In-house translation – outside the box

Tag: freelancing

Ten Takeaways from the ATA German Language Division Workshop in Vienna (22-23 February 2025)
Last weekend, I attended the ATA German Language Division Workshop held here in Vienna. I also delivered a new presentation on Sunday morning (der Morgenstund hat Gold im Mund!). It was the first time that I had presented about the Expert in the Lead (XITL) approach to human-machine translation. Previously it has been the focus of LinkedIn posts and articles in the ITI Bulletin and Universitas Mitteilungsblatt.

GenAI/LLMs/MTPE and the Profession vs the Industry
1. Don’t be afraid to present on something new: presenting on a new topic is exhilarating – and audience feedback is really helpful. Presenting to a small, intimate audience is great for presenting on a new topic. I’d been tempted to go for really flashy slides, but opted for readability and high contrast. Day one reminded me to check my slides were clear: in black-and-white or with high contrast.
2. Even if we’re not all overly keen on GenAI and LLMs, translators certainly see the value of tools: there was a short presentation about AutoHotKey (AHK), which I knew of, but am not able to use in my working environment in the office. From the presentation, it was clear that I’d have plenty of use cases for it. And my other neighbour showed me a lightweight USB-C powered second screen. Various laptop stands and travel tech was on show over the weekend.
3. The continuing prevalence of AI bias, how to handle it, as well as how to prompt accordingly: Dagmar Gromann gave a two-part session focussing on typical AI bias. I think I was primed by the prompt about what Germans typically eat for dinner. I went for Obazda as a starter after it featured heavily in the prompt output! This session also addressed inclusive language – prompting me to re-listen to the Yellow of the Egg podcast.
Freelancing and in-house
1. In-house translators are far closer to freelancers than some may think: while I don’t contend with the “business” side of translation professionals as an in-house translator, I face many similar issues. I also need to get my point across to decision-makers, and convince people of the value of human translation.
2. Freelancers are suffering from the industry shift from an emphasis on “top quality” to “good enough”: I touched upon how the industry’s “flight from quality” is affecting the profession (see the graphics below). Some may approach a day where they have to reconsider their ability to “stay in the game” up until retirement. This mirrored the sentiment in a recent “Standing Up” (a closed Facebook Group for translators) thread. I am grateful to Standing Up for connecting me with one of my neighbours for the weekend.
Techniques
1. Always have something to hand to take notes: as Nina Sattler-Hovdar pointed out in her transcreation workshop on the second day – always take notes – whether on paper or on your phone, tablet or computer. I’m big on always having a notebook on me (even when watching football with my children). The takeaway already paid dividends this week when a thought came to me while printing out some texts. I quickly scribbled it onto one of the photocopies with the biro by the photocopier. I am sure I would have forgotten after a chat in the Teeküche.
2. Multiple approaches to the same issue: I talked to a few participants about their personal view of translation memory systems/CAT. People’s personal CAT use varies, often by their areas of specialisation. I believe firmly in “you do you” – if it works well for you, don’t change it! Different approaches includes different segmentation e.g. paragraph segmentation rather than sentence-based segmentation. The former is an approach I took many years to find. I find it very useful for “freer translations” e.g. speeches.
3. The priming effect: a couple of warm-up exercises focussed on the priming effect. I fell into the elephant trap a couple of times: which might possibly have been a sign of tiredness! One presentation analysing machine translation output was very interesting – professional translators use broader varieties of techniques to render texts than machine translation. Many techniques cast me back to my student days and Translation Methodology. At the wordface, intuition plays a big role, so I don’t really analyse my preferences towards techniques. I probably could/should find time to do so.
The human factor
1. Translators are an upstanding and ethical bunch: in a world that sometimes can be very devoid of compassion, translators are very compassionate. Even when earning a living (even if this is hampered by industry practices), we still retain our integrity. Sadly some of the tales of agency work paint a far less upstanding picture.
2. Nothing beats human company: as someone attending for the first time, I was made really welcome and had a day and a half of great conversations with some consummate professionals. This is why I value, and feel duty-bound to fight for, the translation profession. Aaron Maddox’s final session was thought provoking and led to open discussion – including about the positive effects of life coaching.
Many thanks to all the organisers – Bettina, Ellen, Karen and Robin – as well as all the other participants. To anyone I didn’t really speak to over the weekend, I hope there will be future opportunities. And a particular thanks to my “neighbours” Sarah and Johanna, and other group work participants for the lively chats.
2 March 2025
Busting the 100% productivity myth: great(ly exaggerated corporate) expectations
A post on LinkedIn recently addressed the issue of expectations for delivery of a translation project. The suggested timeframe provided for a single translator to translate a website of approximately 25,000 words was approximately 1 week. The responses of other linguists generally fell into two distinct camps: firstly, the that’s-no-way-near-enough-time camp, and secondly, the it’s-no-wonder-translators-are-losing-out-to-MT-if-they-are-that-slow camp. Fence-sitters would probably fall into a how-long’s-a-piece-of-string camp – which is a justified argument – as the subject matter was unclear.

