Elia Together Conference

Barcelona extended a warm welcome to the first Elia Together Conference last week. It was the first European conference bringing freelance translators and Language Service Providers together. Over 350 participants gathered at the World Trade Center from 39 different countries.

Bringing everyone together in such numbers for a new initiative was an achievement. Difficult subjects were broached and discussed openly. The atmosphere remained pleasant and constructive to a previously unprecedented degree.

Some may argue that only the converted attended. Maybe so, but word travels fast in the translation industry.  Freelancers’ voices from the end of the “food chain” have been heard. The food chain collapses if plankton die out. The human translation chain risks dying out if conditions become too “acidic” for freelancers.

The planning committee chaired by Arancha Caballero and Manuele Vecchi put on an interesting series of presentations to address current challenges. The conference had three tracks: 

1. Relationships - moderated by Jost Zetzsche
2. Growth - moderated by Iwan Davies, ITI's Chair
3. Technology - moderated by José Blanco Pérez

The conference team was also supported by Danilo Monaco.

For the most part, I attended the Relationships track. Regular reports kept us informed about key points discussed in other tracks.

In the keynote address, Stephen Lank drew our attention to some incredible ironies in the translation world:

1. We facilitate communication for clients yet the translation industry has internal communication problems.
2. Communicating across cultures is our job – yet we have a cultural communication problem. Most communications are not in a native language. We fail to make the same allowances as we would for clients in similar interactions.

The various presentations will be available on the Elia Together website shortly, so I will not summarise them all here. I felt that there was a new atmosphere and a new energy at Elia Together. It is for us to shape our industry. At the end of the day, all sides desire the same: professional respect and trust.

This two-day conference promises to transform our maturing industry. Bullying is out for example. Whether by LSP or freelancer, it will be no longer be tolerated.

Elia already has a series of dates in the calendar to drive the discussions and strategy forward. Project managers were described as the stress sponges for all sides. The December dates devoted to them seem a particularly welcome initiative.

Elia Together will reconvene in Berlin in 2017. See you there?

Future Elia Events:

21-22 April - ND Focus, Elia's Networking Days for Executives, Mallorca/Majorca, Spain

October 2016 - Elia's Networking Days, Brussels, Belgium (exact dates to be confirmed)

December 2016 - ND Focus, Elia's Networking Days for Project Managers, Barcelona, Spain (exact dates to be confirmed shortly)

February 2017 - Elia Together, 2nd Conference, Berlin Germany (call for papers and exact dates to follow)

More about Elia

A long open letter to SDL

Dear SDL,

I attended your London Roadshow at the Sofitel London St James Hotel on 22nd October 2015. This was my third SDL Roadshow. It was my first as a freelance translator. I was a translation buyer/project manager and client on the two previous occasions. I wish to share my Roadshow impressions with you from my multiple perspectives on the localisation industry.

 TM Experience

As an MSC student in Translation Technology, I gained experience in a wide range of software including SDL Trados, Multiterm and Passolo. My preference back in 2005-7 was Déjà Vu. Since turning freelance in 2012, I have preferred Kilgray's MemoQ as more intuitive. I have also tried WordFast and OmegaT. It was in hearing of the improvements in SDL Trados from fellow professionals that I signed up for this year's Roadshow.

Great organisation

As a former marketer, I couldn't help but be impressed by the new slickness of SDL's marketing and event organisation. I liked the way you extended an equal welcome to all your different types of clients - even humble freelance translators. The coloured-edged badges made it easy for your sales team and attendees to find each other. Your sales manager came up to us early on and made it known where we could make enquiries or seek answers to technical issues. Not pushy, just available. I liked that.

The presentations were well planned. The room was wider than it was long. It had a screen for both sections of the room. This meant that it was easy to follow the software demonstrations.

Listening to clients

My biggest impression was that SDL is taking much more notice of its clients' and end-users' opinions than it did in the past. A number of developments in SDL Trados Studio 2015 relate directly to such customer requests.

