Reliability and Speed in Translation

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 to be 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 the 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.

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 translator conferences we go to, what courses we take in the field, how we network with other translators in our region and language pair(s). These "involvements" sometimes help translators translate better, which is important for users and thus for the pride we take in reliability. More crucially, however, they help us feel better about being translators; 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, discussing problems and solutions related to linguistic transfer, user demands, nonpayment, and the like, 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 surrounded by other professionals who share our concerns. 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.

Speed is a very important factor in translator’s work. A translator's translating speed is controlled by a number of factors: typing speed; the level of text difficulty; familiarity with this sort of text; translation memory software; personal preferences or style; job stress, general mental state.

The first thing to remember is that not everyone translates for clients. There is no financial motivation for rapid translation when one translates for fun. The second is that not all clients need a translation next week. The acquisitions editor at a university press who has commissioned a literary or scholarly translation may want it done quickly, for example, but "quickly" may mean in six months rather than a year, or one year rather than two. And the third thing to remember is that not everyone is willing or able to force personal preferences into conformity with market demands. Some people just do prefer to translate slowly, taking their time, savoring each word and phrase, working on a single paragraph for an hour, perfecting each sentence before moving on to the next. Such people will probably never make a living as freelancers; but not all translators are freelancers, and not all translators need to make a living at it. People with day jobs, high-earning spouses, or family money can afford to translate just as slowly as they please. Many literary translators are academics who teach and do research for a salary and translate in their free time, often for little or no money, out of sheer love for the original text.

There can be no doubt, however, that in most areas of professional translation, speed is a major virtue. The translator should work to increase his/her speed. The simplest step is to improve the typing skills. 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.

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.

In addition, with translating speed as with other things, variety is the spice of life. Even the fastest translators cannot comfortably translate at top speed all day, all week, all month, year-round. In this sense it is fortunate, in fact, that research, networking, and editing slow the translator down; for most translators a "broken" or varied rhythm is preferable to the high stress of marathon top-speed translating. Interruptions may cut into your earnings; but they may also prolong your profes­sional life (and your sanity).

Many freelance translators and agencies increase translation speed through the purchase and use of translation memory (TM) software. These programs — notably TRAD OS Translation Workbench, Atril's DejaVu, IBM Translation Manager, Star Transit, and SDLX — are all fairly expensive, and mainly useful with very repetitive translation tasks, such as a series of user's manuals from the same client, so their most spectacular application has been in the translation divisions of corporations ("in-house" translating). TM software makes it possible for a new hire to translate like an old hand after just a few hours of training in the software.

TM software also only works with texts that you receive in digital form, so if most of your work arrives over the fax line, you can safely put off buying one of the programs (scanning a faxed job with OCR (optical character recognition) will introduce so many glitch characters that you will spend more time fixing up the text for the software than the software would save you). Freelancers who use it are also quick to point out that TM software doesn't "create creativity" — it is purely for organizing existing term match-ups — and so is useless with literary translation, and even for translating advertising copy.

However, despite these limitations, TM software has brought about a revolution in the translation profession that is comparable to the spread of digital computers in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s. Many agencies now regularly send their free­lancers TRAD OS files to translate (TRAD OS seems to be the agency favorite; freelancers by and large prefer DejaVu, which they call DV).

Still, freelancers who do high-volume work in repetitive fields (especially those who do the bulk of their work for two or three agencies) say that TM software pays for itself the very first week — sometimes the very first job. They note that there is an inevitable "down time" involved, as you have to spend several hours learning how to use the software, inputting term databases, setting operating options, and so on; and the software is somewhat time-consuming to use. But the gains in productivity are enormous, an estimated 20—25 percent or higher. Freelancers who use TM software regularly say they will not translate anything without it — even a short easy sentence that seems to require no terminological support at all.