A Pragmatic Eye

I’m a bit concerned that too many of these posts seem to be having a pop at something, so time to post something a bit more positive, since I’m not actually a full-time misanthropic curmudgeon.

What follows is not exactly the most original of issues, but one that crops up regularly enough. It can hardly have escaped anyone’s attention (well, not anyone likely to be reading this, anyway) that many languages, for reasons that undoubtedly seemed splendid at the time, avail themselves of a grammatical feature known as gender. This feature, in the case of French (your favourite language probably has similar examples) means that for example all victims and persons are referred to as female (la victime, la personne), and that, f’rinstance, a generic customer or user, say, is male (le client, l’utilisateur), regardless of the actual circumstances vis-a-vis possession of the Y-chromosome or otherwise in the event the customer or user is a human being.

And so it is that your humble interlocutor oft-times finds himself translating documents about customers (’tis the way of the world of commerce) or perhaps users of an IT system, written in the third person singular and sprinkled liberally with the relevant pronouns – il, lui or indeed son/sa/ses – and hence, assuming we are talking about people rather than bodies corporate, running into the minor irritation of how to translate these pesky little blighters, the main issue being, of course, that in contemporary English we quite rightly cannot assume that these people are always male, which rules out using the dictionary translation of “he”, etc., and neither can we use the other dictionary translation of “it”, etc. to refer to people.

It’s only a minor irritation, in many ways, and one not without tried-and-tested solutions. Take a fairly banal phrase such as “l’utilisateur doit changer son mot de passe, et ensuite il doit…“. There are, in my experience, three common or garden solutions:

a) my most frequently-used solution (although a thorough statistical analysis is unlikely to be forthcoming, so take my word for it), is probably to pluralise, enabling the English gender-free third person plural to be adopted, thus: “users must change their password, and then they must…”, although this is not without problems – should it be passwords, or does that mean all users have more than one? Left as it is, does it imply one password is shared by several people? Nonetheless, native English documents often adopt the plural in instructions and similar texts (try googling phrases such as “customers should ensure” versus “the customer should ensure”), so it’s a viable option.

b) the rather stilted, but otherwise hard-to-criticise, “the user must change his or her password, and then he or she must…”. Probably OK scattered infrequently in a text, but how often do we see “his or her”, “he or she” and so on in texts written in native English, as it were? But I cannot lie, I have used it.

c) the informal “the user must change their password, and then they must…”. I’m very much a fan of using the third person plural to double up as the third person singular of unknown sex, and have dropped it into several less formal translations, but it may induce apoplexy in the more conservative reader. And possibly loss of future business, and we wouldn’t want that.

Moving away from common or garden solutions, I’ve been known to use two others:

d) “the user’s password must be changed, and then the user must…” – last resort, really, and I’d wager you’d be unlikely to need to, er, resort to it for this sample phrase. It loses the notion of who does the changing, which is sub-optimal to put it mildly, but in a context where it’s obvious the user is the one battering away at the keyboard, you might get away with it. That said, in this case, one could argue that the structure actually implies someone other than the user changes the password.

e) eschew the fiendish pronouns completely. Only really works for seriously turgid old school legal stuff, where pronouns were pretty much banished from contracts, but imagining for an improbable moment our example phrase was a contract stipulation, you’d end up with “the user must change the user’s password, and then the user must…”.

For completeness (he said optimistically, sure that other solutions must be lurking in the linguistic undergrowth), one option I’ve never used would be to use “he”, etc. in the text (or indeed “she”, etc.) and stick a sentence at the start along the lines of “all references to he, etc. should be taken to include she, etc.”. Another I’m not keen on is to default to “she” instead, which avoids the pitfall we’re trying to avoid by not translating “il” as “he” by default, but replaces it with some others, admittedly perhaps less deep.

All of which is fine and dandy, and unlikely to be news to anyone who has been translating for more than about a day. But it got me thinking about how general (i.e. not translator) English speakers themselves usually deal with the issue. In general texts, I suspect we pluralise a lot. But I turned to thinking about contracts and agreements and similarly formal documents.

In these, I don’t see the plural as an option, for obvious reasons – where one party is entering an agreement with one other party, usually specified at the outset, and like as not with a deft “hereinafter (referred to as) the customer” (singular) for good measure, you can’t go slinging plurals around too often, it’s illogical and I daresay a decent lawyer would make mincemeat of careless usage if need be.

I had also initially thought that i) I rarely (not never, admittedly) see the phrase “he or she” these days, and ii) that use of the third person plural was still too controversial to be used in anything legally binding, say, when bugger me if I didn’t see both in one document. Take a bow, the drafters of the London Olympic ticketing T&C, unflinching in their use of “he or she” and then “their” as the corresponding possessive. Not only that, but they have also pluralised, in precisely the way I thought unlikely in the paragraph above. I suspect this kind of solution happens a lot, the whole thing reads formally, but naturally, despite several solutions being used where French, for example, could stick simply to “le client” and il, lui, son/sa/ses. But when I’m not hard at work, I sometimes don’t notice things that it would actually be useful to register upstairs.

At which point I decided to compare two roughly equivalent documents, not dissimilar to the type of stuff I translate fairly often, and demonstrating the issue perfectly. I hauled out the T&C for my Société Générale bank account in France, and the T&C for my HSBC account in the UK. To cut immediately to the chase for once, I find that HSBC uses the second person to refer the account holder, and Soc Gen sticks to the third person. (In fairness, I know this is not a universal distinction – I know of at least one French insurance company that uses the second person in its policies to address the policyholder directly, as it were.)