Currently there are more “famine” than “feast” posts from freelancers. (N)MT and LLM-based translation form a two-pronged attack that are affecting human translators. Industry-side evangelisers sometimes claim that MT more content translation than human translators can translate. Even if this is the case, there is still a diminishing wedge for human translators.

Since 2022, I have regularly seen posts about translators being reduced to post-editors of Machine Translation. The rates do not reflect the true amount of effort required to bring translations up to standard. Which in turn leads to a drop in motivation. It isn’t realistic to expect the same service for a living rate as a dumping rate.

100% productivity is corporate settings: an illusion

In the modern data-driven world, we are incredibly IT-dependent. Updates need to be done, and they don’t always happen overnight, during lunchbreaks etc. I’ve previously covered why I schedule my return to work to allow me to start with a home office day: with a “soft logon” the night before. Unless you user blocker appointments, you are bombarded with mails, calls, Teams chats etc. And all this eats into your productivity – particularly if you consider your day like a game of Tetris.

As I pointed out to one comment about the 25,000 words in a week, which suggested 100% productivity in the corporate world, this is a fallacy. Time and activity tracking frequently sanitises out “Tür-und-Angel-Gespräche” with colleagues, lunchbreaks that overrun, online calls that start and end late. Full calendars are seldom a sign of productivity in their own right. There are also “meetings that could have been a mail” and continuous calls are draining. I now maintain better call discipline – sticking rigidly to the intended call length, and excusing myself from over-running calls.

Is human productivity the issue?

Returning to the how-long’s-a-piece-of-string issue, about productivity and its effect on translation output, it is clear that there are unreasonably high expectations on productivity. As a translator, you might have a “straightline top speed”, but for how long can you maintain it for? And does the ride remain comfortable, or do things straight to rattle or get uncomfortable. When I went in house, to try to gauge my output, I set myself an original 1,500 words a notional daily output. A 1,500 word document to translate from scratch can reasonably be expected to be sent back by the end of the day,

Would I start translating the second I got into the office? Rarely. Unless an item has come in the previous evening and I had set up the project the previous evening. It might be necessary to perform some alignments, concordance-based terminology work, or (re)read the legislation. Sharing an office means inevitable phone calls and distractions. I often work with noise cancelling headphones when the office is fully occupied. When I have a lot of short tasks I use desktop timers to keep moving between the tasks.

6 out of 8, or 8 out of 10?

If I am lucky, I get about 6 hours (out of 8 hours) undisturbed translation time a day, and would have to go at a steady 250 words an hour to do 1,500 words in that 6 hours. As translation memories and termbases grew, “plain vanilla” translations became a lot quicker. Filler tasks like translating investment warnings are now practically automated. The translation task mainly involves locking a few segments and a quick check of the output and a bit of formatting.

Consequently, I have been able to increase my notional daily output to 2,000 words, but the added 500 words a day reflect a number of factors:
- I do considerably less terminology work. Now it is frequently ad hoc rather than in dedicated terminology sessions.
- I also have read-only translation memories containing bilingual alignments of European law at my finger tips, allowing me to spend more time in Trados Studio than I previously did.
- Better screen setup means reference materials open on a second screen, a glance away.
- I have a very narrow subject focus – at its broadest, my subject matter is financial market supervision, but predominantly focussed on banking supervision. There are very few supervisory procedures that are genuinely new. I have occasional forays into insurance and Pensionskassen supervision, securities supervision or banking resolution.
- Regular expressions for QA have helped reduce cognitive (over)load.
Despite such “efficiency” improvements, achieving 8 hours’ pure translation productivity still requires working for over eight hours. Changes in daylight conditions also need considering. However, mature TMs also have drawbacks – which is why I have looked into better use of segment penalties, and terminology can also change over the years.

Barnes’ Iron Triangle applied to translation

As I alluded to in a previous post about imposter syndrome affecting translators – and how I banished my early career doubts, unrealistic expectations from customers are a genuine problem. For translation, the holy trinity of specifications consist of price, quality and time.

