On
the market as a factor in the training of translators
Anthony Pym 1998
First published in
Koiné 3 (1993), 109-121.
The market demand
for translations is often cited as a determinant on the way translators
should be trained. But how should one assess the strength of this
relation? In search of answers, I propose to consider several
general aspects of the translation market as found in Spain, particularly
with respect to processes of specialization. I shall integrate
a few mediatory political and cultural factors before projecting
the resulting market profile onto our teaching institutions. Despite
this one-way methodology, my main arguments will be against any
strong direct relation between market demands and the training
of translators. Paradoxes abound.
I should perhaps note
that I have worked, off and on, as a professional translator in
Spain from 1981, mainly in the fields of economics and sociology,
and that I was involved in the training of translators from 1987
to 1992, first in Barcelona and then in the Canary Islands. Most
of what I have to say is based on this unquantified experience.
I can thus only present arguments for discussion, not information
compiled from a position of omniscient expertise.
1. The consequences
of technology
As in many fields,
the market for translations is ultimately determined by the available
technology. This has never been truer than in the age of personal
computers, modems, faxes and translator-specific software and
support tools. Although combinations and improvements of word
processing and communications technology will no doubt continue,
we can be fairly sure that the major twentieth-century revolutions
have already taken place. The next decade will most probably be
spent sorting out the consequences and further integrating computer-aided
translation. The following outcomes already apply to professional
translation:
1.1. Professional
translators must physically possess basic computer technology,
not only for relations with materially distant clients and for
accelerating outputs but also for accessing larger-scale technology,
fundamentally data banks of various shapes and sizes. If they
have not made this step, they will not be professional translators
for long. But personal computers are cheap enough and becoming
cheaper, and the skills required need not be inhuman.
1.2. Communications
technology means that the labour market for translators is no
longer strongly determined by material distance. The market is
increasingly decentralized, becoming national and international
rather than intra-city. Living in the Canary Islands I spent three
years working for clients three or four thousand kilometres away.
The only real constraint on distance is the cost of telephone
calls.
1.3. The services
offered by translators are extending into other areas. Most obviously,
the production of electronic texts means that we are doing a good
deal of what was once called revision, typesetting, formatting
and layout work. Properly equipped translators can also carry
out straight terminology work, editing and text production, making
maximum use of their target-language competences. Some years ago
a translator was employed to render a Spanish publisher's catalogue
into English for the Frankfurt Book Fair. Nowadays he doesn't
translate it, he writes and formats it, going through the Spanish
publicity copy and selecting what is likely to be of interest,
then going to Frankfurt to represent the firm. He is still a translator,
but he now offers a rather more complete service. This could well
become a general tendency, both for freelance translators and
small service companies.
1.4. There is a corresponding
move away from in-house translation departments as once found
in large companies. The most successful alternatives are small
service-sector companies and cooperatives. These offer general
language services within an extremely flexible framework, allowing
teamwork on the diversified tasks outlined above. Gambier (1988)
points out that such arrangements allow much larger investments
in technology than can be borne by individual translators; they
enable a distribution of irregular workloads; and they potentially
offer a group guarantee of quality. Such organizations may or
may not have related branches in different cities; they may or
may not be agencies relaying work to independent translators.
But the general tendency towards small specialized companies has
nevertheless been as clear in Britain's years of economic recession
(Verrinder 1983: 30-33) as in Spain's years of economic expansion
in the late 1980s, to say nothing of the Finnish experience supporting
Gambier's analysis. A striking example of the general process
can be found in the English translation services for the Barcelona
Olympic Games, which went through three stages in the space of
four years. Although the services were originally supposed to
be provided by a university translation school, it was then considered
more efficient to set up a centralized in-house team. But what
would happen to the translators after the Games? How could they
develop the flexibility needed for continued survival? In the
end, the translators themselves set up an independent agency that
took over much of the Olympic work at the same time as it diversified
and thus ensured reasonably long-term employment. The straight
translations carried out by such companies or agencies are sometimes
combined with service activities like publication, graphic arts,
publicity, research work and company representation, depending
on the individual backgrounds of the translators and the extent
to which they are able to invest in technology.
There is an almost
natural transition from individual freelance translating to small
cooperatives and companies. But the transition is not always easy.
At least one minor note of warning should be sounded: The bonds
of friendship that often link individual translators tend to be
strained as soon as money and quality are at stake. And friendship
is sometimes of greater value than business.
The market trend for
the coming years can be described in terms of these four factors:
the imperatives of communications technology, a geographically
decentralized labour market, combination with associated services,
and the development of highly flexible service-sector companies
or agencies. All this is reasonably well known. But none of it
should be taken as a recipe for the training of translators. There
are further factors to be considered.
