There are many ways that you can make your services stand out from the crowd so that they aren't a commodity; I think that being an expert is one of the best.

But becoming an expert isn't easy. It's so hard, in fact, that some people even say you shouldn't bother trying to become one.

Becoming an expert is hard because it takes lots of time and effort. Many people will tell you that it takes 10 years to become an expert in a given domain. And that's not all: just putting in the time doesn't guarantee you'll even become an expert. The danger is that you'll reach competency after a couple of years, and just coast after that without improving much.

I'm like that with cars. I've been a car owner for over 20 years. I can check the oil in my car, top off the fluids, change a tire in a pinch. But I'm no expert on cars. I don't work on my car on the weekends; I take it to a mechanic. I don't even change the oil if I can avoid it. I've reached a basic level of competency in car maintenance, and haven't been inspired to progress any further.

Interestingly, so-called "natural talent" doesn't seem to play much of a role in becoming an expert. It's almost pure effort and stick-to-it-iveness. Also interestingly, an undergraduate degree followed by a PhD and two-year postdoc seem to be just enough to make you into an expert in some academic field.

The secret to becoming an expert

Now I'm going to tell you the secret to becoming an expert. The secret is: follow your bliss. Or to put that another way:

Do what you love.

This kind of sounds like the pitch of some shady late-night motivational speaker infomercial, but this really works. This is what will get you doing whatever it is you're doing for 10 or more years, and will give you the passion to keep improving after you've reached competency. There might be other ways to achieve expertise, but this is the only sure one that I know of.

So how do you know what you "love" — what you should be devoting your time to becoming an expert in? I like to use a simple test: imagine that you've just won the lottery. You're set financially for life. But you've still got to do something, right? What would it be? That's your "bliss" — that's what you need to do in order to become a real expert and get off the commoditization express.

If I won the lottery (and after I was done with a trip around the world), I'd be studying foreign languages, writing, and programming. These are the things that I really love to do, and the areas where I have the best chance of becoming an expert.

Of course, once you're an expert, barring a knock on your door from Ed McMahon (really dating myself, I know), you'll still have to make that work for you in order to make a living. In my case, nobody was willing to pay me to learn Japanese or write whatever I wanted, so I turned to translation as a way to leverage what I've learned. Likewise, I couldn't find anyone to pay me to write whatever programs I wanted, so I have to program things that other people want.

But the point is that you can make it work for you. The key is to become an expert; there's almost always a way to turn that into a career. It's totally backwards to pick some prosperous-looking profession and try to become an expert in that field. Nine times out of ten, you'll get stuck in the doldrums of competency, wondering why you aren't as successful as you would like to be and why you hate your job so much.

One last word of advice: you can change your mind. Don't be afraid to pursue new interests. The key is to enjoy it.

Although my talk was in Japanese, the students emceed the presentation in both English and Japanese, and I was impressed by their English ability.

I spoke for a little over an hour, followed by questions from the students. They also gave me a lovely bouquet of flowers! The kids' questions were really smart, and showed that they're interested in the translation profession. Below are two of their questions, and my answers.

What do you like best about being a translator?

My favorite things about being a translator are probably:

• Freedom: I get to work at home, live in Okinawa, and set my own schedule
• Learning: I'm always learning new things, and get paid to study things that I am interested in

How much money can a translator make?

There is a wide range of income for freelance translators. Some translators can barely earn a living, and need to get side jobs. The very top paid translators can earn over 10,000,000 yen (US $100,000) per year.

Two of the big areas of improvement are using synonyms and similar words to expand search results, and automatic translation to find results in other languages.

These are generally useful, because they get more results from the pages we're after. Some examples from the article are adding matches for "song lyrics" when you search for "song words," and matches for "homicide" when you search for a string containing "murder."

But these techniques tend to foil the main ways I use Google when I'm doing research for a translation. When I use Google as a research tool for translation, I'm usually looking for exact phrases. I'm looking to see if a given English phrase is used in the same kinds of contexts as its Japanese equivalent.

I also use it to try and find the English names for Japanese organizations. If I've made a reasonable effort and no English name turns up, then I'll translate it myself, but if there's already an English equivalent with any currency, I think I have a duty to use that. Actually, when there is an English equivalent for an organization name, 95% of the time I find it on the organization's home page. But for the other 5%, it makes a big difference to be able to search on exact phrases.

