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the 2-year experience minimum barrage
Thread poster: Anne LE ROMANCER
Anne LE ROMANCER
Anne LE ROMANCER  Identity Verified
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:04
English to French
TOPIC STARTER
Thanks Feb 28, 2019

I would like to thank you all for your tips/pointers/constructive criticism. It all helped tremendously. I apologise if my English appeared somewhat lacking. It stung a bit after 15 years here and years of teaching but no one is perfect and I’ll put my pride aside and get on it ASAP.
After pondering all your comments yesterday, a bit of a turmoil went through my head. But actually I realised that I had already started to put in place what some of you suggested due to the age of my
... See more
I would like to thank you all for your tips/pointers/constructive criticism. It all helped tremendously. I apologise if my English appeared somewhat lacking. It stung a bit after 15 years here and years of teaching but no one is perfect and I’ll put my pride aside and get on it ASAP.
After pondering all your comments yesterday, a bit of a turmoil went through my head. But actually I realised that I had already started to put in place what some of you suggested due to the age of my children (not that young at 9 and 12 but young enough that I still need to be there). Considering I still have more or less 3 years of school run to do with my youngest I do not plan on working full time yet but part time ie a couple projects here and there and my tutoring job on the side will allow me that flexibility. This way I will carry on learning from my pairs, from my mistakes and will do as much CPD as I can. My plan is definitely to start small and not to take on more that I can chew. I have too much respect for both our profession and our clients to do that. This is the reason why the year 2006 appears on my profile (took me a while to understand why it said 19 years of experience.....it calculated from the day I subscribed in 2006, a box is ticked automantically there lol). Long story shot I registered with Proz in 2006 when I was pregnant with my first child as I already wanted back then to put into practice my translation qualification. However, the lack of sleep and motherhood have taught me that it wasn’t the right time for me back then. 12 years later I have emerged from that young childhood phase and can now pretend to much longer hours of work fairly uninterrupted.
I shall take the time to learn at my pace while being respectful of my clients obligations/deadlines.

I’m rewriting the all bio thing. Found some brilliant inspiration on Proz.

Again thanks a million. I hope I can slowly build my confidence (I do not want to make any mistakes hence terrified of going forward and making those mistakes....being a perfectionist is sometimes hell I tell you!!!).

Anne

[Edited at 2019-02-28 14:19 GMT]
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Sheila Wilson
Sheila Wilson  Identity Verified
Spain
Local time: 21:04
Member (2007)
English
+ ...
NMT will challenge the role of general translators, not specialists Feb 28, 2019

David GAY wrote:
It's not a secret that every major LSP is working on a NMT programme and now offers NMT to their clients.
There have been a lot of mergers recently. The goal of these mergers is to invest heavily in NMT and to leverage
collections of texts already translated to feed their NMT engines.

As you say, that's old news. But although I can well see it shrinking the market, I anticipate that most of the jobs to disappear will be the run-of-the-mill translations that have always been terribly poorly paid, and the types of technical translations that have already been severely hit - income-wise - by MT + CAT TM use.

How will it affect high-end marketing translations, which is where the OP should be headed? Hardly at all, I reckon. Just as the CAT tool discounts that plague other sectors barely touch that particular segment. At any rate, they haven't affected my role in it much. The market for working with boutique agencies to produce well-crafted persuasive texts for discerning clients won't disappear as long as people keep buying and selling.


Tom in London
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gayd (X)
not necessarily Feb 28, 2019

Sheila Wilson wrote:

David GAY wrote:
It's not a secret that every major LSP is working on a NMT programme and now offers NMT to their clients.
There have been a lot of mergers recently. The goal of these mergers is to invest heavily in NMT and to leverage
collections of texts already translated to feed their NMT engines.

As you say, that's old news. But although I can well see it shrinking the market, I anticipate that most of the jobs to disappear will be the run-of-the-mill translations that have always been terribly poorly paid, and the types of technical translations that have already been severely hit - income-wise - by MT + CAT TM use.

How will it affect high-end marketing translations, which is where the OP should be headed? Hardly at all, I reckon. Just as the CAT tool discounts that plague other sectors barely touch that particular segment. At any rate, they haven't affected my role in it much. The market for working with boutique agencies to produce well-crafted persuasive texts for discerning clients won't disappear as long as people keep buying and selling.


If I feed my NMT engine with millions of translations done by Sheila Wilson, I guess that my NMT engine will be able to translate with
Sheila Wilson's quality at a fraction of the cost of human translation and much quicker. And even if it's not the case, I'll ask her to correct the few infelicities for peanuts.

