A crisis as an opportunity Tēmas autors: Daniel Frisano
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Daniel Frisano 
Itālija
Local time: 20:51
Biedrs (kopš 2008)
angļu - itāļu
+ ...
If anything, the current situation in the translation industry motivates me even more to produce a minor masterpiece with every new project, no matter how small — even if it's just a 150-word warning about electromagnetic emissions for a €12 hairdryer.
I'm taking the challenge. May my clients be blown away by everything that they receive from my hands. May they always recognise and appreciate the difference between a professional job and a quick fix / MT shortcut / post-editors ... See more If anything, the current situation in the translation industry motivates me even more to produce a minor masterpiece with every new project, no matter how small — even if it's just a 150-word warning about electromagnetic emissions for a €12 hairdryer.
I'm taking the challenge. May my clients be blown away by everything that they receive from my hands. May they always recognise and appreciate the difference between a professional job and a quick fix / MT shortcut / post-editors posing as translators, etc.
Your thoughts? ▲ Collapse
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It's good to have clients who appreciate that difference. My experience suggests that most of them don't. I had three big projects where the client did appreciate my deliverables: I took in translations that were totally ruined and produced translations that made the client happy. On the other hand, there's our current main client and its staff of reviewers. My translation decisions are too complex for them because they prefer machine-like outputs. Even when I try to explain my decisions when re... See more It's good to have clients who appreciate that difference. My experience suggests that most of them don't. I had three big projects where the client did appreciate my deliverables: I took in translations that were totally ruined and produced translations that made the client happy. On the other hand, there's our current main client and its staff of reviewers. My translation decisions are too complex for them because they prefer machine-like outputs. Even when I try to explain my decisions when responding to a complaint, they sometimes still fail to understand them (the depth of potential misunderstanding between people sometimes appals me). Lately, I stopped receiving jobs from that customer. I didn't ask why, but I suspect that it's because the managers were specifically instructed to remove me from their order flow. It's nice to know that you have personal haters among certain people ▲ Collapse
| | | | Zea_Mays
Itālija
Local time: 20:51
Biedrs (kopš 2009)
angļu - vācu
+ ...
| we are entrepreneurs | May 19 |
Daniel Frisano wrote:
If anything, the current situation in the translation industry motivates me even more to produce a minor masterpiece with every new project, no matter how small — even if it's just a 150-word warning about electromagnetic emissions for a €12 hairdryer.
I'm taking the challenge. May my clients be blown away by everything that they receive from my hands. May they always recognise and appreciate the difference between a professional job and a quick fix / MT shortcut / post-editors posing as translators, etc.
Your thoughts?
I'd say: It depends. (And I'd say that those clients will first do a cost-benefit calculation.)
How much are you paid for that 150-word masterpiece? Can you earn a living that way? If so, then it's fine.
I'm not sure I understand your dislike of MTPE. Most of the content that you would do post-editing on is simple, repetitive and/or boring. As a good translator, you'd still be able (if you'd like to) to create masterpieces from it while earning more than translating it from scratch. Just don't accept MTPE tasks that pay peanuts.
Machine translation of some types of texts is here to stay - it's been around for a while now; it's nothing new, just its use has increased (but at the same time, the amount of content for translation has increased).
As entrepreneurs, we're free to decide whether to accept jobs like these.
But in my opinion, the current situation is not only due to MT and/or AI, but mainly to an economic weakness that has been ongoing since 2022 (we all remember what happened then). Just look at what happened to the German economy.
As soon as the economy recovers, there will be more translation work, as companies will start investing again.
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Daniel Frisano wrote:
If anything, the current situation in the translation industry motivates me even more to produce a minor masterpiece with every new project, no matter how small — even if it's just a 150-word warning about electromagnetic emissions for a €12 hairdryer.
I'm taking the challenge. May my clients be blown away by everything that they receive from my hands. May they always recognise and appreciate the difference between a professional job and a quick fix / MT shortcut / post-editors posing as translators, etc.
Your thoughts?
I sort of approached translation when I was a preteen girl (10–12 years old) and wanted to understand Formula 1 conferences of my idol Ayrton Senna. So I started to record in VHS the post-race press conferences and replay them over and over during the week, after doing school homework.
I had English classes at school, so understanding the English wasn't that hard, but I wanted to understand the final part when he spoke Portuguese. So I started to write on paper what it seemed to me he was telling, and then, every day at school, I looked at the words in bilingual Portuguese-Spanish dictionaries (no internet in those times). So I used to sort of “translate” the Portuguese part of his post-race press conference; those were my first experiences as a self-taught amateur “translator.”
Then, I studied Brazilian Portuguese for years; later, I studied to become a technical-scientific and literary translator. And, throughout all this time, I have always kept the same mindset regarding translation: make it your own.
So, in every single translation I work on, I always have the mindset: make it unique and leave your “voice” on it. And it really doesn't matter to me if the client/agency recognizes my “personal mark” in the translation, because it's my own way to do any translation, and I never thought to change it, no matter the outside world.
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