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Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Take, O take me as I am: accepting and mitigating the downsides of freelancing | Feb 27 |
There's a scene in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse in which Mrs Ramsay takes the hand of single artist Lily Briscoe and says, maternally, "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life". You can almost hear Woolf, a famously free spirit herself, gritting her teeth.
Now imagine me leaning over, taking you by the hand, and saying, paternally, "a worker who has not spent time in an office has missed the best of life." You'd be gritting your teeth as well, right? Here you are, a freelancer, living a life of freedom and independence, and here am I, apparently suggesting that corporate drones have something of which we should be envious.
Well, yes and no.
The full moon was very bright when I got back from biweekly choir practice last night at half-past nine, but there was still a sprinkling of stars visible. I expected similar conditions this morning, but the moon and stars had been replaced by an even layer of cloud and we had our walk in chill pre-dawn gloom rather than moonlight.
That is a banal example of things not turning out quite the way one expects. Here's another one. A few years ago I was chatting over coffee with somebody I used to work with about how difficult it is to leave the financial industry. "But you've been a shining example of that" he said. "You got out, and you're doing great." He was right about the work, but it has been even more difficult than I expected to create new friends and networks here in West Wales.
Part of it is that there simply aren't enough people - my office building in Tokyo had a larger population than my nearest town here in Pembrokeshire - so you inevitably interact with fewer individuals. Part of it is that freelancing, whether that be in translation, graphic design, consulting, or any one of a number of other professions, is a solitary occupation.
Leaving a traditional workplace to go freelance is a radical act, if you think about it. People in traditional employment working eight or nine hours every day may well spend more time with their colleagues than with their families. Now, you may only derive satisfaction from, say, 20% of your interactions at your former place of work, and find 80% of them neutral or annoying. Nevertheless, going freelance means that all of those positive interactions vanish, at least on a day-to-day basis. That's a meaningful change in your social circumstances.
This is not news to most freelancers, and undoubtedly some people are reading this and thinking "Hah! I'm fine thanks." That's good; we all aspire to be at least fine. Nevertheless, the need for social contact exists on a continuum like almost every other aspect of human behavior. There will be some for whom a minimum of interaction with other people is ideal, but most of us are neither 24-hour party people nor extreme introverts.
Most of us float somewhere around the center of the distribution, and as such the social aspect of the traditional workplace has much to offer. I tend to think the slightly strange attitudes I see expressed by some freelancers are caused by their lack of experience in professional environments involving more than one or two people, an absence of the adult socialisation that a traditional workplace enforces, for good or for bad.
But freelancing is what it is. Isolation comes with the territory. My argument is that if you are a newly fledged freelancer you should take especial care to ensure a minimum level of social intercourse with other people, having first made an effort to establish what that optimal level is for you personally. You may need more contact with others than you think.
While the attractions of freelancing are easily understood, one should be keenly aware of the downsides, especially as the negative psychological effects may not be either immediate or obvious. Fortunately, they can be addressed through hobbies and interests, volunteer work, or even something as simple as taking the time to chat to people during your daily shop. I like a bit of clonc when I'm out and about myself.
And "hobbies and interests" leads us back to, in my case, singing. I am not a good singer but even in a small community choir the presence of other voices helps hide any vocal infelicities. As a pastime, it gets me out of the house, and I enjoy the process of singing and the feeling of togetherness that it engenders. Some of the relationships I have formed through singing are rather superficial, and some are quite close, but I have met dozens of people and feel far more connected to the local community.
Last night attendance was low due partly to the cold and partly due to people being unwell, but it was a good evening. We continue to practice Bread and Roses, and part of a song by The Incredible String Band. We're also learning Caravan of Love, which some of you may remember as a Housemartins hit in the 1980s, but we didn't practice that last night.
Finally we did an old favorite, the beguilingly brief Take, O Take Me As I Am, winding through it with deliberate lack of haste, again and again and again, without resting. Despite its Christian origins we treat it as a secular song, but the unhurried repetition brings out a meditative and spiritual quality even for those of no particular faith.
I have not warmed to any of the versions of Take, O Take Me As I Am I have seen on YouTube. I find the production is often overblown, and dislike the way so many performances employ dozens of warbling singers and even instruments. Do you really need wall-of-sound vibrato and church organs for this, the most contemplative and pared-down of hymns? To stretch the analogy a little, such ensembles are like the workplaces we have left behind, achieving what bombastic force they have mainly through sheer numbers and application of resources. There comes a time when the intimacy and integrity of the solo performance has more appeal. Viva freelancers!