This was something of a Eureka moment for me. In essence, then, it seems we have a sixth solution for those situations where the third person referred to in a text may naturally be taken to actually be the reader, along the lines of:
f) “As the user, you must change your password, then you must…”
Not the most elegant solution, perhaps, for that particular example, but I wanted to show it could be done, alongside the other options.

As luck would have it, while drafting this post, I had two examples where I was able to use this new, to me, approach. The first was in a brochure, which, while written using the third person, was clearly attempting to appeal to the reader to become a client, hence the third party roles mentioned were ripe for conversion to the second person, which apart from being a neat solution linguistically, surely has the benefit of engaging the reader more?

Hence “le [noun] gère librement son [noun], il peut également…” became “as the [noun], you manage your [noun] as you see fit, and you can also…”.
(Apols for the redaction, but the full phrase makes the end client obvious, and apart from potential confidentiality issues, the bulk of the English translation on the website has nothing to do with me and I’d hate anyone to think it did!)

The second example was an amendment to a contract of employment, full of le salarié doit this and l’employé s’engage à that, plus the accompanying pronouns. Given that the employee was a) the intended reader and b) named at the start of the amendment, it was the work of an instant to add a quick “hereinafter referred to as “you”” and then the work of quite a few more instants to whack in “you are to” and “you undertake to” and so forth, but the overall effect did the trick, I feel.

“Well,” you may be thinking, “I’ve just read 1,500 words for nothing,” in which case I apologise. But while I doubt very much I’m the first person to have thought of it, I don’t recall ever seeing this idea suggested anywhere else before (not that I claim to have completed the internetz, or anything), so I thought I’d shove it out there and see if anyone has any thoughts…

Dear Colleagues

I have a slightly unusual situation with an agency or a fellow translator and I’m not sure how to respond. I’m going to be vague about the details at this stage, but I’d welcome your opinion just as much as I know some of you love to give it, because we all know that agencies are essentially Satan’s representatives here on Earth, intent on driving us to bankruptcy, insanity or a custodial sentence for breach, cackling mercilessly at the thought of our tearful families pleading for just a week-old crust of bread. Well, except this agency perhaps, who are basically nice people who I’ve worked with for ages, although they only pay 3 groats a page 90 days EOM, and I can’t afford to upset them, and they give me tons of work, I’ve no time to look for other clients, or indeed to wipe my own bottom. Hence this forum posting.

And this fellow translator, well, the work I’ve received, looks like the output from a random word generator. Or perhaps unedited MT. I haven’t got time to test that theory by actually running it through an MT website to check, I’ m busy on here. Either that, or some relative or other has trodden on a rusty nail, accidently turning the translator’s mobile phone off and disabling their email in the process (what are the odds, eh?), and is now in intensive care, I assume, because the delivery is now a month late and I’m at my wits’ end.

On the other hand they are all so very passionate about languages and words and whatnot, and are quite obviously the very salt of the earth. In no way would they or I be better employed flipping burgers, or spending more time learning to distinguish the humerus from the gluteus maximus.

So anyway, yes, this situation, well, I’d very much welcome your input. There is, naturally, nothing to be gained by proposing anything by way of plausible explanations or attempting to look at things from the other party’s point of view. I might have been unsure of my position when I started this thread, although I probably wasn’t, but typing out the facts has certainly crystallised matters for me, as writing things down or just explaining things to someone else often does, and I now know exactly where I stand. Obviously the sensible thing to do at this stage would be to not post, but where’s the fun in that? This way, I can drip feed extra information (which may or may not be true, how are you to know?) to support my increasingly entrenched position, and make the rest of the forum look like chumps, albeit quite helpful chumps, or trolls and ignoramuses, and I emerge covered in glory. Absolutely.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

So, what about the legal/contractual side of this alleged trend in the industry to pay nothing whatsoever for 100% matches? (See original post here.)

Not all jurisdictions are the same, of course, but this delightful crew are, happily, based in England so I can indulge in some bar-room level speculation. If you’re not getting paid or receiving any other benefit for the work you are providing, then there is no consideration, and if there is no consideration, then there is no contract. I paraphrase, naturally, you can buy whole books on the subject of consideration and contract. I feel I should point out that I am aware that plenty of jurisdictions have no such concept, including our near neighbours Scotland and France, and that there are those who feel that not all contracts actually need a consideration aspect. There is, therefore, an element of mischief in the following…

Anyway, obviously, ALS would probably argue that the purchase order is an overall price for an overall delivery of documents, and that is what has been offered and accepted and is being paid for: X words for Y money.

However, one of the reasons I rejected the offer I was made (see above) was in fact that it consisted of several documents, at least one of which was entirely 100% matches/repetitions, in other words, I was going to have to take the time to take a copy of the file and rename it, run it through the TM, save it, make sure the formating was OK, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera., for which I would receive the princely sum of diddly-squat. Not only that, but I would be able to demonstrate, using the CAT analysis and email records, that I had received no payment whatsoever for that particular document, and that the agency specifically, deliberately and expressly intended not to pay me for it. (Apart from the basic objection in principle, I knew that this situation would make it extremely hard for me to find the motivation to make any effort on this document whatsoever).

Under those circumstances – where it is possible to physically distinguish meaningful sections of text that are being paid for from sections that are explicitly not being paid for – what exactly is the legal/contractual situation, I wonder? Because one could rephrase the above proposal, from “X words for Y money”, to “A words for Y money and B words for free” (where A + B = X, naturally) – what then?

I have searched my Contract Law book, and wandered around the internet, to no avail. I have found nothing yet about contracts that include a free component.

