The Expendable Translator | Hacker News Reader

The Expendable Translator

nybooks.com

20 pointstintinnabula16 comments

I can tell you I have worked as a translator and it used to be that the hourly rates were respectable. Nowadays you make the same as an admin assistant.

Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology. I ended up learning how to code and I am working on something now that uses language and programming (NLTK)and oddly, I found programming to be much easier than learning languages (I speak 6 human languages ) because it is a lot more predictable, stable and less dependent on context.

Translators should learn how to code. There is a lot of demand now for people who can do NLP.

> "I speak 6 human languages"

Impressive!

"Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology."

For some language pairs that is true. And that's one reason people aren't willing to pay decent rates for human translation. But for other language pairs machine translation produces nonsense. I've run a small translation agency addressing one of the latter language pairs and have stopped focusing effort on building it since there aren't enough customers willing to pay for decent translations. I even get people who send me text that came from automatic translation and ask me to proofread it, saying it should be quick and low cost to do so because it is "already translated". In fact it is worse than starting with the original and doing the translation because it is mostly nonsense.

I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't need super exact translations. What I meant by my comment was that it used to be that knowing many languages was a valuable skillset, i.e. "you can get a job easily". That is no longer true. One reason for that is the rise of "translation agencies" which have taken a big chunk off of the pay rate.

I am learning Chinese and a bit of Russian but it will take about three years to become fluent in these two since the alphabets are different.

Translation gave me the ability to see abstract patterns in text which is something I only realized when I was randomly attacked by what appeared to be bots on Quora. I could tell the language patterns buried underneath the non-sense and I could see through their code. This was useful but unexpected.

That is when I realized that language is related to form (syntax) as much as it's related to meaning and that's how it is connected to programming (or how I experienced this connection, I am not sure if there is an "official" explanation somewhere).

The "replaceable" nature of the translator is the key.

As long as publishers can easily get a different person to do the work with little effect on the success of the piece, translation compensation will be low.

Yes, it is a creative effort. Yes, an excellent translation (especially of poetry!) is difficult, and is a much better final product.

But if the translator's name doesn't drive sales, translators won't be compensated as if it did.

Old books have been translated many times, new books compete with millions of other books and are easily overlooked, and have to compete with FB feeds and online articles. That's why it's hard to get good pay in translation. There's an overabundance of content in all domains: text, image and video. We have reached an age of post-scarcity with digital content.

Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

You're not going to get paid well for a job that close to 15% of the population can do with no training

>Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

Depending on the combination of languages - it is an extremely rare skill! Just being multilingual is not enough, you need to be multilingual in the correct combination of two languages! Although a majority of translations are English->Target language, that is not always the case.

How many people know both Japanese and Arabic well enough to translate? How about Mandarin Chinese and German? Portuguese and Danish? French and Tagalog? Hokkien and Russian?

Your second point "sought after" is the important part. How much demand for Russian books are there for Hokkien speakers? No demand - no money.

Along with that, you also have to know how to translate into a format that people actually want to read. You can translate a work into a different language, but you may lose the spirit of the work in the process by writing words that are technically a "correct" translation, but end up being very dry or boring to read, compared to the original work.

First, this is the sort of shallow dismissal we need less of on HN.

Second, please don't routinely create throwaway accounts to post with here. It's fine if there's some specific purpose, e.g. something personally sensitive, but we ban users who do it routinely. Hacker News is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.

To be fair, community can and does develop without usernames at all, it's just that people aren't on a personal basis with one another. To be honest, I recognise or even look at most usernames and I doubt many others do. It's similar to reddit, in which someone's username will only be noticed if they are extremely popular (very rare) or have a novelty username.

The effect is lessened here because the prominence of one's posts is not tied to how many points they have (like on old forums) because a person's points are not immediately visible. But anonymous messaging with optional usernames works just fine as seen on 2channel, 4chan, 8chan and the 'old chans' (now defunct).

I don't think community is at all dependent on usernames being used or not.

No, I have to insist on this. Some people want the kind of forum where there are no usernames, and that's just fine. But HN is not that kind of forum. Users who want that are welcome to find (or create) such a place, just not to turn HN into it.

It's important to draw clear lines around what HN is and isn't, and this is one of those lines.

I agree totally that HN is not that kind of forum, I was more picking up on the point that community does not require names to exist. Sorry if you weren't trying to make that point!

Ah I get it now. Yes, that's a valid distinction.

Translating literature is not a trivial task. You could Google translate most books and be able to understand what's going on, but it won't make for good reading.

It actually requires a degree of creativity and literary skill on the behalf of the translator to make a good version in another language. Arguably it's a different work of art to the version in the original language.

Translation isn't "translation". It's rewriting a work or source in another language. Very few people can write in their native language, even, so finding a good translator is difficult.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com