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | A flurry of activity | Feb 28 |
It is dry when we leave the house for our morning walk at six o'clock, but it has rained overnight. When the dog leaves the path to snuffle around in the undergrowth, I am surprised to see him surrounded by what appears to be dozens of silver flowers. Then I realize that it is light of my head torch reflecting off the moisture on the tiny leaves of brambles and vines at ground level. We walk on, listening to the quavering of the barn owls as they quarter the woodland in search of prey. We have a... See more It is dry when we leave the house for our morning walk at six o'clock, but it has rained overnight. When the dog leaves the path to snuffle around in the undergrowth, I am surprised to see him surrounded by what appears to be dozens of silver flowers. Then I realize that it is light of my head torch reflecting off the moisture on the tiny leaves of brambles and vines at ground level. We walk on, listening to the quavering of the barn owls as they quarter the woodland in search of prey. We have a good local population of barn owls and little owls, which suggests that the ecosystem is healthy.
Our French windows open out onto the rear lawn, but that is higher than the house so there is a bank between the house and the lawn. In this a family or families of voles live. These are affable, small-eared, blunt-nosed little creatures, several of which could comfortably sit in my hand if they ever stayed still long enough. They only seem to have one speed, which is flat out. Their runs extend for several yards in each direction from their burrows, essentially tunnels through the grass and undergrowth that have been formed by their repeated passage. When they decide to go somewhere, it is as if they are moving in a speeded-up video. They are literally so quick that the eye has difficulty following them.
A few years ago we had a thriving colony of these miniature rodents, but one day we caught a glimpse of something sinuously mammalian whipping through the undergrowth, and for a long time after that we no longer saw the voles. While we cannot prove anything, in our household this incident has become known as The Night of the Weasel. Now we have a few voles back, but they still do not have the numbers they had before they were subjected, as we interpret it, to involuntary mustelid-based population control.
(This series is highly recommended for younger children who like a good story and beautiful illustrations.)
We also have some field mice, but we see them only occasionally. Although similar in size to the voles they are shyer, and are easily distinguished from them by their slightly bulbous eyes, large, semi-translucent ears, and pointy noses. One gets the feeling that if they could talk one would find them slightly neurotic and anxious, whereas the voles for some reason exude a sense of bluff and cheerful competence.
After a couple of days of no work, this morning I have had an offer of nearly 9000 characters for a notice of convocation, with a fairly relaxed deadline, and a press release of about 3000 characters that will need to be done by tomorrow. I would not be too worried about the latter, except for the fact that I have begun using the new notebook PC as my main machine, and Dragon NaturallySpeaking is playing up.
I don't know whether it is some setting I have overlooked, or whether the latest incarnation of Notepad in Windows 11 is incompatible with Dragon, but in Notepad the software is not selecting text accurately when instructed. For example, if I were to tell it to select "the software" it selects "e software", omitting the first couple of characters that I wanted to be highlighted. This has thrown my workflow into chaos, and I suspect I'm in for a difficult few days as I try to work around this problem.
Dan
EDIT Just after writing this, I receive another inquiry about 110,000 (!) characters starting tomorrow, for delivery in the second half of March. It's for an end client for which I've done a good amount of work over the past few years, so presumably the agency is just sticking with the translator they know. Accepted.
EDIT2 To the embarrassment of the client, the 9000-character project has, after being thrown into the CAT tool, been reduced to less than 100 characters. She offers me a generous minimum payment to cover the disappointment. I chuckle and accept. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
As I mentioned in a previous post, for the whole of the winter pigeons have been bursting into flight as the dog and I pass on our morning walk, despite it being dark. Two days ago a blackbird gave an alarm call as we walked by - the first time that has happened for many months. Yesterday we heard birds singing as... See more As I mentioned in a previous post, for the whole of the winter pigeons have been bursting into flight as the dog and I pass on our morning walk, despite it being dark. Two days ago a blackbird gave an alarm call as we walked by - the first time that has happened for many months. Yesterday we heard birds singing as we walked up the drive towards the house. This morning, all of a sudden, the woodland is alive with song as we amble along the footpath. Spring is here.
Yesterday I completed something over 2000 characters and submitted the project safely. The work itself went without any major hitches, but I had a number of significant issues with my voice recognition software. Dragon NaturallySpeaking (I'm using version 15.6) is a bit flaky the best of times, but having just moved to Windows 11 it has got significantly worse. It is inserting random spaces into the text as I dictate, and when I ask it to select some text it will select something completely different. For example, in the screenshot below I asked Dragon to select "in touch" and instead it selected all but the first two characters of "increase slightly". Useless.
About the only saving grace of this latest problem with Dragon is that it does have something of an ecosystem attached to it, and this means that there are options other than the built-in DragonPad or Windows Notepad (which is what I have traditionally used). To write this I'm using SP Pro provided by Speech Productivity. It seems to be working fine so far. I will experiment with it over the next few days.
I deliberately chose this time to migrate to my new system because February tends to be busy and March tends to be quiet. However, if the large project offered to me yesterday comes in as planned, and at the size planned, I will need to dictate for many hours a day, every day, for several weeks. Now is not a good time for Dragon to go AWOL but go AWOL it has gone. I have asked a question on the Knowbrainer forum and tried implementing the suggestion given to me there, but that has not worked.
