Jianjun's Blog

When a global financial turmoil evolves and businesses get credit pinch and many of them even collapse, cash is once more the king and everyone is cutting costs and craving for liquidity, companies surely will cut back translation budgets. 

Besides that, I insist that the best time (by ‘best time’ I mean a period in which online outsourcers and suppliers have almost ready-made mutual trust) for online translation marketing is going away if not completely over. ProZ as such a portal has met its bottleneck and now is struggling to keep up the revenue by reducing premium member fees to less than 60 USD/year for China-based translators and creating self-issued certificates or badges for paying members to attract new clients. 

Despite of the efforts, however, online clients probably will soon no longer trust anyone simply because she/he has a nice-looking picture, a glamorous profile or a flashy website. In a cyber translation outsourcing market where even certificates can be self-made or even faked, they will need to grab something concrete about that person, something they can prove as reliable, before contacting the freelancer. More and more wise outsourcers now know a simple rule: Established translators never lack jobs. So these translators are unlikely to stay online everyday looking for new clients and new projects and pay this fee or that fee to get job opportunities.

On the other hand, if a freelancer started earlier like from 2001 to 2005 (when many online swindlers hadn’t even realized there was a market that they could also easily cheat in), and if she/he could keep her/his good quality and hence had retained a good client base, she/he should not feel much pain during this hard time. Having a large client base is like investment diversification (although this strategy is not doing very well at this time in the financial world as the global markets and sectors plunge indiscriminately ) – there are always long-term clients giving you enough jobs. 

If you work as a freelancer, lowering per unit rates won’t bring you out of the mire. Instead, it will kill your translation skills until one day your quality is ruined and you can never get any good clients. The theory behind this is quite simple: to earn enough with low rates, one has to overwork and for long hours, and this results in unavoidable lower quality. After a time, when it has become a habit, the translator can no longer provide quality services and never get good rates. This is a vicious circle. 

Therefore, don’t worry about other people’s low rates. Keep your rates and quality and the client will come back when those guys fail them time and again. And also don’t worry about those clients (agencies) that only accept low-cost offers without caring about any quality, they are swindlers themselves and will be kicked out of business after a while. 

Freelancers are individual business entities and all businesses need a sound development and risk management strategy. If one has knowledge about these and the necessary mechanism in place, she/he will regret less when financial disasters happen and it is a lifetime’s job to learn from these experiences.

Many translators would agree that living in the country where your source language is spoken is the best way to build upon your existing language skills and give your translation career a certain credibility. It’s hard to disagree with this view. Immersing yourself in the local language and culture is the ideal way to equip yourself with the linguistic and cultural knowledge needed for a career in translation. What better way to learn obscure slang and the latest ‘buzzwords’ than through daily interaction with native speakers from all walks of life?

Not all translators have the luxury of living in the country where their source language is spoken, whether it is due to family obligations or financial circumstances. Trailing spouses and partners of expats may find themselves living in a country where neither their native nor source languages are spoken, working as translators in countries where their language combinations are in lesser demand.

Thanks to the Internet, however, there are still ways for translators and other language professionals to maintain, even improve, their language skills and keep up with the latest terminology and developments in their chosen areas of specialisation. As a former freelance translator looking to re-enter the highly competitive world of Chinese-to-English translation, it’s important for me to know what the latest trends in the PRC and Greater China are, which political and social ‘buzzwords’ are in fashion and, like all other translators, continue to learn new words and expressions on a daily basis. Language is constantly evolving and 普通话 (国语 in Taiwan) is by no means an exception.

I have a list of resources I have found invaluable and would like to share with fellow Chinese-to-English translators, especially those of you who are no longer living in the ‘Middle Kingdom’. If there’s a resource I may have missed and which you feel a translator should have among their list of bookmarked sites, then do not hesitate to leave a comment with a link to the resource in question.

• Online Dictionaries : There are a number of fairly good online dictionaries. One of my personal favourites is Jukuu, which lists a number of example sentences with every search result. iCIBA is also a link worth bookmarking. It’s important to note that these dictionaries do not necessarily provide translations for highly specialised or technical terms. Links to specialist online dictionaries and glossaries will be dealt with in a separate post.

• Internet Slang : For those who come across obscure slang while browsing online forums, check out 网语网. It’s quite possible that much of the slang and terms listed on that site will be out of date by the time I finish writing this post. Nevertheless, it’s one of the best resources I have found thus far for the rapidly-evolving language of ‘net speak’.

• New Terms & Buzzwords : The Chinese Terms section of the People’s Daily Language Tips website is full of useful words and phrases. The site is actually aimed at ESL learners but those wishing to boost their Chinese vocabulary may find it equally helpful. Latest additions include 高清晰度的卫星图片 (high-resolution satellite photo) and 堰塞湖 (quake lake). The Shanghai Daily’s Buzzword Blog is another great resource, which gives the reader a bit of background information about each ‘buzzword’.

• Glossaries : While I intend to cover specialist glossaries in another post, I thought I would share a link to a site which has a sizeable collection of subject-specific glossaries. FanE.CN’s has over 20 pages’ worth of glossaries and word lists for subjects ranging from media and traditional Chinese snacks to needlework and real estate.

Online newspapers, radio and blogs are also excellent ways to stay informed about linguistic and social developments in the Chinese-speaking world. I will review a selection of these in my next post.

This is all for my debut post at Jianjun’s Blog. Check back often for more of my articles on the challenges of Chinese-to-English translation.

A few Twitter users reported today that they were seeing partially localized text on Twitter web interface. Currently, localized text strings are often mixed with English, and text language changes according to your browser settings.

The following picture shows Chinese with English when I used Safari Chinese version:

Here’s another screen shot showing French mixed with English when I viewed the page with my French version of FireFox:

And I have a feeling that they are still testing the pages before going on with the full-scale internationalization – anyway a nice development out there!