Eleftherios Kritikakis wrote:
Esther Pugh wrote:
So we'll see.....
Anyone who's seen the prices announced (or enforced) recently by the major 2-3 agencies (which control about 90% of certain languages) would wonder if it's even worth worrying about it.
It's not as if we'll lose a gold mine. Those with direct clients can still work without restrictions, since the ABC test doesn't apply to them.
It only affects those working with agencies. Agencies with sufficient volumes are now working with MT and the new prices amount to something like 2-3 cents per word, more or less. Agencies that pay more and don't care about MT don't have enough volume to cover even modest groceries. And the volume that still pays a decent rate is decreasing rapidly. Even agencies that want to pay their translators more, cave in to competition by the cheap gigantic ones.
You can differentiate yourself with much better quality and good writing, and guess what - nobody cares. This is a result of my own investigation after reviewing, as an editor, a large number of projects for over 6 months lately, producing a detailed report and sending/storing my own reports.
My conclusion is that "even 10 critical errors per 1,000 words is ok, as long as their clients never notice. Not talking synonyms or legal ambiguities here; I'm talking about translating a donkey as a banana, that bad. I'm talking about Google Trans sounding like a professor by comparison. PMs are unable to tell the good translator from the bad, they don't speak the language. In the vast majority of cases they pick according to personal feelings or impressions or resume exaggerations.
It's all the rage nowadays to start an agency (all you need is 1 computer and 1 desk) in any industry you pick out of a phone book,
and make a casino-like Project Software that forces professionals to wait all day looking at the screen in their agony not to miss something that pops-up - the critical effects on their health are ENORMOUS (high blood pressure, poor circulation, weak bones, various orthopedic issues, deep vein thrombosis, pancreas and stomach problems, weak immune system, etc), let alone zero social connections and zero job-related opportunities.
This is cave-based labor now. Misery for the translator, but it works like a charm for the agency. And if they realize that, they'll probably send us an email telling us to walk around the desk 30 times every 10 minutes, so that they feel better about themselves taking care of it.
Of course one can take on an enormous daily volume of work at almost zero price as a desperate attempt to hold on to a sinking ship.
Or one can hope that he/she can hold on to an income if he/she shrinks his/her life enough (in both free time and income) for the next 5 years or so. Personally I never thought it will last long, realistically, but I hoped for a longer warning. Though I have been warning as people here know, for more than 10 years, the cutoff curve of 2020-2021 was steep.
The 12 cents per word rate (the norm in the days of TMs 15 years ago) should have been more than 19 cents per word now (inflation-adjusted). Instead it'll go soon to 2 cents. This ProAct law will probably force us out of this misery, since we're not willing to do it ourselves.
Personally I stopped worrying a few days ago, when I realized that this job has no good future, at least not for US standards and cost of living. Apparently I had to go through the "5 stages of grief", since nobody wanted to take my 12-year old warnings seriously. There's an enormous amount of money printed by governments nowadays which goes to various developing industries and projects - the translation field is still based on sweat equity, but now it's very cheap too.
What are we trying to save, so passionately? A gold mine? Hardly...