Chinese translators face a daunting future owing to a lack of realistic career planning putting them on a trajectory that makes them both poor and miserable. Moreover, the pain is one shared by both translators and their clients, forced to work with primarily broken translations. In a previous article, I described how industry focus is neglected by translators, resulting in Chinese translators ignoring vital training in fields that constitute over 75% of the translation market. This is a reflection of a broader trend: Chinese translators are not engaging in realistic career planning, which results in careers cratering before they even take off. In this article, I’ll describe how Chinese translators, too, can have good and meaningful careers by engaging in realistic long-term career planning, and will be touching on the role of a behavioral trait known as “grit,” which ensures they reach the finish line.
The Effects of Poor Career Planning
A lack of proper career planning results in the crash and burn phenomenon so common among translators in China. Prior to enrolling in a translation program to learn the profession, very few translators actually consider what kind of translator they want to be, let alone evaluate readily available information about the income earned in the relevant field. As a result, the majority of new translation trainees have a very strong interest in translating a variety of “light” topics, particularly literature, subtitles, academic journals, current events, museum exhibition descriptions, and marketing copy. A typical program in “business translation” teaches the translation of what corporations would typically call “content marketing” material. The problem with this is that nobody taking this career direction—at age 23, 24, or higher now—is really thinking about whether these fields pay a living wage. And they don’t: museum exhibition translators and whitepaper translators earn less than most blue collar professions, even after a decade of experience.
To a large extent, the kind of materials trainees want to learn how to translate is largely the same as the range of materials they encountered as English majors in college. Courses in legal, financial, and technical translation are in incredibly low demand compared to “soft,” non-technical fields. To further highlight the severity of the issue, a book I purchased on translator training was devoted entirely to soft fields like literature and tourism. I found no articles—from anywhere in the world—about legal, financial, or technical translation. This is a huge disconnect from the real world. If you look at the Nimdzi industry report on which verticals account for the market, just 25% of the global translation industry for all language pairs is in these soft fields. The medicine-related verticals alone are 50% bigger than the entire media and marketing industries combined. This results in a huge problem when 99.9% of prospective translators are training for a field which accounts for 25% or less of the language services industry, to the point where the field is so saturated that wages are literally lower than what they could make delivering stir-fry. Luckily, with a little career planning, this situation can be avoided.
Nevertheless, most people, unfortunately, don’t plan at all. Chinese to English translators now typically spend over a decade training hard to be translators, focused totally on the foreign language material. At the end of that decade, they look for job opportunities and discover that the average media translation internship offers a meager $7 per day, whereas HR assistant or secretary internships offer $12 per day. Consequently, about 95% of trainees make a beeline for the assistant/secretarial jobs. These same companies are happy to pay $1,000/day for a true expert’s assistance, and several have in-house people in China averaging $200 per day, so the problem isn’t the industry — it’s skills. No bank or tech company is going to pay that kind of money for someone whose expertise consists in having read a bunch of newspapers and novels. Quite a few banks in Shanghai do hire the very best translation school interns—and put them on a remedial training program for them to learn the relevant industry terminology. So, even the very best need a lot of remedial training and, after they get that training, the candidates are likely to job-hop. Therefore, it makes zero sense for any employer to hire one of those candidates.
A more realistic person would, as early as possible, have a strong idea about what kind of job they want to do down the line and what kind of skills are necessary for that job. Without that kind of orientation, translators risk becoming zero-knowledge, zero-value workers. Many people look at the translations being released and think that translators are just extremely negligent with their work. Surprisingly, these same people also think that translators are being totally reasonable while producing broken translations. Having zero knowledge of the field they are working in—and being paid commensurately—results in translators making absurd choices that lead to zero-value, broken translations.
Translators Need “Grit”
Becoming a translator who is not just competent in the eyes of their peers, but creates value for stakeholders, is something that will take at least a decade of perseverance just to get started. This is a fact reflected in research done by Betty Lou Weaver that indicates transitioning from ILR3+ to ILR4 proficiency levels in a second language takes an average of 14 years. This is on top of the typical 12 years to reach ILR3+. So, overall, reaching ILR4 proficiency takes around 25 years unless you are able to shorten the timeline with highly elite training from places like MIIS. This career progression is basically the opposite of engineering, where graduates have awesome knowledge right out of the gate, and invent a lot of things. If, as a translator, you are inventing things and English words like “circusee,” then it means that your efficacy as a translator is too low. Likewise, according to ILR, most foreign language majors graduate with just an ILR 2+ level from college, when ILR4 is going to be needed for perfect translation performance. The federal government does recognize that most linguists never reach ILR3+, and likewise, federal standards do not recognize the existence of consistently perfect translation performance.
Most new graduates have an ILR proficiency level of 2, some rock stars graduate at 2+. That covers maybe 8,000 out of the 80,000 words someone like a medical translator needs to know to keep up with what doctors write. Legal translators have a similar, but worse, challenge: the law uses a lot of common words to mean something totally different from what laypersons think they mean. For example, the Statute of Frauds has nothing to do with fraud, because it uses the same meaning of “fraud” that applied 1,700 years ago rather than the one in use today. In the PRC, it’s still translated as “a statute to prevent fraud,” despite American law classes typically pointing out that “fraud” means what the ancient word does.
Acquiring just the linguistic knowledge alone, not to mention industry-related information, will require a great deal of what psychologists call “grit.” The behavior of “grit” is generally described as a positive non-cognitive trait where a person has long-term perseverance of effort combined with a passion for a long-term goal. Thus, without having an industry focus and a career plan in mind, it is fundamentally impossible that a translator display “grit.” On that note, it’s important to understand that those two factors described in the above sections alone absolutely do not constitute grit. In addition to having these goals, a translator, starting from the very earliest period as a trainee, will need to be on a trajectory where they consistently pursue their goal and track their progress over the next 25 years. In reality, what most translators do is go into casual worker or vacation mode within a year after graduating college, including both full-time workers and even master’s program trainees.
Conclusion
Chinese translators’ careers go awry, resulting in shockingly low pay, largely because they are not engaging in realistic career planning. In order to succeed in the field, translators need to consider their direction in addition to thinking about the probable outcomes of their efforts. Moreover, a job in language services requires a great deal more learning and training than in most other fields because it relies heavily on general language knowledge in addition to technical skills. A translator may need 15 to 20 years to acquire all of the knowledge needed to pass the ILR-4 skill level, which requires a great deal of persistence and tenacity — a personality factor called “grit.” Translators in general do not make such insignificant wages because the work they do lacks value, but rather because the quality of their translation services is so low as to produce little or no value. Translators can overcome these limitations by selecting an industry focus, realistically planning a career, and having the grit to see it through from start to finish over a period of many years.
