10 ms·

The global streaming boom is creating a translator shortage (2021)

107 points by donohoe 5y ago

amelius 5y ago
What nonsense. Just pay decent salaries and your problem will be solved.
blamazon 5y ago
If this is anything like the “trucker shortage” in the USA, it’s not just because of the demand, but also because the jobs suck and are underpaid relative to the amount of skill/commitment required to be good at it. And yet, executives always complain only of the demand? Are they unable to see the truth or are they simply unwilling?
- amelius 5y ago
  It probably goes like: 1. repeat in media that there is a shortage of X 2. people conclude that it is a good idea to get an education/training in X 3. there are more people are in X, meaning that wages can drop 4. profit
- eloisius 5y ago
  Exactly. It’s like after the dot com boom no one can be content to get normal rich. Everyone wants to get “exponential” rich with software leverage. I know several people that serve as interpreters (Chinese/English) and the amount of work and dedication it takes makes me feel ashamed when I think of how comparatively easy it was for me to learn how to code and how much of a disparity between our pay there is. I think I’m pretty libertarian-minded, but the business mindset of the modern world is so shitty. Some things can’t be automated with acceptable quality, but it seems like our MBA overlords just can’t countenance paying a human being to do skilled work unless it’s something flashy like React.
  - sacrosancty 5y ago
    You seem to be suffering from the fallacy that hard work deserves high pay regardless of the usefulness of that work or the available labor supply. It's a very good thing that we pay people according to market rates in the long term because it continually optimizes production of good things that we all benefit from. I'm sure making gravel with a hammer is even harder work, and it's a good thing that we don't pay people to do that. In the short term it can screw over individuals who find themselves in the wrong type of work, but there are easy ways to protect against that too, for those that are worried enough.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      No, I’m not. Within the context of this article I’m lamenting the fact that even in the face of demand so great that it mops up the supply and causes a shortage, businesses still wont pay enough to stimulate sufficient supply.
  - soco 5y ago
    And let's not forget how much crappy software we have around us because said overlords decided how much investment in quality is good enough and started to fail fast.
- nmz 5y ago
  Not only are they unwilling but they've also become basically scammers. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged
  - hackernewds 5y ago
    TL;DL? tough to scan an audio 24m long
    - blamazon 5y ago
      I dunno why NPR makes it hard to find these, but here's a transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/901110994 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/901110994
- WJW 5y ago
  Executives are in the business of buying labor for money and as any purchaser they would prefer to get the best deal possible. Why wouldn't they try to get potential sellers to sell their labor to them for less than it's worth? Best case they get valuable labor for less than market price, worst case someone rejects their offer and may be mildly offended for a while. If they find no takers, they'll slowly raise offers until they find someone. Of course this stops working when there is a genuine shortage of labor, or when a company gets a sufficiently bad reputation that nobody wants to work for them anymore. Both of those cases are not a problem for 99% of companies though.
Daiz 5y ago
This article was widely derided among translator/localizer circles, because the true fact of the matter is that the only thing causing "shortage" is that the pay is shit. A lot of the article here builds up on statements by David Lee, the CEO of Iyuno-SDI, and even the article mentions the fact that his company pays its staff terribly: > Last year, several major European translator associations blacklisted Iyuno-SDI, discouraging their members from working for the company due to increasing cuts to their freelance subtitling rates. Anyway, besides the long-standing general disrespect toward the importance of localization, one of the big things driving down rates that has come along recently is the practice of "machine translation post editing" (MTPE for short), where a company first uses machine translation to produce an absolute garbage of a script (because translating fiction is simply not going to work out without an actual intelligence to drive the process) and then hires a translator who will usually need to pretty much redo the entire thing to get something good out of it. But hey, because they're only "editing" an existing script, that's enough justification to slash the already bad prices to basically nothing!
- missedthecue 5y ago
  I mean at the end of the day there are only so many translators, and streaming did not exist on this level even 5 years ago. That's a lot of new demand while the old demand is all still there. The idea that there can never be a labor shortage, only a pay shortage seems a bit odd. Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? Only a shortage of people willing to pay up for it?
  - k__ 5y ago
    "Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? Only a shortage of people willing to pay up for it?" There are more houses empty than homeless people. So, there seems to be a bunch of people willing to pay for houses and no living in them.