Clear vision

As a translator with a Smart Cities' specialisation, I was particularly interested in SDL's focus on the Internet of Things (IoT). This demonstrated to me that SDL is thinking well beyond client requests too. The videos and explanations to explain that vision were very clear.

Interactive

I liked the use of interactive questions with the audience using their smartphones and tablets to respond. The analysis was available in real-time too. 66.67% said that they had a much clearer understanding by the end of the Roadshow. What a great way to measure how your audience is responding to your messages during a live session. It was so much better than a cagey show of hands.

Open to criticism

Your Roadshow team invited comments from the audience - good, bad and indifferent. I was generally very impressed by SDL's Roadshow. I do have one major misgiving.

Word counts

My concern relates to how SDL has responded to project manager requests over word counts. It was very hard to hold my tongue when I hear that SDL allows project managers to "manipulate data". Someone is losing the plot when word count scrutiny gets to the level of quibbling over whether a hyphenated word should be one word or two.

Surely it cannot be common sense for SDL to spend valuable IT development time on such "manipulations"? In the demonstration, a word count was reduced from 112 to 79 words.

If we take a very average rate of say £70 per 1000 words, 33 fewer words mean a saving of £2.31.

Maybe company project managers feel the "manipulations" are worthwhile on large projects? Such quibbling is responsible for creating bad feeling between translation companies and freelancers. It makes freelancers feel aggrieved towards SDL and other tool manufacturers too.

Translation company salaries

I understand that SDL is responding to project managers' requests. Not every client request is practical in the cold light of day. The translation industry is not noted for its financial acumen. Salaries in the industry have fallen behind other fields.

I remember reading in the lead-up to the UK's ATC conference that even a senior translation project manager could only expect a salary in the £20,000 range. I pity junior project managers trying to survive near the breadline in London. Maybe this explains why £2.31 seems so important?

Client viewpoint

Clients are looking to save thousands or hundreds of thousands in their documentation processes - not £2.31. Process streamlining is more likely to deliver real savings. Translation makes up a very small fraction of a project's costs. The real savings are always to be made in multilingual design and other production costs.

As a client, I valued and set a value on my time. It strikes me that while a freelance translator and a project manager are quibbling over £2.31 neither can be working productively. The freelancer will not be earning at all. The project manager's time will no doubt have far exceeded the saving he is pursuing too. And what price do you place on the damage to a working relationship?

Relationships

I fear that SDL must shoulder some of the responsibility for the bad blood between freelancers and translation companies. I was a client when SDL and other agencies started selling their discounted rates based on full and fuzzy matches. The words "discounts" and "savings" are always music to clients' ears. They impress senior management and go down well in performance reviews.

Pricing strategy

Clients are not responsible for the translation industry's ludicrous pricing system. They readily accept hourly and daily charges from other suppliers working on the same projects. Clients generally want a bottom-line translation price to add to other project costs. They need the reassurance of price comparison to ensure that they are paying a fair market rate for their stated quality level.

My colleagues never fully understood the complexities of translation pricing. One translation company presented a price study that claimed massive savings. The claimed savings exceeded our annual translation budget.

How realistic are TM savings?

With translation company help, I set about analysing actual translation memory savings over the long-term on live projects. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to the figures. I would be unable to reveal them for confidentiality reasons anyway. However, I can say that for marketing texts, where there is far greater originality from job to job, the TM savings were minimal.

Greater savings are made in repetitions on financial and legal documents. Such projects involved hundreds of pages and were produced in multiple language versions. I would still argue that TM savings are insignificant by comparison with the cost benefits from genuine multilingual design and streamlining production processes.

TM discounts v. Quality

In my view, the translation industry's focus on TM discounts has been to the detriment of quality. When translators do not get paid for 100% matches, they understandably do not waste valuable time on pressurised projects checking them. This approach once resulted in large chunks of English copy appearing in a Spanish prospectus after a problem with SDL Trados extraction. To add insult to injury, the said prospectus was then certified to be a fair and true translation of the original. It still was the original...

