My Future as a Translator

Several years ago, before most of us were talking about AI, I made a decision.

In my first year as a translator, I had the opportunity to work for an online dictionary website. Over the next several months, I used my linguistic skills to help edit Spanish <> English dictionary entries. I was especially excited about the project because I had learned about the website while getting my master’s degree in Translation Studies, and it had quickly become one of the most helpful tools in my everyday translation work. It was an interesting project that paid well, and working on it made me feel like I was making a positive contribution to my new industry.

Several years later, the same company contacted me again to work on a new dictionary project. I eagerly accepted based on the great experience I’d had in the past, but during the initial trial contract it became clear to me that the work had a new purpose: to improve machine translation output. I probably could have worked on this project for months, if not years, and made quite a bit of money. Yet in the end, I chose not to continue working on the project. I explained to the project manager that while I appreciated the opportunity, I felt it was unethical to work on a tool designed to replace translators. It was the first big ethical decision I had to make in my career, but looking back, I feel confident that I made the right decision.

I have been extremely fortunate to have steady work throughout my 12-year freelance career. I now find myself in the midst of my first big lull in work as the industry is seemingly overrun by inferior AI translations, some of which are being generated by that same company. I was always able to find small translation, editing or copywriting projects to fill the gaps in the past, but those projects also seem to have largely disappeared.

As far as I can tell, the vast majority of opportunities available to professional translators at the moment involve refining subpar AI output, often in huge volumes for astonishingly low rates. Most of the advice from prominent voices in the translation industry seems to be to embrace AI by either using it ourselves or accepting post-editing or validation jobs.

Perhaps I am an outlier, but I have never accepted machine translation post-editing jobs. Years ago, a client for whom I regularly provided ES>EN translation and English editing services tried to save money by sending me documents they had clearly run through Google Translate, since my editing rate was lower than my translation rate. The machine translation was so bad that they ended up having to send me the original Spanish documents and pay the higher rate anyway because there was no way to fix the machine translation. Newer AI models may have improved considerably when it comes to translation, but they still make nonsensical errors, though they are often harder to find now that a higher percentage of their output seems reasonable.

I don’t know what the future holds for me as a translator, but I do know that I don’t want to spend my days trying to decipher and polish AI slop. I don’t like the fact that most AI models are trained on the stolen creative work of countless humans, from professional writers to anyone who has ever posted anything on the internet. I don’t like the fact that we are not being compensated for this theft of our resources (from creative work to water and energy consumption), even as it starts to take our jobs. I don’t like the fact that even the people who have created these AI models don’t fully understand how they work or what they are capable of. I don’t like the fact that by post-editing AI translations, I would essentially be accepting accountability for low-quality work done on the basis of theft.

So in this moment, I will try to keep going as a translator for as long as I can. I truly love translating and it has always brought me joy, even when I’m dealing with boring documents like financial reports, because I love using creativity and research to solve linguistic challenges. If that is no longer possible because humans will be relegated to doing excruciatingly tedious proofreading of AI texts, then I suppose I will be finding a new way to use my linguistic skills in the world. A way that respects humans and helps them connect with each other without relying on thievery and deception.

Why You Should Hire Me Instead of Using AI Translation

If the text you’re having translated matters to you, then hire a human translator like me who you can trust to do a good job using the skills that a high-quality translation requires. When clients hire me for a translation project, they aren’t just hiring some "thing" that takes text in Spanish and translates it to English. They are hiring:

• An eagle-eyed proofreader and fact-checker who identifies spelling, grammar and factual errors in the original text and informs the client so that they can be fixed.

• A skilled writer and editor who ensures that the translated text flows naturally and conveys the client’s message to the intended audience with clarity.

• A discerning researcher who knows how and where to find accurate information when lexical and cultural issues arise during the translation process.

• An experienced linguistic specialist who has developed a deep knowledge of both languages through years of study, and who continues to learn every day as languages and cultures evolve.

Reliable Fact-Checking & Editing: Skills Only Human Translators Can Provide

One of the many benefits of hiring an experienced translator (as opposed to using an unreliable AI translation) is that they can catch errors that have slipped into your text. On numerous occasions, I have been able to help clients fix mistakes in their source text, which is especially important when it is being used as a basis for translations into multiple languages. Sometimes these errors have been minor spelling or grammar mistakes, but in other instances they have been major inaccuracies that could affect their credibility as a business.

