Isthat all there is? Is that all there is?
Esto es lo que hay. Esto es lo que hay.
(It wasn’t actually dinner with Renato but ratherlunch with Renato, but you know I can’t resist a meta-reference.) Readers ofthis blog are aware I have a low opinion of Renato Beninatto’s take on a lot ofissues. The problem is that the world is a small place and eventually even he readthese snarky posts and started contacting me on Twitter and via this blog. Ibasically pretended not to notice, because some of the stuff he says is sooutrageous that it provides easy fodder for a lot of blog posts. But heinsisted. He proposed a grand debate. I humbly begged off. My counter-offer wasthat he should write a guest post on this blog. He declined, somewhatpredictably, excusing himself on the grounds of time constraints and that hedoes not write that well. It was therefore a stand-off. However, he proposeddinner in Madrid as one way out. I acceded, although as I said, I was very reluctant.I knew that once you see pictures of someone’s kids, you can’t really be assarcastic as you once were. The problem is that if he did’nt exist, I might haveto invent him; he’s just that juicy. Nonetheless, I thought at least I owed hima hearing. I knew that he was going to “sell” me. Sell me what, I was not sure.But if he insisted, I could not in good conscience refuse all personal contact.Nonetheless, I felt less like a berobed Alec Guinness going to meet David Prowsethan one of those writers in Po-Mo novels where an uneasy author meets one ofhis characters.
We met for lunch last Tuesday. He was inMadrid for a localization association’s networking event. The conversation was in Spanish, which he speaks fluently. He is a talker (not ahuge shock). He was not there to hear me out so much as to clarify his ownviews. The main message he wanted to transmit was that he is not a carpetbagger.He is a translator who pivoted by several degrees to the business side ofthings. He launched into a detailed narration of his professional life, from abusiness and economics degree, to his first job at a consultancy at which he alsodid translations, to film subtitler (like me), to independent freelancer (likeme), to owner of a budding agency in Brazilian Portuguese and Latin AmericanSpanish, to executive for several large “multi-language vendors.” His careerspans a period in which translation transitioned from being a cottage industrydominated by individuals and small companies to a slightly less fragmented cottageindustry in which much larger mid-caps provide outsourced language services to multinationalblue chips. I think a lot of his views are tied to his participation in thattransition.
I don’t dispute that he is an experiencedtranslator. Point taken. He is not a carpetbagger. Okay. Most of his views thatI have found questionable have to do with slightly superficial ideas about thetransformative power of technology. Surprisingly, that subject was barelymentioned during a lengthy three-hour-long exchange. His attitude is thattechnology is an adjunct and not as central an issue as many think, at leastfrom a business perspective (I think that is just a step away from my ownsuspicion that translation technology is commoditized, but he did not go as faras saying that). Another surprise is that he also expressed considerableskepticism about crowdsourcing. Furthermore, when I asked him if he thoughtthat translation was a commodity, he did explicitly and flatly refute the idea.
Beyond personal biography, the message hesought to sell me was that “we are not so different, you and I.” I concede weare both Latin Americans of almost the same generation who drifted intotranslation. We are both typical of a certain, recognizable middle-class typeof South American who comes from No-Place, raised and educated in severalcountries, with two or three passports, two or more languages, and withgrandparents who hail from all over the globe. But I replied several times thatour views are indeed sharply different, and probably determined by our contrastingpositions within the industry. He is a born entrepreneur. I am not. He hasprobably gambled his life savings on a wing and prayer a couple of times. I am bynature risk averse. He feels frustrated that criticism of business as a dirtything is unfair. His view is that we cannot and should not demonize companies. Iagree with him on that, but that does not mean that sleazy businesses or shoddypractices should not come in for criticism.
It is not so much the facts on which we aredivided. It is on the interpretation of those facts.
For instance, he is very enamored of theargument that a call for all translators to try to get into the high-ratesector is self-defeating. He drew a Gaussian curve on a napkin and told me thatif everyone in the overpopulated, hamsterized portion of the bell curve jumpsinto the higher part of the curve, the better-paid freelancers would faceincreasing competition. In my view, that is a very simplistic way of looking atthings. It assumes a perfect, undifferentiated market. In such a hypothetical (andunlikely) case, I still don’t think other freelancers would be my competition.Neither is Lionbridge, which is too large to be interested in the tinycompanies I serve. My concern is competition from junky small agencies that arepure intermediaries for a so-so database, or perhaps a junky larger agency suchas Transperfect, which is very aggressive in competing at every price level andfor every single loose dollar drifting along out there (anywhere). No. I wouldwelcome more translators emigrating from the middle of the bell curve, because Ithink a rising tide could well lift all boats.
