6 ms·
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 pa
by 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 agoI 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 agoYes, 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.
- k__ 5y agoInteresting idea, actually! In some cities we already have second home taxes of about 20%. So why not empty home taxes too?
- erehweb 5y agoWhile it's true that there are more houses empty than homeless people, many of the empty houses are in disrepair, vacation homes, or just temporarily vacant between owners / renters. See https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/three-factoids-that-arent-quite-right https://someunpleasant.substack.com/p/three-factoids-that-ar... for some more details.
- throwaway2048 5y agoI mean yes, presumably the houses aren't empty for absolutely no reason whatsoever
- missedthecue 5y agoIf it's not possible to house homeless people in them, the factoid is completely uninsightful
- throwaway2048 5y agoIts only not possible because the system prevents it, which is exactly the point being made.
- barry-cotter 5y ago> So, there seems to be a bunch of people willing to pay for houses and no living in them. I’m willing to pay $1 for a kilogram of gold. That doesn’t mean anyone’s interested in selling it to me.
- k__ 5y agoIs selling gold equivalent to renting out flats?
- barry-cotter 5y agoYes. Someone is selling and someone is buying. There’s a price where the market clears such that supply equals demand. You can’t change that price by taking people’s stuff. If you increase supply the price will drop. If you increase demand the price will rise.
- blamazon 5y agoThe person you’re replying to didn’t say there isn’t a labor shortage. Only that the cause of the labor shortage is oft incorrectly identified as solely due to demand.
- randomdata 5y agoA shortage occurs when price is prevented from rising (price gouging laws, for example), where buyers would spend more if they could, but are stopped from doing so. While it is technically possible that the "shit" pay is a result of a price ceiling, that seems highly unlikely. If you have millions to spend on a translator I'm sure nobody is going try and stop you from spending it. What is much more likely is that the demand just isn't there. Someone thinking something would be nice to have does not mean that they are truly in the market.
- Daiz 5y agoThere absolutely isn't a labor shortage with translators. There's plenty of talent out there, it's just that many are not willing to work for the peanuts that big companies are offering so they end up doing something else to get by instead. If the companies tripled or quadrupled their current rates, many who have abandoned the field in the past due to poor compensation would jump right back in. We had a good demonstration of the above here in Finland a while back. There's been a lot of talk here about a "nurse shortage", but the reality is that most places just aren't willing to pay nurses well. When an individual company announced an opening for nurses with way higher pay, they were flooded with qualified applicants - many which came from people who had quit nursing previously due to poor pay.
- piker 5y ago> There absolutely isn't a labor shortage with translators. There's plenty of talent out there, it's just that many are not willing to work for the peanuts that big companies are offering so they end up doing something else to get by instead. If there is insufficient supply to meet demand at the market price, this information is irrelevant. Whether or not there are enough people capable of being in the translation market, there aren't enough actually in it to satisfy demand. There must be a structural issue on the other end causing the translations not to be valuable enough to the would-be purchaser to raise pay and clear the market. That creates this set of circumstances.
- toyg 5y agoThe structural issue is that prices are not really elastic at both ends. The power imbalance between employers (who can get by with low-paid lower-quality work, or just sit on the work until they find a perfect match without raising salary) and employees (who need a job today to pay for food and shelter) is a big anchor.
- WJW 5y agoI don't think that it's quite so clean-cut as you say: - Employers will have deadlines they must meet, regardless of whether they can find a translator at the price they would like before that time. There will be contractual penalties if they cannot manage this. - Potential translators don't have to work for peanuts as a translator even if they need a job "today" to pay for food and shelter. There are jobs in other industries which may pay more than translation.
- yarky 5y ago> Would you say that there isn't a housing shortage? There isn't, the problem is everybody thinks they must be owners despite their financials. Truth is, offer is limited because not everyone can afford a house in most cities. From a bank perspective, the bank wants more from both sides : deposits and loans and that's the truth driving the "demand" : let's give away more loans !
- Philip-J-Fry 5y agoYou say there's only so many translators. Yet, almost every time something is released there's thousands of people complaining that the translation is wrong. So who are these people? You might not call them "translators" but they can speak both languages. There's lots of these people and I'm sure that if the work was well paid then many of them would jump at the opportunity. The issue is that it's not well paid. Those who want to do translation work and not live paycheck to paycheck often have different jobs and translate work as a hobby, e.g. many Anime and Manga translators.
- missedthecue 5y agoBeing bilingual is not the same as being a translator.