For example, a few years ago I was tasked with translating some facts about countries to be used in an educational game for children. The company, based in Latin America, had prepared the facts in Spanish, which I would translate into English. My work would then be used as the basis for translations into many other languages. As I worked, I came across several obvious issues, such as the inclusion of several facts about the “country” of Hawaii. I was able to inform the client that Hawaii is not a country, but a state, so that they could remove the incorrect “facts”. Perhaps the error would have gone unnoticed in the game, but it’s also possible that a parent playing the country trivia with their child might have seen it and wondered why they should be paying for an educational game that had such glaring errors in it. Thankfully, this risk to the company’s reputation was prevented because of my attention to detail.

Research: An Essential Part of the Translation Process

There is a common misconception that translating is a simple, straightforward task. If you’re proficient in two languages, you should be able to instantly convert text from one to the other, right? Not really! I may know a lot of Spanish after studying it nearly my entire life, but that doesn’t mean I know every word and its intricacies. That’s why translation work almost always requires research.

I recently translated a document that primarily focused on business matters, but it also contained some medical and legal terminology. As a result, the translation required quite a bit of research. Aside from the usual need to look up unfamiliar terms and verify definitions or usage, I also had to do more in-depth research when it came to specialized medical and legal terms.   

For example, when I came across the name of a medical condition that I was unfamiliar with, I turned to WordReference (my favorite online dictionary) and Wikipedia (in both languages) for translation assistance and a basic understanding of the condition. Once I had what I thought was the appropriate English translation, I also did a quick Google search for the term and checked citations by reputable medical sources like national health agencies to verify the term’s accuracy and usage.

The text also referred to specific international legal agreements, so I found the official documents online for additional context and to ensure that the terminology I used in the translation matched the agreements when necessary.

If I hadn’t taken the time to do this research, the quality of the translation would have suffered. You can only ensure the accuracy of a translation if you’re willing to do the extra work required to fully understand the text.

The Dangers of Relying on AI Transcription in Translation Projects

I recently worked on a translation project that was a great example of the pitfalls of AI. I was hired by an agency to translate transcripts of interviews that had been conducted in Spanish. When I initially skimmed the documents they had received from their client, it seemed like a straightforward task. However, once I got started, it became clear that the transcription had been generated by AI, which the agency had not been told.

How did I know it was transcribed by AI? The transcripts were a mess, riddled with the types of errors a human would not make. For example:

• When the interviewers introduced themselves, their common female names (which were referenced elsewhere in the document) were changed to somewhat similar male names (think Jane > James or Anna > Andrew). Default male bias, perhaps?

• At one point a university with an unusual name was referenced. The AI simply invented a word based on the pronunciation (which produced no search results on Google), but I was able to correct it with an educated guess based on context.

• Every time uno or dos was said, the transcription cited the numbers “1” or “2”. However, in most instances the speakers were using terms like cada uno or los dos.

• Worst of all, text was repeatedly attributed to the wrong speaker. I didn’t have access to the original audio recording, but the issues were obvious. The interviewer would ask a question and the interviewee would start to answer, but then the transcript would switch randomly between speakers, as if the interviewer had the power to read the interviewee’s mind about their personal experiences.

In the end, this translation took much longer than it should have because the source text was generated by AI. Since it was for an agency that I have a great relationship with and the transcription issues were not their fault, I took the time to find and correct as many errors as possible, as well as sending them a list of the issues I had discovered so that they could pass it along to their client. I doubt I’ll ever hear what comes of it, but my hope is that the client might rethink their use of AI given the serious inaccuracies that were introduced into their transcripts.

The Secret Sauce of Translation

As machine translation post-editing has become increasingly popular with clients wanting to save time and money, some seem to have difficulty understanding why I decline such projects, despite my best attempts to explain all of the work that goes into a translation.  

So instead, let’s imagine that I’m a chef at your favorite restaurant, where you always order pasta with my homemade tomato sauce. Making the sauce requires a variety of time-honed skills and knowledge: developing a recipe, sourcing the ingredients and knowing how to adapt when their flavor varies, knowing how to use and cook the ingredients, monitoring cooking times and kitchen safety, and so on. 

