Legal translation quality is being routinely wrecked with risks to clients by ignorance of a common business principle known as Little’s Law. The results of Little’s Law when applied to translators are nothing short of disastrous, and I would argue that the results are therefore a disaster for clients. When someone new to the translation field, particularly in developing countries, looks at the earnings that can be had from translation, they will typically take the time they spend on the translation itself and then divide this number by how long it took them to derive their hourly income. However, hourly income is not annual income, as many Uber drivers discovered after being baited in by misleading advertisements. A typical translator new to the industry actually has no way of predicting how much they could possibly earn over the coming year and, as a result, the effects of Little’s Law cause translation incomes to deflate 25%-50% over what someone with the same level of education would expect to earn.
Finance and legal translators are not just taking Little’s Law lying down, rather they are busy scheming various ways to take back the value lost to Little’s Law by using a variety of devious techniques to hollow out the value of the legal translation. This can be extremely dangerous to law firms, who have attempted to solve the problem on their own but, thanks to Little’s Law, introduced problems that make the cure worse than the disease. Let’s take a closer look at Little’s Law to understand why the legal translator relationship becomes dysfunctional.
How Little’s Law Works
Little’s Law Theory is a widely accepted concept in business, management and project management, and is a useful tool for understanding and analyzing the performance of a system or a process. The Harvard Business Review article on this subject is a good comprehensive look at contemporary scholarship on the issue, but a cursory understanding of the principle is sufficient for understanding legal translator behavior. If your work has anything to do with business at all, such as corporate law or business translation, then I would suggest that Little’s Law is essential knowledge for your profession since it’s a fundamental law governing most business operations.
First proposed by John Little in 1960, Little’s Law has since become a fundamental cornerstone of operations management. The easiest way to think of Little’s Law is to imagine it like a water tower during peak shower time with new water being pumped in. What is the throughput time for the new water? Little’s Law Theory gives a simple, yet essential, mathematical equation that states that the average number of units (water) in a process or system (the tank), L, is equal to the average rate at which those units enter the system (the added water flow), λ, multiplied by the average time spent in the system, W. In other words, L = λ x W.
Another perspective of L = λ x W is to answer the question “how long will a translation client have to wait in line?” To calculate the performance of a system or process using Little’s Law Theory, simply multiply the average number of translation clients in the line by the average rate at which new translation clients line up and the average time they spend waiting in line while other translations are done. Stunning results emerge if you look at a range of variables on a graph and include what happens at peak times: the authors in the Harvard Business Review article found that the amount of time a project spends waiting in line at 60% resource utilization may be 1-2 days, but can be as much as 2-3 months at 95% resource utilization.
In the translation industry, waiting times of months in some language pairs, like Japanese-English where cheating is uncommon, are often reported. It’s not unlike a doctor’s office where an appointment may not be available for a few days, yet the translation industry is fairly unique in that agencies rarely want a client to be waiting for more than a couple hours before a project starts, which results in low resource utilization.
Uses of Little’s Law Analysis
By understanding system or process performance using Little’s Law, managers can identify areas where changes can be made to improve efficiency. This is especially true for a totally dysfunctional system like legal translation.
Little’s Law Theory can also be used to assess the impact of changes to a process and to forecast the results of such changes. This can help managers make informed decisions about how to optimize the system or process, and allows them to make decisions about how to best allocate resources and improve overall efficiency. Outside the translation industry, where the law is generally ignored, we see lots of business systems being well-optimized for customers’ needs.
You’ve likely seen Little’s Law in action in your daily life. For example, in customer service call centers where, at some point, you may have experienced being put on hold by customer service for several hours at a time, but more recently waiting times have improved a lot.
Toyota and CostCo are two companies that famously use Little’s Law optimizations to achieve low-cost, agile operations that bring high quality and low cost to consumers. According to these companies, they use Little’s Law Theory to analyze the performance of their business processes by comparing formula results to actual performance. If formula results are higher than actual performance, then the system or process is clearly inefficient. If formula results are lower than the actual performance, then performance is better than expected. Thanks to its optimizations, CostCo does not have products piled up in warehouses for very long periods of time waiting for customers to buy them.