Explained simply, it goes like this. You want a high quality translation? You’ll either have to pay a premium rate (i.e. price is high), or allow more time for the translation. You want a quick translation? You’ll either have to pay a premium rate (i.e. price is high due to needing translators to work extra hours, or in a team) or sacrifice quality. You want a cheap translation? You either sacrifice quality (e.g. review processes, terminology checks, coherence checks) or have to wait on delivery.

The AI hype and the genuine advances in machine translation have pitted the industry against the professionals. There is a different playing field in the age of NMT and generative AI. There has certainly been a big leap since statistic MT was in its heyday. You have to therefore manage your customer’s expectations (explain what you do – e.g. explain that you use CAT and not (N)MT), and what the expected delivery time is.

Managing expectations.

I’ve always believed in expectation management (a skill you learn as a parent). Back in 2016, along with recurring daily work, we had most substantial relaunch of my employer’s website to date. Eight years on, there are still regularly new pages and posts, and the workflow has proven itself. I had to work to a fixed deadline for go live, at the end of an intense month (including work trips to London, Zagreb and Nuremberg).

The project allowed me to also educate colleagues/customers about realistic expectations, while also changing the translation workflow for publishing directly to the website. Now, with backend CMS access. I extract texts from the source view in the CMS and open the files in Trados Studio. I could translate pages as they successively went live in the testing environment. That approach eliminated dealing with multiple versions of the same page or post as Word files. Agreeing on a top-down approach allows prioritisation of certain content for translation. This ensured handling top level content child pages/posts first, and steadily working through subpages.

For multi-day projects, I explain how to involve me before a final version of the document exists. This approach is particularly useful for multiple iterations of a text. It also helps to allow more translation time – PerfectMatch helps to overcome document iteration issues. Naturally, I do also make sure that I allow a slight buffer, and early delivery is easier than having tight deadlines.

Ultimately good customer communication is key – keep they updated about progress – maybe check in with them partway through the project – possibly the earlier the better. Try to group questions about terminology or wording suggestions together rather than a constant trickle of questions.
3 March 2024
What an outsourcer looks for in a freelancer’s website
As a freelancer with a small stable of very fixed customers, I didn’t actively market my services. Agencies usually contacted me about whether I had any capacity to take on work, and I was in an enviable position to respond “Thanks, but no thanks!” So why did they continue to contact me then? Quite simply because I had a website. The website was both up-to-date (in terms of software used and specialist areas) and gave a good impression of whether I was the kind of person that the agency or company wanted to work with.

For potential customers there was information about some of the delivery formats that I was able to offer, that I worked with a CAT tool, the standards that I was familiar with (given that I was in a very niche area), as well as what I absolutely wouldn’t translate (one speciality was close enough to another to suggest that I might also cover the latter). The website was rounded off with information about approximate rates for new customers, general terms and conditions and the necessary information to prove beyond doubt that I was not just a swanky website purporting to be based in Austria as a conduit for getting jobs to be passed on to freelancers based in dumping rate jurisdictions.

To put it coarsely, having a website for me when I freelanced was about conveying an impression of “knowing your sh*t” and ensuring that others “know you’re not (talking) sh*t”.

Indeed, when I hung up my freelancing boots and went in-house, I still kept my web domain, which I have used for translation-related blogging ever since, as well as to present potential topics for speaking opportunities at conferences and universities. My domain name was too good to let go of and my mailbox still allows me to find out about translation blogs, podcasts, calls for papers and mailing lists, particularly when I am commuting into the office. A kind of one-stop shop for my translation-related news fix. Similarly, were I ever to decide to go freelance again, it would remain my brand.

The outsider looking in

After nearly nine years in-house, I needed to compile a list of potential “boutique translation teams” either fully in-house or working in teams with other local translators for language combinations and subject matter that I needed. Effectively I was doing market intelligence – not from a freelancer perspective e.g. to see who and where the competition is, but to see who to contact should I need to do so, A publicly available directory of members from a translation association yielded around 250 results for the combinations I wanted, all randomly ordered and presented in a “business card” format. A single search provided me with the information I needed all nicely shown on a single page, even including the postcodes (Postleitzahl) and contact numbers, e-mail addresses and website addresses.