A project experience

I remember that my mildest-mannered colleague once became practically apoplectic over a marketing translation. The English sentences had been reworked into a different order. This meant that every single sentence in the German version started in exactly the same way. It strikes me that when a software system and pricing focus override creativity and common sense, then something needs to be done. My colleague got a very poor impression of the translation industry from this particular translation.

Translating Europe Forum 2015

There was an amazing new generation of confident, entrepreneurial at the Translating Europe Forum in Brussels last week. They are digital natives. Many have a Masters in translation and are trained in translation tools. (Only 50% of Proz translators use translation tools). SDL's Roadshow demonstrated how much these new language professionals are needed. The demand will outstrip the supply. There are concerns that they will not stay beyond five years after training.

TransCert

During the forum, it was possible to gain access to the training materials for TransCert. There were 182 slides to explain translation estimating and invoicing. This demonstrates how ridiculously complicated translation pricing is. I pity both trainers and students grappling with the subject.

Time-based pricing

In switching sides of the industry, I have become aware of how some translation companies take advantage of newbie translators. The best favour that SDL (and other translation tool providers) could do for the next generation of language professionals is to drop TM discount calculations from its software. This would encourage simpler and fairer time-based pricing. It would bring localisation pricing more in line with what clients expect from other creative industries.

Poaching risk

This new generation of language professionals is talented, confident and entrepreneurial. They will be poached away by other industries if the word-based pricing approach does not change. SDL's own Roadshow showed how much they are needed. We can't afford to lose any of them. We need to attract many more enthusiastic recruits.

SDL, I reiterate that you are not to blame for the way the translation industry has implemented your software. The ball is in your court (and that of other translation tool providers now). You can help to drive the localisation industry towards the sustainable pricing strategy that it so desperately needs.

I hope this letter will empower other translators, project managers, buyers and clients to give further examples in support of this change from their experiences.

Thank you for an impressive, informative and friendly event. I hope you will see this letter in the positive manner in which it was intended - as part of your own drive for continuous improvement.

Thank you for reading.

Karen

Karen Andrews

Freelance translator

Former client/translation buyer/translation project manager with 15 years' experience

Anglicity Ltd

A pan-European agreement on translation working practices?

 

Future-proofing panel at EC Rep. in the UK © Anglicity

At the French CNET conference, Miklós Bán of Proford explained how a 16-page agreement had transformed the translation business climate in Hungary. The agreement was worked out between AHTI (the Hungarian Association of Translators and Interpreters) and Proford (the Hungarian Association for Language Service Providers). I believe that s similar agreement should be worked out not only in France and the UK, but across the European Union - and maybe even worldwide in the future?

Towards a Pan-European agreement? © md3d

Miklós Bán is the Chairman of Proford, the Hungarian Association of Translators and Interpreters. Proford is a young association by comparison with the French CNET network founded in 1977 or the UK's ATC founded in 1976. It was founded in 2012 and has just 11 members. CNET has a membership of 30 French LSPs and the ATC has a membership totalling nearly 150 worldwide LSPs.

A future for the British translation industry? © UMB-O

Historically, there had been a lot of animosity between the freelancers and LSPs in Hungary. Cooperation was difficult and tough market conditions had exacerbated the situation. It was in the LSP's best interests to reach an understanding. After all, they need good translators for their businesses to function well.

Miklós viewed freelance translation and translation companies as essentially two different professions. There was a lack of understanding between the two sides. They needed a point of reference - a document that could act as a professional standard to outline what each side could expect from the other.

Recommendations

Recommendations for translation company associations to reach a similar agreement included:

1. Start any improvements on your own side first.

2. Do not criticise the freelancers.

3. Be prepared to make the first gesture - in fact, make the first 15 gestures to establish trust.

4. Invite freelancers to translation company events free of charge.

5. Work under the International Federation of Translators' (FIT) umbrella - for an external viewpoint, to check proposals against international practices and legal issues.

