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 academic curiosity and a willingness to learn new things are vital assets in the highly competitive translation market. While marketing skills and linguistic knowledge are essential for a successful career in freelance translation, translators must also know how to research new terms and understand what it is that they are translating. This is especially true of those translators who choose to specialise as they will need to be familiar with the relevant jargon and be familiar with their chosen area of specialisation. Medical translators are often expected to have at least a basic knowledge of biology and medical terms, while technical translators may find it useful to know how certain components of a machine function.

For those translators who choose to stick to ‘general’ translation, or who are considering moving into a certain area of specialisation, it’s important to know where to turn to when you come across an unfamiliar term or concept. Specialised dictionaries are a good start and the reference section of your local library can be a great help in times of need. Online encyclopaedias are a relatively new resource and there are several Chinese-language encyclopaedias that are worth bookmarking.

• Hoodong (互动在线) - China’s largest wiki site and online encyclopaedia. Its format is very similar to that of the well-known Wikipedia, it’s easy to browse and covers a wide range of subjects. With over 2 million articles, you should be able to find what you’re looking for.

• Baidu Baike (百度百科) - The second most popular online encyclopaedia with over 1 million articles and is pleasing to the eye. Its only drawback is that it’s quite hard to browse.

• Wikipedia ZH (维基百科) – Last but not least, there’s the Chinese-language edition of the world renowned Wikipedia encyclopaedia. Due to the popularity of the other two websites and internet restrictions in some parts of Mainland China, Wikipedia hasn’t had the same level of success amongst the Chinese-speaking community. It’s still a useful resource as its multilingual platform will allow you to cross-reference unknown terms with relative ease.

That’s all from me for now. The Beijing Olympics kicks off in a few days’ time so I would like to end this post with a resounding “中国加油!”

Before the main content, a few words about my blog:

Politics is not part of my blog’s coverage. But for the last few weeks, such things infiltrated into this place. Although I categorized them as cultural, I know they are more political. Now my blog is back in normal mode.

Yesterday I attended a translators Powwow. We had lots of discussions about the market, the client, the rates and the quality. Obviously ‘bypassing the agencies to get direct clients and high rates’ was of great interest to many translators. But there were agency representatives present. Their feedback was unless you can achieve a high standard of quality, let’s not talk about rates.

A colleague from Italy expressed concern that in her country the rates have been going down. I don’t really know what the situation there in Italy. But rates are dependent upon many factors. Different language pairs have different rates. For some language pairs the market demand is very low while the supply is over abundant (too many translators) – such as between some of the most popular western languages. The market situation for such languages is very challenging. But there are still successful translators who get well paid for their superb quality job.

For some languages, rates could be extremely varied and, needless to say, with very different qualities – Chinese for example. Unless there is a reliable source that can provide true reference for quality translators, it’ll be difficult for both good clients and good translators to recognize one another. One of the purposes for me to attend the meeting was to identify such translators as my partners. Some colleagues expressed similar intent and we agreed a Trusted network is the way to go.

How to identify good translators? I pay more attention to the way they speak, how they socialize and interact with other colleagues than their translating experience. I enjoy working with responsible and optimistic people. Equipped with good language skills, necessary training and correct work attitude, work experience could accumulate through real work. One of the rarest virtues of a translator is the willingness and the ability to self-adjust and self-improve in regards to quality.

I agree with Jeffrey of Insupro who says freelance work makes people seclusive and very characteristic. This is actually detrimental to any collaborative teamwork. Sometimes we see a translator and a proofreader mutually pointing fingers at each other. Translators must realize this problem and be more open-minded and sociable instead of close-minded and bigoted. Even though the nature of the work is such that translators are mostly confined to their little space, I found interacting with social media guys do make me feel better and my mind become more active.

I also had a chance to personally see the guy who copied my content. He doesn’t look like the person who did such things.