[Modifié le 2019-02-28 14:59 GMT]


Jorge Payan
 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:04
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Just shows Feb 28, 2019

David GAY wrote:

If I feed my NMT engine with millions of translations done by Sheila Wilson, I guess that my NMT engine will be able to translate with Sheila Wilson's quality at a fraction of the cost of human translation and much quicker.


Just shows how little you know about high-end translations.


Sheila Wilson
Dan Lucas
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gayd (X)
gayd (X)
it just shows Feb 28, 2019

Tom in London wrote:

David GAY wrote:

If I feed my NMT engine with millions of translations done by Sheila Wilson, I guess that my NMT engine will be able to translate with Sheila Wilson's quality at a fraction of the cost of human translation and much quicker.


Just shows how little you know about high-end translations.


.. how business unaware you are. As I said, even if the quality is not the same, you'll be forced to do the job for peanuts because you'll need to support yourself. It's called market power.

[Modifié le 2019-02-28 15:09 GMT]


Jorge Payan
 
Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:04
Member (2008)
Italian to English
offensive Feb 28, 2019

David GAY wrote:

.. how business unaware you are.


That's an unnecessarily offensive remark.

David GAY wrote:....you'll be forced to do the job for peanuts because you'll need to support yourself. It's called market power.


I'm touched by your faith that markets always go for the fastest and the cheapest. Just shows how little you know about markets. Especially this market.

And I never work for peanuts.

I've noticed that there are a few people in these forums who are always going out of their way to tell the world that technology and MT are going to kill the market for translations. They always seem to have what I can only call an Ayn Rand-ish tone about them. Kind of arrogant. Like they know better.

[Edited at 2019-02-28 15:16 GMT]


Dan Lucas
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gayd (X)
gayd (X)
I think Feb 28, 2019

Tom in London wrote:

David GAY wrote:

.. how business unaware you are.


That's an unnecessarily offensive remark.

David GAY wrote:....you'll be forced to do the job for peanuts because you'll need to support yourself. It's called market power.


I'm touched by your faith that markets always go for the fastest and the cheapest. Just shows how little you know about markets. Especially this market.

And I never work for peanuts.


you didn't understand what I wrote. But never mind. I don't want to waste too much time.


 
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Kay-Viktor Stegemann
Germany
Local time: 22:04
English to German
In memoriam
Translation is not deterministic Feb 28, 2019

David GAY wrote:
If I feed my NMT engine with millions of translations done by Sheila Wilson, I guess that my NMT engine will be able to translate with
Sheila Wilson's quality at a fraction of the cost of human translation and much quicker. And even if it's not the case, I'll ask her to correct the few infelicities for peanuts.

[Modifié le 2019-02-28 14:59 GMT]


The basic error in this Big Data approach to translation is the wrong assumption that the same input should always lead to the same output. This paradigm will be a dead end for all kinds of MT, neural or whatnot. The same source sentence can have lots of different target sentences, depending on context, meaning, audience, mode, style guide, and so on. In every particular case, some of these possible target sentences will be dead wrong, and the MT engines of today are not equipped to decide which one. That would require a machine that actually understands the meaning and context of language, or can understand and apply a style guide. We are generations away from such a machine, despite all the hype.


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Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 22:04
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Even SDL does not believe humans will become superfluous Feb 28, 2019

I went to a Translators' day organised by a client a couple of weeks ago, and they had a representative from SDL among others. She said MT may change the way we work, but it will not replace translators.

That particular client is definitely staying with humans, although watching the machines. So aim at the quality end of the market and hope clients and end users will learn to differentiate.

I wondered if you could find some academic clients who do not have wildly tight
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I went to a Translators' day organised by a client a couple of weeks ago, and they had a representative from SDL among others. She said MT may change the way we work, but it will not replace translators.

That particular client is definitely staying with humans, although watching the machines. So aim at the quality end of the market and hope clients and end users will learn to differentiate.

I wondered if you could find some academic clients who do not have wildly tight deadlines?
Though many of them want translations into English, not the other way, and I have no idea what would be needed in French.

There ARE people around who need quality translations and can wait for them, keep searching!
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Tom in London
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I didn't say humans are going to be completely superfluous Feb 28, 2019

There will still be posteditors/ proofreaders. But the market is going to shrink anyway.
It's not in the best interest of SDL to say that the market is going to shrink as they still
want to sell their software to newbies. And considering that the high end market represents 20%
of the market is conservative.

