Globalization and Segmented Language Services
© Anthony
Pym 2000
Previous version published in Facköversättaren
(Göteborg) 10/6 (1999).
Globalization is not really
global. Only in restricted areas of professional and economic activity
is the increase in cross-cultural communication leading to major
qualitative changes. International English works in many workplaces,
but by no means most of them; it invades our computers, our music,
our investments, but not our hearts, our kitchens, our bedrooms.
And even in the restricted and sensitive field of language services,
globalization is not the only game in town. Or better, its effect
is not always globalizing. Instead of making everything the same,
the undoubted increase in communications is, I suggest, producing
a more segmented market for language services. Let me describe just
three of those segments, such as I see them developing and separating
around me.
First, at the most
numerous bottom end of the market (bottom because numerous), countless
poorly paid translation jobs are being carried out by students, recent
graduates, friends-of-friends-of-clients, or variously incompetent
or indifferent part-timers, who may or may not have university training
in the language concerned, as translators or otherwise. Fatally, the
remuneration for this broad underclass is usually just enough to keep
them studying. People working in this segment tend to conceptualize
their task as transferring information from territorial culture to
territorial culture, language system to language system, since the
effects of any really globalizing profession are as good as invisible.
Theirs is a simpler world, in tune with most of the simple models
used to teach translation: A to B, and nothing in between.
A second segment would then comprise many contracted literary translators,
established freelancers, salaried language professionals in non-technical
fields, part-time conference interpreters, bilingual secretaries to
middle-management and above, and tenured academic staff, including
the ones who teach translation. This reasonably comfortable second
group is the kind of professional location for which most teachers
feel they should be preparing their students, perhaps because it is
the niche of tenured teachers themselves (could anyone hope to go
higher?). If asked, most people here would either see themselves as
mediating between territorial cultures or, increasingly, as providing
services so that readers may understand and participate in specialized
fields. That is, the effects of globalized specialization may be recognized,
but since the translators are generalists or freelancers who provide
services in a number of fields, they would tend not to see themselves
as actually being affected or carried away from more primal cultural
allegiances. A and B are still separate, and perhaps culturally richer
because of it.
Third, there is a growing top-pay demand for highly competent language
professionals, often two-way, in fields such as information technology,
economics, marketing, and the general run of multinational business.
This demand mostly goes beyond restricted conceptions of translation;
it would have more to do with notions such as the ‘intercultural management
assistant’ or ‘consultant’, the ‘language-services provider’ or ‘information
broker’, with what has more modestly been termed the ‘multitasking
translator’, or perhaps even with a conscious extension of the IT
term ‘localization’. In all these areas, professionals are called
upon to do more than just translate. They can be paid two to four
times the comfortable salaries earned by tenured teachers of translation;
they know what time they start work, they do not know when they will
finish; they work nights and weekends; they can afford luxury goods
that they have little time to use. The growth of this sector has been
so fast, the power structures so dynamic and fragmentary, and the
salaries so high, that there are relatively few official regulations
in force, and little question of unionism or collective action. This
is fundamentally where people are paid for what they can do, and not
particularly for where they have come from, what kind of university
degree they have, or what social structures are around to protect
them. The providers of language services in this segment would tend
not to confuse their professional activity with belonging to a territorial
culture; their specialized knowledge would formally make them participative
members of a professional caste: in between A and B, there is now
something else, something like a set of globalized professions, or
even what I would like to call ‘intercultures’. But we are not here
to coin terms.
Why mention the development of these three market segments? Well,
first, they seem to be growing further apart, so we might expect translators’
associations to be somewhat stretched by the process. Second, the
lines of demarcation would seem not to reflect anything quite as neat
as ‘literary’ vs ‘non-literary’ translation, which opposition might
belong to a by-gone age. Third, and most importantly, our training
programmes are doing very little to address these changes.
In Spain, where I try to translate
and teach, the general quality of everyday pragmatic translations
at the bottom end of the market, those for the tourist industry
or whatever, is just as bad or even worse than it was thirty years
ago. At the same time, the growing top-end of the labour market
remains inadequately supplied with appropriately skilled professionals.
And in our all-comfortable middle, scarcely a feather is ruffled.
© Anthony
Pym 2014
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