The global streaming boom is creating a translator shortage (2021) | Hacker News Reader

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

restofworld.org

107 pointsdonohoe69 comments

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!

Came here to say this, as a professional translator finding it harder and harder to make ends meet.

Feasibly 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.

There 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.

I’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.

The alternative is that the ukrainians don't get treated.

Or 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.

Hiring 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.

Or that translators are paid. But ideally a combination of paid and volunteers - just like most other roles in charity/relief work.

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?

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 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.

> 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.

> Whether or not there are enough people capable of being in the translation market, there aren't enough actually in it to satisfy demand.

This is a largely semantic argument about how we describe the phenomenon of more supply coming on-line in a market when demand increases.

Does that definitional question really matter here? It has very little to do with the point that OP is making, which is that the pending translation needs of streaming services will easily be met if they pay more for translation services.

> 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.

One likely explanation is that for the people who actually pay for translation services, it is more profitable to queue up translation work rather than pay extra to accelerate it.

In other words, the issue is not that there is demand that is not being met, but is instead that demand for translation output (i.e. consumer demand for international streaming content) is not translating to demand for translation services.

Most likely, the amount of money that Netflix, etc, is losing in the short term not translating content is less than they would have to spend to accelerate the translation work.

It is absolutely relevant because it gives the real reasons: it's not that there aren't enough people, it's that there aren't enough people accepting to be paid this little. Which means it's not a labor shortage but a wage shortage. The issue is on the employers' side

But there is supply, at the correct market price. At the end things will get translated. Maybe disposable stuff won't, but things like Streaming will. And for any price the translator sets, as long as translators refuse to work for peanuts.

The problem here is one company wanting to increase their profits by reducing what they pay for translations, plain and simple.

There is also a massive shortage of new developers. You heard it from me: I'm paying 30k/year on Palo Alto, but nobody wants to work. Lazy bastards!

On a serious note, I've seen something similar happening with copywriting in the past, having worked in a couple "Uber-but-for-copywriting" companies. Copywriters would get about 2x, 3x what they can get now, but due to freelancing work opening up to amateur copywriters, the price and quality was pushed down until the internet became the SEO cesspit it is today and experienced professionals had to either accept or quit the internet copywriting market. It's a race to the bottom.

Or the primary market players form a near monopsony, and this is a PR piece to try to keep it that way.

Any time someone is complaining about a shortage of ‘skill x’, it’s almost always a shortage of ‘folks who will put up with me and get through my hiring process for $y dollars with skill x’.

Some small exceptions of course in truly chaotic or difficult times, but it holds pretty solid as a rule.

> Whether or not there are enough people capable of being in the translation market, there aren't enough actually in it to satisfy demand.

No. It would mean that the demand truly isn't there.

> 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.

Or the demand isn't really there. People may be overselling demand.

The 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.

I 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.

You 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.

Being bilingual is not the same as being a translator.

Bilinguals are already better than the low end translation market.

They are much more capable of becoming translators though. Reading and writing both languages is 90% of the way there.

> 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....

"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.

While 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-ar... for some more details.

I mean yes, presumably the houses aren't empty for absolutely no reason whatsoever

If it's not possible to house homeless people in them, the factoid is completely uninsightful

Its only not possible because the system prevents it, which is exactly the point being made.

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.

Interesting idea, actually!

In some cities we already have second home taxes of about 20%. So why not empty home taxes too?

> 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.

Is selling gold equivalent to renting out flats?

Yes. 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.

Well, 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.

The 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.

A 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.

There 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.

> 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 !

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.

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

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?

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

Not only are they unwilling but they've also become basically scammers.

https://www.npr.org/2020/08/10/901110994/big-rigged

TL;DL? tough to scan an audio 24m long

I dunno why NPR makes it hard to find these, but here's a transcript:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/901110994

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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.

shortage*

* at the current price point

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