2. The demand for
specialized translation
The technological
factors determining this market structure also have a more indirect
influence on the kinds of texts we have to translate, since technology
is changing the outlooks and requirements of our clients. We are
witnessing constant increases not only in the rate of change in
highly technological areas but also in the degree of intercultural
contact in these domains, to say nothing of the sheer quantities
of texts produced. This is creating a major intercultural stratification
of discourses, cutting across what were once idealized as relatively
homogeneous national languages. Enormous quantities of texts and
terminologies are fairly remote from anything like common everyday
language, seriously questioning political ideals of "all-purpose"
languages. This general phenomenon might be called "specialization",
although the term is clearly shorthand for a complex configuration
of tendencies. Such specialization has several effects on the
demand for translations:
2.1. Since the international
and linguistic distribution of specialized-text production is
very unequal, these changes are taking place in a very asymmetric
way. Information flows have quite different directions on different
levels. For example, Spain's accession to the EC meant the country's
agriculture had to be significantly restructured and modernized,
requiring the translation of all kinds of regulations, technical
manuals and market information, mostly from English. However,
this inward flow also created a demand for sociological studies
of how EC policies were working in Spain, and these studies had
to be translated into English. So while regulations and technical
texts went one way, sociology went the other. Specific languages
can thus compound general specialization. The translator's decision
to become professionally competent in a particular target language
thus implies accepting certain restrictions on fields of specialization
(this is particularly clear in the cases of limited-diffusion
languages like Catalan and Basque).
2.2. Despite increasing
specialization, it would be wrong to predict an indefinite increase
in the amount of translating to be done in specialized areas,
just as it would be conceptually inept to see translation as an
integral part of technology transfers. The reason is quite simple.
As the initial demand for translations increases in a given area,
it approaches a point where language-learning policies become
more profitable or cost-effective. One thus finds that the proportion
of meetings using interpreters, out of the total of JICS services,
diminishes according to the degree of specialization: 57% for
the Commission, 31% for the Council of Ministers, 8% for the Economic
and Social Committee, and down to 0.21% for the European Investment
Bank (Commission 1993; more
recent figures here; my thanks to Carlo Marzocchi for corrections
on this point). To take a diachronic example, the demand for English-language
computer technology in Spain in the 1980s seems to have had roughly
the following consequences (if some simplification can be allowed
for): translators could not keep up with the initial demand and
their work always lagged far behind the developments; the market
value of good technical translations shot up - giving rise to
several of the small service-sector companies describe above -;
untrained translators who knew nothing about computers briefly
entered the market; the general quality of translations plummeted
and the Spanish language consequently failed to establish fixed
terminologies for many areas of the new technology. In the midst
of the mess, the more specialized users and sellers of this technology
were forced to upgrade their English, entirely bypassing translative
mediation. Although this particular process is difficult to quantify,
it has partial parallels in other specific areas like the introduction
of a futures market in Spain. Indeed, the tendency away from generalized
translation has affected most highly specialized fields. All Spanish
scientists read English and a good many publish directly in English
as well. They do not need translators; they need English-speakers
able to correct their syntax. The result is that in many highly
specialized fields translation only really enters at a moment
of vulgarization, well after the actual technology transfer.
2.3. Although specialization
has partly assisted the development of small service-sector translation
companies, it does not necessarily require the employment of highly
trained specialists in the fields concerned. Given the acceleration
of changes, flexibility and adaptability are of greater market
value than is field-specific in-depth knowledge. And even when
individual translators attain high degrees of specific expertise
and stable employment in specific areas like financing or engineering,
they would often be economically better off working as finance-consultants
or engineers than as translators. Highly specialized competence
can price one out of the translation market.
2.4. Given this limitation,
translators increasingly work in teams or at least in conjunction
with non-translators. This usually involves seeking the advice
and cooperation of internal or external experts, often the clients
themselves. Examples here could be anything from correcting a
Spanish scientist's paper written in faltering English (but written
with all the correct terminology) to participating as an active
member of research teams, combining properly translational skills
with the more general use of foreign languages for research work.
More mundanely, this tendency means that a good translator is
not someone who knows many things but someone who has the skills
and contacts to find specific information when necessary.