Is it then possible then to remove the “B words” from the scope of the contract? If so, what does my supplying that document then become? A favour? Does the translator have any contractual obligations? Is there any enforceability? As long as you deliver the “A words” on time and up to snuff, is that sufficient not to be in breach of contract?

Let us assume for a moment that the free stuff, the “B words”, falls inside the scope of the contract (as no doubt ALS want us to) – what then is the translators liability? We are contractually obliged to provide a decent translation, fit for purpose (your jurisdiction’s wording may vary, but the idea is universal – our output has to be useable). And we have here at least 3 possible scenarios relating to the stuff we are, under this hypothesis, contractually obliged to supply up to a certain quality standard:
i) a document that is 100% matched with a TM populated by someone else’s efforts from prior to this project
ii) a document that is 100% matched with a TM populated by my own efforts from prior to this project
iii) a document that has no matches at the start of the project, but, if I translate other documents first, then becomes a document with 100% matches?

In terms of ii) and iii) I would be happy to assume liability for my previous work, assuming it has not been revised to a lower quality. But what about i) ? We are now in a position where, not only does the “free work” component include the time taken just to ‘deal with’ (so-called ‘ignore’) the text, we really should check it. We are liable for it, are we not?. Unless you reply with a counter-offer declining to be held liable for any of the 100% matches… but if we’re getting into the realms of counter offers…. the world’s your oyster.

And what about liability insurance? Given the propensity of insurance companies to wriggle out of paying indemnities whenever they can, we are surely pushing the boundaries a little here, if those of us with insurance expect to be covered for work we do for nothing?

If, conversely, we assume that, contrary to ALS’ intentions, there is no contractual obligation attached to the free stuff, the “B words”, what then? I wonder here whether the normal concept of the “duty of care” we all owe our fellow citizens as we go about our daily business might apply? In which case, surely, once again, I cannot simply skip over the 100% matches (especially if they are result of someone else’s work) without leaving myself potentially liable?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions. ALS may do. Or may think they do (the joy of the law is that there are two sides to every story and one can usually find some kind of legal justifcation for almost any position one chooses to adopt!). And while this section started as a bit of mischief, and kind of “what if…?” piece, it appears to have reached a potentially serious conclusion.

Well, it has in my view. I like to think I know where I stand when I do pro-bono work or anything else for free (duty of care, and all that). I like to think I know where I stand when I’m doing paid work (contractual obligations, liability limited to cost of the job and/or covered by professional insurance). I’m really not sure where I stand, in any sense, when a purchase order includes both paid and unpaid work. And when I’m not sure where I stand, I prefer to stand elsewhere. Pragmatically, as it were, I prefer not getting involved.

You may or may not agree with the idea of doing work for free (in this case, I don’t; in others, I do), that is your prerogative, of course. And when everything is going swimmingly, there is probably no issue, if you don’t object on principle. But when an agency tries to make some kind of claim against some text you supplied them with as part of a larger job, text that you did not actually translate and did not get paid for… well, rather you than me, that’s all.

(Note: as you can probably tell, I’m not a lawyer. My studies have included legal elements, but no legal qualifications. I am aware that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. The above is not intended as legal advice.)

Another LSP is causing a minor stir with a unilateral change to its T&C, or so it would appear (I don’t work for them). Applied Language Solutions (ALS), who claim to “Respect everyone like a friend”, which seems a clumsy turn of phrase as well as an odd thing to say, have emailed the world and his wife (but not me):

High quality translation is an ever-evolving skill and the research and development into technology tools to assist in the process means that customers want to see these advancements reflected in our charging model.

I dunno so much – are end-customers that aware of the technology used? I suspect many are not. Customers may “want to see” lower costs, which is what ALS mean here, they may even ask for them, but are they basing such requests on knowledge of how our CAT tools and suchlike work? I doubt it, and reading between the lines of my own experience, such as when the volume of TM matches is not as it first appeared when a job was first offered, those agencies that operate systems involving reductions for TM matches do in fact charge most end-customers for every word, pay us lot a reduced rate for those matches, and pocket the difference.

In recent months, a zero charge for exact matches and repetitions has become a trend within the industry. As a result, we can no longer pay linguists in the same way, as we cannot pass these costs on to our customers.

Interesting turn of phrase. A trend on which side? The agency/end-customer side, or the agency/freelancer side. I suspect only the latter, if indeed there is such a trend, although ALS try to make it sound like the former (I refer my honourable friend to my earlier statement on how much end-customers know). Such an arrangement was offered to me once, last year. It’s not something I have heard a great deal of discussion about. Maybe I hang out in the wrong places.

Anyway, the money shot following this clumsy and dissembling foreplay, is:

ALS will no longer pay linguists for exact matches and repetitions for any new projects.

And just in case you feel cheap and dirty:

We value the large number of linguists registered to work on our customer translation projects and we understand from feedback with many of you that other language companies are communicating similar changes in their payment models.

I am sceptical that freelancers are running off to ALS moaning that other agencies are adopting a 100% matches = no money policy, and that ALS are just following suit. I’ve never discussed one agency’s practices with another (unless perhaps, rarely, to make the opposite kind of point, that something that agency is doing is not up to the standard I would like to see, and do see in others).

So, back to the highlight – no money at all for repetitions and 100% matches. Although this has not caused the cacophony of weeping and wailing and gnashing of keyboards that followed other similar announcements (Lionbridge a few months ago, thebigword in 2009-ish), there has been some response, including at least one freelancer announcing that he actually voluntarily charges zero if the project is over a certain size.

