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.
Comments(4)