2.5. The above factors
are having an influence on the more traditional sector of part-time
freelance translators working on the fringes of both in-house
and service-sector companies. The need for flexibility means that
freelancers are still very much in existence, although they increasingly
cooperate with each other, giving advice, exchanging information
and distributing work, all of which is made easy by modems. These
kinds of informal arrangements may approach those of the service-sector
company. And yet there remains a very real frontier between the
two sectors. Freelance networks or "letterbox" arrangements are
usually too small in extension to attract major clients. But they
are small enough to offer certain unspoken practical advantages
like tax evasion, at least in recent years in Spain. The factors
noted above are restricting this freelance sector in two main
ways. On the one hand, specialization and rising client expectations
are throwing certain amateur translators out of the market (as
in the case of computer technology in the 1980s), particularly
those who are not native speakers of the target language. On the
other, the freelance workers who stay in the market usually take
steps to better their work conditions. They can either put up
their rates and keep just a few very professional clients or branch
out into other activities that eventually take them away from
translation, becoming international company representatives, editors,
publishers, publicists and, less ambitiously, teachers of translation.
It has become traditional to complain about the limited social
recognition of translators, inadequate rates of pay, impossible
deadlines and the health hazards of looking at a computer screen
all day. But the market itself is reacting to these problems,
first by isolating professionally adequate translators and putting
a fairly high price on their products, and second by allowing
these translators to switch over to more lucrative or prestigious
endeavours. Inadequate translators might hang around in a semi-employment
limbo for a while, but soon they too tend to find alternative
positions using foreign languages, ranging from bilingual secretaries
to the bad scholars who turn out to be brilliant businessmen.
Either way, good or bad, few professional translators remain full-time
translators throughout the whole of their employment history.
These then are five
further factors that help profile the translation market in specialized
fields: asymmetric information flows mean that the effects of
specialization are compounded by restrictions to certain target
languages; the demand for translations is not subject to unlimited
expansion but will tend to give way to language-learning policies;
flexibility is thus more valuable than in-depth knowledge in one
particular field; specialized problems are most likely to be solved
through teamwork arrangements; and even specialist translators
are not likely to remain full-time translators for their whole
career.
3. A free market
for translations?
So far we have more
or less assumed that the market for translations is rationally
structured in terms of technology and its consequences, including
the basic logics of supply and demand and international information
flows. But no one can pretend that human rationality simply has
to be deciphered from technology. Our markets are constantly redressed
in terms of criteria involving social and cultural desirability.
This leads to several quite specific considerations:
3.1. Most obviously,
many literary translations are subsidized in one form or another.
Government policies differ from country to country, particularly
with respect to the proportions of intranslations to extranslations
(Colas 1992). One might no longer praise the highly interventionist
policies used in eastern European countries, but less interventionist
strategies, including anything from the buying of books to the
employment of literary translators as academics, remain more than
symbolic throughout Europe. One of the literary translator's professional
skills, alongside the ability to render style, has become expertise
in the presentation of grant applications. These latter skills
have to be learn somewhere along the line. And they have little
to do with the constraints of any market economy
3.2. Non-market policies
have also given rise to the largest collectivity of translators
in history, the one working for the European Communities. The
policy of conserving nine official languages provides employment
for far more translators than could be justified by any market
rationality, consuming some 40% of the EC's administrative budget
(Coulmas 1991: 23). There has been a shift towards translating
for "real needs" (Hoof-Haferkamp 1990), which would explain the
evidence we have seen of relative non-translation correlating
with specialization. But the general policy remains a question
of political desire rather than economic calculations. Similarly,
for purely cultural reasons, the Barcelona Olympics were obliged
to adopt four official languages - Catalan, English, French and
Spanish -, creating a translation demand that had no cost-effective
relationship to Barcelona's sociolinguistic status as a bilingual
city. Translation is sometimes a cultural policy option that cannot
be deduced from strict market logics.
Strict economic rationalities
are thus overridden by political priorities in the broad areas
of literary translation and language policy. In both these fields,
secondary factors increase the demand for translators. The result
is a certain ideological dissociation of translators and policymakers
from hard thought about how to make markets work.
4. How to train
translators
The main thrust of
my argument is by no means original. As is stated in the programme
of the ESIT in Paris, the purpose of translator training should
be "to produce not translators who are specialists, but specialists
in translation". We should be teaching translation as a general
set of communication skills that our students can apply and adapt
to the changing demands of future markets, and indeed to changing
professions. These skills should include obvious things like the
use of personal computers, basic research procedures, a few ideas
about public relations and marketing, and more than a bit of accountancy.