- krapht 5y agoBilinguals are already better than the low end translation market.
- Philip-J-Fry 5y agoThey are much more capable of becoming translators though. Reading and writing both languages is 90% of the way there.
- dmitriid 5y ago> Reading and writing both languages is 90% of the way there. It really isn't. It's maybe 40% there. Actual good translation of something requires you to be very good in the "I'm good at writing literary essays" sense in both languages, and be able to understand and research relevant references in both languages, and be able to understand various cultural differences, and....
- tluyben2 5y agoWell, my wife was a pro translator but she found she could make a nicer living by writing books. If it paid enough, she would not have quit (and she was on the higher scale with corp clients). You need a good network and clients who want to pay for quality. The reality is that most just pop text into Google translate, fix the result a bit and that’s it. You cannot compete if companies are willing to pay for crap like that. One of the last projects was a German to English documentary and the client sent over a translation by someone ‘asking a fraction of the price’; the translation was simply wrong for a large amount in of the text. German has many things words and contexts that simply are wrong if you translate them directly. The last project which was the end of it was a Portugese book; she (my wife) translated 1 chapter but to make the humor and cultural references work in English, it was a very expensive chapter. So they found someone on Fiverr who did it. I am not kidding; it is some of the worst things I have ever seen; this translator, like the amateur he is, mixes up he/she and puts ‘the’ in front of everything. This is indeed what you get if you naively translate PT to EN but now that book was published totally unreadable for an English audience. But it was very cheap. That was the last straw. So tl;dr definitely money as far as I see around me. Because to recognise quality you have to spend time and know both languages well, it seems many pick cheap. If you see translations for Netflix movies and shows from ES, PT, FR, NL, DE, I often go back (I watch everything OV but with subtitles and the subtitles mostly stink) thinking, what, he really didn’t say that at all. There are massive errors in there along with the flattening and badly translated nuances. Humor never works unless it’s slapstick because translating humor is really expensive.
- yakak 5y agoThere is a housing shortage and a doctor shortage because there are groups enforcing limits. Someone has to bid too low and not get one of these, that this highest unnaccepted bid went up means nothing to NIMBYs or the AMA. There is no shortage of fast food workers or translators. If the bids go up to be on par with restaurant jobs or international business jobs, someone adequately qualified will decide to stop looking for a better career option and take one of these jobs.
- elliekelly 5y agoI’ve seen several medical organizations seeking volunteers who speak Ukrainian to help with refugees. It’s concerning to me how little some organizations value accurate translation. Even when there is potential liability involved.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y agoThe alternative is that the ukrainians don't get treated.
- ddoran 5y agoOr that translators are paid. But ideally a combination of paid and volunteers - just like most other roles in charity/relief work.
- acdha 5y agoOr that they pay someone a fair wage. Seriously, if you’re doing aid work right now when donations are pouring in, if you put up a donor pitch saying “we need to hire some Ukrainian translators to help aid go to the right place, can you add 5%?”, what are the odds that you don’t quickly end up with more money than you can find people to hire? The trap you’re falling into is that the CEO class doesn’t like to legitimize paying for work they don’t consider important. They’ll funnel millions to management consultants who range from useless to net-negative because that money goes to people similar to them, but they often don’t respect “menial” work for the same reason and view it as a cost to be minimized as ruthlessly as possible. I mention this because it’s not uncommon for IT people to see our current market demand and conclude that we’re in the first camp when most organizations’ senior management think the opposite.
- jltsiren 5y agoHiring a person properly takes time, especially when you are dealing with international situations, public funding, tax-exempt charitable organizations, employee rights, or other factors that make the task more difficult. And when the demand for the required skills has suddenly increased by orders of magnitude. If you need a translator next month, you hire a person. If you need them yesterday, your only option is looking for volunteers.
- Vivtek 5y agoCame here to say this, as a professional translator finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoFeasibly how many people are there who can TL Korean into Dutch? A few hundred? And they are doing top level work in diplomacy and business. So what happens is that there is one Korean>English master script that Netflix uses.
- barry-cotter 5y agoThere are many more people who are capable of translating from Korean to Dutch than actually do because no one does. Just like no one does for Swedish, Norwegian or Danish. There must exist members of the professional class in those countries who don’t speak English at a high level but they’re really rare. In international business they’re going to be non-existent. The top third of students in Germany in their grammar schools (Gymnasium) read novels in English during their studies. Germans have worse English than the Dutch and Nordics. This is just a terrible example to try to prove your point.