    - bfdm 5y ago
      Yes, we have not correctly priced (taxed) empty property yet. If municipal government would charge say 100% value as property tax when mostly empty (as a starting point, say it is the primary residence of nobody for 180 days in the last 360), then it would be treated very differently.
the_duke 5y ago
I personally know several translators. Most of them either already left the field or are considering it. Freelance/contract work with lots of time pressure, low pay and no benefits is the norm. With ML translations becoming better, much of the work is reduced to manually patching up whatever Google Translate spits out. Which of course is used as justification for further lowering the pay. The only somewhat happy ones landed a good gig at international institutions like the UN or EU, but that comes with extremely boring material. Pay well and there will be plenty qualified applicants with the relevant degrees.
- toyg 5y ago
  Also, most of those applicants will likely be extremely flexible. People who study languages for years typically don't stop at one or two.
mkl95 5y ago
There is a senior engineer shortage in my area. The reason is that senior engineers make more money working from home for companies that have their HQ somewhere else.
iswu 5y ago
I am fluent in important strategic and business languages. Any translator job offer I have recieved has always tried to pay people around $25 per hour but calculated by the second with all downtime excluded. If I worked in IT, my downtime could be spent learning new skills and getting paid to do it. Working as a translator and you have a take home pay of about $4 per hour as your downtime is not compensated, like a waiter without tips. I am sure there are better translation gigs out there -- but the entire field has "avoid like the plague" written all over it.
- dylan604 5y ago
  It's funny that the people wanting the work for hire want to pay by the hour, but typical translators charge by the word or page. Standard transcription service fees are similar. Transcribing a feature film can much less expensive than a half hour talking head segment. Talking heads don't stop talking where features have a lot of cinematic/dramatic moments without dialog. A translator would need the same thing PLUS the actual translation.
  - iswu 5y ago
    I believe it. Anyone making it a long term profession needs to be really good and also really aggressive about their pricing, otherwise it just wouldn't be a livable income.
olegious 5y ago
My wife is a highly trained linguist / translator, she’s leaving the industry because the pay is shit and translators aren’t valued.
dylan604 5y ago
About 10 years ago, I was involved in prepping content for foreign studios to have their content available to US streaming markets. Finding translators was an issue. Hiring professional translators with PhDs sounded like a good idea, but a lot of their translations were "technically" correct yet made for not interesting. Out of desperation and making use of a connection we had to a local university, our contact reached out to a professor friend that introduced us to a couple of students that were ESL and were from the country that produced the content. While these translations might not have been as true as the PhDs, they were reworking them to be more intune with an American audience. The content creators approved this work, and were okay with it. The college students were able to do this as part time finishing a couple of episodes a week. The pay was better than whatever part time job normally available for a student, but less than what a professional would do. Plus, they were able to keep up with some of the shows they would watch if they were back home. The typical hiring pains occurred as some students were better than others, and some were just not good fits.
Ari_Rahikkala 5y ago
Stories like this might as well be titled "Local change in Earth's magnetic field causes objects to float in the air". They shouldn't be read and then disputed because their details don't match the facts, they should be laughed out of the room based on the title alone. The forces they suppose to be relevant just aren't anywhere even close to the brute economic logic that actually governs how many people are willing to work in a field. If companies want to employ more roofers, they should pay roofers more. It turns out that they will find more roofers that way. If they can't afford that... then we as a society didn't actually want that much roofing done in the first place. Or teaching, or farming, or programming, or whatever kind of job this story happened to be about again.
aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
shortage* * at the current price point
silvestrov 5y ago
I think there is another aspect which the article does not mention: most young people are "fluent listeners" in English and most movies shown internationally are in English. So many young viewers wants English subtitles (to match the language spoken), not Danish/Swedish/... subtitles. This is like when English viewers wants subtitles because it is too difficult to hear what the actors are saying. So there is only a significant demand for good translation for a small number of movies. For all the other (trash) movies Netflix puts out, translation is a cost center with no benefits. Otherwise Netflix would employ translators directly. There is a good market supply as translation is easy for any language students. Only the super-low payment is keeping the talents away. Conclusion: the "labor shortage" is a "sorry, but WONTFIX" statement from Netflix. It's just politically unacceptable to say it directly.