That’s fine, we are all free to set our own charging parameters (this same fellow charges the full whack for partial matches, for instance, not a reduction). And for me, the main point for this post is not about whether freelancers should or should not accept unilateral changes “requested” by agencies (or anyone) – it’s been covered before, it’ll be covered again (e.g. here with a partner blog post here)

Personally, I object to this notion (hence I am unlikely to add it to my T&C on my own initiative or anyone else’s) purely because it seems the thin end of a wedge that, although I’m not sure precisely how it will end, I am sure I would not enjoy experiencing.

So, first, let us be clear that zero pay for reps/100% matches (we need a single word for this concept) really is working for free. If you ignore them, that requires mental effort and takes a few seconds of your time, every time. If you just skip through the 100% matched segments, that takes time (regardless of whether we are able to resist the temptation to a)read and b)correct them, unpaid). If you hit the auto-translate button, you still have to monitor it. Whatever you do, you will be working in some way or another, it’s inevitable.

I am, as I’ve said before, very much a “fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work” man. You could argue (and some do), that if you do some work unpaid, and some work for pay, it will balance out, as long as the paid work is paid high enough to compensate for the unpaid. Do one hour for nothing; do another hour for twice your target earnings, and all is hunky-dory. That’s great in theory, and I agree it would be fine if that were how it worked.

In practice though, it must be said that the kind of agencies who apply these kind of policies are going to be the price-centred, pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap segment. The chances that you will be able to compensate by asking for more for the non-matched bits are slim to nil. They’re competing for end-customers solely on price (effectively, no matter what corporate effluent their marketing department might manage to spew out about quality or service) and they are trying to pay you a bit less, not to pay you the same or more, but under a different model or worked out in a different way.

Remember I said I was offered an arrangement of this sort last year? It was a 30k word job, and 20k was reps/100% matches, for which they wanted to offer me payment for just the 10k “new” words, as it were. So, at least this arrangement is not new to me, as it seems to be to some who have commented elsewhere. In response, I ran through the arguments above, and apart from the odd hopelessly optimistic query when they are presumably in fairly dire straits (“get your matches for nothing and your reps for free” perhaps?), I hear nothing. But their rates are low, and getting lower, and I’m trying to get away from that kind of price-focused agency.

And, having taken the view that it is indeed asking people to work for free, on the flimsiest of grounds to boot, I also just think it’s the thin end of a nasty pricing wedge. If they think 100% matches don’t deserve remuneration, what about the 95% matches (in truth, they can be very often left untouched in the target language, in my experience*). What about names and addresses and numbers and…. who knows? Once you accept the principle of working for free, which is bad enough, in combination (and this next bit is important, in my view) with the likelihood that this will not be compensated for elsewhere, who knows where it will end?

* On the subject of the linguistic effect of this policy, it should not be overlooked that, in contrast, some 100% matches need to be changed, for the sake of providing the best possible translation, even within one document. We all know that. ALS probably know that, but don’t care. However, I had overlooked the possibility of a 100% match that needs to be changed to actually be grammatically consistent with the text preceeding it, let alone to actually provide an optimum translation.

I wonder too, about the legal/contractual side – but I think this post is long enough, and it’s a slightly different topic, so another post on that issue follows…

Some of the following was drifting in and out of my thoughts as I drafted the previous blog entry, and perhaps it would be helpful to add it here (as ever, part of the aim is to clarify my own thinking, none of which will probably turn out to be devastingly original).

(And my apologies – this is a mini-epic.)

One element to all this is that freelancers are two things in one. They wear two hats, sometimes simultaneously. Firstly, they are individuals, members of society, probably members of a family, consumers, voters (perhaps not always, I suppose) and so on, just like anyone other adult. And secondly they are business entities, not necessarily with separate legal personality, certainly, but nonetheless, they are businesses. Something of an artificial distinction perhaps, given that ultimately, anything a business does, any decision it takes, is quite naturally done or taken by a human person, and for a freelance operation there is only one person making all the decisions. Nonetheless, I think it is a point worth making, because we are businesses dealing with other businesses, as well as people dealing with other people.

Of course, then, how an incorporated business behaves (if you will forgive the constant anthropomorphism) is largely determined by the ethics of its senior managers (and supervisory board, perhaps), with the constant background concern that their ultimate duty is, as things stand (by which I mean, in some countries at least, as the law stipulates), to act in the company’s (sometimes interpreted as shareholders’) best interests, these being typically measured in the short, medium and long term by money (I summarise and simplify hugely, see for instance here from a UK perspective. We of course, as independent freelancers, especially the unincorporated ones, are free to do otherwise.

As a student studying business in the 1980s against the backdrop of the miners’ strike in the glory of Thatcher’s Britain, this constant focus on financial value struck me as being short-sighted. I could grasp the point that if it was cheaper to import coal from Poland than mine it in Nottinghamshire, it made financial sense to do so. I also understood that in many cases, people had been striving to break long family traditions of working down the pit, for many reasons, not least the danger and unpleasant working conditions. And yet on the other hand, it seemed there was more to the coal industry than digging up black stuff to burn in power stations, and perhaps people’s career decisions are best left to them to make. I digress a little, and there are more knowledgeable people who have written numerous books and drawn countless more insightful conclusions about that whole period; suffice it to say it left a lasting impression on a previously somewhat right-leaning young man.

