Unbundling of the Translation Process (1)
I don't know what things are like with your language pair/direction and field of specialization, but with Japanese-to-English financial translation we're starting to see a significant unbundling of the translation process.
In other words, the puzzle that constitutes the entire translation process from start to finish is being broken up into its separate pieces. More specifically, the translator is now only being expected to perform one of the three key components of a translation project. Post-translation DTP has never really been expected of the translator, so the three components are these:
Research
This process, which can be performed either before or during the translation, involves looking up people's names in kanji to find out how they are rendered in English and searching for the official or semi-official English translations of companies, organizations, statutes, regulations, white papers, etc.
Translation
This is the actual translation work, and involves conversion of the Japanese text into accurate and natural English.
Checking
This is the process of checking the translation against the source text for errors and omissions. This could also be followed by some polishing and spiffing up by another native speaker of English if necessary (such as in the case of marketing materials).
The translator increasingly needs to only perform the middle process, with other staff taking care of the first and last tasks. The checking process was unbundled fairly early on, while the unbundling of the research process is a more recent development. It normally takes the form of the English for terms that would previously have had to have been looked up by the translator being provided to the translator in advance using the comment function.
But why is this unbundling occurring? Surely it would make more sense to have one person handle all three processes rather than farming them out to three different individuals?
Well, there are two main reasons. The first is supply and demand. There simply aren't enough Japanese-to-English financial translators to handle all the work, so the job that the translator actually has to perform is being stripped down to the bare minimum. Japanese financial institutions have finally sorted out their balance sheets after the lost decades and are increasingly going international to boost their revenues as the domestic market shrinks due to population decline. The demand is skyrocketing but the supply is flat.
The situation is so grave that a friend of mine, Ted Terasaki, a U.S. CMA-qualified Japanese translator, has set up a business offering webinars and classroom courses to Japanese people looking to get into J-to-E financial translation, where even they, Japanese natives translating into a foreign language, can expect to make $500 a day freelancing.
The second reason is cost. J-E financial translators are high earners, and they simply won't accept having to perform mundane tasks that anyone with a TOEIC score of 800 points can handle for them. So it's cheaper for the agent/client to hire someone like that to complete the tasks than to boost the translator's rate to the level it would need to be at to get them to do it. Plus the unbundling approach means their top translators can handle more volume per day than they would be able to otherwise.
You might be thinking, "Yeah, but I translate from French to English in the field of leisure and tourism. People like me are a dime a dozen, so this unbundling thing is not going to happen with me."
Well, in my next article, I'm going to explain how ANY translator can leverage some basic principles to successfully unbundle themselves (i.e. get to where they only have to perform the one task instead of all three) in ANY translation market.
Until then, if you're keen for more ideas for succeeding in freelance translation, check out my ebook on Amazon. It's called 88 WAYS TO BE SUCCESSFUL AS A FREELANCE TRANSLATOR.
Best of luck on your journey.
Matt