As a general aim, having these areas packaged as "general communication
skills" would seem to fit in with the various factors we have
seen above, since the main lesson to be learnt from the market
is that we really cannot learn many immediately applicable lessons
from the market. The best we can do is to encourage flexibility
and watch out for change. But if we then look at more specific
market read-offs, particularly at those now being applied to translator
training, several paradoxical relationships have to be accounted
for:
4.1. Perhaps the most
obvious paradox is the way the language-specific compounding of
specialization tends to force translators to develop competence
in several target languages, precisely as a means of diversifying
against excessive specialization. A translator specialized in
rendering computer technology from Catalan into English would
be in such a narrow market as to remain mostly unemployed. Or
again, a translator who has specialized in the translation of
computer technology into Catalan would be in a far more fragile
market position than one who can render the same technology into
Catalan and Castilian. The greater the specialization of the market,
the greater the translators' interest in diversifying their competence.
When combined with the desirability of teamwork and active relationships
with clients, this often means that two-way competence is required,
at least with respect to oral communication.
4.2. The market factors
listed above clearly have little to do with purely linguistic
or literary problems. It was thus only to be expected that traditional
philological training would eventually be unable to supply the
skills needed by the market. The first reaction to this inadequacy
was the development of highly specialized programmes for training
interpreters. But the more recent and more interesting reaction,
dating from the beginning of the 1980s, is the orientation of
general translator training away from linguistic models and towards
theories that incorporate clients, specific-purpose demands and
quite radical translational modifications, viewing translation
as the production of a new text rather than the reproduction of
an old text. The approaches range from Justa Holz-Mänttäri's
formalized theory of translative actions (1984) to Daniel Gouadec's
very practical mixture of insight and advice (1989). The pedagogical
applications can be anything from translating the one text in
different ways for different client instructions, to problem-solving
on the basis of actual case studies incorporating various factors
like client, reader, time and restricted information sources (I
used to explain my problems to the class to see if they could
solve them for me). There can be little doubt that these general
approaches provide appropriate principles for thinking about adequacy
to market demands. But there are two interesting ambiguities here.
First, this kind of theory most usefully provides name-for-things,
but does so without extensive historical or quantitative analysis
of the different ways translation has actually been used. One
is ultimately left with opinions formulated as academic-sounding
expertise, in a discourse close to the one I am using here. Second,
and as a counterweight, although the very existence of these names-for-things
can have normative implications (one should translate for a specific
purpose, one should respect reader expectations), in-class discussion
of these factors can also question the extent to which they should
define our task. Our ethics need not be mercenary; the discussion
and historical comparison of market factors need have normative
effects (Toury 1992). In fact, the incorporation of market factors
into our theories could make us adopt a critical approach to immediate
market demands.
4.3. Beyond general
theories and procedures, translator training must try to address
the phenomenon of specialization. Are we to train translators
for a specific market sector or should we simply make everyone
do a bit of everything, then throw them into the water to see
if they can swim? This is a major question in countries like Spain,
where there is a stable unemployment rate of about 15%, rising
to some 22% in the Canary Islands and particularly affecting first-job
seekers. It might be impossible to predict exact future changes,
but it is just as impossible to remain indifferent to the labour
market that our students have to confront. A bit of local history
might illustrate the problem.
When the Las Palmas
translation school was set up in 1988, the idea was to specialize
in commerce and tourism, since the island's economy depends on
a huge port and a lot of tourists. Some even thought the translation
school should be associated with a school of tourism and that
teachers would work closely with a school of business studies,
both at that time within the same university. But none of these
plans were followed through. The failed linkage was due to inevitable
political reasons, but also to one apparently very good practical
reason: Las Palmas has virtually no demand for new translators
in either of these sectors, since the port traffic is not significantly
affected by specialization phenomena (it has not been expanding
in recent years) and the tourist sector has generally adopted
a policy of foreign-language learning. All my students could find
local employment as teachers of English, but very few of them
could work locally as full-time translators. So the idea of specializing
in local sectors, which might seem quite logical, is defeated
by the economics of alternative policies, as well as by the more
obvious principle that the labour market for translation is not
local. It was apparently wrong to seek long-term solutions in
an insular context.
4.4. But would it
have been entirely wrong to collaborate closely with the schools
of tourism and business studies? Perhaps we had the right solution
but we didn't know it at the time. My reasoning here has nothing
to do with any direct read-off from the market situation, since
the above factors should make it clear that there can be no direct
read-off anyway. It is simply that the teaching of techniques
for working within a specialized markets requires very developed
case studies as examples, with the appropriate backgrounding and
contact with experts. The elements for such examples are most
easily found in local areas of specialization, whether or not
these areas constitute a real labour market for translators. And
as they work in one specialized area, students should ideally
learn how to learn about further areas. Training for specialization
thus requires the integration of specialized fields as actual
content material, but not necessarily at any level beyond that
of elaborate samples from a far more complex world.
