On translation
Talking about my thirty years as a translator, how AI is eating away the profession, and why translation matters...
Not long ago, I consigned my battered bilingual dictionaries to the recycling bin. They had been gathering dust, unopened, for several years. All the reference one could possibly need is now online. Holding onto them was a romantic, nostalgic gesture - a reminder of the olden days of having to order such niche tomes over the phone, from the catalogue of a specialised London bookstore. Parting with them, too, was tinged with a certain romance: a tentative flirtation with the possibility of a new life.
I have been wedded to translation for thirty years and, like all marriages, it has had moments of great contentment juxtaposed with intense frustration. At its worst, it has felt like a marriage of convenience, a bitter mistake. Something I fell into simply because it was a safe option.
Translation as an industry is a victim of predatorial AI. Not so long ago, it seemed unthinkable that human translators could be replaced by machines because language is too nuanced. Arguably, that still holds true. However, the more ‘ready-cooked’ human translation that is fed to the machines, the more refined their palate becomes, and I now think it likely that most translators will be demoted to post-editors of machine output within five years. Of course, the fallout from Brexit in the UK, exacerbated by ruthless corporate cost-cutting, have contributed to the ailing state of the translation industry; but AI is the chief culprit in its demise.
For me, the financial pain became acute late last year. December was my lowest-earning month in memory, compounded by the announcement that an agency which regularly provided me with work had gone bankrupt – owing me £1600 in outstanding invoices. Neither I, nor the many other freelancers affected, are likely to get our invoices paid. My workload this year has been unpredictable at best. For a couple of months, I was unable to sit at my desk while recovering from surgery, and most of the months when I have been open to work have not yielded a liveable income.
Albeit the most urgent one, financial precarity is just one of several reasons why translation has become untenable for me. We all know the ways in which a sedentary routine impacts our bodies over time, and thirty years of solitary working can be a bit isolating even for an introvert who enjoys their own company. I love interacting with people one-to-one, and after a couple of years of studying I feel as qualified as I ever will to start offering hand reading and tarot-based somatic coaching. I mean, the prospect of putting myself ‘out there’ turns my legs to custard, but…
As I draft this piece, the nagging doubt that is uppermost in my mind is: your readers don’t want to read about translation. How boring! Yet I realise that my fear of never having much of interest to say when in a large social group – we introverts tend to apply excessively fine-meshed filters when it comes to sieving nuggets of share-worthy information – has played into that notion that translation is of no relevance. Whenever I explain the oft-misunderstood difference between translation and interpreting, I flinch at the negative language I reflexively use (“I just do the written stuff, I only work from home, interpreting is the ‘glamorous’ job”). I dismiss my life’s work so far to a ‘just’ and an ‘only’, as if it has never really mattered. I am only a translator, that’s the message – overt and covert – that I have been sharing all these years.
Perhaps (she says, hesitantly – old habits die hard!) I should set the record straight: because translation does of course matter, and my mild shame about it says much more about me than it does about the value of translation: it betrays my worry that I had somehow let myself down by creeping off back-stage to work in obscurity.
Admittedly, in my early twenties, I ignored the deeply-buried confident part of me that was drawn to a career in the diplomatic service in favour of the anonymity of translation. It was an easy route for a shy introvert to take. However, the main motives behind my decision to become a translator were my adoration of languages, and a deep-seated need to work unsupervised. Although I started out in-house at Lloyds Bank's International Services Centre in Birmingham, the aim was always to go freelance at the earliest opportunity. After just four-and-a-half years in that job, I took voluntary redundancy when the bank decided to get rid of two of its four translators. By then, Lloyds were the last bank to have a dedicated translation service. Sadly, the department is now long defunct.
