- ever shorter project cycles
- rising cost pressure in many segments
- a greater than ever need for business savvy to survive
- increasing use of technology in many areas: it's not enough to be a good translator; one must often be an IT expert or have access to such expertise
- radical "scoping" policies, i.e. discounts based on match scales
Solutions to these and other issues may
be technical; often they are matters of policy.
It is hard – impossible, really –
to look ahead and see with any certainty the technical shape of the
future. But I believe that the most important elements of the future
are known and knowable.
The title of my talk is taken from a
well-known saying of former US president Harry Truman: the buck
stops here. What does that mean? It's about responsibility.
But responsibilities in many areas of
our profession are often not clear, or the lines are becoming
blurred.
More and more, stakeholders – I hate
that word – in translation processes try to pass that buck,
making others, such as individual translators, responsible for
technical preparations which lie outside their areas of expertise.
Really, this is not a technical
problem. It is a human issue.
I said that the key elements of the
future of translation are known or knowable. I believe that these are
the elements of our human nature. How we choose to work with others.
How we decide to train the next generation. How we share
responsibility.
In our drive to optimize our processes
we must, if we are to recognize the solutions for the complex
challenges of our future, allow a certain inefficiency in
which our subconscious minds are given scope to process these
challenges and find solutions. Often, we need to sleep on it.
You know the old saying: work
smarter, not harder. Not like a hamster on a wheel. But this
requires space. And quiet. Time to talk, and negotiate, and
understand our partners and customers and help them understand us.
The buck stops where???
Who is responsible? We have to think about this, talk and decide.
An example of a critical
decision for the future came out in a discussion with Doug Strock and
others as we prepared for the panel on MT and its role or lack
thereof in the future. When I mentioned to Doug how few specialists
there were in my areas, how difficult it is to find a research
chemist with an understanding of patent law and high-level
translation skills, he commented that this is why we need machine
translation. I'm sure he was joking. He said that we are the last
generation of real subject matter experts translating in such areas.
After we die out, there will be no choice but to rely on machines to
understand the texts we translate today. Bollocks.
Let's forget the question
of quality and the impossibility of achieving the necessary accuracy
of translation with machines and post-editors ignorant of the subject
matter. Why can't we simply develop the human resources we need
instead? We did it after the launch of Sputnik. The United States
and other countries transformed their education systems.
I have a lot of personal
ideas for how to solve specific challenges facing us now and in the
future of translation.
For a long time, I have
been an advocate of including formatting – such as tags – in piece rate translation quotation.
With regard to the
technical qualifications and competencies for using technology in
translation, I have been carrying on a private campaign to persuade
tool vendors, professional associations, translation agencies and
others to develop outcome-based testing and certification of basic
problem-solving skills for translation using technology, to
determine, for example, whether a translator truly understands how to
work with embedded objects in a compound document or translate tagged
formats such as HTML or an XML for which the tags containing
translatable content must be specified.
But it's not my ideas
that are important and offer the best solutions for our common
future. Nor are they yours most likely. It is the ideas and solutions
that we develop together in discussion and negotiation, with as
little "noise" as possible.
Therefore I would like to
close this rant and send you all off to the coffee break early to
talk and decide for yourselves how to share responsibility in a
sustainable way, to decide where
the buck should stop – now and in the future.
 |
| Photo by colleague Valerij Tomarenko: TM-Europe 2012 in Warsaw, Poland |
The fact that I know what a tag is and don't introduce errors in the text is enough to put me ahead of many of my colleagues. I agree. It isn't fair that agencies expect us to know how to deal with these things, but it helps if we do.
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