You’ve always been happy with the service I provide and you love my sauce, but one day you decide that you should be able to get the sauce cheaper and faster. You walk in with a jar of the cheapest tomato sauce at the grocery store and ask me to improve it so that it tastes just like my homemade sauce. Surely it won’t take nearly as much time as cooking it from scratch, and using the jarred sauce instead of starting with fresh ingredients should decrease the cost as well. So you have a proposition: you’ll give me the jarred sauce to start with, and in exchange, you’ll pay me a fraction of the price once I’ve successfully turned it into my homemade sauce. You say it will be a great deal for me because the time saved will translate into increased output, and I’ll be able to get rich selling my delicious sauce in bulk. 

The whole idea is ridiculous, isn’t it? You obviously can’t just hand a chef a jar of store-bought sauce and expect them to magically transform it into their special recipe. The cheap store-bought sauce surely contains preservatives, plus any number of mysterious ingredients and additives that impact its flavor. It may contain lots of rosemary, while the chef’s recipe uses none. It would require considerable time and skill for the chef to refine the store-bought sauce so that it met their standards, but even then, it could never be the same as theirs. So many unknowns were introduced into the process by starting with the jarred sauce that they have no way of knowing if they were able to correct for them. For that matter, they cannot even guarantee that the sauce is safe for everyone who consumes it, since they don’t know all of the ingredients or how they were prepared. 

That is what it feels like when clients provide a translation generated by AI and ask for it to be “refined” so that it achieves the same high quality as a professional translation done by a human. It is excruciatingly frustrating work that generally takes much more time and effort than translating the text on your own. In exchange, you are offered considerably less money and the knowledge that you are furthering the demise of your industry, sacrificing quality and human ingenuity in favor of making a handful of companies richer. No thanks!

How Watching TV Can Improve Your Language Skills

One of the joys of being a translator is that there is always more to learn when it comes to language. Since my work primarily involves formal Spanish in business contexts, it doesn’t expose me to much slang or new linguistic quirks. I don’t translate much audio either, so I rarely get the opportunity to use my listening skills while working. To remedy that, I like to watch television shows in Spanish in my free time, which lets me improve my language skills while having fun.

I’ve learned so much from Spanish-language television shows over the years. When I lived in Spain before becoming a translator, my friends and I used to watch a mystery series named El Barco together every week, which resulted in me learning a bunch of nautical vocabulary since it was set on a ship. It’s always a thrill on the rare occasion that I come across zarpar or other terms I learned from the show.

More recently, I’ve seen how Spanish is adapting in terms of gender-inclusive language, with new terms like the pronoun elles showing up in shows. By watching shows from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Spain, I’ve learned about cultural and linguistic differences between some of the many Spanish-speaking countries in the world.

I’ve also learned tons of new vocabulary, often pausing to look up a word in the dictionary. My favorite recent example is the word tiquismiquis. The second I heard it, I paused the show and was delighted to discover that it means “fussy” or “picky”. I may never come across the term again, but throughout my career I’ve been surprised countless times to find that something I learned while watching TV has been applicable to my work. You never know what you’ll encounter as a translator, so it’s always helpful to keep learning! 

How Translation Pricing Works

One of the most important matters to discuss when hiring a translator is pricing. While clients often assume that translation is the type of service that would be billed hourly, most translators charge per source word instead. In my experience, this is beneficial to both the translator and the client.

For clients, having a fixed price from the beginning helps to avoid unpleasant surprises at billing time. Translation work requires research and editing, and the amount of time required to provide a quality translation can vary greatly. Hiring a translator at an hourly rate without fully understanding the translation process or the complexity of your text could result in a final bill that is much higher than expected.

As a translator, I also find that working for a fixed price allows me to focus on doing a good job by the deadline without worrying about exactly how many minutes I’m spending on the translation. On the few occasions early in my career when I worked at an hourly rate, I felt pressured to work faster so that the client wouldn’t think I was overcharging them for my services. High-quality writing takes time and thought, and so does a high-quality translation.