ComradePhil 5y ago
Here's what is most likely true: - There is no shortage of Korean to English (or Korean to French or Korean to German for that matter) translators in Korea (same applies to all popular languages where it makes business sense to have these translations) - Translation falls in the category of jobs that is completely doable remotely - A small fully remote team of people can produce high quality translations very efficiently So, I don't believe that the problem is "translator shortage". It's a problem of organization and management or economics of it.
- umeshunni 5y ago
  But another part of what the article says is that "Korean to English" translators might be plenty, but "Korean to Spanish" translators are rarer and won't work for whatever wages a media translation firm is willing to pay. So, you get a "Korean to English" translator who translates the script to english ("pivoting") and then an "English to Spanish" translator who translates the english 'pivot' to Spanish. As you can imagine or as you might have observed from doing Google translates, this ends up with a poor result.
speeder 5y ago
This has been noticeable, companies are trying to hire translators en-masse, often low quality ones with shitty pay. Lately I am seeing more and more media with absolutely awful translations, not just streaming, but games and whatnot too. Things we have now: 1. Serious translation studios that hired several political activists that will happily butcher the original script to fit their worldview. 2. A ton of freelancer translations that work for low pay, often fixing machine-translated scritps, and do a crap job overall. 3. More serious translators but that don't have time and pay to actually know what the subject is about so they just plop down a more literal translation, often with weird results as words with multiple possible translation might end with the version that makes no sense in the context. Some exmaples past few weeks from what I saw in media: 1. more than once I saw media that the translation was forcibly shifted toward left-wing politics OR had all sexual references removed and/or towned down, sometimes both. 2. I saw both games, movies and series released recently that not only had the usual errors, but had outright missing letters, mojibake (yep! never expected to see mojibake in modern media, how people make that mistake?), phrases that someone obviously pasted from another document but selected it wrong and thus is missing parts of it and so on. 3. Was watching "Last Kingdom" yesterday, noticed translators weren't sure how to translate some things and in each episode the translation of some specific words or phrases changed, sometimes more literal, sometimes less, but wildly inconsistant.
rdiddly 5y ago
Ignoring for a minute that this sounds like a sly promo for Squid Game (mentioned 10 times), we're all grown-ups here who have taken Econ 101, right? If demand is outstripping supply, the price goes up and tamps down the demand and/or induces more supply. Tamping down demand would look like studios churning out less crap, or at least confining it to their own countries of origin, which might be a secret win for everybody. Induced supply would look like translators realizing they can make a living at it, and switching jobs or even college majors. Holding the wage down artificially has the predictable result, a "shortage." Just like in tech.
newsclues 5y ago
If services like Netflix had a market built in for users to request translation/subtitles and there was some sort of royalty/bonus for translating titles that are popular with the demand for the right languages. But we will probably get government mandated translated services that few people will use for most of the translators time. But hey at least I have the option of watching some old crappy movies with a dozen First Nations languages that are barely spoken and French dubbed and subtitled for me. (Canada is insane)
fleddr 5y ago
An interesting tale of how news is fabricated these days. The original tweet that is the basis for the linked article: "not to sound snobby but i’m fluent in korean and i watched squid game with english subtitles and if you don’t understand korean you didn’t really watch the same show. translation was so bad. the dialogue was written so well and zero of it was preserved" The typical Twitter unhinged take. It's not slightly off or could have been better, no, its ZERO. YOU DIDN'T WATCH THE SAME SHOW. The follow-up tweet is of course to blame white people, as expected. Next, these unreasonable takes are the basis of news articles because they too love a controversy, and there it is: an industry problem is made up. Meanwhile, in the real world nobody cares. They watched Squid Games and loved it.
- xdfgh1112 5y ago
  I played a visual novel called Raging Loop in Japanese. The game relies on lots of Japan cultural stuff and native language puns. The HUGE script was translated to English by one guy who did his best but a lot was lost. Typos, awkward sentences, parts that don't make sense. And yet the English version has high ratings on metacritic and Steam. Clearly the majority didn't notice or care. Maybe a good story overcomes an average translation.
aeternum 5y ago
More accurate headline would be "The global streaming boom is increasing demand for translators"