6. Recognise that in any conflict, there is generally fault on both sides. Always criticise your own side first.

7. Encourage any translator employees or freelance translators to join the freelance associations - especially younger generations with fresh viewpoints.

8. Share viewpoints on the whole translation process - companies often can't see the freelance viewpoint and vice versa.

FIT Conference in 2014  © Anglicity Ltd

Drafting the agreement

The agreement set out the rules between the parties and had several key stages:

1. agreement on the topics to be covered and scope

2. drafting

3. editing

4. lock-up

5. compromise

6. acceptance and endorsement

By the end of stage 3, they had two separate 16-page documents - a freelance version and an LSP version. At this point, they locked the two sides in a room together to work on a single, unified text. It took 8 hours. 

An lock-up lead to the final agreement © pict rider

Details

1. Definitions

They used those set out in the European translation standard EN15038.

2. Terms of cooperation

Covered non-disclosure, no sub-contracting, NDA, NCA, certification and references.

3. Quality

Mutual requirements. What input is needed? Who does what?

4. Complaint management

5. Technology

CAT, MT, IT, infrastructure

One of the biggest issues was over intellectual property (IP). Case argued for translation memory as client's property.

6. Payment

·      Capacity and output

·      Basis of payment

·      Payment terms - not the exact terms, but they have to be specified in advance and accepted. Payment has to be respected by the LSP.

·      Public procurement

Minimum rate

Proford tried to set a minimum rate. (I will return to my discussion with Miklós in the break on this subject in a separate blog).

The tricky points

Miklós outlined the tricky or sticking points in the negotiations between the two sides.

1.    Gain insight and empathy for the opposing viewpoint. (The viewpoint of the company owner may be far removed from the freelancer, if no project manager experience).

2.    Mutual reality checks on the right way to do business together

3.    Ownership

4.    Basis of payment

5.    Money

6.    Terminology/identity - what is an LSP?

7.    Change - climate change, openness, commitments, responsibility

A chain of agreements from Hungary to UK/Europe?  © H.Peter

The Hungarian document now offers an endorsed outline on best practice in the translation industry. Proford would like to share it outside Hungary. Having worked on nearly all sides of the industry (client, translation buyer, freelancer, project manager), I have witnessed the lack of trust and its consequences for all parties. I believe that this proposal should be given serious consideration and support by all national associations and the European Union.

For further information on Anglicity's services, email karen@anglicity.com.

Karen Andrews runs
Anglicity Ltd. She is a

technical writer and 

translator with over

15 years' marketing

experience. Anglicity offers

marketing consultancy and

content marketing with a 

particular focus on innovation.

Visible translators - a new business model

The translation business model has seen little change for decades. Technology is challenging the status quo. Large, inflexible agencies and big technology solutions are not the answer for all clients.

Existing business models
Existing models often place linguists in charge of translation businesses or non-linguist entrepreneurs in the driving seat. Either party is felt to be too language-focused for business or too cut-throat and profit-oriented for the art of translation. Either way, the most important person in the quality chain, the translator gets squeezed. Not enough fight or too much - the result is the same.

Translator investment

As the translator's earnings are eroded, so too is his or her ability to

·      buy or rent a decent home and office

·      maintain fluency and keep source/target languages up-to-date

·      attend translation conferences and relevant trade fairs at home and abroad

·      equip an office and buy the latest software

·      make an ongoing investment in CPD

·      join professional associations and attain certifications/qualifications

Even experienced, full-time translators complain that they cannot afford many of the above. Current agency rates often fall short. Clients expect all the above in a professional. As a freelancer, I want to offer my clients the sort of service that I expected as a client. I therefore place great importance on CPD and attending trade events to keep up-to-date.

Future options

If existing translation agencies are unable or unwilling to increase the rates to freelancers, then there are two options. Option one is to leave the translation community all together. Option two is to cut out the middlemen.