When potential clients reach out to me for a price quote, I tell them my standard rate so that they can determine whether my pricing is within their budget range. At the same time, I note that I charge more for complex texts with specialized terminology and ask to review the text that they want to have translated so that I can give them an exact estimate. This transparency allows us to agree on a fair price in advance and start our business relationship with trust.

What to Expect When You Hire a Translator

Hiring a translator for the first time? Here’s a guide to what you can expect before, during and after a project if you hire me:

First, I’ll ask for a copy of the source text to be translated so that I can assess difficulty and estimate how much time will be required, as well as provide a quote (usually based on a per-word rate). If the text cannot be provided in advance, I’ll need a detailed description with information such as the text type (financial, medical, literary, etc.), word count and any special instructions.

Once we’ve agreed on a price and deadline, I’ll get to work! During the translation process, I may contact you with questions about the text. Typically, questions involve ambiguities, inconsistencies or inaccuracies I have encountered while translating. In the past, this attention to detail has helped clients not only receive an accurate translation, but also correct issues in their original text.

Depending on the size of the project, I may also provide progress updates. I strive to always meet deadlines, but in the rare circumstance that an extension is needed, I communicate it as soon as possible.

After I’ve finished the translation and carefully reviewed it for accuracy and consistency, I’ll send it to you along with any notes relevant to the translation. If you have any questions or concerns, I’ll be happy to address them. Finally, I’ll request payment as per the terms agreed to, and follow up if there are any delays.

How Translation Is Like A Puzzle

Just over a year ago, I wrote a post about why I believe translation is a fascinating career. In it, I primarily focused on how my translation career has given me the opportunity to constantly learn about new topics that I never would have learned about otherwise, as well as add diverse terminology to my personal lexicon, related to everything from Mediterranean fish species to industrial machinery.

Last week, I suddenly realized another reason I love translating: sometimes, it's like doing a puzzle! I've always been a puzzle fanatic, from jigsaw puzzles to crossword puzzles. There's something so satisfying about taking different pieces and fitting them together to create a new whole.

In many situations, translations are straightforward, and choosing the right words to convey the source text in the target language is quite simple. However, in some cases, such as a large translation I worked on last week, they can be a bit of a puzzle.

There are many reasons why the translation I was working on last week felt like a puzzle. First of all, the document I was translating was for a translation agency instead of the actual client. While you can often rely on getting additional context from a direct client, it's much more difficult when working through an agency. In this particular case, there was no way for me or the agency to reach out to the document's writer for more information, so I had to do a bit of detective work during the translation process.

As I've mentioned in the past, sometimes the little things can be the most difficult in translation, including grammatical aspects like gender. In this case, I was dealing with a report that referred to people either by their last names or by simply using third-person singular verb conjugations. This posed an issue because Spanish doesn't require the use of the words él and ella ("he" and "she") before conjugated verbs.

While I could have used the neutral singular "they" instead, it would have made the report much harder to read. In some cases, I found a stray él or ella with a name that allowed me to determine whether the person was female or male, so I could use phrases like "she said" and "he noticed" instead of using the singular "they". In other circumstances, the person's full name would be mentioned, but then I'd have to figure out what gender corresponded to their name.

Luckily, Spanish naming customs are helpful in that respect. Not only do Spanish speakers tend to choose from a much narrower list of names than English speakers, but they are also fairly gender-specific. From a translator's standpoint, that's incredibly helpful, as you can feel fairly confident it's accurate to refer to someone named María as "she", and José as "he". However, there were still a few stray names that I had to research online in order to determine the correct gender pronoun to use.

Another thing that made this translation like a puzzle was the fact that since I couldn't contact the original writer, I had to try to put myself in their place and see things from their perspective. In a sense, I was acting like a detective, trying to decipher their meaning. Certain sections of the report were clearly written for an audience with far more context than me, so I had to simply do my best by filling in a tentative translation while guessing their meaning. Luckily, as I worked my way through the document, additional details filled in the contextual gaps, so I was able to go back and make those tentative translations more accurate.

In the end, after a week's worth of detective work searching for the right words and the right meanings, I was able to fit all the pieces together. While the topic wasn't exactly fascinating, I still found it fun because it was a challenge, just like a good jigsaw puzzle. Sometimes when you do a translation, you might have to accept that a few pieces will be missing from the final product, but hopefully you'll manage to get enough of them together to convey the full picture.