In Toyota’s “Kaizen” methodology, production lines are basically always kept running without work stoppages, and efficiency is always being incrementally improved by optimizing the amount of parts waiting in line. A production line grinding to a halt at Toyota is considered an extremely serious problem and, therefore, Toyota managers are constantly running that “L = λ x W” equation to ensure that there is always a line of parts waiting to enter manufacturing, neither too short nor too long. As a result, both CostCo and Toyota are able to pass their savings directly to consumers.
Dysfunctions for legal translation quality
Legal translators are not given the same kind of Little’s Law optimization that a CostCo warehouse gets and, without that kind of consideration from managers, the unrestrained, uncontrolled force of Little’s Law causes the legal translation system and organization to melt down into a dangerous dysfunction. Note how in the Toyota and CostCo systems there are always new items in line waiting to be worked on. Toyota has never experienced anything similar to what happened in the Soviet economy, where factories sat idle for weeks waiting on parts to come in before a flurry of activity would take place. Nor has CostCo ever experienced a situation similar to Soviet shops, where people would physically wait in line for months to buy something like a chair or bed. However, legal translators function almost exactly like the dysfunctional Soviet economy, whether they work for translation companies or law firms.
At translation companies, a legal translator generally only goes to work if a client has projects that are needed, and project managers essentially ignore the translator’s existence otherwise. Basically, all projects must start immediately and are calculated based on academic estimates of translation speed— with the result being extremely widespread cheating by translators to foist faked translation work on clients.
While untasked with any project, legal translators spend all of their time waiting on new work to arrive. Based on the ATA compensation surveys, it appears a typical translator is waiting on assignments for 40% of the time, or 800 out of 1,200 hours a year. Why aren’t these translators doing what happens in big law firms, where they work 100 hours a week and are waiting around without any client work following an M&A deal? In my own experience in corporate law, a lot of the necessary corporate drudge work lawyers do isn’t mentally taxing, to the point where associates are called “$160,000 paper weights.” Translation is different, it’s very mentally taxing and causes exhaustion after a certain number of words. This is why simultaneous interpreters rotate during a conference; after a half hour (3,000+ words), an interpreter’s brain will basically be burned out. Thus, translators are underworked.
Project managers at translation companies inevitably calculate translator compensation as if they are working a full 2,000 hours a year. In reality, the translator is idle half the time. Per the ATA compensation survey, 2nd year translators in the USA average something like $20,000 per year. In China, they might get $3,500 a year, strict poverty wages. Salary is basically non-existent; translators are treated like Uber drivers with advanced degrees. After a few years of this, translators begin trying to cheat clients as aggressively as possible to earn a living wage. Cheating in legal translation is remarkably easy, especially with AI tools, and since lawyers cannot bill for closely inspecting translation work for cheating, it tends to go unnoticed.
Some law firms try to solve the problem by introducing “legal secretaries who translate”: English majors in China who also translate as needed. This would be a good idea if law firms knew how to manage translators—but they don’t, which brings to mind the expression that the first myth about law firm management is that it exists. I’ve had several students graduate and work in-house at big, prestigious international law firms, and what is the result? They spend 95% of their time doing secretarial work and maybe 5% on translation. That results in them having so little experience that they don’t know how to translate the document, and instead simply rely on an AI translation tool to complete the translation for them.
Solutions
What can be done to mitigate the damage caused by the Little’s Law phenomenon in legal translation? I suggest going back to the principles that make Toyota and CostCo great when managing legal translator performance. Treat the legal translator as if they performed like a Toyota production line or some other physical asset, that is, treat them like they are important. A legal translator needs to be kept busy and working, and also have a lot of guidance and mentorship to be effective. Translation services are unique in that they aren’t limited to just client work, and any kind of published material can be used by translators to keep them regularly working and improving their translation abilities while creating things of value and continuing to work. Treat legal translators as partners in a mutually beneficial relationship, and avoid neglecting their workload as typically happens in translation companies in law firms.