Anyway, as of this writing, the large project has not yet arrived. This is an entire 有価証券報告書 (yuka shoken hokokusho), or securities report, which is an official filing submitted to the authorities. These are detailed summaries of the operations and financial position of the company in question and typically run to about a hundred pages. I translated one of these more or less in its entirety a few months ago, a complete example last year, and have tackled parts of dozens of such reports over the years.
Based on my by-now considerable experience with long projects, I usually suggest to clients that I deliver a certain amount every few days. This makes it easier for both sides, because it motivates the translator to work away steadily at the project rather than trying to cram in a huge number of characters in the final few days, and it allows the project manager to have the incoming submissions checked in digestible chunks.
For this reason I propose to the project manager that I deliver around 10,000 characters every few days. She agrees, and suggests a schedule based on the same two days every week. I like the simplicity of this, and the numbers look fine, so this is what we decide on.
This means I will have to be fairly disciplined, but it should leave me a little bit of spare capacity to handle requests from other clients if they arise, but nothing too large or nothing with a very tight deadline.
It is, I think, a bad mistake to take on so much work that other clients are cut out completely for extended periods of time. I'm convinced that clients prefer freelancers with a high level of expected availability. If a client inquires about availability three times and the same freelancer tells them they have no spare capacity three times, I suspect that freelancer moves down the PM's mental list of people to contact for work. This is probably less of an issue during times that are understood to be seasonally busy in a particular industry which you specialize - I get bookings weeks in advance for busy season - but during relatively quiet periods I feel there is an expectation that you will have some availability...
EDIT: Just before I posted this the PM for the large project got in touch to let me know that the volume will increase slightly because the client wants the text in the graphical material to be translated as well. She should have it ready to hand off to me in about an hour.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | The sting in the tail | Mar 1 |
Today is officially the first day of spring. At 6 AM it is raining steadily outside, and when I pass the car it is covered with either accumulated hailstones or snow - the sting in the tail of a dying winter. The dog and I rush round our morning circuit and get back into the warm as soon as we can.
Yesterday I spent a lot of time preparing the ground for the large project, which was handed off late in the morning, and also messing around with the Dragon voice recognition software. As mentioned yesterday, it is no longer playing nicely with the Windows 11 version of Notepad. On a separate forum, Dragon users have pointed out that I can use DragonPad instead of Notepad to dictate (yes, but that has its own issues) and there have been a number of other helpful suggestions. Nevertheless, this problem slowed me down drastically yesterday and as a result I completed less than 2000 characters of translation.
Suggestion: if your workflow depends on particular piece of software, it would be wise to have a plan for what to do if that application has a problem.
In my case it means that for Trados Studio I have an additional license on a separate machine, and indeed a whole separate machine that I can use if I absolutely have to. Phrase is not a problem; my clients provide the license so it can be installed on as many machines as I like. Dragon NaturallySpeaking itself I had understood to be a single point of failure, but I have it installed on the other machine and I have been looking at Talon as a replacement/backup. I had never imagined that Notepad - that most ubiquitous of Windows software - would become the SPOF in my workflow.
After a bit of lateral thinking, it does seem that I've been able to resurrect the Windows 10 version of Notepad for use on Windows 11 so we shall see how that goes today. I really don't want to have to make major changes to my workflow at a busy time, which March has unexpectedly become. I mean, the work is welcome, but I was planning to use this as a quiet period for migration.
The project manager for this job has suggested a timetable that means delivering about 13,000 characters every three days, so an average of more than 4000 characters a day. That is a demanding schedule, so updates to this thread are likely to be much more concise over the next three weeks (no doubt to the relief of many).
I must do a big push today to compensate for the delays I had yesterday.
Dan
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Our back door faces east, and when I opened it this morning I saw through the bare branches of the damson tree a clear lightening of the horizon, the first time this year. The photo below was taken a little while later, at the eastern edge of the woodland. In the space of just a few days everything seems to have become more spring-like, but it was still a frigid 1.3C when the dog and I left the house.
On the professional front, I did get some work done yesterday, a bit over 5000 characters all told. Okay but not great.
The afternoon was disrupted by the need to go and pick up the Land Cruiser, which needed to have some work done to pass its MOT. It was quite a long list, which is not surprising given that it is 20 years old this year. All in all, it was painfully expensive, and left me brooding over the cost of running two vehicles. As my wife pointed out, if I bought a similar car new then my monthly payment would be about as much as the amount I just paid for the yearly service, plus my annual insurance would be several multiples what it is currently. She is absolutely right, and bangernomics still makes sense, but the absolute cost is still high. However, when you live in the middle of nowhere and have children of school age it is unwise to depend on one car, and living where we do it's useful to have one vehicle that can handle difficult conditions.
