Things seem so random all of a sudden, and time feels like it’sspeeding up.
The ideological arm of Lower QualityTranslation, also known as the Common Sense Advisory (CSA), has published yetanother dubious white paper on thetranslation market, enticingly entitled “Translation Demand-SupplyMismatch.” Thankfully, the organization charges a lot for its full-lengthreports, so peasants such as the writer of this humble blog are left to peruseonly the public summaries. This allows us to devote the precious few momentsleft on this Earth to more profitable pursuits, such as the latest sluttyexploits of those crazy Kardashians or that never-ending cliff dive known asthe Spanish equity market. The CSA does push the low quality envelope a littleaggressively, though, but, after all, their audience certainly is not little old yourstruly. Their stuff is aimed more at the larger translation agencies thatdisguise themselves as technology companies and perhaps the odd middling sort ofagency that dreams of making it to The Show.
Anyhow, in the fragmented age of theInternet, some of its stuff winds up on my iPad and the ease of blog publishingallows me to kick the tires a little bit. The first surprising takeaway of“Translation Supply-Demand Mismatch” is pretty breathtaking: The law of supplyand demand isn’t applicable to the translation industry.
To start off, the author cites threefactors that are constraining supply.
The first one is that old chestnut (say itwith me) known as the Content Tsunami. I have played enough with this faulty concept to trotit out and flog it again. Let sleeping, defunct horses lie.
The second factor is a shrinking supply oftranslators. Really? Based on what evidence? Hmmm, “executives at languageservice providers (LSPs) regularly tell us…” That is called hearsay evidence ina court of law.
Thirdly, “translator productivity hasstagnated.” This is a very strange way to put it that reveals an entireunderlying agenda:
Inthe survey we conducted for this report, we found that individual translatorsaveraged just 2,684 words every day. This number hasn’t changed much fordecades, if not centuries.
Okay, De Palma has proven that supply isconstrained (I guess…). Let’s take that as a given. The expectation would bethat translation prices are soaring at a rate that zips past Zimbabweaninflation rates (cha-ching!). But no (crushing disappointment):
Withsuch a classic case of high demand and inadequate supply [please note this elegant example of question begging], prices would rise, much to the delight ofLSPs and freelance translators… However, we don’t see widespread rate increasesany time soon, given the price sensitivity of the language sector and tightbudgets at companies stockpiling cash.What? The laws of supply and demand don’tapply to the translation sector? Really? That’s fascinating! You could get aNobel Prize by demonstrating why that happens! Do, please, tell me more!
But Mr. De Palma has other more pressingbusiness to take care of than the teensy weensy little detail that one of themost basic laws of the social sciences just doesn’t have any relevance tothe area of the economy he analyzes. Because he is, after all, too busy fryingother fish. McFishsticks, to be more precise. Yes, the lack of pertinence ofone of the most basic laws that describe economic reality merits less than apassing mention, because now we are into the nitty gritty of where we wanted togo: “Some informed companies andspecialists intelligently apply MT and other translation automation to theproblem.” A clunky sentence? Perhaps. Completely misguided? Possibly. Aringing endorsement of cheap translation? You bet your ass! This is followed bya reference to a discarded guru from the 1970s who mistakenly thought that bynow we would be colonizing Jupiter. All of this crowned with an admonition thatthe world is changing way too fast and that he who doesn’t adapt risks beingleft behind by the dizzying rate of innovation at companies such as Trados andLionbridge:
weexpect that many buyers and suppliers will merely react to the changes ratherthan permanently change their behaviors. If they can step back from theirday-to-day issues, though, they will see that the market for language servicesmarket has fundamentally changed. Once a cottage industry, language has becomea core business process and critical enabler for a range of economic,political, and humanitarian activities – and subject to all the attendantmacroeconomic pressures. Some participants will be unnerved by so many changesin such as a short time, leading to the displacement that sociologists labeled“future shock.“ To survive, they will have to adapt to the new realities andeconomics of language services.So, please, translators, take a step back. Please.I beg you. Be careful. You might get some of this future schlock on your shoes.Yuck.
