Unfortunately, most poorly compensated professional translators wishing to enter the interpretation field, are not necessarily going to be in any better position than they are at present.

Parallel developments in the fields of legal, medical, and conference interpretation are also combining to drive down quality and qualifications in these areas. Among these should be mentioned:

* The steady transition from courts and hospitals that directly hire on-site interpreters, to phone and VRI (video remote interpretation) as provided by a few big LSP’s and VRI companies, in state court and medical settings.

* The growing preferential hiring, in state and Federal court systems, of uncertified court interpreters, as a significant cost-saving measure. All of this in blatant violation of Federal and many states’ laws, not to mention the Title VI Civil Rights Act specifying that qualified language services be provided to all LEP (Limited English Proficiency) persons in court and medical settings.

* The preferential use of foreign based and lower priced U.S. based interpreters working both remotely or on-site, at U.S. based conferences.

* The general uninformed state of knowledge, by judges, attorneys, medical providers, and conference organizers, of the difference in quality provided by a certified interpreter, as compared to an untrained or subtrained bilingual.

Kathleen Morris
Federally Certified Spanish Interpreter
State of IL Certified
Medically Certified Interpreter

Hi Luigi,

Yours is one of the smartest, most objective voices out there, and it would have been remiss of me not to quote you.
Thanks for the links to your two other very interesting articles. As you said: “The future has already begun, tempus fugit, time is running out and it is always less. So, if the question is when, the answer is now, hic et nunc, before it’s too late.”

Thank you, Jon. I wholeheartedly agree with your comments. It’s the way many of us feel today… The state of mind among many long-time translators seems to be “switch gears or switch career”, and that’s not always a happy place to be.

I’m afraid you may be right when you say that PEMT will soon become the bulk of our work. When that day comes, my only hope is that post editing will actually be about editing (vs. retranslating most of the text), and that “editors” will be paid more than what they are paid today. And that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it?

Most of us long timers are highly educated, highly qualified, and highly experienced. But how many LSPs are actually willing to compensate us for what we’re worth? How many clients are willing to demand (and pay for) qualified translators? How many LSPs/clients can tell the difference? How many of us will have left the profession in 5–10 years to become teachers/professors, interpreters, seminar presenters, conference speakers, e-book writers or full-time bloggers?

Like you, I’d be hard pressed to counsel anyone thinking about it as a career today. 🙁

The first is that, in my view, all of the factors mentioned here will have the inevitable effect of drastically reducing the demand for good human translators in the countries with higher costs of living. When I started out, in the typewriter/snail-mail era, there was of course no machine translation, so everything required humans. Also, it seems to me, many translation customers in those days were generally better informed about what translation involves and what good translations look like than the great number of people who are looking for something quick and easy these days, and have no problem settling for whatever Google Translate gives them.

Therefore, a large percentage of the famous “exploding world-wide demand for translation” we always hear about (I have no idea how large, but it must be a considerable fraction) is perfectly happy with “good enough” translations. What supplied a good deal of demand for translators’ services when there was no machine translation is now completely unavailable to us. Smartphone apps, it seems to me, have put the old-fashioned phrasebooks out of business, and this is only the beginning of the trend. Most of the estimates of the demand for translation and the size of the market that we see are probably not to be trusted — at least, if we are thinking about good professional careers.

Second, even highly skilled and experienced translators will increasingly have to change their work methods from the traditional “me and my typewriter/PC, and a few dictionaries to thumb through” to one in which they routinely work in close collaboration with machine translation systems (which, however much we want to deny it, are getting more and more effective). We may feel comfortable now with looking down our noses at “mere post-editing,” but I think that it will fairly soon become the bulk of our work, and we need to get used to it. We need to make it clear to the public that good translation in the 21st century has become, not just a process monopolized by humans, but a partnership between machine translation and people who know how to work with it.

The nature of the translation industry has changed so much since I entered it that I have no idea how I would counsel someone who is thinking about it as a career today. All I could say is that they should very carefully consider whether it would make any sense for them to start in on it, except as a hobby.