It was when I was in this, for want of a better word, vulnerable psychological state that I received an email from a regular client mid-afternoon. He offered me a fairly large project involving confidential materials for a major multinational, with a deadline of Monday midnight. I should have politely declined, but I accepted it anyway. I couldn't help thinking of the job in terms of it generating income equivalent to more than half the invoice that I just paid for the Land Cruiser, and so recouping my outgoings.
The upshot is that I'm even more desperately busy than I was yesterday morning. It's at times like these that I get that stop-I-want-to-get-off feeling, but it's not easy to turn down money, especially when you, you know, could do with the money. All I can do is push through the next few days. The key will be working steadily rather than rushing. The rest of the family will be away this afternoon watching Dune 2 at the Mwldan cinema, so at least that will minimize distractions.
Easter is several weeks away yet, but to lighten the unintentionally downbeat atmosphere I am posting an irrelevant but strangely comforting picture of some still-warm-from-the-oven hot cross buns.
The yellow table mat at the bottom left is made of bamboo. We bought quite a few of these in different colors from a small tatami shop not far from our flat in Tokyo, just below Iikura crossing and only a few hundred yards from the Tokyo Tower. That was about 20 years ago, and they have been really hard-wearing. The craftsman who ran the shop was elderly when he sold them to us, and has doubtless long since retired.
Time to get to work.
Dan
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Moon half done, job half done | Mar 3 |
When we come out of the house this morning the waning moon is nowhere to be seen in what is a slightly cloudy firmament, but after walking down the drive, turning right down the track, then bearing right again, I notice it near the house, a perfect half circle poised low over the horizon.
It is a still morning and the sky is already light. I'm just putting away my phone after taking the photo above when I hear the unmistakable sound of geese calling high up ahead of us to the west. I can't see anything but they are clearly flying at speed because within a couple of seconds the honking passes over our heads and then a few moments after that the noise has receded to the east. They may well be heading for the estuary of the Teifi at St Dogmaels, where they congregate in huge numbers.
Yesterday was a long day, but about half of what I need to deliver is done. I completed over 7000 characters for the job I need to submit by midnight tonight, and another 1000 or so characters for the job I need to submit on Monday night. I now feel I have a reasonable handle on both projects, and will be able to get them in on time.
As noted previously, the former project is an ongoing issue, but having completed about 10% of it I have its measure. The smaller job is a presentation, and I want to reuse a lot of the material in the target segments. This is not necessarily straightforward with Japanese text. I'm guessing it would seldom be an issue when translating a European language to English - maybe one would have to look out for the delimiters for thousands, that sort of thing? - but in Japanese you have the problem of half-width versus full-width characters, even for the same number or symbol.
Look at these two percentage signs, for example. The upper one is a full-width character (not acceptable in English) and the lower one is half-width character, which is what would be used in English.
％
%
Or these numbers:
８
8
The difference in width isn't very clear looking at this post actually, so here is an image showing what it looks like in Notepad.
The same goes for punctuation symbols and things like parentheses. If the segment is a full sentence that I'm going to dictate anyway, I probably won't bother but sometimes it's useful just to do a search and replace, often using a regex, so that things like ８％ become 8%.
Financial translation from Japanese to English usually and unsurprisingly involves a lot of figures and values, so it is sometimes worth spending 5 minutes just getting all of that out of the way. Most of the time is spent actually thinking about the regex itself, but the ones I use most often are easy enough to reproduce so the whole thing only takes a few seconds.
Interestingly, one of the classic texts on regular expressions, which I read back in the nineties, was written by a chap who has lived in Kyoto for many years, and who is also a keen photographer. You can see some of his pretty pictures here.
Back to work. I need to do at least 6000 characters today, and presentations tend to be bitty and slow.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-03-03 08:14 GMT]
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | In spring it is the dawn | Mar 4 |
"Haru wa akebono" said Sei Shonagon, famously, and she was generally right about that sort of thing, being a (witty and occasionally snarky) poetess. Today her comments are bang on the money.
I'm not entirely sure what relevance she has to human resources strategy, or the acquisition of treasury shares, but maybe there is a message in her work somewhere that covers it. I suspect she would have found it all frightfully crude and boring.
Yesterday I succeeded in grinding out about 6000 characters of the presentation materials. There are about the same amount remaining and I think I'm probably okay, but today's schedule is being complicated by an unavoidable appointment in the local town. So after that I will have to rush back to the office and focus on work.
Another long day and another long week ahead. Ganbarimasu, as always.
Dan
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Fast food or translation? Maybe fast food | Mar 5 |
Source: Salary.com
Something entirely normal happened yesterday: somebody started a thread on insultingly low translation rates. What was interesting was that somebody else pointed out that fast food workers will be earning $20 an hour in California next year (more minimum wage hikes). I suspect this will only accelerate the existing trend towards introduction of self-service kiosks at fast food restaurants, but the poster was quite right in my opinion to imply that fast food workers are probably earning more than many freelance translators.
