Is
that all there is? Is that all there is?
Esto es lo que hay. Esto es lo que hay.
(It wasn’t actually dinner with Renato but rather
lunch with Renato, but you know I can’t resist a meta-reference.) Readers of
this blog are aware I have a low opinion of Renato Beninatto’s take on a lot of
issues. The problem is that the world is a small place and eventually even he read
these snarky posts and started contacting me on Twitter and via this blog. I
basically pretended not to notice, because some of the stuff he says is so
outrageous that it provides easy fodder for a lot of blog posts. But he
insisted. He proposed a grand debate. I humbly begged off. My counter-offer was
that he should write a guest post on this blog. He declined, somewhat
predictably, excusing himself on the grounds of time constraints and that he
does not write that well. It was therefore a stand-off. However, he proposed
dinner in Madrid as one way out. I acceded, although as I said, I was very reluctant.
I knew that once you see pictures of someone’s kids, you can’t really be as
sarcastic as you once were. The problem is that if he did’nt exist, I might have
to invent him; he’s just that juicy. Nonetheless, I thought at least I owed him
a hearing. I knew that he was going to “sell” me. Sell me what, I was not sure.
But if he insisted, I could not in good conscience refuse all personal contact.
Nonetheless, I felt less like a berobed Alec Guinness going to meet David Prowse
than one of those writers in Po-Mo novels where an uneasy author meets one of
his characters.
We met for lunch last Tuesday. He was in
Madrid for a localization association’s networking event. The conversation was in Spanish, which he speaks fluently. He is a talker (not a
huge shock). He was not there to hear me out so much as to clarify his own
views. The main message he wanted to transmit was that he is not a carpetbagger.
He is a translator who pivoted by several degrees to the business side of
things. He launched into a detailed narration of his professional life, from a
business and economics degree, to his first job at a consultancy at which he also
did translations, to film subtitler (like me), to independent freelancer (like
me), to owner of a budding agency in Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American
Spanish, to executive for several large “multi-language vendors.” His career
spans a period in which translation transitioned from being a cottage industry
dominated by individuals and small companies to a slightly less fragmented cottage
industry in which much larger mid-caps provide outsourced language services to multinational
blue chips. I think a lot of his views are tied to his participation in that
transition.
I don’t dispute that he is an experienced
translator. Point taken. He is not a carpetbagger. Okay. Most of his views that
I have found questionable have to do with slightly superficial ideas about the
transformative power of technology. Surprisingly, that subject was barely
mentioned during a lengthy three-hour-long exchange. His attitude is that
technology is an adjunct and not as central an issue as many think, at least
from a business perspective (I think that is just a step away from my own
suspicion that translation technology is commoditized, but he did not go as far
as saying that). Another surprise is that he also expressed considerable
skepticism about crowdsourcing. Furthermore, when I asked him if he thought
that translation was a commodity, he did explicitly and flatly refute the idea.
Beyond personal biography, the message he
sought to sell me was that “we are not so different, you and I.” I concede we
are both Latin Americans of almost the same generation who drifted into
translation. We are both typical of a certain, recognizable middle-class type
of South American who comes from No-Place, raised and educated in several
countries, with two or three passports, two or more languages, and with
grandparents who hail from all over the globe. But I replied several times that
our views are indeed sharply different, and probably determined by our contrasting
positions within the industry. He is a born entrepreneur. I am not. He has
probably gambled his life savings on a wing and prayer a couple of times. I am by
nature risk averse. He feels frustrated that criticism of business as a dirty
thing is unfair. His view is that we cannot and should not demonize companies. I
agree with him on that, but that does not mean that sleazy businesses or shoddy
practices should not come in for criticism.
It is not so much the facts on which we are
divided. It is on the interpretation of those facts.
For instance, he is very enamored of the
argument that a call for all translators to try to get into the high-rate
sector is self-defeating. He drew a Gaussian curve on a napkin and told me that
if everyone in the overpopulated, hamsterized portion of the bell curve jumps
into the higher part of the curve, the better-paid freelancers would face
increasing competition. In my view, that is a very simplistic way of looking at
things. It assumes a perfect, undifferentiated market. In such a hypothetical (and
unlikely) case, I still don’t think other freelancers would be my competition.