107 points by donohoe 5y ago

What nonsense. Just pay decent salaries and your problem will be solved.

If this is anything like the “trucker shortage” in the USA, it’s not just because of the demand, but also because the jobs suck and are underpaid relative to the amount of skill/commitment required to be good at it. And yet, executives always complain only of the demand? Are they unable to see the truth or are they simply unwilling?

amelius 5y ago
It probably goes like: 1. repeat in media that there is a shortage of X 2. people conclude that it is a good idea to get an education/training in X 3. there are more people are in X, meaning that wages can drop 4. profit
eloisius 5y ago
Exactly. It’s like after the dot com boom no one can be content to get normal rich. Everyone wants to get “exponential” rich with software leverage. I know several people that serve as interpreters (Chinese/English) and the amount of work and dedication it takes makes me feel ashamed when I think of how comparatively easy it was for me to learn how to code and how much of a disparity between our pay there is. I think I’m pretty libertarian-minded, but the business mindset of the modern world is so shitty. Some things can’t be automated with acceptable quality, but it seems like our MBA overlords just can’t countenance paying a human being to do skilled work unless it’s something flashy like React.
- sacrosancty 5y ago
  You seem to be suffering from the fallacy that hard work deserves high pay regardless of the usefulness of that work or the available labor supply. It's a very good thing that we pay people according to market rates in the long term because it continually optimizes production of good things that we all benefit from. I'm sure making gravel with a hammer is even harder work, and it's a good thing that we don't pay people to do that. In the short term it can screw over individuals who find themselves in the wrong type of work, but there are easy ways to protect against that too, for those that are worried enough.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    No, I’m not. Within the context of this article I’m lamenting the fact that even in the face of demand so great that it mops up the supply and causes a shortage, businesses still wont pay enough to stimulate sufficient supply.
- soco 5y ago
  And let's not forget how much crappy software we have around us because said overlords decided how much investment in quality is good enough and started to fail fast.
nmz 5y ago
Not only are they unwilling but they've also become basically scammers. https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged
- hackernewds 5y ago
  TL;DL? tough to scan an audio 24m long
  - blamazon 5y ago
    I dunno why NPR makes it hard to find these, but here's a transcript: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/901110994 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/901110994
WJW 5y ago
Executives are in the business of buying labor for money and as any purchaser they would prefer to get the best deal possible. Why wouldn't they try to get potential sellers to sell their labor to them for less than it's worth? Best case they get valuable labor for less than market price, worst case someone rejects their offer and may be mildly offended for a while. If they find no takers, they'll slowly raise offers until they find someone. Of course this stops working when there is a genuine shortage of labor, or when a company gets a sufficiently bad reputation that nobody wants to work for them anymore. Both of those cases are not a problem for 99% of companies though.

Daiz 5y ago

This article was widely derided among translator/localizer circles, because the true fact of the matter is that the only thing causing "shortage" is that the pay is shit. A lot of the article here builds up on statements by David Lee, the CEO of Iyuno-SDI, and even the article mentions the fact that his company pays its staff terribly: > Last year, several major European translator associations blacklisted Iyuno-SDI, discouraging their members from working for the company due to increasing cuts to their freelance subtitling rates. Anyway, besides the long-standing general disrespect toward the importance of localization, one of the big things driving down rates that has come along recently is the practice of "machine translation post editing" (MTPE for short), where a company first uses machine translation to produce an absolute garbage of a script (because translating fiction is simply not going to work out without an actual intelligence to drive the process) and then hires a translator who will usually need to pretty much redo the entire thing to get something good out of it. But hey, because they're only "editing" an existing script, that's enough justification to slash the already bad prices to basically nothing!

missedthecue 5y ago
I mean at the end of the day there are only so many translators, and streaming did not exist on this level even 5 years ago. That's a lot of new demand while the old demand is all still there. The idea that there can never be a labor shortage, only a pay shortage seems a bit odd. Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? Only a shortage of people willing to pay up for it?
- k__ 5y ago
  "Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? Only a shortage of people willing to pay up for it?" There are more houses empty than homeless people. So, there seems to be a bunch of people willing to pay for houses and no living in them.
  - bfdm 5y ago
    Yes, we have not correctly priced (taxed) empty property yet. If municipal government would charge say 100% value as property tax when mostly empty (as a starting point, say it is the primary residence of nobody for 180 days in the last 360), then it would be treated very differently.