I don't know why this is. Why would you earn yourself next to nothing working as a freelance translator when you could earn better money elsewhere in the kind of job that is widely available, and probably get a bit of social contact as well? I conclude that there are many people for whom the idea of being a translator is important. It is in some way a significant part of their self-image, perhaps.
Another factor is that if you are not in a populous area and there are few jobs available, then translation is - if you speak a language - an obvious work-from-home kind of job. I suspect that, furthermore, many of these people do not realize that they need to offer more than just a second language to succeed in translation. They don't succeed, and this leads to a good deal of angst, understandably.
I have done okay in translation, and sometimes I get accused of being "lucky" because I work in a somewhat rare language pair. Setting aside for the moment the very much greater difficulty of acquiring Japanese in the first place compared to a typical European language (by the time I started Japanese I had many years of experience in Welsh and French, including an A grade at A-level in the latter, and I really suffered with Japanese), it is simply untrue that freelancers in the JA-EN language pair are all doing well.
If you subscribe to mailing lists and forums for this pair, you will find that there are plenty of people who are struggling. It is absolutely not the case that being in a specific language pair will guarantee you success. However, I do think that the level of intellectual property in the country of your source language is important. That is, if you translate from a language in which there is a lot of information that is of interest to people in the wider world, demand should be fairly healthy as matter of course. But that says nothing about supply. There are still many projects that simply don't pay because there are too many people who are prepared to undertake them for almost no money.
On a pair-specific mailing list a few months ago, we had a situation in which somebody got in a huff and withdrew from the list, but not before delivering a parting shot that that boiled down to "lots of you guys are struggling, but I'm not, hah!". That surprised me, because they are apparently involved mostly in the translation of literature in a broad sense, and my perception is that this is never been a well-paid area of work. One of the comments they made was that there is a shortage of translators willing to tackle novels.
Now, this is an area about which I know absolutely nothing, because I'm not interested in literary translation, so I can only take at face value their assertion that a novel of about 300 pages would be paid $4,000. If we assume a book with 600 Japanese characters a page (realistic?) and 300 pages, that's 180,000 characters. At current exchange rates $4,000 is roughly 600,000 yen, so that's about 3 yen a character, which is just too awful for me to contemplate.
To put it another way, if one translates 500 characters an hour - I'm assuming that literary translation is not the kind of thing where you can cheerfully bash out 1000 characters an hour - it would take 360 hours to complete such a project, or roughly $11 an hour. And this is in a so-called "rare" language pair! It's also conditional on maintaining 500 characters an hour, which may be optimistic.
Meanwhile, the median hourly rate for fast food workers in the U.S. is estimated to be $13. If you love translation, if it is a passion of yours that you get to indulge and sometimes get paid for, if you maybe live at home with your parents or if you have a spouse who is the main breadwinner, then it would seem a no-brainer to put your hand up for this kind of literary work. If you have a family to feed, perhaps not.
What do I think drives success? I think it is a multifactorial problem, but that these days domain-specific knowledge (a specialization) is probably the single most important issue, together with the ability to write well in your target language. I think both of these are underestimated, particularly among those with relatively shallow experience in translation. Knowing your source language well is important, of course, but you need to be able to write fluently in your target language, have a decent grasp of the rules, and a decent grasp of when it's okay to break them.
I most definitely do not think that a degree in translation is required for success in this industry. Some basic understanding of translation is probably useful but this is the kind of thing that to my mind could be studied in a three-month, part-time course. It's not the kind of study for which you should be getting into thousands of dollars of debt, because the return is so uncertain.
We have in the past had threads in which people with an academic background asserted that graduates of translation degrees are basically a few steps ahead of everybody else. If you are browsing this forum and come across such threads, I suggest you think very carefully about whether the people pushing translation degrees have a vested interest in such courses. That interest could be either pecuniary, in the sense that they are involved in teaching such courses, or psychological, in the sense that they need to feel that their involvement in such teaching has resulted in meaningfully improved outcomes for their students. If somebody stridently proclaims the benefits of a translation degree, ask to see the data that underpins their opinion.
If you were to compare people taking such degrees to the entire freelance translator population, which will include large numbers of people with low levels of linguistic skill and maybe no formal education in the language at all, it may be that translation degree students do have good outcomes. I would argue that if you are at the level where you can take a degree in translation, you are already in a very small minority in the sense that you can fund and take the time to do so. Therefore, the proper benchmark is not the low end of the freelance translator population but the median income for professionals in your country.
My advice has been the same for many years. If you are a younger person and you're thinking about specializing in financial translation, or accounting, or possibly in something ultra-niche like derivatives contracts or investment research, why not just go and work in finance? If you are thinking of specializing in engineering, why not go and work in that sector, or take a qualification in it? You'll probably earn more and you'll certainly learn more, and if translation is still here in a decade you can always return to it.