[Modifié le 2019-02-28 18:24 GMT]


Jorge Payan
 
Christine Andersen
Christine Andersen  Identity Verified
Denmark
Local time: 22:04
Member (2003)
Danish to English
+ ...
Well, there is no point in arguing... Feb 28, 2019

But the market is HUGE and growing. Even if 20% is a conservative guess, there is still room for people who can actually translate. Anyone who has made the standard for the ITI is in the running.

One of my interests is glass - and a couple of hundred years ago, glass was a luxury. Industrial processes have taken away all the routine work, and the specialists who used to blow window glass until the mid 20th century have been put out of business by industrial float glas, which makes p
... See more
But the market is HUGE and growing. Even if 20% is a conservative guess, there is still room for people who can actually translate. Anyone who has made the standard for the ITI is in the running.

One of my interests is glass - and a couple of hundred years ago, glass was a luxury. Industrial processes have taken away all the routine work, and the specialists who used to blow window glass until the mid 20th century have been put out of business by industrial float glas, which makes perfect panes and far larger sheets than glassblowers ever could. Everyone can afford nice, mass-produced tumblers for everyday use, but there are still plenty of craftsmen who make a living blowing glass. It has not even been pushed off the market by plastic, and it's not going to happen...

OK, glassblowing is not the same as translating, but I think translators who invest in Studio and other products will be able to benefit from them for years to come. People round the world will be tired of struggling with English and MT, especially in combination.

The amateurs and wannabes may find it hard to make a living, but I hope (and believe) the market will settle into an end where MT is adequate, and an end where only real humans are good enough, and where they are recognised.
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Jeff Whittaker
Jeff Whittaker  Identity Verified
United States
Local time: 17:04
Member (2002)
Spanish to English
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Just two years? Feb 28, 2019

Consider yourself lucky. When I started in 1993, I had to make direct phone calls (no internet back then) and I can't tell you how many rejections I got because they would only work with people with at least 10 years of experience.

Luckily I stumbled upon an agency that was in the midst of a huge project and gave me a chance.

One good thing about back then was that freelance translation was somewhat of a secret society, meaning that most people did not even know it exis
... See more
Consider yourself lucky. When I started in 1993, I had to make direct phone calls (no internet back then) and I can't tell you how many rejections I got because they would only work with people with at least 10 years of experience.

Luckily I stumbled upon an agency that was in the midst of a huge project and gave me a chance.

One good thing about back then was that freelance translation was somewhat of a secret society, meaning that most people did not even know it existed, so merely contacting an agency with a resume and saying you were a translator and that you were a member of a translation society, that would get you in the door. Today, the industry is no longer a "secret" and many thousands of people are trying to dabble in it or find "gig" work, so companies are naturally more cautious about trusting experience without verification.

If you tell people today that you work at home, they shrug their shoulders or say, that's nice. Back then, they would feel sorry for you and give you job suggestions.

[Edited at 2019-02-28 20:26 GMT]

[Edited at 2019-02-28 20:27 GMT]
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Tom in London
Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:04
Member (2008)
Italian to English
Barrage Mar 1, 2019

Here are some pictures of barrages:

http://tinyurl.com/y377w2yd


 
Arianne Farah
Arianne Farah  Identity Verified
Canada
Local time: 17:04
Member (2008)
English to French
We're not going anywhere soon ;-) Mar 1, 2019

Tom in London wrote:

I've noticed that there are a few people in these forums who are always going out of their way to tell the world that technology and MT are going to kill the market for translations. They always seem to have what I can only call an Ayn Rand-ish tone about them. Kind of arrogant. Like they know better.



I've done some computational linguistics at the masters' level and my husband now works in AI and does a little NLP (natural language processing)... the more we learn, the more we agree that human translation isn't going anywhere soon.

If anything, I've found that MT and MTPE have expanded the translation market and companies are now launching into new markets and translating enormous corpora that they wouldn't have otherwise - all that MT and MTPE is for text that otherwise simply would not have been translated and it's pulling in all the bottom end of the market so you get a lot less 'noise' in the professional circles. Meanwhile with the new markets, there's a wealth of marketing and regulatory texts that need to be translated by professional translators - the market has ballooned in the last few years, so when you see so many MTPE jobs you think they're cannibalizing the existing market, but it's an illusion - most established translators have no trouble booking up and rates are rising once again after having plateau-ed for a decade - I personally can't keep up with demand anymore and I've been in the business for 15 years.


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Lincoln Hui
Lincoln Hui  Identity Verified
Hong Kong
Local time: 05:04
Member
Chinese to English
+ ...
AI Mar 1, 2019

You will be hard pressed to find an industry that will never be threatened by AI or automation, so you might as well be a translator.

Sheila Wilson
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Tom in London
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the 2-year experience minimum barrage







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