the_duke 5y ago

I personally know several translators. Most of them either already left the field or are considering it. Freelance/contract work with lots of time pressure, low pay and no benefits is the norm. With ML translations becoming better, much of the work is reduced to manually patching up whatever Google Translate spits out. Which of course is used as justification for further lowering the pay. The only somewhat happy ones landed a good gig at international institutions like the UN or EU, but that comes with extremely boring material. Pay well and there will be plenty qualified applicants with the relevant degrees.

toyg 5y ago
Also, most of those applicants will likely be extremely flexible. People who study languages for years typically don't stop at one or two.

mkl95 5y ago

There is a senior engineer shortage in my area. The reason is that senior engineers make more money working from home for companies that have their HQ somewhere else.

iswu 5y ago

I am fluent in important strategic and business languages. Any translator job offer I have recieved has always tried to pay people around $25 per hour but calculated by the second with all downtime excluded. If I worked in IT, my downtime could be spent learning new skills and getting paid to do it. Working as a translator and you have a take home pay of about $4 per hour as your downtime is not compensated, like a waiter without tips. I am sure there are better translation gigs out there -- but the entire field has "avoid like the plague" written all over it.

dylan604 5y ago
It's funny that the people wanting the work for hire want to pay by the hour, but typical translators charge by the word or page. Standard transcription service fees are similar. Transcribing a feature film can much less expensive than a half hour talking head segment. Talking heads don't stop talking where features have a lot of cinematic/dramatic moments without dialog. A translator would need the same thing PLUS the actual translation.
- iswu 5y ago
  I believe it. Anyone making it a long term profession needs to be really good and also really aggressive about their pricing, otherwise it just wouldn't be a livable income.

olegious 5y ago

My wife is a highly trained linguist / translator, she’s leaving the industry because the pay is shit and translators aren’t valued.

dylan604 5y ago

About 10 years ago, I was involved in prepping content for foreign studios to have their content available to US streaming markets. Finding translators was an issue. Hiring professional translators with PhDs sounded like a good idea, but a lot of their translations were "technically" correct yet made for not interesting. Out of desperation and making use of a connection we had to a local university, our contact reached out to a professor friend that introduced us to a couple of students that were ESL and were from the country that produced the content. While these translations might not have been as true as the PhDs, they were reworking them to be more intune with an American audience. The content creators approved this work, and were okay with it. The college students were able to do this as part time finishing a couple of episodes a week. The pay was better than whatever part time job normally available for a student, but less than what a professional would do. Plus, they were able to keep up with some of the shows they would watch if they were back home. The typical hiring pains occurred as some students were better than others, and some were just not good fits.

Ari_Rahikkala 5y ago

Stories like this might as well be titled "Local change in Earth's magnetic field causes objects to float in the air". They shouldn't be read and then disputed because their details don't match the facts, they should be laughed out of the room based on the title alone. The forces they suppose to be relevant just aren't anywhere even close to the brute economic logic that actually governs how many people are willing to work in a field. If companies want to employ more roofers, they should pay roofers more. It turns out that they will find more roofers that way. If they can't afford that... then we as a society didn't actually want that much roofing done in the first place. Or teaching, or farming, or programming, or whatever kind of job this story happened to be about again.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago

shortage* * at the current price point

silvestrov 5y ago

I think there is another aspect which the article does not mention: most young people are "fluent listeners" in English and most movies shown internationally are in English. So many young viewers wants English subtitles (to match the language spoken), not Danish/Swedish/... subtitles. This is like when English viewers wants subtitles because it is too difficult to hear what the actors are saying. So there is only a significant demand for good translation for a small number of movies. For all the other (trash) movies Netflix puts out, translation is a cost center with no benefits. Otherwise Netflix would employ translators directly. There is a good market supply as translation is easy for any language students. Only the super-low payment is keeping the talents away. Conclusion: the "labor shortage" is a "sorry, but WONTFIX" statement from Netflix. It's just politically unacceptable to say it directly.