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So, back to work for me. Yesterday I did not get to my desk to start work until well past 11 a.m., and at that point I still had another 6500 characters to complete. It was a real slog, lots of fragmented text with little context and a good deal of confirmatory research required, but I finally finished and submitted it at around 9 p.m. I was tired by the time I got to bed.
Today I'm switching to the large and long-term project that is scheduled to continue until the final third of this month. I should aim for 6500 characters today, as I need to submit about 13,000 by tomorrow evening. Given that I know the end client well, I think that is doable.
I also had a client contact me yesterday about a job that she booked way back in January. She sent me a draft of the project. It is only about 4000 characters but it's about technology, which will be a nice change of pace. The deadline is not too demanding. The final version should be handed off to me today.
In addition to that I have had a request from a regular client for a press release to be translated by next week for a major consumer goods manufacturer. This too has a relatively low character count and a relaxed deadline, so I accepted that as something to do in parallel with the large, long-term project. That will start tomorrow.
In Japanese-English financial translation I have found that March is usually a quiet month, but this year it is going to be a bit full-on.
Dan
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Things are starting to get complicated. Yesterday I did 5000 characters on the long-term project for Client A. I need to translate rather more than that today to hit my target for delivery tomorrow morning JST.
I have also accepted the press release job I mentioned recently for Client B, for delivery on Tuesday, about 3000 characters.
A different project manager at Client A has approach me this morning about a similarly sized project behalf of an end client for which I ... See more Things are starting to get complicated. Yesterday I did 5000 characters on the long-term project for Client A. I need to translate rather more than that today to hit my target for delivery tomorrow morning JST.
I have also accepted the press release job I mentioned recently for Client B, for delivery on Tuesday, about 3000 characters.
A different project manager at Client A has approach me this morning about a similarly sized project behalf of an end client for which I did a lot of work in December (a relatively young company that has only just started providing English materials to investors, and needed a lot of text translating at once). Given that there is that pre-existing relationship, this end client is already something of a "regular", and I don't like to turn down regulars. Also, it is not much more than 2000 characters. On the other hand the deadline is fairly tight - handed off to me tomorrow, and delivery on Friday morning GMT.
Of course, after delivering Thursday's tranche for the long-term project, I will need to deliver another tranche of that by Monday morning JST, which implies an average of about 3000 characters a day for that job alone.
So it's looking like 3000 characters a day for this long-term project, plus 2000 characters or so tomorrow for Client A, plus around 4000 characters pre-booked by occasional Client D by Saturday morning, plus something close to that for Client B by Tuesday.
My schedule is tight enough that I have had to politely decline a rather small, uninteresting and fiddly job from a European client.
Another headache is that a zip file sent me by a client which, when unzipped, results in garbled filenames (the original filenames are in Japanese). This is the dreaded mojibake problem. I remember having this on my previous system, and solving it, but I don't remember how. Usually you have to add a language to part of the Windows settings. I have tried various things and it's not working.
As a stopgap measure I have unzipped it on my previous machine, where everything turns out fine, and copied the files over to my new notebook, but this is not a practical long-term solution. Yet another headache that translators dealing in European languages do not have to deal with.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-03-06 08:37 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Translation degrees have their benefits | Mar 6 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
We have in the past had threads in which people with an academic background asserted that graduates of translation degrees are basically a few steps ahead of everybody else. If you are browsing this forum and come across such threads, I suggest you think very carefully about whether the people pushing translation degrees have a vested interest in such courses. That interest could be either pecuniary, in the sense that they are involved in teaching such courses, or psychological, in the sense that they need to feel that their involvement in such teaching has resulted in meaningfully improved outcomes for their students. If somebody stridently proclaims the benefits of a translation degree, ask to see the data that underpins their opinion.
I came off a postgraduate diploma in translation capable of functioning in the real world as a translator. I would not have been able to do so otherwise.
I have no data, but my experience is that translators without a language degree often lack a detailed understanding of the workings of the foreign language, and translators without a translation qualification often have a poor grasp of the nuts and bolts of translation. There is a big gap between having worked in field X and lived in country Y and being a capable translator. Some people don't need translator training, but I would say most do.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Education, yes, but does it have to be a degree? | Mar 6 |
Christopher Schröder wrote:
There is a big gap between having worked in field X and lived in country Y and being a capable translator. Some people don't need translator training, but I would say most do.
The point that competence varies by individual is entirely fair, and you're right that most people do need some education.
That notwithstanding, there is a world of difference between spending a few hundred quid to take a part-time translation course consisting of an hour of study each week and lasting a few months, and spending three full-time years at university, and paying many thousands of pounds for the privilege. (£10,400 for an MA at Portsmouth, for example.)
I would think for a full-time course even one year is too much. As far as I can tell, there really isn't that much to learn about translation. There's a bit of sensible stuff about tone and register, and the rest is all pointless theory used to bulk out the teaching. It might be interesting, but clearly many translators get along fine without - I'm one of them, which I accept may make me a little biased.