As an outsider trying to get an impression about individual providers their websites are incredibly useful. Even in 2023, the output from the directory showed that the list of translators with an active website was only a tiny subset of all the records returned in the desired language combination. I was genuinely both surprised and shocked about how few translators did have a website. Where business communications are frequently only online, it surprises me that so few have a website. In particular, given the fact that the pandemic ravaged a lot of face-to-face networking opportunities, a website is still indispensable as a networking tool, even if social media is also on the rise. Some nominally have an office@domainname address, but then the domain name yields a parked webspace. Even a business card-style website would be better than a parked domain page.

Would you look to someone to translate your web content who doesn’t have their own web presence?

Over the last 18 months I have been following the #litranslators hashtag, where the issue of whether or not to have a website has been a recurring one. Many translators struggle to find the time to establish their web presence, and others concede that they struggle to keep their presence up-to-date. For some, it is clear that there are still hurdles to creating and maintaining their web presence themselves, even though out-of-the-box CMS-based websites are easy to set up. Relatively they are far less time-consuming than static sites from days of yore, e.g. created in Dreamweaver and reliant on FTP uploads.

I might be a rare breed as a translator who handles external procurement for translators, so might be more demanding as well as also having an insider’s insight into the industry myself. In my line of work, we are not able to use dumping rate agencies overseas, and I also scrutinise “last mile” issues. I like to have a good feeling from the outset, rather than painstakingly teasing out details from potential providers.

I frequently need to outsource translation that is content intended to appear on a website. I really struggle to outsource web content translation to a translator who doesn’t have their own website. After all your website helps me weigh up if your content sounds authentic.

Five things to consider when putting together a website.
- If you are an interpreter that also translates, explain which language combinations you interpret in, and which you translate in. In some cases, even mention the cultures of the languages – e.g. Austrian German, Swiss French. This is not such a trivial distinction to make, particular in legal translation.
- Mention your specialist areas: cite major projects, testimonials and specialisms. It can be difficult to mention who your clients are. You might like to state the size of projects you take on (in terms of pages, lines or words), or to state what kind of projects you have recently completed. (e.g. English translation of a German legal practice’s website (~35,000 words)).
- Mention the CAT tool(s) you use. Include the versions you run, which can be useful if a customer wishes to send you packages to translate that might be version-dependent. If you use MT, state how you use it including any mitigations (such as pseudonymisation or anonymisation) you use. Be prepared to state what MT engines you use if asked – beware that you might put off customers who are wary of their data leaving the EU if you don’t state how it is guaranteed that this doesn’t happen.
- Enter where you actually operate from: there is a temptation by agencies to claim to have satellite offices across a country or multiple countries. I use a list of serviced offices and co-working facilities published through a self-employment advice group (Google maps would do the same!) to check these details. Some customers might not like the thought of outsourced work being done in co-working facilities and are reassured about precautions you take.
- Pricing/rates (you can always specify a “from” price or a price range), should always be up-to-date. I was amazed to see rates listed as “valid from 01.01.2017”. I am aware that translators tend to increase rates annually, and in line with inflation. If you link to market surveys for translation rates (e.g. this one from Universitas), make sure you link to the latest version of the survey. If the latest survey data is two years old, I am naturally aware that it will reflect current levels of inflation.
Prove you are serious about data…

The number of directory entries using free e-mail addresses amazes me. I am sure some translators will say that they only use a “throw away e-mail address for mailing lists”. But this argument doesn’t fly when you have it listed as your primary contact address. It surprises me how many translators are happy to use a gmail, gmx or hotmail account. The problem is that while they are convenient, you may give off the impression that you are not 100% serious about your customer’s data. Expense is no longer a factor. Usually your webspace domain includes mailboxes (and lots of mail forwarding addresses). For everything that impressed me from one website, an elephant in the room remained: a freebie e-mail address. Some approaches you might take are as follows:
- A data policy page. I had a page on my website explaining my data policy (e.g. server located inside the EU, FTP access for customers to allow larger files, size of attachments that could be accepted, special data options for customers e.g. mails deleted from my mailserver immediately after download, information about security of offline backups, delivery using encrypted USB sticks).
- Consider a webform with captcha on your website in addition to or instead of an e-mail address for people to contact you. Many forms also come with IP blocking to keep the spammers and trolls away.
- Ensure you have a secure website with a valid certificate. Also make sure you do regular plugin and core updates to your website. And don’t leave unused plugins in your website. I run five different websites. The upgrades take a few minutes each week – most I can even do from my phone.
- The same applies to how you store your data – e.g. cloud usage. As secure as off-the-shelf services like OneDrive or DropBox make themselves out to be, think about cloud backup security.
4 June 2023