And so “…they know the price of everything and the value of nothing” emerges from my creaking, lefty lips pretty much weekly (and did so even when we had a supposedly left-leaning government here) – because sometimes I just cannot be arsed to be sparkling and original. I strongly believe that those who employ others (or in more general terms, create a link of financial dependency), particularly those in unskilled and semi-skilled positions (the “easily replaced” in my previous post), are ethically bound to treat those people decently. Such jobs are largely a means to an end in our essentially capitalist system, and those ends are, in a word, social. Work to live, not vice versa, and all that kind of thing. The failure of employers to behave fairly, ethically and responsibly towards employees, using them as human resources before the term was even coined, were the spark that lit the unionisation fuse. Men don’t spend 20 years beating panels because they’ve reached the peak of Maslow’s pyramid. They do it to remain members of their communities, and if they rally to the cry of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work”, it is at least partly for social reasons. (I hope I’m not guilty of romanticising the role of unions too much – there have, of course, been some fairly shoddy union practices over the years, some driven by little more than greed and a desire to see if the tail can wag the dog.) (Am I guilty of using too many brackets?)

This is a further reason why I feel any union-esque tone in any call for solidarity between freelance translators is inappropriate, to add to the others already given (it was an idea lurking shapelessly at the time, I skipped it for brevity’s sake, it has, to be honest, taken a few days to percolate into even this not exactly bite-sized explanation). While we may blithely blather about online translator communities and suchlike intangibles, the reality is much more fluid than the sort of communities that unions and other organisations were and are, rightly or perhaps wrongly, trying to protect and preserve. It is also, of course, not entirely disconnected from the point about not knowing anything about the quality (in a broad sense) of those with whom it is proposed I join forces. We are not standing cheek-by-jowl in a windy car-park counting a show of hands that I know are just as capable and limited as my own. I realise this view may not be shared by all those who made positive noises on Twitter and elsewhere about the “No peanuts – no thanks” post.

Perhaps I do stretch the union comparison too far. Some have mentioned as much. I can go along with that; after all, I strongly believe the target population is fundamentally unsuited to any union-like structure. Try this, then. What you have is not a group of people united in some common cause. What you have instead is a group of businesses that individually share one interest. The thing is, that interest is the same interest that any business has. It’s a given. I don’t think anyone need get on a hotline to The Economist or WSJ to report a radical new grassroots movement of businesses that would prefer to earn more not less. Why make a song and dance about it?

So much for me (you? us?) as an individual member of society, what about me, you, us, as the financial dependents (or indeed actual employees) of our own businesses? I can, I imagine, rule out any need to join forces to save us from exploiting ourselves… If we decide to replace ourselves with a cheaper alternative, it seems a perfectly valid business decision (translation contract provisions notwithstanding). There is probably little to say here; we could amuse ourselves with scenarios whereby we give ourselves pay cuts to boost company profits, but who gets the profits? (Not to dismiss salary+dividend tax efficiency out of hand, of course.)

And so to the business aspect. I contend that once you’ve decided to operate independently, as a business, you make rational business decisions. But perhaps not exclusively. As a business decision, my office location could hardly be worse. Almost anywhere on the planet would be cheaper, but my business has decided to employ me, and here is where my community and social ties are (frayed and thin though mine are, my immediate family’s are stronger), so my labour does not come cheap if I am to afford to live here, as I wish to do. So, like anyone else, I am not some automaton making only economically-rational decisions on either my own or my business’ behalf.

But having decided to operate as a business, and especially having decided to operate in translation in particular, my business is no longer bound to operate solely within my local community, or even within my country. (I can see how an interpreter might take a different view – indeed, perhaps even an opposite one, if the local market is indeed dominated by one source of income as in point 2. of the previous post). If I am offered projects with inadequate financial reward, I decline. I look elsewhere. If this becomes a long-term trend and long-term revenue drops, I change some business basics. I look harder for clients. I make sure I specialise in something to justify a decent rate. I relocate so the dropped revenue becomes adequate. I revise my revenue expectations or cut spending. I diversify or move out of translation altogether. I outsource to people who will work for even less than the reward I previously viewed as inadequate for myself, on a scale that meets my revenue needs. The options are endless, but in my view, probably should include setting up or joining a website to whine about it.

That last option may sound a bit like the kind of exploitation I previously basically described as unethical. I can see why, and it would not be my first solution. But the fact remains that there are thousands, tens of thousands, of people happy to work for, well, peanuts. And I mean happy, not merely tolerating a situation for lack of any better options. I have read forum posts by translators in Peru and Ukraine, for example, both working for under 5 cents per word and neither seeing any reason to charge more, and both quite plainly sending the message they were doing very nicely thanks all the same and rest of us could go do the other thing if we thought they would change because it suited us. Same applies to the vast numbers in the Indian sub-continent, for example. They are clearly serving a market segment of some kind. Maybe it is not my segment, in which case I don’t care, frankly, any more than I would if they were basket weavers, lion tamers or cutting edge website designers. If they are in my segment, I either have to be just plain better, or add value in other ways, or indeed rely on clients seeing the benefit of using a service provider in a stable Western democracy with reliable infrastructure and a sound legal system (all of which are in part why it’s so dashed expensive to live here!).

Is that position contradictory? On the one hand, I believe corporations, particularly big organisations that may be the foundation of a community (in the case of mines, the very reason for the community’s existence), should think twice, or be made to think twice, before making the decision to switch to a cheaper labour force elsewhere. And in essence, most procurement decisions have an impact on some workforce, somewhere, as most economic output requires labour. There is the trickledown effect (disputed by some), the adverse effect of high employment in one area, reduced taxation and higher benefit payments – basically, the harm an organisation does to an economy on which it may, at least in part, depend for its ultimate survival.
We are all in this together, which would make a snappy slogan for someone.