The generous severance payment enabled me to buy a computer and fax machine (remember those?) and invest in those eye-wateringly expensive dictionaries that are now recycled pulp. Initially, financial texts made up the bulk of my work: fresh out of the banking environment, they were my area of expertise. Despite the boredom of the work itself (the world of finance has never interested me), the autonomy suited my ungovernable, introverted nature, and the flexibility it afforded was a boon when I became a parent. As time went on, however, agencies began sending me a far greater variety of texts: pretty much anything, in fact, that did not require specialist medical, technical, or scientific knowledge. One day I might be translating a contract for the supply of IT services or a report on the impact of loneliness among the elderly in the Netherlands, the next the catalogue of a grower of heirloom tomatoes or a magazine article about Egyptian amulets. Perhaps the most niche piece entrusted to me was an information text about prosthetic penises…
Oh, the morsels of obscure knowledge I have foraged, over the years. Sometimes I have wondered if my online search history might alert the authorities – such as the occasion when I found myself googling explosives for a construction-related text. Whether I was born curious, or my magpie mind is the result of having to research the most eclectic range of subjects for my work, I cannot say, but: being a translator has taught me that you’re probably fascinated by more things than you realise. Just last week, I translated a Dutch information guide to obtaining pilotage exemption certificates in certain seaports. What a delightful surprise to find myself enthralled by searches for shipping terminology; to smell saltwater as I typed, to hear the clattering and clanging of a busy quayside, punctuated by the screeching of gulls. Who’d have thought that such alchemy could be concealed within a functional text? Yes, being a translator is a constant reminder of the ability of new and unexpected information to spark that childlike sense of wonder and excitement. Glorious, isn’t it?
Most enjoyable of all were the once-frequent tourism and art-related pieces from the Netherlands. Dutch has always been my favourite language to work with; I've had a deep affinity with it ever since a two-week holiday there, as a five-year-old, and am captivated by all things Dutch, especially the art of the 'Golden Age'. Translating documents about Dutch artists, both modern and from centuries past, was a joy. It nourished several parts of me: art lover, inquisitive learner, armchair traveller, and linguist… Sadly, that work has dried to a trickle.
As I write that, emotion wells up in me at the remembrance of what it feels like, to be in a foreign country, talking to people in their language. It's just… magical, isn’t it? As a teenager, I also experienced it as a form of shape-shifting, the donning of a subtly different personality. During my stays in France and Germany, the more confident part of me who was unafraid to occupy her space stepped forward. I could envisage a wholly different, more exuberant life there, lived by my most extroverted self.
Beyond this very personal realm, however, speaking another language opens an enchanted door to that culture: it is as if all five senses are polished by the forming of the words, the sounds ring clearer, the sights are four-dimensional, the food more full of flavour. It is as if one even starts SMELLING in the language. Yes, it is quite, quite magical.
Translation is a kind of magic too. Think of all the myriad bridges conjured by translators over the centuries; of all the knowledge made accessible to multitudes of people by their solitary, quiet endeavours. Of all those words crafted by foreign-language authors that have found apparently distant cousins with whom, it turns out, they have so much in common. Of how many more beautiful words there are out there, thanks to translators!
At its heart, to translate is to explore another person’s world. By which I mean, a good translation does not simply lift a word from one language and plonk it into another. Rather, the translator must become an anthropologist of the written word, inhabiting the landscape of the source language and interpreting its features in a way that feels familiar to the target readership. We often talk of language as a living thing, in the sense of continually evolving meanings and grammatical modifications, but the life of a language is more three, or even four-dimensional than that: it acquires a life of its own, which almost seems separate to the people who speak it. Surely books have been written on the ways in which the language we grow up speaking moulds our psyche, and the extent to which, say, it is the French language that shapes French culture as much as the other way round.
Translation does matter. A few months ago, I was so frustrated with it that, when I bid adieu to my faithful old dictionaries, and emailed an agency for whom I no longer did much work to ask them to remove me from their database, I wondered if, at last, I was about to make the leap off the cliff, a clean break. My heart is certainly all for it, but my head has a firm grasp of the back of my shirt, and won’t let me jump. For now, I still need the scraps of income that translation – or these days, proofreading or post-editing machine translation – provides. I don’t hate the latter as much as I expected to; if I’m honest there’s a sadistic pleasure to be had from telling a machine it’s done a crap job (which, sometimes, is still the case), and pretty much rewriting its output.
Beneath all the necessity, however, is that magic that still has me under its spell: the endless enchantment of language, and the beauty of connection and communication across its borders. That is the alchemy of translation. People are at the heart of every text translated: no matter how mundane that text may be, a life or lives will be affected by its content. And the involvement of a person in translating it, that energy with which words become imbued as their meaning is conveyed by one human to another, can never be replicated by a machine.