While it'll be hard to leave behind my life of relative freedom in sunny, laid-back Okinawa for the corporate world in rainy Washington, I'm actually really excited about this move. Firstly, it's like this job was made for someone with my somewhat unusual combination of programming and translation skills. There will also be a lot of opportunities to learn, both from daily interaction with hardware and software engineers, to working alongside veteran translators. Among Nintendo's many benefits, they also have a tuition reimbursement program and encourage employees to take higher degrees.

One of the main problems I've faced working alone, without even many colleagues around to talk with in real life, is that I've found it hard to grow professionally. Sure, I can get better at what I'm already doing, but branching out and learning new things is a challenge. I turned 40 last year, and that got me thinking that I'm not done learning, so the offer from Nintendo came at just the right time.

It will also be good to live in the US for a while. My son is half American, but he's lived 12 of his nearly 13 years in Japan; it will be good for him to live in the US for a while, and it will prepare him for university there if that's what he decides to do. My wife is also ready to live in the US for a while, although of course there are many things we're going to miss about Japan (and especially Okinawa).

Coming right at the age of 40, it's struck me that maybe this is my own mid-life crisis — but at least taking a new job is a milder form of mid-life crisis than some of the men my age I know. Heck, I didn't even go buy a Harley.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.

The more ignorant you are about a subject, the easier it seems to you. When I was starting out as a translator, I got bitten by this more times than I like to remember.

Paper and pulp? Why not — how hard could it be? I use paper every day, and once I took a paper-making class. A survey on healthcare in Vietnam? I just had my checkup last month, and I LOVE Vietnamese food. And so on.

Even when I glanced over a document ahead of time, it seemed easy — it wasn't until I actually dug into the translation (after accepting the job, of course ) that I realized I was over my head.

As a corollary, the more we know about a subject, the more likely we are to know our limitations. For example, although I specialize in IT and telecoms, I refuse to do electronics or chip-making stuff. I know how hard that stuff is.

The problem with the Dunning–Kruger effect is that you actually believe that you can do a good job. How do you know to turn down a job when you think you can do it?

After a while, I developed a kind of sanity check when offered a job in a new field. I ask myself how long actual experts in the field study. Then I ask myself if I have studied that field long enough to duplicate their understanding.

And then for good measure, I think about all the botched translations I've seen in my fields by people who said, "Why not — I own a copy of Windows and play Minefield ALL THE TIME."

While I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions of these books, other than the obvious fact that the oil and other resources are indeed running out, it got me thinking about the long-term future of the translation industry, going out 50 years or more.

I think that three factors will have the most impact on the translation industry over the rest of the century: decline of the United States as a superpower, artificial intelligence, and peak oil.

End of United States Hegemony

The global dominance of the US is in decline. As the dominance of the US declines, so will the dominance of English. Of course, there will be a lag, with English retaining its prestige for some time after US power fades, but in the end I think we'll see a much more multilingual world.

Currently, English is to a large extent the foreign language that is learned. One Italian engineer once told me, "English is not a language to study, it's a language to know." German or French you might study; you're expected to know English.

As a result, English is something of a lingua franca for translation, with English translations being made for non-native speakers of English. For example, multinational corporations will often translate their manuals into English only, and then use those in all locations worldwide.

For the case of Japanese as a source language, it's also fairly common for a document to be translated into English, and then from the English into other languages, even if the English translation will never be used. This is because it's apparently easier to find Japanese->English translators, and then translators from English to another language, than, say, a Japanese->Spanish translator.

The waning of US power will be followed by a decline in English. I think that the end result will be more overall translation, but somewhat less translation into or out of English. Instead of just creating English versions of documents, future clients will be forced to translate into many different languages; conversely, the role of English as a lingua franca or intermediary language will decline.

AI

Despite a continual tide of bold predictions, machine translation isn't appreciably better than it was 30 or even 40 years ago. The problem is that beyond a certain rudimentary level, the process of language translation requires the full intelligence of a human brain. This is why translation is an AI-complete problem. And general human intelligence has remained a far-off goal since the field of AI was invented.