In these cases, when Google gets too smart, it actually makes it harder to find what I'm after. I especially don't want Google to back-translate my search terms into Japanese, and show me Japanese matches!

You can kind of force Google into being more literal by prepending your search terms with a plus sign (+), but this doesn't always work, and the rules for when it works and when it doesn't are opaque (as far as I've been able to tell).

As Google gets increasingly smart about guessing what we really wanted to search for, I wonder if it will get increasingly hard for those of us who already know exactly what we're searching for, and just want to know if it exists.

The back story

The end client had been burned a couple of times by horrible translations. So they contracted with this new agency, on the condition that they could meet the translator and verify his/her ability. The agency didn't have anyone suitable, so they found me through an introduction. Dealing with a translator directly was out of the question, because the end client has a strict bidding process that requires huge capitalization and credit rating just to bid.

The meeting

I met two nice people from the translation agency, and then we drove down to the client's office together. This was my first time meeting them, so although they had my CV, and we had exchanged emails, they wanted to know some more about me. One of their first questions was, "Do you read kanji?" The end clients would probably want to show us some documents, and if I couldn't read them it might not come off well.

I was flabbergasted. I asked the leader of their team, "Can you be a translator and not be able to read the language you translate?" Apparently, you can: this PM's other native English speaker (NES) is an interpreter who also translates. But she doesn't read Japanese well, and instead has her partner dictate her documents; she then "translates" from the voice recording.

I answered that yes, I could read kanji, and kind of shrugged it off until we got to the meeting. There, when the documentation lead brought out the documents that I was supposed to translate, he asked me the same question: "Can you read kanji?" I bemusedly told him yes, and we went on with our discussion, but it left me thinking. Are native English-speaking translators really so thin on the ground that our very existence is questioned?

The null hypothesis here would be that my spoken Japanese is so bad that they doubted my ability to actually read the language. This can be discarded, however: my spoken Japanese isn't at the native level, but it's good enough for these purposes.

It's possible that these two groups' small sample size allowed skewed results to be magnified. I don't know about the end-client's experience with native English-speaking translators, but as I wrote above, the agency's other NES doesn't read Japanese.

Part of it might also be my looks: I'm a big white guy, and I know that I tend to give off a vibe of being big, strong, and not too bright. People often tell me that they're shocked when I first open my mouth and Japanese comes out. So maybe that helped boost the incredulity factor.

Happy ending

Despite the initial doubts of both the agency and the end client as to my kanji-reading abilities, the meeting went well. I'm now working on an interesting project with good feedback from the client. I'm hoping that I can change some minds about NES translators and their abilities. I kind of feel like I'm trying to prove the existence of Big Foot. Which in my case isn't too far from the truth.

They're wrong, of course. Firstly, you're not ready to start thinking about becoming a translator until reading those foreign squiggles is no longer a challenge, and secondly, technical terms are actually the easiest things to translate. Why? Because they're most often in a one-to-one correspondence between the two languages. I doubt there are many languages lacking a direct translation for the word "hydrogen," for example.

Technical terms aren't the problem: it's the fuzzy stuff around them that really gives us headaches. Figurative, vague, and culturally bound phrases are what give us ulcers, or what make translation an exciting and rewarding career (or both!), depending on your outlook.

The problem is that unlike "technical" terms, there's no one "right way" to translate these expressions. You've got to tailor each translation to the context at hand. If you look at translators' mailing lists like honyaku, by far the most digital ink is spilled on translations of "fuzzy" terms like ganbaru and tettei. Note that here I'm using the term "fuzzy" to mean a phrase that doesn't map directly to an equivalent in the target language. "Ganbaru" and its ilk are fulfilling their roles perfectly in the context of the Japanese language.

A case in point is the term 取り組み (torikumi), which literally means "grapple." It's used figuratively in the sense of "grappling" with issues or challenges, and makes frequent appearances in corporatespeak of all types.

While it's possible to translate this into English as "grapple" as well, it's not nearly as common as the Japanese, and in many cases doesn't fit. This is a conceptual mismatch: the Japanese language has a figurative image of "coming to grips with something" that English lacks.

Take for example the following phrase, which gets nearly 26 million hits on Google:

環境への取り組み

The phrase means, roughly, "things that we are doing for the environment." It would be totally inappropriate to translate this as "grappling with the environment," or even "coping with the environment." I would likely translate this as "Environmental Initiatives" or "Commitment to the Environment."