Some of you may be familiarized with AlvinToffler’s Future Shock idea. Thelatest season of Mad Men plays a lot withthe unease that Americans felt in the mid-sixties. The fear was that the worldwas changing a lot faster than the speed at which an individual could assimilateit. In Mad Men’s case, it is not somuch because of technology, admittedly; the vertigo felt by the characters is punctuatedmostly by famous crimes, such as the U of T at Austin sniper and the nursemassacre in Chicago. Half a decade after Pete Campbell was having sexyfantasies about the daughter from TheGilmore Girls, Toffler put the finger on that unease, called it futureshock, and made a bundle of money explaining this anxiety to the general public.Anyone who is around forty has found that book lying somewhere in thebookshelves of every household he visits. However, what Mad Men is pointing at is socialchange. As the United States becomes more fragmented socially, racially,generationally and sexually, the world begins to look a lot scarier and lessintegrated. That is the subject of a lot of pre-post-modernist literature. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. But technological determinists take another, slightly different, view: chiefly, that itis technology that is driving everything. And technological determinism, as Ihave pointed out often, is our sad, secular religion.
Now, note that to state that the rate ofsocial change is speeding up is not exactly a world-changing perception. We canall pretty much agree on that. However, the prediction that this rate is only set to speed up to a pointwhere we all go insane (i.e., that it is exponential) is quite anotherthing. As a recent reporter who visitedToffler writes:
Still,the accelerating change doesn't seem to be driving people crazy, as waspredicted by Future Shock. Alvin Toffler says it may be that youngergenerations have simply become more adapted to change, that it is theirculture. Academic futurist Stuart Candy says the Tofflers were wrong to predictwidespread "future shock," as a form of societal illness orbreakdown.So, let me see… Future 1-Toffler 0. Shocker!(Schlocker?) And yet, forty years on, sub-gurus are still peddling this as adiagnosis for people trudging through the Great Stagnation. (Which prompts onequestion: Why, if the world is changing so quickly, is a book from four decadesago still relevant? After all, Adam Smith apparently isn’t relevant, sincedemand and supply is obsolete. Why should Toffler remain pertinent to our madcapera of flying cars and weekend trips to Mars?)
But all of this is deceptive. We have arrivedat this point by conceding the premises of Mr. De Palma’s faulty analysis.Let’s go back to some of his more eyebrow-raising observations. Chiefly, thatthe dynamics of supply and demand don’t apply to translation. If true, thatshould blow you away like a tornado. But, as noted, the author glides blithely by.
Imagine a naturalist who passes by anelephant with a giraffe neck and says: “Wow! That’s kind of weird! It contradictseverything we know about evolutionand the animal kingdom. But, wait, look over there! Is that a new Krispy Kreme?Wow! In the middle of the bush? That’s even more awesome!”
Or imagine your friend giving you a tour ofhis new five-bedroom house. “And this is the guest room. However, the law ofgravity doesn’t apply here, for whatever reason.” You peer inside and see abed, a dresser and a cocker spaniel floating around in zero gravity. What wouldyou do? Would you follow your friend out to the garden to have cocktails as thefurniture and the dog float round and round? Or would you devote your entirelife to finding out why the law of gravity doesn’t hold in your friend’s guest bedroom?
I wonder. Is it possible that a lotof the “empirical” observations about supply constraint are not really based onany concrete studies? Maybe. Is it possible that the translation market isincredibly inefficient, as I have often preached from this digital pulpit?Hmmmm, perhaps. Is it possible that the enormous spectrum in which translationprices float is due to massive information gaps? You know, that’s possible. Oris it perhaps also the influence of the commodity thesis that is explicitlyor implicitly held by a lot of buyers and sellers of translation? You know what,now that you mention it, that mightbe part of it. That surely does not mean that supply and demand doesn’t apply. Only that a slightly more informed analysis is needed that employs the tools ofvery traditional microeconomics. Also, a consultation of slightly less outdatedgurus might come in handy. Unfortunately, none of these avenues of inquirywould help Mr. De Palma sell more reports.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.
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