Isthat cannon fire or is that my heart pounding?
Is that the thunder of distant guns or isit the sound of translation prices crashing to the ground?
Wait, no. It’s only the gruesome sound ofMcLSPs biting, kicking and eating each other alive aspart of a massive cannibal apocalypse.
And the bloodcurdling squeals of a millionhamsters…
What a dreadful sound!
This is how groupthink works.
Eventhough the industry has reported strong growth overall each year, our previouspricing survey showed that rates went down for nearly every language between2008 and 2010. Have rates decreased even further from 2010 to 2012? Or, arethey starting to stabilize for some languages?His clients in the Cheap Translation sectorshout: “That’s true! I get dozens of unsolicited CVs from completely unqualified peopleevery day!” David Grunwald, for instance, goes on to conclude the following:
Workflowsinvolving MT are being used more-and-more by LSPs and translation buyers. Thisis cutting many translators out of the loop, causing a glut in the supply ofhuman translation resources. At GTS, we receive hundreds of applications a month from under-employed translators.
Now, please note two things:
1.- De Palma didn’t actually say prices are dropping. He noted that prices dropped in2008-2010, but that corresponds to the severest portion of the deepest worldwide economicdownturn since the Great Depression. He doesn’t actually say that prices have dropped since then, either. He has equivocatedon the issue of prices over the past two years, but in most cases he tends notto cite any concrete empirical evidence that tends to confirm his sweepingobservations about prices (or about much of anything, for that matter).
2.- Grunwald adds some empirical evidence:the abundance of CVs from under-employed “translators.” (I can safely say thatGrunwald’s definition of under-employed translators is different from mine. Imay concede the “under-employed” part, although not perhaps the “translator”part.) For my part, even though my website explicitly states that I am not anagency and I carefully cultivate a gruff, grumpy public persona, I get dozens of CVs fromclueless translators-cum-spammers regularly (by the way, if you’re reading this, Iregularly mark your messages as spam, which further decreases the likelihood that youre-mails will reach any real clients). I do not think that says much about the “market”but rather about current Internet culture, which tends towards cheapcommunication, a model that Grunwald is probably better acquainted with thanme.
Furthermore, despite the fact that Spain isundergoing a deep, secular recession, I just had the busiest month for a longtime and one of the best months ever from the point of view of revenue. Doesthat mean I think that human translation is booming? No. That is only an isolateddata point in a sea of data points. Worse, it is just unstructured anecdotal and highly biased evidence, which is the basis for 90% of De Palma and Grunwald’s outlook.
People need to learn to think critically.Even numbers into which society invests a lot of effort are just vague approximations.Few people know that a figure such as the US jobs number has a margin of error ofplus or minus 100,000 jobs or that it is revised continuously for severalmonths after it is released. The quarterly and yearly GDP numbers, likewise,are constantly revised for many months and even years after they are announced.And those are two key figures in which millions of dollars are invested andwhich depend upon the work of thousands of survey takers, economists, and statisticians. Oneof the reasons why people should study economics is to be less impressed by the“reality” of big-sounding numbers. Most of the numbers bandied about anindustry as tiny as translation are little more than fluff on some geezer’sspreadsheet. And often even less than that.
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