And yet I am happy for clients to make exactly that same decision, to my detriment, and see no reason to join a club to fight it. If any of my customers can get the exact same service as I provide, from Peru at a third of the price, they absolutely should. I am a business, my customer is a business, making a business decision about another business, a freelance operation which has entered the industry voluntarily and in the hope it proves financially worthwhile. It is up to me to make that business work, by adding value from the service I provide and the wider environment in which I operate. I’m not, and none of us should be, in the position of a vulnerable employee, financially dependent on one source of income and socially inert. Any business that cannot do that should reflect on why that is, not seek to blame the world and build artificial barriers to entry. If there were only one translation agency in the world, I would probably feel differently. But there isn’t, so I don’t. And on that slightly repetitive note, I will close.

(Please keep comments about the miners’ strike to a minimum – it was just the catalyst for my own leftist epiphany and that’s why it’s mentioned here, and quite frankly, even if that epiphany was based on lies and misunderstanding, I’m a bit long in the tooth to go changing now. Telling me I’m a Scargillite pawn won’t change how I feel about the issue of freelancers uniting to moan about free market conditions.)

Once again, in the interests of tying up loose ends, in this case from the comments section in my own Nov 2010 blog post “Who sets prices?”, I think I’ve managed to crystallise the logic behind my instinctive rejection of initiatives like those mentioned – No peanuts, the italia.it petition crew, the United Translators group on Yahoo!… there may be others that have passed me by.

The common underlying theme, it seems to me, could be summed as some need to unionise, join forces against The Man and suchlike. No Peanuts makes specific reference to a “living wage” and while I’m happy to accept it’s likely just a convenient shorthand, it also perhaps reveals a certain mindset.

I would suggest there are essentially two groups of people who need protection against exploitation by those on whom they rely for income:
1. Those who can be easily replaced. Unions were largely started by unskilled workers, fearful of being replaced at the drop of hat with no safety net if and when they refused to work longer hours, take a pay cut, etc.
2. Those who, no matter how skilled, only have one income source (read “employer” in most cases), such as those working for the public-sector – teachers, health workers, and nationalised industry generally.

(Yes, some poor souls may be in both groups at once.) I am more than happy, morally and economically speaking, to support solidarity for groups of people with fewer choices and opportunities in life. However, I am not convinced that freelance translators fall into either category. There really seems little prospect in the immediate short term that all translation will fall into the hands of one agency, or even a coterie of agencies working in cahoots. And of course, while no-one is ever indispensable, we should all be striving not to be easily replaced; the internet is awash with advice to specialise, and it is one conclusion I draw in my own (rather long, admittedly) article on who sets translation prices. If any of us is that easily dispensed with, we should either seek to remedy the situation sharpish, or consider whether our competitive advantage may in fact be found in some other form of income-generating activity…

So much for the logical (to me, anyway!) argument against it.

In practical terms, there are two further arguments:

a) what, exactly, would be the terms and conditions to be applied worldwide and who would decide them? “Living wages” vary hugely, to say nothing of payment terms. While, AFAIK, none of these initiatives has in fact attempted to set or even recommend rates (which would be of doubtful legality in many countries), they are left merely exhorting us to charge decent and respectable prices that are enough to live on, which presumably is what people do anyway, otherwise they would do something else for a living. Or should. It must be said, there are some who do not, perhaps, act in the economically rational manner I would expect (translation is, unfortunately, plagued by those who are “passionate” about it, and seem prepared to suffer a dog’s abuse for the privilege of calling themselves translators – as touched upon by me (again) here).

b) who, exactly, would I be joining forces with? I estimate that about half the translations I’ve been given to proofread over the years are pretty substandard stuff. By inference, therefore, about half the (Fr-Eng) translators out there are people I would probably rather not be associated with. (And, as such, probably also fall into group 1) above of those easily replaced and who probably do feel under threat.)

Translators are always banging on about being professionals, educated, and worthy of the respect given to architects and lawyers and suchlike. Most of us have the intellectual capacity not to be exploited or oppressed, and the ability and initiative to follow other paths if we prefer them or feel the (financial) need. You don’t see Norman Foster calling for a worldwide union to include no-hopers who would struggle to sketch a shed, and I am as yet unconvinced of the need to bind myself to a movement that, I feel, seems likely to include too many of the translation world’s equivalent. Feel free to disagree below…

I promise to try to make this the last bit of blog-related navel gazing. I’ll also endeavour to make it the last post with an abysmal title including the word ‘blog’, but no promises on that score.

Having been wondering who would read a freelance business-related blog and why, and possibly taken huge strides to ensure the question remains purely academic as regards this one, and tossed ideas around elsewhere, I have refined the ideas that were taking shape previously in terms of rankings on the one hand and the personal branding aspect on the other (in older blogs & comments). It seems rather poor form to keep them to myself, and possibly give the impression I don’t like to see things through or resolve apparent conundrums, so here goes.

An analysis

Discussions and reading about the subject suggest there are various aspects to a freelancer’s interaction with and outpourings to a waiting world, described variously as networking, marketing or promotion (strictly speaking, the latter being only one of four ‘Ps’ in the marketing mix), reputation-building and so forth.

Thinking some more, I’ve reached an analysis that suits how I see things, which is, I hope, not too idiosyncratic. The key attributes involved, for me, are:

– one-to-one versus one-to-many communication. I think we can ignore one-to-one from here on (the underlying theme being business-related blogs), but make the comment that in a sense, one aim of business-related communication is to reach a one-to-one stage (email, phone, meeting, etc.) with a lead with a view to conversion to a client. Hence, one-to-one is perhaps one of the ends, rather than a variable in the means.

– one-way communication versus two-way (or multiple-way) communication. An advert is one-way. A business lunch is two-way. It’s the difference between an announcement, statement(s) or a perhaps giving a speech, and the exchanging of ideas and information, whether in real time or otherwise.