Neither is Lionbridge, which is too large to be interested in the tiny
companies I serve. My concern is competition from junky small agencies that are
pure intermediaries for a so-so database, or perhaps a junky larger agency such
as Transperfect, which is very aggressive in competing at every price level and
for every single loose dollar drifting along out there (anywhere). No. I would
welcome more translators emigrating from the middle of the bell curve, because I
think a rising tide could well lift all boats.
Another challenge Renato posed: Do I think
all translators should charge homogenous (and high) rates? No, that is certainly
not my view either. A market should be stratified and diversified in order to
reflect different levels of service, specialization, and experience. I certainly
don’t think someone who just graduated should get the same compensation I get.
My view, though, is that the current state tends toward a curve that is far
more skewed to the left side of the distribution than is warranted. I see a lot
of highly qualified specialists struggling to make rent, or people living with
roommates well into their thirties. Not a pretty sight. A slight trend toward
the right side of the chart would not be a bad thing, in my view.
Another pointed challenge: Do I think there
should be an international brotherhood of translation teamsters demanding
standard wages? Not really. First of all, I don’t think it’s feasible in the
age of the Internet (except perhaps for interpreters), or even desirable. Rent seeking
is not a pretty sight. We have to accept the good that globalization brings in with
the bad: the former being access to a worldwide market, the latter being Lionbridge
and those annoying South Asian agencies who claim to do “native Spanish.” I
don’t think homogeneity is something professionals should strive for. (But even
if that were to happen, at least homogenous rates would relieve me from the
niggling worry [to which I’m sometimes prone] that I’m competing on price. It would allow
me to focus on differentiation.)
In response to the undesired homogenization,
I challenged him with this question: What is more valuable for a young
translator, to toil for years as a cog in a Very Large Translation Agency for
pennies a word, or to forego paid work and maybe get into a graduate program,
travel, take a course on specialized translation, or learn another language? He
saw no problem with spending your apprenticeship years in the commoditized sector.
I, on the other hand, don’t think there is much of a future in working for
faceless PMs you never meet or agencies who think translation is a commodity. So
that is another major difference.
On another issue, I asked him if he
sincerely believed that a translator could deliver 10,000 words a day of
high-quality, publishable material. He replied in the affirmative, but I was
surprised to learn that it turns out technology has little to do with it, in
his view. He confided in me that back in the eighties and nineties (when SMT
was not even a twinkle in the eye of Phil Ochs and post-editing was a typo),
his output was 7,000 words a day (he described his method as dictating into a
tape recorder which would then be transcribed by a typist). My interpretation
of this is as follows: A few productivity tweaks, whether from MT or TM or
whatever, should suffice to push the profession into five-digit daily outputs.
In other words, technology is a red herring. Renato countered by asking me what
my output was. I answered honestly that 7,000 words a day was a bridge too far
for me, but conceded that I had actually pumped out 5,000 words on many days.
With the caveat that I couldn’t do it for more than two weeks in a row before
being totally burned out. So you see, slight differences of opinion conceal
vastly different views of the profession.
Let me provide another example of differing
interpretations of the same facts. Renato said he had once been asked at an
event what output a translator could achieve in the future. He had replied with
typical bullishness that 30,000-35,000 words per day was a feasible number for
a translator in the Era of the Jetsons. I gasped (audibly): “That’s absurd! How
could you even proofread that output?!”
Undaunted, he went on to tell me that the day after he voiced that opinion, he had
logged onto his email to find an advertisement from a leading CAT tool designer
in which a translator gave a testimonial claiming that the tool had allowed her
to translate 32,000 words in a single
day. Once again, I blurted out: “That person doesn’t know what she’s talking
about! Thirty thousand or twenty-five thousand 100% matches do not count as words you translated!” That
person was completely misreading a technology she didn’t understand (and the
company was more than a little dishonest in publishing the testimonial). You
see what I mean about differing interpretations? For Beninatto, the incident is
a harbinger of a happy future marked by greater productivity. For me, it is a perfect
example of how translators are completely incapable of interpreting
technological change. Night and day. Day and night.