ComradePhil 5y ago

Here's what is most likely true: - There is no shortage of Korean to English (or Korean to French or Korean to German for that matter) translators in Korea (same applies to all popular languages where it makes business sense to have these translations) - Translation falls in the category of jobs that is completely doable remotely - A small fully remote team of people can produce high quality translations very efficiently So, I don't believe that the problem is "translator shortage". It's a problem of organization and management or economics of it.

umeshunni 5y ago
But another part of what the article says is that "Korean to English" translators might be plenty, but "Korean to Spanish" translators are rarer and won't work for whatever wages a media translation firm is willing to pay. So, you get a "Korean to English" translator who translates the script to english ("pivoting") and then an "English to Spanish" translator who translates the english 'pivot' to Spanish. As you can imagine or as you might have observed from doing Google translates, this ends up with a poor result.

speeder 5y ago

This has been noticeable, companies are trying to hire translators en-masse, often low quality ones with shitty pay. Lately I am seeing more and more media with absolutely awful translations, not just streaming, but games and whatnot too. Things we have now: 1. Serious translation studios that hired several political activists that will happily butcher the original script to fit their worldview. 2. A ton of freelancer translations that work for low pay, often fixing machine-translated scritps, and do a crap job overall. 3. More serious translators but that don't have time and pay to actually know what the subject is about so they just plop down a more literal translation, often with weird results as words with multiple possible translation might end with the version that makes no sense in the context. Some exmaples past few weeks from what I saw in media: 1. more than once I saw media that the translation was forcibly shifted toward left-wing politics OR had all sexual references removed and/or towned down, sometimes both. 2. I saw both games, movies and series released recently that not only had the usual errors, but had outright missing letters, mojibake (yep! never expected to see mojibake in modern media, how people make that mistake?), phrases that someone obviously pasted from another document but selected it wrong and thus is missing parts of it and so on. 3. Was watching "Last Kingdom" yesterday, noticed translators weren't sure how to translate some things and in each episode the translation of some specific words or phrases changed, sometimes more literal, sometimes less, but wildly inconsistant.

rdiddly 5y ago

Ignoring for a minute that this sounds like a sly promo for Squid Game (mentioned 10 times), we're all grown-ups here who have taken Econ 101, right? If demand is outstripping supply, the price goes up and tamps down the demand and/or induces more supply. Tamping down demand would look like studios churning out less crap, or at least confining it to their own countries of origin, which might be a secret win for everybody. Induced supply would look like translators realizing they can make a living at it, and switching jobs or even college majors. Holding the wage down artificially has the predictable result, a "shortage." Just like in tech.

newsclues 5y ago

If services like Netflix had a market built in for users to request translation/subtitles and there was some sort of royalty/bonus for translating titles that are popular with the demand for the right languages. But we will probably get government mandated translated services that few people will use for most of the translators time. But hey at least I have the option of watching some old crappy movies with a dozen First Nations languages that are barely spoken and French dubbed and subtitled for me. (Canada is insane)

fleddr 5y ago

An interesting tale of how news is fabricated these days. The original tweet that is the basis for the linked article: "not to sound snobby but i’m fluent in korean and i watched squid game with english subtitles and if you don’t understand korean you didn’t really watch the same show. translation was so bad. the dialogue was written so well and zero of it was preserved" The typical Twitter unhinged take. It's not slightly off or could have been better, no, its ZERO. YOU DIDN'T WATCH THE SAME SHOW. The follow-up tweet is of course to blame white people, as expected. Next, these unreasonable takes are the basis of news articles because they too love a controversy, and there it is: an industry problem is made up. Meanwhile, in the real world nobody cares. They watched Squid Games and loved it.

xdfgh1112 5y ago
I played a visual novel called Raging Loop in Japanese. The game relies on lots of Japan cultural stuff and native language puns. The HUGE script was translated to English by one guy who did his best but a lot was lost. Typos, awkward sentences, parts that don't make sense. And yet the English version has high ratings on metacritic and Steam. Clearly the majority didn't notice or care. Maybe a good story overcomes an average translation.

aeternum 5y ago

More accurate headline would be "The global streaming boom is increasing demand for translators"