Yet all most dictionaries give us as the translation for 取り組み is "grapple," with perhaps "come to grips with," "cope with," or "tackle" thrown in.

The two example sentences from the 5th edition of the Green Goddess (widely recognized as the top J->E bilingual dictionary available) also take this weaselly way out:

その問題に関しては社会全体の取り組みが必要である.
When it comes to that problem, society as a whole must grapple with it.

まだまだ日本の環境問題に対する取り組みが遅れている.
Japan is still lagging far behind in grappling with environmental problems.

Even if there seems to be a direct match for the term in the target language, the connotations can create unwelcome meanings in the translation. I blogged before about how translating 防止 as "prevent" can be politically charged in the case of global warming.

With time and experience, we gradually build up a personal bag of tricks to deal with these pesky terms. Each time you figure out a way to deal with a fuzzy concept adds another trick to your bag. I gave two examples above for 取り組み: "initiatives" and "commitment." Another possibility is "efforts."

Having this bag of tricks means that you can solve conceptual mismatches quickly, instead of pulling on your hair for an hour and then going with the lame dictionary translation anyway. It's one of the main assets a translator accumulates with experience, and it's far more important than dictionaries or glossaries of "technical terms" for producing smooth, accurate translations at an economically viable pace.

The mobile site was for the Japanese subsidiary of a major European brand/fashion corporation. The company had changed the site from a cutesy, plastered-with-cartoon-animals design to a clean, stylish design inspired by the iPhone, and in fact designed specifically for compatibility with the iPhone. As an example, the page background was changed from white to a wood-inspired, shaded brown. The amount of text on each page was pared down considerably as well.

The company hired to evaluate the site did a focus group-style study with the target audience, and found that the subjects almost universally preferred the old, "busy" site, and found the new site 殺風景 ("drab").

Part of this dreariness may have been an attempt to appeal less to young women, who give lots of eyeballs but not much revenue, and more to older women, who might actually buy some of that overpriced stuff. But the study showed that even women in their 30s and 40s liked the old site design better, cutesy cartoon kittens and all.

On the one had, the company wants to maintain a consistent international image (one remark was that the new site design conforms the the global brand image). But I saw this as another proof that you need to design websites for your audience, not necessarily according to what looks good to you — especially when marketing in different cultures.

I recently discovered a site that makes this a lot easier: http://screenshots.modemhelp.net/. This site has screen shots for Windows and Mac operating systems, as well as popular software, all organized and labeled.

Say, for example, you need to get the names of Control Panel icons from Windows 2000, or the menu items on the context menu for the Recycle bin in Windows Vista, or the System Preferences icons for Mac OS X. Yep, it's all there.

Unfortunately, the site doesn't appear to have screen shots for Windows 7 yet, but at least those are substantially similar to Vista's.

1. Offer to raise rates without being asked

Of course, everybody likes to make more money, but more than that, offering to raise rates without being asked shows that you value the translator's work, and want to build a lasting relationship.

The amount doesn't have to be large, either. One of the main agencies I work with recently offered to raise my rate by 0.875 yen/source character (which works out to about $0.02/translated word). At a time when a lot of agencies are asking translators to lower their rates, this gesture raised my estimation of the agency greatly. Since then, I've taken extra pains to ensure that I'm available for them.

2. Give useful feedback

From the translator's viewpoint, one of the greatest values that an agency can add is feedback. Agencies are presumably proofing and correcting translations before sending them to the end client, and it's very helpful for the translator to see any edits that have been made. This is both to prevent disaster due to the agency's "incorrections," and so the translator can learn and improve. It relieves two sources of translator stress: "Do they hate my translation?" and "Are translation monstrosities being published in my name?"

Giving feedback shows a number of things. It shows that you are interested in producing the best translations possible. It shows that you view your translator as an investment, rather than a resource to be used and discarded. And it shows that you value your translator enough for the minuscule effort that giving feedback requires.

One of the worst things an agency can do is actively hide feedback from the translator. For several years, I translated all the speeches for a certain executive through an agency. I assume the end client liked my work, because they always asked for me specifically. I also never got any negative feedback. It wasn't until about two years after starting, when I saw one of my translations in print, that I realized that they had been changing several of my terms to their in-house preferences. When I asked the agency about this, they told me that they had received the glossary from the client after the first couple of jobs, but were just correcting my translations before sending them off, without telling me.