The difficult bits in my experience are acquiring a firm understanding of your source language, and being able to write well in your target language. I think those are skills that are better addressed by education aimed specifically at those areas. Take some courses in your language of choice, and take a writing course in your target language. Cheaper, more flexible, probably better results.
If degree-level translation education were "free" then maybe it would be less of an issue, but going into debt for a degree of dubious utility doesn't strike me as a good investment. I'm sure that people joining an arts-related course understand very well that most of them will never recoup the money, and that's fine.
Do most prospective translation degree students realize that they may be in the same boat as drama students? Provided that they are understand what they're getting into, it should be their own choice, of course!
Dan
[Edited at 2024-03-06 16:39 GMT]
| | | | | This would be better as a separate thread! | Mar 6 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
That notwithstanding, there is a world of difference between spending a few hundred quid to take a part-time translation course consisting of an hour of study each week and lasting a few months, and spending three full-time years at university, and paying many thousands of pounds for the privilege. (£10,400 for an MA at Portsmouth, for example.)
I would think for a full-time course even one year is too much. As far as I can tell, there really isn't that much to learn about translation. There's a bit of sensible stuff about tone and register, and the rest is all pointless theory used to bulk out the teaching. It might be interesting, but clearly many translators get along fine without - I'm one of them, which I accept may make me a little biased.
The difficult bits in my experience are acquiring a firm understanding of your source language, and being able to write well in your target language. I think those are skills that are better addressed by education aimed specifically at those areas. Take some courses in your language of choice, and take a writing course in your target language. Cheaper, more flexible, probably better results.
If degree-level translation education were "free" then maybe it would be less of an issue, but going into debt for a degree of dubious utility doesn't strike me as a good investment. I'm sure that people joining an arts-related course understand very well that most of them will never recoup the money, and that's fine.
Do most perspective translation degree students realize that they may be in the same boat as drama students? Provided that they are understand what they're getting into, it should be their own choice, of course!
Dan
Yes, but you need to remember that you are not the norm. Far from it. (I can only guess at your capabilities as a translator, but you're intelligent and articulate, which is a good and frankly unusual start.)
I'm no fan of university translation courses, but having done one and then taught on it and then hired three people from it, albeit a long time ago, I can assure you that you're vastly overestimating most people's abilities.
The main thing the students did was practise translating. They needed a lot of practice, because they were incredibly slow and not very good at it. And these were specialist linguists who had been translating throughout school and a first degree. Imagine the first translations of an engineer who's picked up a bit of the local lingo working abroad.
Exceptional translators from either background are always going to be, um, exceptional...
Plus: In many countries university education is still free; the purpose of a degree is generally not to turn out a specialist worker but a capable thinker; I don't think any translation student will be under any illusions by now; and, of course, switching to other careers later is always an option (-:
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Christopher Schröder wrote:
I'm no fan of university translation courses, but having done one and then taught on it and then hired three people from it, albeit a long time ago, I can assure you that you're vastly overestimating most people's abilities.
Fair enough. I think I'm going to have to hold my hand up here and acknowledge that I don't have the data or the experience to support my views. At least you've actually worked with other translators, and I have not (I have only ever met people socially). I cannot comment on my own ability relative to that of others; all I know is that I have made a decent living from it so far.
I agree this would be a good subject for topic, though perhaps better approached from the angle of "how much formal training is actually needed?" rather than the usual "do I need a degree?".
Despite my arguments above, I did a four-year combined language/discipline degree and took a year out in the country of my source language as well, so even I can hardly deny that I have been educated good and hard.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-03-06 13:50 GMT]
| | | | Michael Hughes
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2022)
Japanese to English
+ ...
| What made you decide to become a translator Dan? | Mar 6 |
To clarify I'm making no insinuations either way here as to whether it was a good career choice or not - just genuinely interested to hear your story and would love to read a post on it.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 13:52
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | By accident and coincidence, as is the case in much of life | Mar 7 |
Michael Hughes wrote: To clarify I'm making no insinuations either way here as to whether it was a good career choice or not - just genuinely interested to hear your story and would love to read a post on it.
Okay, just to restate, I focus overwhelmingly on Japanese to English financial translation, with industrial as a sideline in which I would like to do more work. How did I get into it? There's not much to tell, really.
As you know, I worked as a sellside analyst in Japan for nearly 20 years, and before that I had spent a year as an accountancy trainee at Touche Ross (which I joined fresh out of SOAS, where I studied Japanese with economics). I was then hired in London by a Japanese securities company in I think September 1994, and worked in the City until they shipped me out to work in Osaka in early 1995 (three days after the Kobe earthquake). I was headhunted by a foreign firm in Tokyo in 1999, and then worked for a variety of securities companies/investment banks until late 2012. By then I had young children, and my wife and I wanted to bring them up in the countryside rather than in central Tokyo, and I also wanted to reconnect with the UK and my family after two decades away.
