Translation is a service, and that implies that some level of consultation is necessary for any client seeking a translation because it opens a door to a world of new opportunities. Unfortunately, many clients don’t get to experience this because the standard model used by translation service providers requires handing off clients to junior project managers, who often have little knowledge about translation and whose main job is to insulate clients from experienced translators who do possess the insights clients need. In effect, translation clients are paying translation companies to worsen the quality of service they receive! However, not all translation clients make a beeline for dishonest translation companies, and they can expect good service from genuine translators. In this article, I’ll be drawing on my corporate legal translation background to highlight how clients can benefit from consulting with translators about how to ensure the translation services can best meet their needs.
Where to Start
When a client has a translation requirement that needs assistance, a big and immediate question is naturally going to be “Where to start?” Conference interpreters realized this need for guidance half a century ago when they introduced the consulting interpreter system. This system helps determine what kinds of interpreters are needed and how to best structure their services for an event. Translation services are very similar, and translation clients need to consider the main questions of who (to staff), why (to use a certain approach), and how (much should be spent). These questions should ideally be answered when a client first inquires about the translation process. In practice, almost no translation companies today provide valuable answers when answering these questions for clients, as most translation fees are spent on supply chain management costs while turning a blind eye to quality; with clients falsely believing that the money is being spent on high-quality work!
As a prerequisite for figuring out the right answers to these questions, the translation consultant needs to apply some variant of Skopos Theory, which I discussed in detail here. A client only wants to spend money on a translation project if they have a purpose they are trying to achieve; determining that purpose and applying the correct translation approach — whether it’s legal translation, official translation, or localization — is essential to getting good results. Nonetheless, the Skopos Theory is rarely applied by translation companies. The reason behind this is that firms frequently have their administrative assistants or very junior staff talk to translators and, if asked about the project’s purpose, will often simply respond with, “To translate the document!” A skilled translator, however, would be able to infer the client’s purpose by understanding who the client is and what they do professionally, yet it’s standard operating procedure at many translation companies to anonymize and withhold all information other than the document being translated. This is not the approach we take at CBL — we ensure all translation-relevant details make it into the translation work product, offering insights into who should do the work.
The question of who should do the work is extremely important, as most clients do not know the difference between translators and interpreters, let alone the different specialties within translation. One could argue that, in theory, any person could do all skills and all specialties, but this person would not perform above the entry-level of performance. This is not unlike a general practitioner of law, usually a solo practitioner, who does not provide a ton of value but also does not earn a ton of money. This is further supported by the fact that income totals for US solo practitioners, as measured by the IRS, are very similar to ATA compensation survey income totals measured using similar parameters. A client usually gets better results from a specialist, and this is what generally happens with corporate legal matters.
Although younger translators have begun to specialize now, the shortage of competent translators for specific fields and language pairs still makes finding translators at the partner level difficult. For instance, finding highly experienced translators specializing in translating patents from Chinese or Arabic into English is fairly challenging as there may be, at most, a half dozen specialists in either of those language pairs at an ATA-certified level of experience. There is another factor driving the shortage. Most translation companies’ standard operating procedures require getting the translation out as fast as possible and, unless the translator is available immediately, procedures require using less competent or even minimally qualified alternatives. Very few translation companies will even allow a project manager to recommend waiting on these highly qualified linguists. Many even publish absurd articles advising clients to not look for translator certifications! Could you imagine a law firm recommending their clients use unlicensed attorneys? All of this has resulted in a chronic and severe shortage of highly qualified translators. Handling such shortages while still optimizing business performance should be a key factor to consider for any translation client.
Next comes the issue of process. Most translation companies recommend a very ineffective process that does not exist in other professions, which I wrote about here in an article on TEP. The “gold standard” most translation companies recommend is having three strangers separated by a Chinese wall complete and revise translations in assembly line format. The three people, predictably, do not cooperate very well and the translation subsequently gets poor results for the business. In my opinion, a better strategy would be to follow the structure used in the related industry. For example, a corporate law firm has a partner working with a few associates; having partners working with associates is a good model. The same law firm, when doing eDiscovery and producing thousands of documents, then uses an army of low-paid, trained contract attorneys following very restricted protocols overseen by partners and associates. An eDiscovery translation should also use this approach yet, in reality, it almost never does. In order to save some money, the typical translation company will simply hire an army of very cheap contract translators and deliberately ignore those with partner-level skills. What if they do hire someone with partner-level skills who follows a TEP process and advises about quality defects in the work done by their colleagues? In most cases, this person would be immediately fired by the translation company to prevent there being any witnesses to their negligence.