Agencies, please don't do this. Give your translator the best feedback possible. If you've got a good translator, she'll thank you for it.

3. Give direct access to end clients

This is a big trust issue. Translation agencies guard their client lists jealously, because that's one of their main assets (and I agree that cultivating clients takes a lot of effort). Some agencies also want to shield their clients from the fact that their $100K translation is being done by a motley crew of oddball translators.

But when I can get direct access to the end client through my agency, it shows that they really trust me, both not to steal their clients, and not to create a horrible impression. I've found that after I've visited a client, or even talked with them on the phone, they tend to second guess my translations less. This is probably because it's easier to trust someone's judgment after you've met them.

Speaking directly with a client can also eliminate a lot of miscommunication, because information doesn't get mangled passing through an agency coordinator, who may not know the technology involved.

4. Shield translators from frivolous customer demands

This goes hand in hand with direct access to customers. Customers can be very needy, and good translation agencies shield their translators from this. The agency might compile five or six separate change requests into a single request, or handle trivial requests themselves (like "make the font bluer").

I remember one job in particular, where my translation wound up in the middle of a corporate turf war. Three or four different departments sent back mutually contradicting edits to my translation, many of which were horrible (some of the editors obviously had only the most tenuous grasp of English).

The agency compiled all these corrections into a single edited document, with color coding to show who had changed what. They also held the client to two rounds of these edits, saying that they'd charge for any more. These actions by the agency went a long way toward preserving my sanity on that job.

5. Handle the "annoying extras" themselves

As a translator, I do best when I'm translating. Every non-translation task I need to do is less time I can spend translating, meaning I'm less happy and earning less money. That's why even if I can charge for it, I don't like doing things like creating charts and graphs, laying out images, or handling various formatting tweaks.

Even if you pay translators extra for these things, it's probably not their core competency and they're almost certainly not earning as much as they could doing straight translation.

That's why I love it when agencies take care of these things for me, so that I can concentrate on translating. One agency actually OCR's files they get from the end-client as TIFF images, and sends me pristine Word files to translate. Another agency extracts FrameMaker files into RTF for me to translate.

When these time-wasters are taken care of, I can work for a lower rate and still earn more than when dealing with pesky layout and format issues, and still be happier and saner at the end of the day. To me, it just makes economic sense that you'd pay a cheaper DTP person to handle these things better than the translator can, and let your more expensive translator concentrate on what she does best. I really enjoy working with translation agencies that get this point.

On the other hand, though, if the scientists ever crack this mystery wide open (perhaps by giving up on computers with nothing but 0s and 1s to deal with and creating new machines that function more like a brain) then we’ll get our translating machine.

Well, IBM has created a cell-by-cell simulation of the human visual cortex. At 1.6 billion neurons, this is a huge leap from their simulation of a portion of a mouse cortex in 2006, and an entire rat cortex in 2007 (55 million neurons), so they seem to be making pretty rapid progress.

The main question seems to be whether Moore's Law will keep going until they get up to a complete human brain.

Reverse auctions are one of the ways that big corporations cut their expenses down to the bone. They know that everybody wants a "big" client, and they take advantage of this fact ruthlessly.

A friend of mine runs a translation agency, and his biggest client — a manufacturer that's a household name in Japan — uses reverse auctions.

This manufacturer has a list of translation companies that have passed its translation test, and not screwed up on any jobs for it in the past. Then when it has a translation job, it sends requests for quotes to all the agencies on its list. The agency that responds with the lowest quote within one hour gets the job.

Not to set myself up as a paragon of quality translation, but I don't work for my friend's agency because the pay is too low. Nevertheless, my friend seems to be happy with the quality of translators he has; his problem is that he can't find enough translators to fill the huge volume of work he gets (wonder why…).

The core problem with this setup is that manufacturing companies try to apply manufacturing practices to things like translation, which are decidedly not like manufacturing (for one thing, there is no "economy of scale" with translation). Generally, the most egregious demands for volume discounts I've received have been for work from manufacturers.

But if you're looking for translations of passable, but not great quality, and you want to pay the absolute lowest price possible, then a reverse auction is a good bet.