May 15, 2008
The invisible translator
By the nature of our profession, translators are generally invisible when they're doing their jobs right.
I say "generally" because this isn't quite a universal truth. For example, unlike in the United States, Japan is a country where a movie subtitle translator (and arguably not even a stellar one) can become a television celebrity. But that's a post for a different time (and a different blogger!).
So let's assume that a translator who has done her job is effectively invisible — there is no awareness of her presence between the author and reader. The implication is that despite the ubiquity of translation, the general public has a poor awareness of it.
This makes customer education pretty difficult, to say the least. Yes, we can sometimes find savvy consumers of translation, but most of the time they're in turn beholden to an ignorant consumer of translation down the line.
It also makes marketing translation as a profession a losing proposition.
Not be be a pessimist, but I don't see the market changing any time in the near future. Translation has been around a long time, and attitudes haven't really changed. The best we can do as translators is insulate ourselves from the ignorant consumers as best we can by surrounding ourselves with the savvy ones, and slowly, slowly educating our existing customers and culling out the bad ones.
I agree with your assessment of the current situation, but I’m not so sure that attitudes will not change in the future. It just takes a couple experiences *actually* translating to become a “translation savvy consumer” (in my opinion), and my impression is that with more and more (non-Japanese) information on the net, people will be doing more of this as time goes by.
@Chris:
Thanks for the comment. I certainly hope you turn out to be right!
As they say, experience is a great teacher, and as they also say, experience is that thing you get right after you needed it.
Customers tend to get edumacated about translation by commissioning a really bad one. If the customer is savvy enough to recognize that the translation was bad, they may reason that better translations can be had, and may go out in search of those.
There are, of course, contrary cases (especially in Japan), where the customer is convinced that a translation that you or I would consider bad is just the thing. There’s not much to be done in this case except allow the customer to fail.
I’m wondering—was there a specific experience that prompted this post?
@Adam
“I’m wondering—was there a specific experience that prompted this post?”
Actually, what got me thinking about this topic was a discussion on the JAT list about how we can market JAT. Also, the theme of IJET-19 was “translator and customer education.”
It just strikes me that given the inherently low profile of translation, marketing translation as a profession and educating customers about translation is an uphill battle.