A translation consultant can help avoid these problems. When working for a big corporation, a typical translation company’s standard operating process is to use a feedback loop that results in a drift to low performance, usually below what a machine translator can do. Since standard processes require terminating anyone who is obviously a witness to negligence, the system filters any kind of negative evaluation out of its business culture. Thus, a situation develops where the company is producing 100% lightly edited machine translations while executives swear machine translation is never used. They evade questions about whether they audit for fraud, which is usually not permitted because objective measures of fraud would be evidence of negligence. In contrast, the key goal for a translation consultant working for the same big corporation would be to set up a systemic process where quality and performance targets can be achieved. This requires as the Harvard Business Review points out in an article, incorporating the view of dissenters instead of immediately terminating them.
Cost/Benefit Analysis is the final prong in determining the process, but is something rarely done for translation work — and executives even think of translation as a cost center! For translation projects in fields like advertising and marketing, this isn’t too hard to measure. You can look at things like advertising click rates, performance, and on-page engagement. For movie subtitles, you can look at how many viewers turn off the show due to bad subtitling — a shocking 70% for Netflix. In legal translation, you can look at how frequently a case fails vs. Benchmark success rates. For instance, the failure rate for the China initiative was 70% vs the DOJ’s benchmark prosecution failure rate of less than 2%. If you spend $1,000,000 on a TV series or pursuing a legal case, then the value of reducing the failure rate from 70% to 2% is $680,000. That amounts to 58 cents per word for a book-length translation of 400,000 words. If you split the difference, which is what most companies do with Google advertising costs, i.e., they gain $1 for each $1 of revenue spent, the justified translation price is $.29. That is incidentally what most translators get. A typical company hiring $1,000/hour lawyers will pay translators on the same case $4/hour. Even if you deduct the law firm’s overhead costs, that’s still over a 100-to-1 difference. A skilled translation consultant would point out here that, if the company uses $70/hour partner translators and $25/hour associate translators working as a team with their lawyers, they potentially stand to be $300,000 richer at the end of the day since the $25/hour translator is the enabling factor for the $1,000/hour lawyer.
The sad fact about translation consulting is that most translation companies blatantly steer clients to what works best for the translation company itself, not the client. For example, if there are 3 expert patent translators specializing in Chinese-to-English translations whom the company has no contact with, and who may not even be available all month, the translation company will usually intentionally misinform the client to steer them toward generalist translators
Legal Service Consultancy
A more recent phenomenon that has appeared, starting in Europe and spreading elsewhere, is Lawyer-Linguists positioned to advise on legal matters and competent to consult on translation work. In my experience, even good lawyers at big law firms will expect me to be able to provide them with good legal advice! The Lawyer-Linguist role is a new one, and while they can provide useful guidance on legal matters, their primary specialization is typically in legal translation. In truth, a Lawyer-Linguist is better suited to collaborating with local attorneys on how to best serve the client. Local lawyers not native in English typically cannot fully understand what the client needs and expects, or what their particular situation may be. This applies to even the most high-priced lawyers. It should come as no surprise to anyone that an hour dedicated to getting better at practicing law is an hour not spent practicing law. As a result, lots of ‘bespoke’ provisions in even Fortune 500 companies’ contracts are just translated word-for-word, despite being legally ineffective, simply to appease the client without acknowledging the language problem. Lawyer-Linguists can readily tell when communication isn’t happening and correct it.
Additionally, legal translation consultants can offer unique insights when drafting documents. Lawyers know very well that big law firms spend lots of money reviewing documents to ensure that they are perfect, often doing multiple rounds of revision to deal with things like commas. Legal translation actually involves a very slow, close look at the document and reading it in a different way, making it an effective method for addressing errors. While it’s easy for lawyers reading over text to skip over phrases that don’t make sense, translators translating to or from Chinese are forced to come up with matching phrases, which is impossible if the source has an error that prevents it from making sense.