But machines are getting inexorably more powerful, and consequently they're getting smarter as well. One by one, the cherished set of skills reserved to human intellect are being overtaken by computers.

In the 1990s, an IBM computer conquered the skill of chess. IBM is now attempting to do for Jeopardy what it did for chess (Youtube video here). Yes, this is just a mechanistic and rather simple-minded application of rules and data to simulate human trivia knowledge. On the other hand, it's getting us a lot closer, performance-wise, to the kind of general intelligence needed to perform tasks that are today "uniquely human." What will scientists be able to accomplish when computers are 10 times, 100 times, 1,000 times more powerful than today? (Yes, it seems certain that at least a 1,000-fold increase in performance will be possible, barring the end of modern civilization — see below)

It's entirely conceivable that computers will reach the level of general intelligence needed to perform translation as well as or better than human beings. The funny thing about general intelligence, however, is that it's general: such a computer could also perform surgery, write sonnets, and swindle little old ladies out of their pensions. If you think that's far-fetched, remember that even today, computers are driving cars on our streets, flying and landing airliners, diagnosing diseases, and performing scientific research.

It's very hard for me to picture what such a future society would look like. It would be nearly impossible for human labor to compete with machine labor — every job that can be done by a computer seems unavoidably destined to be performed by a computer.

Our current economic system would no longer function in a society where human labor has no value, and the only value was derived from the capital required to purchase computers and resources. Would it be a post-scarcity utopia, or a hell of marginal, meaningless existence for all those but the capital-owning elite?

Peak Oil

We probably reached peak oil in 2005, and there is still no viable alternative source of energy to replace it. Since oil supplies will dwindle over the same curve that they rose, over the next century the price of oil will gradually increase, until it will be far too precious to burn in a combustion engine.

And that gives humanity a century to come up with alternative sources of energy. Unfortunately, demand for energy is currently rising, rather than falling. Even though rising energy prices will stimulate energy efficiency (global petroleum consumption fell by 15% during the oil crises of the 1970s), we're obviously going to need a lot of relatively cheap energy to keep modern society as we know it running.

The progress toward intelligent machines will depend greatly on how expensive energy is. If we succeed at creating a generally intelligent computer, but it consumes as much power as a small town, then depending on the price of energy, it might be more cost-effective to employ a town-full of people instead.

As energy grows more expensive, R&D will also slow. A lot of our technology is also tied to cheap energy, from the machines used to extract resources, to the trucks used to transport them, to the factories used to make our shiny new widgets. Our technological future is therefore going to depend greatly on whether we can find alternative sources of energy that are cheap and plentiful enough to supply the energy required by our modern society.

Or course, translation was a viable profession long before the industrial revolution, so it will remain a viable profession no matter how energy-starved our future civilization becomes.

Translators will also do quite well in an eco-conservative future, where it is much cheaper and more efficient to move around information than widgets. Translation is quite amenable to remote work.

The only future scenario in which translation as a profession will end is one in which machines take over virtually every form of labor currently performed by humans. Thus as long as computers don't put us out of work entirely, there will be ample work for the translators of the future. And if computers do put us out of work, at least we'll have plenty of company.

r * p * h * d * w
where:
r = rate
p = pages per hour
h = hour worked per day
d = days worked per week
w = weeks worked per year

Let's try plugging in some numbers. Say that you charge $30 per page, you translate 2.5 pages per hour, you work 4 hours per day (that's actually optimistic for hours worked in a corporate environment), 5 days per week, and 50 weeks per year. Call this person Average Allie.

Average Allie:
$30 * 2.5 p * 4 h * 5 d * 50 w = $75,000

Now, let's say you charge $40 per page, and translate 2 pages per hour, with time worked the same (Quality Quinton).

