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.

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!”

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.

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.

He noted that not everyone might like to reveal his/her true identity on the web and said China is still not a ‘common peoples’ society’（公民社会或平民社会）and ‘individual rights have to be protected by oneself, and probably may not be fully protected.’（个人的权益需要自己注意保障，而且未必保护得过来。）

Although other colleagues were mostly joking about his comment, I see in China some people do think revealing their true identity may cause them discomfort or even ‘danger’. What are these people? I know lots of people in China fake girls in chats. The fun won’t be there if their manly faces were caught by a cam. I know there are guys who only use cloaked identity to write anti-government posts, comments, etc…

But I don’t think a professional should be afraid of showing his/her true identity. What do you fear and why?

As a matter of fact, IMHO, I believe showing my own identity is the only effective way to fight against those swindlers who claim they are somebody but not. By letting potential clients see who you are and what you think as a real person, you are more likely to build a business relationship. One of the purposes for me to come to this Powwow is exactly to see who’s who and what they are going to say…

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