– the level or proportion of business-related content.

At which point I drew a simple chart, with a view to placing communication methods on it, hoping that would help me see where a blog would fit. This is it:

So, in terms of a freelance translator’s communications (excluding one-to-one), what seems to fit where? I plan to move roughly anti-clockwise round the diagram.

– In A (one way, low business content), very little fits, except that on the basis of what I have seen this far, Twitter is used by some translators for non-business related tweets to which no response is necessary (or indeed, it seems to me, warranted or even possible). That said, Twitter is also the venue for communication in the B, C and D sectors as well, and if I’m honest, I was initially equally bewildered by the point of Twitter as I was for a blog.

– In C (two way, low business content), I see conventional non-business interaction, from going to the pub with friends and suchlike offline activities, to  leisure (non-business) forums, the ebb and flow of non-business information on Twitter about restaurants and hair dye and bands and celebs and the weather, and so. Worth including here simply because it can shift to D quite easily – I have for instance seen web designers win clients in online sports forums almost by accident, and I once had a client that I originally met at a party, although they did not become a client until some time later and it needed a mutual friend to pull the thing together. I was a networking novice back then. But networking is undoubtedly what C is. I view Facebook (which I’m not on) as firmly in C territory, but I know others use it for D.

– D (two-way, higher business content), then, is where I would place business networking. Face-to-face, of course, but also online. Of course, there is a horizontal axis on the chart, and even in a business context, there is some networking that is little more than idle banter (twittering, even, with a small ‘t’) which merges with C. (None of which should undermine your personal brand, the experts say, if you want to take it that far.) Then, moving towards the right of the diagram, there is networking that is perhaps ambivalent in business terms, it may result in business leads, or it may not, such as offering help and advice (as one might see on business & translation forum postings), or indeed online terminology help when it comes to translation specifically, or chewing the fat on business-related matters at a conference. I say “ambivalent”; I imagine those indulging in this practice hope to at least get their name “out there”; to benefit from reciprocity if the boot is ever on the other foot, or become a name that springs to mind when a given situation arises. In short, to generate potential leads and referrals – I know I’ve given work to people precisely as a result of this kind of networking, and I have received some too.

Most networking is, of course, with people one has chosen, at some level, to interact with, and so as an ultimately revenue-generating activity, should generate leads that are a good match with your business.  That said, some networking borders on naked self-promotion, whether online or IRL (attending trade fairs, perhaps?). At this point, any two-way nature of the relationship, with information freely flowing both ways, may become strained, so not only are we positioned at the far right of the horizontal axis with a full-on hard-sell, we may also have crossed upwards into B, as we pitch to increasingly unwilling ears.

– Up to B (primarily or wholly business content, very little or no interaction). Perhaps on the border between D and B, I would put “writing articles”, since no self-respecting personal branding guru would fail to mention this aspect of reputation building. I have heard from more than one sources that printed articles (i.e. in paper journals) may elicit little response although in fact they were intended to generate debate – The Linguist practically begged readers to write in with feedback a few issues ago. (Perhaps a symptom of being on paper and the fact that journal articles are viewed by many as authoritative – if authors wanted feedback, they’d use blogs, wouldn’t they?)

The higher up B we move, the closer we are to pure advertising of the business – the information flow is all one-way. This includes the business website and once you’re there, in terms of online activities you’ll be looking at SEO for business websites, plus more traditional offline approaches (flyers, yellow pages, local papers, etc. – some no doubt more effective for translators than others). The drawback, as I’ve found with the trickle of traffic to my own website, is that all sorts of leads can be generated, some of which won’t match your preferred client-type.

What of the role of the blog, I hear you cry. Fair point.

It is probably fair to say that, in the blogosphere in general, there are blogs covering every one of the 4 segments in my skilfully-crafted diagram. Hence my confusion and possibly ill-advised cry of “what’s the point of it all?” A blog can potentially be almost anything. Anyone would think I’d never read a blog prior to November 2010, but, like children, I view them with a different eye now I’ve got one.

In both the D and B areas of the diagram (the right-hand half), a key aspect is reputation building. Pretty much everything in both can enhance, or not, your reputation. But both segments have (potential) drawbacks.

In B, you don’t get much (or any) feedback. Is your website as fab and groovy as you think, or is it turning people off? Do you get no leads because your SEO is rubbish, or because your website is? Are your articles met with deafening silence because readers are in awe of your authority or because they think you are prize chump but can’t muster the energy to tell you so.

In D, you get interaction and thus feedback, but you perhaps are not in full control of what is being discussed. You may tend to respond, rather than initiate (I know that is the case with me, and there is a tendency in some forums, for example, for those who post most regularly to start very few threads themselves). A real life discussion may drift away from what you wanted to say.

And so that is going to be the intended point of the blog. reputation building with elements of B and D – business based, hopefully with interaction, but if not…

Target

I haven’t said too much about who this stuff is supposed to be for. Networking is done both with potential clients and with peers and others in the same line of business, this being for referral purposes once you hit the mercenary side of ambivalent networking (as per description above). Promotion is conventionally viewed as targeting potential customers, but doesn’t have to, and certainly not online, where there is little or no control over who reads what you publish. And particularly in translation, where no-one can translate everything, promotion to colleagues is a valid (if not always appreciated) option.

So, now all that’s out the way and I’ve clarified matters in my own head at least, I suppose it’s time to get cracking.