Quality Quinton:
$40 * 2 p * 4 h * 5 d * 50 w = $80,000

Now, let's say you charge $30 per page, but translate 3 pages per hour (Fast Frank):

Fast Frank:
$30 * 3 p * 4 h * 5 d * 50 w = $90,000

Curiously, it seems to generally be more lucrative to be fast than expensive.

How about people who work for very low rates ($10/page, or $0.05 word — certainly not unheard of), but work long hours (8 hours/day, no vacations) to make up for it? I'll also assume that they're not very fast (1 page/hour, because those charging the lowest rates are usually the least skilled, and the unskilled are usually slow too). Call this person Poor Peter.

Poor Peter:
$10 * 1 p * 8 h * 5 d * 52 w = $20,800

When people say that it's impossible to make a living as a translator, I think that they must have a scenario like the one above in mind.

To me, it's pretty obvious that the way for people like Poor Peter to improve their incomes is not by working more (increasing the values of h, d, or w), but by becoming better translators, so that they can work faster (increasing p), and charge more (increasing r)

Even more unusually, I'm getting direct clients who ask for very low rates as well. This is rare because when a direct client cuts out the agency, they can already get a good deal by splitting the difference of the agency's markup, and my existing direct clients are very happy to pay me 50% above my agency rates.

My impression is that a lot of translators got spooked in 2009 after not getting any work (one colleague told me she didn't have any work at all for around three months), and out of desperation started taking any work that came along; and now translation buyers are trying to capitalize on this by searching out super-low rates.

Fortunately for me, I have more offers for work than I can handle at my current rates (in fact, I've even raised my rates this year with a couple of clients), but I wonder how long this trend will continue.

Things are tough for lots of people now — the Consumerist reports that 22.5% of Americans are unemployed or under-employed — but I still want to ride out the current Great Recession at my current rates!

When I started translation in the 1990s, old hands would tell me about the "good old days" of Japan's bubble economy, when they'd get 30 yen per word for manual work. The days of those kinds of rates are sadly long gone, but I hope that I won't be talking about my present rates like that 10 years from now.

I've been pretty busy. 2009 was fairly slow. I earned about 10% less than my average, although I also took a lot of time off (about two months total). But right around the beginning of 2010, my work started to pick up, even more than average years. 2010 isn't over yet, but I'm looking to earn as much or more than my average.

I had the opportunity to attend Project Tokyo in September, and I heard a lot of similar stories: 2009 was slow, but 2010 has been very busy. My impression is that a lot of companies sat on their translation work during 2009, but started sending it out in 2010 after their skittishness wore off.

Most of the translators I've talked to about this have been working between Japanese and English. If you work with another language pair, how has 2010 been to you? And if you work between Japanese and English, do my experiences match yours?

Today, we had our first live day of simultaneous interpreting, with a guest speaker. The manuscript he gave us beforehand would take about 15 minutes to read, and he spoke for about 90, so we got some good practice at interpreting without a script.

The course has been a great learning experience so far. For one thing, it's shown me that I need to work on expressing myself in Japanese.

The techniques we're learning for simultaneous interpreting between Japanese and English have been illuminating. Japanese and English are very different structurally, and usually in order to translate a sentence, you need to look at the end.

Here's a contrived example, with the parts color-coded:

新しいバージョンは、Xがあって、Yがあって、前のバージョンより機能性が高くなりました。

You've got a topic, a bunch of "modifiers," or supporting information, and then the predicate. Normally, I'd translate that sentence something like the following, moving the predicate to the beginning, and turning the supporting information into one or more subsequent sentences:

The new version has improved capabilities over the previous one. It has X as well as Y.

This of course won't do with simultaneous interpretation. Especially considering that "X" and "Y" could be of arbitrary length (it's not uncommon for the topic and predicate to be far, far separated, even in spoken Japanese), if you waited until the end, you'd forget the sentence. Or even if you didn't forget it, while you were processing this sentence the next one would be flying by.

