about the price, as this means the translator will have to try to save time on some areas, to end up with a reasonable average hourly rate for the project.

Best of all: have an open dialogue with the translator about wishes and needs, take in the input from them and expect that they are not just trying to earn extra money — in fact, most translators are very logical, analytical people who speaks the truth when they give estimates and suggest prices.