Jianjun’s Blog

When I tell people I’m a translator, I often hear they say, ‘Ah cool, earning money without costing a cent huh?’ I guess most people think what a translator needs to start a career is just two languages and a computer. some even think we are still working with a pen and a piece of paper. But the fact is starting as a translator does require some expensive investments.

Besides a computer, today’s translators have to invest in a tool which is called a Translation Memory (TM). This is a piece of software that ‘remembers’ what you have translated and creates a translation ‘library’. The advantages of using such a tool are multi-faceted:

1. By remembering the terms you used, TM helps to keep consistency. It’s no strange thing that when a translator is working on a large project, sometimes she forgets the translation she used for a certain term. Without a translation memory, she could use more than one translations for the same term, causing inconsistencies. Now, when she’s not sure, a context or glossary search would make things clear.

2. If you can’t remember terms, it’s impossible for you to remember phrases or whole sentences. Translation Memory remembers that for you. For projects with a lot of repetitions such as an operation manual, TM automatically copies or suggests an old translation.

3. MS PowerPoint, Excel, Word, HTML files often contain rich format information - the position of a picture, the font used, its size and color, background sound and animation effects, etc. Needless to say, you want the translation to be exactly the same with the original in these aspects. However, without a Translation Memory, to achieve these is very challenging, time consuming and in some cases impossible.

4. Certain TM also facilitates remote collaboration among team members. WordFast provides a shared TM function. The project translation memory is stored remotely on a ftp server for the whole team to access.

The above advantages are not provided for free, however. Translation Memory prices range from 250€ to 795€ (about $390 - $1264) per license and yes they are mostly priced in Euro.

But the story is not over yet. How come you can translate MS-Office documents without first purchasing the package? The Office 2003 Simplified Chinese version costs several hundred bucks and many clients require PDF file delivery in cases of business card or brochure translation. Acrobat 8.0 costs another 449 USD. Maybe not all translators/businesses use genuine software, but when calculating translators’ work cost, you can’t count that as a factor.

No translators can dispense with a good dictionary. No matter paper-based or electronic, they cost money. And translation training costs money too.

To protect data loss from power outage or hard disk failure, many translators also purchase UPS system, memory sticks or even ftp space. (It’s no surprise that so many translators can’t deliver on time!) Promotional expenses include personal web site and membership fees.

To sum up, being a translator is FAR from cost-free. Depending where the translator is located and what additional services she provides, there are maybe additional costs - such as a fax machine, etc. I hope this article can help people understand how much it costs for a translator to get her business started and why there must be a fee for the translation service.

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