4.5. The need for
varied experience of specialized markets should be dealt with
through extensive student exchange programmes, which are also
the most appropriate way of ensuring adequate levels of linguistic
competence and basic survival skills that cannot be taught in
the classroom situation. The extreme importance of exchange programmes
rarely finds full appreciation. They are still often badly organized,
both materially and conceptually. There should be no need to point
out that programmes like Erasmus and Lingua do not require any
particular standardization of evaluation criteria or the imposition
of pan-European study programmes. Such concepts were clearly negated
by the Maastricht treaty (Art. 126), and correctly so. Just as
trade blocks exist so that each region can specialize in its areas
of greatest cost-effectiveness, so extensive student exchange
programmes should encourage individual translation schools to
associate with locally specialized sectors, quite independently
of the actual labour market for translators. That is, local conditions
should be referred to as examples of specialization, but not because
of any actual market demands. This means that a German translation
student with a particular interest in tourism might choose an
exchange in Las Palmas, whilst a Canarian student interested in
engineering could be better off spending some time in a German
translation school. Exchange programmes could thus enable individual
schools to play to their strengths. The end result should be a
student who has at least experienced specialized markets in two
or three areas and in two or three cultures. But this need not
imply that the student is going to find employment in any specific
local labour market.
4.6. A further paradox
ensues from awareness that European translator training, and indeed
European translation studies, are currently riding on the wave
of an EC translation policy that cannot last. Policies are supposed
to correct market inadequacies, but in this case market considerations
will eventually have to correct the policy. Despite the democratic
ideals often cited, Coulmas convincingly argues that "the EC has
been used by member states to defend their languages' privileged
position rather than being given the chance to produce a language
policy of its own" (1990: 8). Rich countries have been prepared
to pay for their linguistic nationalism. But the costs will become
prohibitive with future enlargements of the EC. Some salvation
might be sought from machine translation, although mostly in the
highly specialized areas where language-learning strategies have
been more efficient; all central resolutions will of course have
to be translated; but with respect to working languages at least,
the general over-use of translation will still have to change.
Translator training
should be prepared for that change. We should be aware that most
of our students are not likely to become full-time professional
translators, that those who do find such employment are likely
to change to an associated profession in the course of their career,
and that translation is in any case an imperfect long-term communications
policy. An adequate training programme should thus not focus too
exclusively on the merely technical aspects of translation, nor
too readily assume that the worlds of clients and readers are
only for clients and readers. On the contrary, extended exposure
to quite high degrees of specialization in real-life situations
should be considered highly desirable, even beyond the level of
case-study examples. Further, institutional mechanisms should
be created so that interested students can combine a degree in
translation with formal training in associated professions, including
double degrees if so desired. It should be remembered that the
market for translators is not the only one interested in our students,
nor is it always the most lucrative, lasting or fulfilling.
I have suggested six
ways in which market factors are or should be affecting the training
of translators, each of them dependent on slightly paradoxical
relations between education and market demands. Briefly, the arguments
propose that market factors require translators to work in several
target languages or at least to have two-way oral competence so
as to counter excessive specialization; these factors stop us
from trying to supply strictly local labour markets; they force
us to use areas of specialization as examples and indeed to diversify
our translation schools; they should encourage us to offer students
as wide a vision as possible of their future areas of employment.
Most of this is only
common sense. In times of uncertainty, a certain degree of diversification
is the best policy. But there are also quite ideological reasons
for distancing any strict market rationality. All of our students,
whether they become translators or not, enter a vague intercultural
community, a group of professionals whose work it is to promote
and carry out relations between different cultures. This community
is of extreme importance now, at a time of very volatile and often
conflictual international relations. As I have argued elsewhere
(1993), intermediaries require more than technical expertise;
they require a few of the ideals of a general humanistic education,
able to transcend the outlooks of their cultures and professions
of origin. That is why translator training in Spain is perhaps
in danger of becoming too specific. We are churning out many technicians
but few real thinkers. Ideally, students should be able to do
more than find work in the market. They should eventually improve
the intercultural relations they are engaged in. And that means
having a few ideas about improving the market itself.
* An early version
of this paper was presented to a summer-school seminar on The
Translator, Translation and Translation Studies in the Market
Economy, Bratislava, 13-16 September 1992.
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Pym, Anthony. 1993.
Epistemological Problems in Translation and its Teaching. Calaceit:
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Last update 8 June
1999
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Pym 2014
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