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Comment by Daiz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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