Unprecedented opportunity for rate increase?
Agencies need to capitalise on high industry growth and improving economic growth to increase rates to translators. As a former client, I can see that the increased professionalisation and industry standards offer an unprecedented opportunity to justify an increase to clients. If not, then increasing numbers of translators will be forced to cut out the middlemen and work with direct clients at agency prices. Their alternative is to leave the profession. Many well-qualified legal interpreters have already been forced outside their chosen profession by the Ministry of Justice Framework Agreement.

Coworking with SMEs
Groups of freelance translators are particularly suited to working with SMEs for example. Large agencies do not have the necessary flexibility to give them all the help they need. A client who is new to translation buying, cultural issues and exporting can find that greater flexibility in working with freelancers.

At a translation conference several years ago, I heard about a Dutch company that put the translator back at the heart of the translation process. His team of translators work directly with clients. I would like Anglicity's future growth to take a similar path. Other business models will undoubtedly co-exist. I believe that there is a future for specialised, freelance coworking teams with direct client contact.

Karen Andrews is an

entrepreneurial freelance
translator and content
writer. Her past experience
as a client gives her a
near 360º perspective
on the translation
community.

UKTI's Positive Signs for Export Success

As a project manager, I always believed in acknowledging improvements as well as highlighting any issues. A few years ago I remember approaching the UK Trade & Investment (UKTI) desk at a trade show. The attitude was that irritatingly prevalent one in Britain that "everyone speaks English". They seemed to see languages as the FCO's job, somehow divorced from export issues. Lately, I have noticed some dramatic improvements at UKTI.

Language and Culture

Firstly, at the 2014 London Language Show, UKTI had a Language and Culture Adviser on the stand. He had studied the Chinese language and culture in the UK and China. It was a new appointment. It is a welcome change in attitude and direction.

Web optimisation

Last year, I also attended an excellent UKTI seminar on web optimisation for international trade. Our trainer was very knowledgeable. It was particularly impressive that she had reviewed every participant's website in advance. She had some valuable recommendations.

Introductory brochure

UKTI also has a very professional-looking and helpful brochure for exporters. It is entitled "Improving your business communications". The subtitle is "Overcoming language and cultural barriers in business: a guide for exporters". It offers a good introduction to export issues. It has sections on languages, translation, interpreting, handling international enquiries and language training.

Professional associations

I am glad that UKTI refers exporters to professional translation and interpreting associations in their brochure. They name the Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIoL) and the Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI). Both are associations of which I am a Member and Career Affiliate respectively. My one complaint is that the brochure's pricing is based on outdated estimates in 2012.  The brochure was printed in 2013. Hopefully, there will be an update and reprint for 2015.

Freelancers and SMEs

According to a 2012 US Bureau of Statistics' report, the translation industry is expected to grow 42% between 2010-2020. The UK is outstripping the Eurozone growth average. The IMF forecasts UK growth of 2.7% in 2015. UKTI is keen to encourage more SMEs to export. Freelance translators are far more able to help small businesses than larger, more inflexible agencies. Training, standards and associations are improving the image, visibility and reputation of the profession.

Professional rate increase

Sectors in high demand can command higher rates to deliver the increased level of services required by exporters. I would argue that the translation profession has a very strong case here for a major increase in professional rates, even outstripping trends elsewhere. A strong profession will have even greater influence on export success.

UKTI events

In the January/February 2015 issue of ITI's Bulletin magazine, there was an article on a UKTI market visit for SMEs to Germany. I will visit France for a UKTI-backed event in 2015. I have also discovered that UKTI runs some very informative webinars.  I recommend that you sign up to UKTI's mailing list. You will get advance notice of regional, in-country and online events related to your target markets.

From this former project manager: well done UKTI, onward and upward please.

Karen Andrews runs Anglicity Ltd. 

She is an entrepreneurial French to 

English translator, content writer, 

editor and marketing consultant.

Email karen@anglicity.com 

for further information 

on Anglicity's translation

and content services.