Another challenge Renato posed: Do I thinkall translators should charge homogenous (and high) rates? No, that is certainlynot my view either. A market should be stratified and diversified in order toreflect different levels of service, specialization, and experience. I certainlydon’t think someone who just graduated should get the same compensation I get.My view, though, is that the current state tends toward a curve that is farmore skewed to the left side of the distribution than is warranted. I see a lotof highly qualified specialists struggling to make rent, or people living withroommates well into their thirties. Not a pretty sight. A slight trend towardthe right side of the chart would not be a bad thing, in my view.
Another pointed challenge: Do I think thereshould be an international brotherhood of translation teamsters demandingstandard wages? Not really. First of all, I don’t think it’s feasible in theage of the Internet (except perhaps for interpreters), or even desirable. Rent seekingis not a pretty sight. We have to accept the good that globalization brings in withthe bad: the former being access to a worldwide market, the latter being Lionbridgeand those annoying South Asian agencies who claim to do “native Spanish.” Idon’t think homogeneity is something professionals should strive for. (But evenif that were to happen, at least homogenous rates would relieve me from theniggling worry [to which I’m sometimes prone] that I’m competing on price. It would allowme to focus on differentiation.)
In response to the undesired homogenization,I challenged him with this question: What is more valuable for a youngtranslator, to toil for years as a cog in a Very Large Translation Agency forpennies a word, or to forego paid work and maybe get into a graduate program,travel, take a course on specialized translation, or learn another language? Hesaw no problem with spending your apprenticeship years in the commoditized sector.I, on the other hand, don’t think there is much of a future in working forfaceless PMs you never meet or agencies who think translation is a commodity. Sothat is another major difference.
On another issue, I asked him if hesincerely believed that a translator could deliver 10,000 words a day ofhigh-quality, publishable material. He replied in the affirmative, but I wassurprised to learn that it turns out technology has little to do with it, inhis view. He confided in me that back in the eighties and nineties (when SMTwas not even a twinkle in the eye of Phil Ochs and post-editing was a typo),his output was 7,000 words a day (he described his method as dictating into atape recorder which would then be transcribed by a typist). My interpretationof this is as follows: A few productivity tweaks, whether from MT or TM orwhatever, should suffice to push the profession into five-digit daily outputs.In other words, technology is a red herring. Renato countered by asking me whatmy output was. I answered honestly that 7,000 words a day was a bridge too farfor me, but conceded that I had actually pumped out 5,000 words on many days.With the caveat that I couldn’t do it for more than two weeks in a row beforebeing totally burned out. So you see, slight differences of opinion concealvastly different views of the profession.
Let me provide another example of differinginterpretations of the same facts. Renato said he had once been asked at anevent what output a translator could achieve in the future. He had replied withtypical bullishness that 30,000-35,000 words per day was a feasible number fora translator in the Era of the Jetsons. I gasped (audibly): “That’s absurd! Howcould you even proofread that output?!”Undaunted, he went on to tell me that the day after he voiced that opinion, he hadlogged onto his email to find an advertisement from a leading CAT tool designerin which a translator gave a testimonial claiming that the tool had allowed herto translate 32,000 words in a singleday. Once again, I blurted out: “That person doesn’t know what she’s talkingabout! Thirty thousand or twenty-five thousand 100% matches do not count as words you translated!” Thatperson was completely misreading a technology she didn’t understand (and thecompany was more than a little dishonest in publishing the testimonial). Yousee what I mean about differing interpretations? For Beninatto, the incident isa harbinger of a happy future marked by greater productivity. For me, it is a perfectexample of how translators are completely incapable of interpretingtechnological change. Night and day. Day and night.
Regarding the “quality is dead” issue, heexplained that it is related to his view that quality as mere error detectionwas the wrong view. He complained that the bandying about of his now infamoustitle was unfortunate (which made me think to myself that perhaps a less“provocative” title would have been in order; you can’t place a huge target onyour back, take a leisurely stroll through the Amazon jungle, and then complainthat the natives are aiming poisoned darts at you). I agree insofar as it meansthat the TEP model in which proofreaders add a myriad of useless tweaks (andoften typos) is not efficient. However, my view is that such a model can workwell in small groups of professionals who work with each other. But scaling upthat model to larger and larger collectives or companies was a recipe for a lotof trouble. And, incidentally, for hamsterization, a term that he criticizes asimpolite (I would reply that it is far more uncouth to deprofessionalizepeople, but there you go).
No, our opinions are completely different.I asked him point blank if he thought a translator should compete on price. Hesaid flatly no, that competing on price is suicidal. But I think where hecontradicts himself is that he often voiced the parallel message that noteveryone can aspire to the higher echelons of the market (which is self-evidentand not insightful) and that the lower-rate competitors will ultimately eatyour lunch.