Edit: almost forgot – while knocking up the draft (which I sat on for a while before posting), I came across these (via Twitter I expect):
i) a post about business blogging in general, which is of interest
ii) a post about getting your name “out there“, which I found interesting and reassuring as I managed to place everything mentioned somewhere on my rudimentary chart.

With 2011 being the Year of Web 2.0 (for me, I realise it was probably 2008 for those with their finger on the pulse, but I come from a long line of late adopters – we didn’t get a colour TV until 1979), I’ve been trying to monitor Twitter more regularly of late (pretty sure I didn’t log in once in December, although I joined in November). One aspect I was keen to get to grips with was indeed the whole Web 2.0 ‘n’ social media ‘n’ personal branding area, and where better to start?

As I result, I discovered, probably from a blog, that WordPress alone spawns something like a million new blogs a month – that might not be quite right, but it’s a bloody astounding figure of that kind of magnitude, whatever it actually is. Many, presumably will not be carried on after initial enthusiasm wears off, but still, that is a lot of blogs.

The other thing I’ve found, following links (and links from links from links from links) is that many blogs regurgitate the same old crud, particularly in the marketing/social media arena. I’m thoroughly jaded and blog-weary after only a fortnight. And even the new (to me) stuff is often crap – some self-styled marketing guru (of which there is unfortunately no shortage) I read recently was advising us all to make sure we know someone who knows a billionaire – and in all seriousness. I was little short of dumbfounded. I’m sure having some vague acquaintance with a billionaire is good for business, but it doesn’t follow that all successful businesses need billionaire patronage, does it? Anyway, the blogosphere is full of ill-conceived rancid dick cheese in a similar vein and largely a waste of bandwidth.

More pertinently, while I can’t be arsed checking traffic on Alexa or wherever, and so have to judge purely on the number of comments, even those with fresh and thought-provoking (in a good way, that is) content seem to get little traffic. In any event, even if they get satisfactory traffic figures, surely the point of those blogs that *are* intended as more than online diaries is to generate some discussion and interest, if only shortlived? Otherwise it’s all so many voices crying out into the hubbub…

So yeah, not much change from last week; I’m still wondering what the point of it all is.

Update: I’m not alone. I decided to google my title, for interest’s sake, to see just *how* unoriginal I was being. And lo! I find an outstanding blog post making the point I think I probably wanted to make all along before I got side-tracked by billionaires and smegma.

If I link to your blog, it’s time to start worrying. Not that you’ll realise I’ve linked to it, since I haven’t figured out all that trackback and what have you stuff yet. No, you’ll only realise when there is the threat of legal action or some other time-consuming hassle.

First, poor old Miguel Llorens had to move his blog here (and to be fair, to update what I said in Nov 2010, the comments are all back, even if the links to the commenters’ websites do not all work) and, if you plough through it, you’ll find dark references to muttered half-threats from m’learned friends.

And then, this week, poor old Rose Newell gets it in the neck from some apoplectic “Director” of the company whose email she quoted in the post I linked to last week. Which has now changed. Luckily for me, the point I wanted to make about it remains. Unluckily for her, she’s got to cope with some uber-sensitive foreign fellow with sketchy knowledge of the UK legal system who wants to sue her for every teacup she owns because she raised a couple of queries about his translator registration process. (See here, if it stays)

So maybe it’s just as well I would have been “meh” if it happened to me….

As I pick the crumbs from the last mince pie (best before date: yesterday) from between the keys, the prescience of my dashed-down remarks from way back (see “Thoughts” on main site and “About” here) hits home – a whole month has indeed seemingly gone by untroubled by any new or interesting thoughts from my head.

I can’t help feeling this is going to be something of an obstacle to generating regular readers. Although to be honest, I’m not sure what the idea of regular readers actually is, I’m assuming that there’s £££ in it somewhere, somehow (ads? work offers?). P’raps it’ll turn out just to be for shits and giggles, as they say.

Anyway, in a way much akin to novels about authors with writer’s block, I imagine there must always the danger that blogs about the difficulty of deciding what to blog about will ultimately take the nimblest of U-turns somewhere none-too-distant from the perineum, and disappear to where the sun rarely shines.

And yet I am not utterly bereft of ideas.
Item 1. Let me be frank. I would like a few more customers, purely for a safety-in-numbers element and to minimise the potential disaster of having too many eggs in too few baskets.
Item 2. I recently completed a contracts module of an MA in Legal Translation (City University) where I received the confirmation I was hoping for, that my contract translation is well up there in the mustard cutting stakes (too immodest? Tough. In theory at least, I’m good at it).
And so I thought about maybe blogging about the happy juxtaposition of the above, the diary of one man’s quest to become England’s Finest Translator of Contracts for the Sale of Goods and Services. But if I fail, I’ll look an utter chump, and if I succeed, I’ll look an vainglorious bastard, and while, like many of us, I have my moments of both, I’m not sure I want to make a bloody parade out of it all, despite any vicarious benefit there may be to any readers. And if, as is most likely, I hit some kind of outcome that is neither fish nor fowl, it will probably fall between every imaginable stool.

The fact is, I’m much better at responding to other people’s comments on events, as my activity on Proz or Stridonium demonstrates. Even the final push to set up this blog was provided by my wish to comment on someone else’s thoughts (and, if I’m honest, comments I suspected might not get approved). But I don’t like that either, because it looks as though one is trying to draw traffic away from the site of the original comment, and I think that is an undesirable trait or effect.

So I can only live in hope that one day, I’ll have the spark it takes to whip up something like this excellent stuff from Rose Newell. See, if I had had an experience of that kind (agency application then bewildering email), I’d be spectacularly “meh” about the whole thing. And I’m not sure that “meh” and blogging are compatible.