So they're teaching us techniques to kind of listen until you get a meaningful "chunk" of information, and discharge that while you listen to the next chunk. Here's an example from a passage where I can still remember how I interpreted it.

Japanese:

(1)バングラディッシュ　チッタゴン大学(2)の経済学教授ムハマド　ユヌス(3)と学生達が、ある村を調査している(4)最中に、素朴な竹製家具を作っている女性に出会いました。

My English interpretation:

(1)Chittagong University in Bangladesh (2)is where professor of economics Muhammad Yunus works. (3)He and his students were on a field trip to a village. (4)There, they encountered a woman who made simple bamboo furniture.

We always do a lot of preparation before each piece. In this case, the preparation included the Wikipedia pages on Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, and the original English version of the article. Incidentally, the English version started, "During a field trip to a village, Muhammad Yunus…"

Tomorrow, we get to interpret for a mock trial, where a GI has been arrested for theft and assault. Very Okinawan topic!

I'm not really interested in becoming an interpreter, simultaneous or otherwise, but the profession has always fascinated me — simultaneous interpreters are kind of like the thoroughbreds to the slow-but-steady translator plow-horses.

My main goal for the course is to stretch myself in new ways. In particular, I'm hoping to train myself in interpreters' ability to think on their feet. I also am looking forward to going both from and into Japanese. I've lately been trying to write more Japanese, and study more translations from English into Japanese, and I think that this has increased my toolset for translating into English.

The course also promises to teach some people skills: everything from eye contact to correct posture (urp). I'm looking forward to an exhausting but valuable eight days.

Earlier in my career, I tried to stick to the style and terminology of the reference translations as much as possible. I figured that since the client had accepted those translations in the past, that was what it wanted. Even if the translation was very bad, I'd just plug my nose and send that pile off.

That turned out to be a bad idea. If I passed the trial, I would then need to translate 10 or more times the volume of the trial using that same painfully bad style.

After a few years, I started ignoring these "reference" translations, and doing what I thought was the best translation. I might look at references to get a feel for terminology, but I'll also diverge from the terminology in the reference if I think it's wrong.

I figured that even if the client didn't agree with me on translation style, at least this way I could look forward to passing the trial with anticipation instead of dread. I work almost exclusively for Japanese companies, and I've also found that I don't want to work for clients that prefer brain-dead chokuyaku. We're both better off if those types of clients find translators who write English just like in their middle-school English textbooks.

It also turns out to be a lot easier and less stressful to do what you consider to be your best work, rather than second-guessing your translation, wondering if this is what the client wants.

To my surprise, I found that after I took the policy of ignoring reference translations, I started passing a lot more trials. But when I thought about it, it made sense: the client was looking for a new translator because they weren't happy with their current provider. In retrospect, it seems like a pretty bad idea to copy the work of the guys who just got fired.

So, back to the trial from a few weeks ago. The prior translations were very bad, and since I'm knowledgeable about the subject matter (software specifications), I ignored them completely and did what I considered to be a good translation. Fortunately, the client not only liked the trial: they were thrilled with it, and although they were originally planning to place a 10-page job, that has turned into a 30-page job, with a promise of more work to come.

And the best thing is that I can use my own judgment to produce the best translation possible.

For some reason, the accepted translation for this term seems to have become "recycling oriented society" (it's the only one listed in the venerable Green Goddess).

The problem is that you almost never see this term used in genuine English documents. Since it doesn't seem very likely that this concept is unique to (or even originates in) Japan, I'm always on the lookout for a better way to express it.

So far, the best English equivalent I've found is "closed loop economy" ("economy" often serves when the Japanese talks about "society"). Unfortunately, clients often aren't adventurous enough to stray from the anointed dictionary translation, so I tend to keep a little collection of links that support my use "non-dictionary" translations.

Here's a comic where I spotted "closing the loop" being used in much the same way as Japanese uses 循環型社会:

We must "close the loop" and make all products
recyclable, reusable, or compostable