To sum it up, I think his career representsan example of the undeniable triumph of the drive to Cheap and Big. However, Ithink Cheap as a pricing model might not be as successful over the next twodecades as it has been over the past two. Cheap is already running intoheadwinds as the middle class in China gets larger and larger. Look at LatinAmerican currencies. They are appreciating at breakneck pace while the industrializedworld deleverages. Of course, the commodities boom will eventually go bust,that is inherent to cycles. But take a look at Brazil’s or Colombia’sinternational reserves. Dutch disease is deadly for cheap labor. Asians andLatin Americans learned the painful lessons of the nineties (the TequilaEffect, the Samba Effect, and those little episodes known as the Russian debtdefault and the Asian financial crisis). They learned them rather well.
To illustrate the point, I mentioned theanecdote about the late Steve Jobs and Obama at a dinner party held last year.Obama asked the Apple CEO how the U.S. can bring back those factory jobs makingiPads. Jobs replied bluntly that those jobs are gone forever.Beninatto knew the anecdote. His eyes brightened when I mentioned it, but I’msure that it’s because he misreads the anecdote. He thinks it confirms thesuperiority of Cheap. But the founder of Apple wasn’t saying those jobs aregone forever because Chinese salaries are dirt poor. His point was far moresubtle. Listen to why those salaries will never come back to the U.S.:
Anothercritical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale theUnited States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. Thecompany’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to findthat many qualified engineers in the United States.
InChina, it took 15 days.
Companieslike Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technicalwork force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers withmore than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans atthat skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, butthe country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.If the FoxConn jobs are fated to remain inChina, it is not because those engineers are cheap. They may earn less thanAmerican engineers, but their country’s real advantage is ease of sourcing and abundance.And that means skilled labor. It is a dramatic indication that China isclimbing up the value chain, just as Japan, Korea, and Chile did earlier. Thatis something a member of a hamsterized work force is not doing. The anecdote does,unfortunately, also spell the end of the highly paid American blue collarworker, whose elegy is pictured in Michael Moore’s films. But it also spellsthe rise of something equally revolutionary: the better-paid blue collarChinese worker and the well-paid, thrifty, and hyper-educated Chinese middleclass. More significantly, it also spells the end of something else: the demiseof Cheap as the main pillar of international business models. China’s edge isnow both volume-based AND strategic. An alert player should pick up his ears,because the times they are a-changin’. Thatis the real significance of the Jobs-Obama story.
As I assured him over and over,I do not think he is an evil person, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find alot of his opinions completely erroneous, if not downright objectionable. Everytime I said that, he assured me with a little twinkle in his eye that, deepdown, we actually agree on more than I think. I could see readily that he is aborn salesman. Perhaps even too good. The dirty little secret about investmentbanking is that, at heart, it is just sales. A trader, a VP, a guru-economist, evena nerdy quant is really just a salesperson. But at Goldman Sachs, the capital sinwas to be “salesy,” which means being slightly too slick for your own good.
So, does the man have horns and a tail? No.Does he smell of brimstone? No. He is a charming, affable person with a bigpersonality. However, if he gets flak from random bloggers, it is probably dueto his lack of awareness about the heterogeneity of the audiences you reach nowon the Internet. A message on a blog or a video uploaded to YouTube is pushedout to an audience that is difficult to predict, much less control. That willbe the case until the Internet becomes a more textured place broken down intoapps or dominated by more regulated spaces unreachable via the flatness of thesearch engine. I told him that. Once again, he completely brushed off thissuggestion. However, I reiterate my belief that if you venture out into theInternet, you have to be prepared to be misunderstood. I write a niche blogread by a tiny audience of 200 people, and the variety of reactions always runsthe gamut from utterly fascinating to completely baffling. We have to learn tolive with that.
So, in closing, I thank him for the invitationto lunch. He was also gracious enough to invite me to the ELIA networking eventfree of charge a couple of days later, an invitation I accepted. Butdifferences of opinion remain and don’t necessarily have to be drowned in bonhomieand red wine, since they can be insightful. My two main messages, which I wouldlike to reiterate, is first of all that translation will probably come to bedominated by a barbell, with large agencies on one end of the barbell andcottage providers on the other. The contrasting views and philosophies of thetwo extremes will become increasingly more divergent, a divergence which willon occasion sound rather bitter. That is unavoidable. Secondly, there is anemerging sleaze problem as some unethical companies scale up.
About both of these opinions he was unsurprisinglydismissive. He cheerfully waved them off, like the eternal optimist he probablyis. I accept these as very real, like the over-analytical pessimist I am.
We must, therefore, agree to disagree andhope for the best, because—to answer Peggy Lee’s melancholy question with a refrainfrom funk-salsameisters Los amigos invisibles—that’s really all there is.
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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