When I came back home in 2013 I had to rebuild my house here in West Wales, which had burnt down a few years before, and I knew that a full-time job would be unsuitable. As it happened that was a wise decision: the builder wanted to talk to me and to get decisions on things at least once a week. Often I had to visit the site to have things explained to me. Most unexpected/ironic phone call: "The chimneys we ordered were caught in a fire at the distribution depot and have been destroyed." That actually delayed completion by several months.
For about 18 months after getting back to Wales I did some work putting out boxes for a local charity, which was (understandably) poorly paid. These were typically placed in pubs and other buildings, so I had to travel around around the whole of Pembrokeshire, southern Ceredigion, and parts of western Carmarthenshire to collect them. That was pleasant and useful in the sense that it reacquainted me with the lie of the land (I had been away since 1987) and it also took me to places where I hadn't been before. Even now I have a good map of Pembrokeshire in my head.
Anyway, on a whim I had signed up at ProZ.com and begun to take an interest in discussions on the forum. One Friday afternoon in the autumn of 2014, I was sitting in my car near the Cleddau River when a notification came into my phone. It was from a southern hemisphere agency that wanted a kessan tanshin to be translated, and they had just lobbed it onto the jobs board as a general offer.
I forget whether it was the whole thing or whether it was just part, but it came to about 14,000 characters so maybe the latter? The deadline was Monday, which was quite tight by any standards. I got the feeling that the project managers didn't fully understand what they were dealing with, but that is often the case with non-Japanese personnel.
I looked at it and thought about the rate I would offer, and calculated the invoice in my head. It was a decent chunk of money. I thought "I've read thousands of kessan tanshin. How hard can it be to translate one?" So I contacted the agency and committed myself. They accepted my rate, not without a bit of argument if I remember correctly, but I got the job and spent the next 2-3 days working flat out, without a CAT tool, without a proper dictionary, and I just about got it in by the deadline.
Because I didn't have any kind of workflow set up it was arduous and I remember being physically exhausted at the end of it. I didn't have any issues understanding the content, but of course actually expressing it in English was not a task in which I had much experience. I had done some financial translation of the years in Japan, but very much on an informal, ad hoc basis. On the other hand, I quite enjoy writing and I had spent many years writing professionally and being edited professionally, which makes a big difference I think.
Still, the agency paid me on time and the money was very welcome. Reduced to the essentials, freelance translation requires almost no capital expenditures, other than a PC, and you can tap into a global market from anywhere. Compare that to some kind of franchise (supplying water filters or something) where you need to invest in a vehicle and equipment and are ultimately limited to the local market. In my case, because Pembrokeshire has such a low population density, the local market just isn't enough to live off.
In early 2015 I made the decision to go full-time. Within a month or two I had been "discovered" by Japanese agencies working in finance, and I was earning above median household income for the UK in my first year. I am generally contacted by one or two new clients every year. Some of these fall by the wayside, some remain clients... That's all there is to say really.
I spend a lot of time thinking about how smooth my workflow and become more efficient. If I catch myself doing something repetitively, I wonder if I can automate that task or shortcut the process. Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Nevertheless, it all builds up and I do think I am significantly more efficient than I was in 2015.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday I translated about 9000 characters, so it was a long, long shift. I did get some help from the TM, and from reference to other documents, but it was still hard work.
This morning I have received the PO for the job that was handed off to me yesterday. I have also received the other job that was supposed to be between 2000 and 3000 characters, but turns out to be just over 1000 characters. Doesn't matter, I'm busy enough.
I have also received a list of jobs, from another regular client, that they want me to tackle during earnings season, which extends roughly from late April to late May. There are nearly 30 projects in the table, and I'm surprised to see that a third of them are flagged as not using a CAT tool. This is a new and disturbing development: over the past several years the trend has been for more, not less CAT tool use, and I personally believe that has been an important factor in enabling the industry to cope with rising volumes of text.
I thank the client and tell her I will look at the list. I also point out that in the heat of earnings season, when I may be tackling several projects a day, it is just not practical to go through a 3000-character Word file or PowerPoint file and enter text by hand without any segmentation, translation memory, or termbase.
In her reply she prevaricates a little and says that things may change, but it's all a bit fluffy and vague. I am going to insist that I will not take on those projects unless they explicitly recognize that I will not accept them unless I can use my own CAT tool.
Another client has just sent me an inquiry for a confidential 3000-character document, which consists of supporting material for a major announcement scheduled for next week. It's provisional at this point, but is technical and interesting, so I let her know I would be able to take it on despite the rather tight deadline (tomorrow).
As I've mentioned several times already, March is usually a quiet month that I use to recharge before the chaos of late April/May. I am beginning to wonder whether I will be fresh enough and thinking that I will need to reject a few projects in early April to allow myself adequate rest.
Dan
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