Volume of Translation Work is Not Supposed to Be a Problem
So why is it, then?
I have been meaning to write about the survey results from Inbox Translation for a while now. Alina Cincan put together a really great survey, and all of us here at Zingword highly recommend people to check it out. There are so many interesting things to talk about that it’s hard to pick just one!
But I will pick just one, and that is a problem that translators raised in the survey related to not having a steady volume of work.
3 main problems translators have
Just as a preface, let’s take a moment to consider the three main problems that translators have (sometimes):
- Problems with badly behaving Language Service Providers (see below)
- Low rates & payment issues (62% total in the survey)
- Volume of work
My current theory is that the unsteady volume of work is what hits translators the hardest.
Related to bad agencies and low rates, you can scroll through these results from the Inbox Translation survey and let them tell you the story (the one you already knew but never wanted to see impaled on a graph).
So this is largely stuff we knew already, and essentially forms a core part of our mission for translators.
The thing I’m especially interested in is the problem with low rates and bad agencies combined with the lack of volume.
According to the survey, when they asked translators what they wished they could change, about a fifth of respondents replied with one of the following:
- More clients
- Stability
- Volume.
Also, 30% of translators who offer different linguistic services said they do so because they don’t have enough work, and 27% of part-time translators said their reason for being part-time is a lack of translation volume.
The full-time / part-time graph also makes you wonder about the 28.5% of translators who are working 30–39 hours, and those working 20–29 hours — I feel reasonably confident that we can infer from the survey that at least 40% of translators wish they had more/steadier work.
Also, translators have a business to run, so it’s not like all these work hours are spent translating for cash.
So, the problem with volume is... Wait, why is volume a problem?
Volume is not supposed to be a problem
There’s a content explosion going on. In fact, every single day, we have more content to translate than the day before. That’s why the industry keeps on growing.
There is investment happening in the translation industry, and that’s what everyone says, too — there is a supernova going on right now, and I’m not talking about the dimming of Betelgeuse (my favorite cosmic story of 2020). I’m talking about the translation industry. The translation industry is the best opportunity in the Milky Way.
The translation industry regularly posts double-digit growth together with this content boom. Technologies have come to help us translate faster, but the content explosion offsets the increased speed of our translations. This makes perfect sense — you translate faster, but you have more stuff to translate.
The industry is valued at 48 billion dollars by CSA Research, and 58 billion dollars by Nimdzi. Thereabouts half of that money is ultimately paid to translators, and the industry has only grown; it has doubled in the last 10 years alone.
I think most translators, deep down, know that their services, even when they are underpaid, are highly valued because the deadlines always seem to be so goddamn tight. If your services are so undervalued and you aren’t getting much respect, it’s not because they don’t need that translation in the worst way, right?!
All of the above is true. The industry is booming, and people need these translations badly. Professional translators are the only ones who can give it to them.
So rayos y truenos, what the devil is going on? If there’s so much work to do, why do so many translators report that:
a) they wished they had more work and
b) they wished that work was more steady.
We’re living in a content boom, and we’re supposed to have plenty of work!
How the volume problem exasperates the rates problem
Quick aside — more and more, I think the bigger problem, between rates and volume, is probably volume. Or at least we can say that, sometimes, the rates problem is also a volume problem (62% of translators said that low rates was the main problem with being a translator).
Considering that according to the Inbox survey, the average rate is 0.08 cents for agencies, and 0.10 cents for direct clients:
- If you take the rate of 0.08 cents, multiply it times a conservative average words per hour of 315 words, you get 25 euros per hour working for agencies
- If you multiply 25 euros per hour times 160 hours in a month, you get about 4,000 euros per month. That’s not a net figure, but you get the idea
- But you can’t multiply 25 euros per hour times 160 hours per month (like they do for normal jobs), because most translators struggle to fill up their agenda with work.
Yet, I think if you said to most translators in Europe who don’t live in really expensive places, “You can get 48,000 euros per year, gross, to do your job,” they’d be pretty happy with that.
So, lately I’ve been asking myself if volume isn’t the primary issue, or put another way, the rates are too low to cover for time spent on unpaid work or waiting for work to come in.
Why do we have problems with steady volume
If we were aliens who spoke alien languages that allowed us to read and write really fast and the minimum translation length were roughly equivalent to Milton’s Paradise Lost, but translation took the same amount of time as it does here on Earth (and these aliens were extra verbose, just because they could be), I am relatively confident that your average translator would be:
- Employed full-time
- Paid the same as most knowledge workers.
In other words, they’d be like software developers, marketers, technical writers, or what have you. Because we all know translators are knowledge workers, just like those others.
What makes the translation industry especially unique is the relatively short duration of the average project, combined with the desire to have the same person working on the same thing.
Building a software application on your latest gig might take 6 months. Translating your latest project for a client might take 4 hours.
So if you visualize the agenda of most translators, you might see holes that could get filled with work, really on a daily/weekly basis — but they are not getting filled with work.
I think there are a handful of reasons for this:
- Translation buyers have no way to see or easily estimate the availability for all the translators they work with
- Tight deadlines mean you have to assign a week’s worth of work to two translators because it’s due on Wednesday, not Friday
- Nobody likes to split files, neither buyers nor translators
- There’s really no technology at work here trying to fill in a translator’s agenda
- I think that some customers prefer to spread their work across multiple translators for a host of different reasons, which might good for them, but maybe not good for translators
Zingword has some exciting projects on the way
The Zingword ethos has mostly been about helping translators get more clients and earn more money for better quality projects. That’s why we spent 4 years developing our platform.
But we are now working on some new technology that, in addition to bringing in clients, will help translators fill their schedule up. So, not only getting new clients, but packing in translation work more densely, hopefully with awesome clients, so you can work more paid hours and fewer unpaid hours.
If you think about a translator’s agenda and imagine a technology that would help translation buyers fill that time up with great translations, then you are on the right track. We think that’s a great way to start on this problem.