Regarding the “quality is dead” issue, he
explained that it is related to his view that quality as mere error detection
was the wrong view. He complained that the bandying about of his now infamous
title was unfortunate (which made me think to myself that perhaps a less
“provocative” title would have been in order; you can’t place a huge target on
your back, take a leisurely stroll through the Amazon jungle, and then complain
that the natives are aiming poisoned darts at you). I agree insofar as it means
that the TEP model in which proofreaders add a myriad of useless tweaks (and
often typos) is not efficient. However, my view is that such a model can work
well in small groups of professionals who work with each other. But scaling up
that model to larger and larger collectives or companies was a recipe for a lot
of trouble. And, incidentally, for hamsterization, a term that he criticizes as
impolite (I would reply that it is far more uncouth to deprofessionalize
people, but there you go).
No, our opinions are completely different.
I asked him point blank if he thought a translator should compete on price. He
said flatly no, that competing on price is suicidal. But I think where he
contradicts himself is that he often voiced the parallel message that not
everyone can aspire to the higher echelons of the market (which is self-evident
and not insightful) and that the lower-rate competitors will ultimately eat
your lunch.
To sum it up, I think his career represents
an example of the undeniable triumph of the drive to Cheap and Big. However, I
think Cheap as a pricing model might not be as successful over the next two
decades as it has been over the past two. Cheap is already running into
headwinds as the middle class in China gets larger and larger. Look at Latin
American currencies. They are appreciating at breakneck pace while the industrialized
world deleverages. Of course, the commodities boom will eventually go bust,
that is inherent to cycles. But take a look at Brazil’s or Colombia’s
international reserves. Dutch disease is deadly for cheap labor. Asians and
Latin Americans learned the painful lessons of the nineties (the Tequila
Effect, the Samba Effect, and those little episodes known as the Russian debt
default and the Asian financial crisis). They learned them rather well.
To illustrate the point, I mentioned the
anecdote about the late Steve Jobs and Obama at a dinner party held last year.
Obama asked the Apple CEO how the U.S. can bring back those factory jobs making
iPads. Jobs replied bluntly that those jobs are gone forever.
Beninatto knew the anecdote. His eyes brightened when I mentioned it, but I’m
sure that it’s because he misreads the anecdote. He thinks it confirms the
superiority of Cheap. But the founder of Apple wasn’t saying those jobs are
gone forever because Chinese salaries are dirt poor. His point was far more
subtle. Listen to why those salaries will never come back to the U.S.:
Another
critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the
United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about
8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000
assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The
company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find
that many qualified engineers in the United States.
In
China, it took 15 days.
Companies
like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical
work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with
more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at
that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but
the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.
If the FoxConn jobs are fated to remain in
China, it is not because those engineers are cheap. They may earn less than
American engineers, but their country’s real advantage is ease of sourcing and abundance.
And that means skilled labor. It is a dramatic indication that China is
climbing up the value chain, just as Japan, Korea, and Chile did earlier. That
is something a member of a hamsterized work force is not doing. The anecdote does,
unfortunately, also spell the end of the highly paid American blue collar
worker, whose elegy is pictured in Michael Moore’s films. But it also spells
the rise of something equally revolutionary: the better-paid blue collar
Chinese worker and the well-paid, thrifty, and hyper-educated Chinese middle
class. More significantly, it also spells the end of something else: the demise
of Cheap as the main pillar of international business models. China’s edge is
now both volume-based AND strategic. An alert player should pick up his ears,
because the times they are a-changin’. That
is the real significance of the Jobs-Obama story.
As I assured him over and over,
I do not think he is an evil person, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find a
lot of his opinions completely erroneous, if not downright objectionable. Every
time I said that, he assured me with a little twinkle in his eye that, deep
down, we actually agree on more than I think. I could see readily that he is a
born salesman. Perhaps even too good. The dirty little secret about investment
banking is that, at heart, it is just sales. A trader, a VP, a guru-economist, even
a nerdy quant is really just a salesperson. But at Goldman Sachs, the capital sin
was to be “salesy,” which means being slightly too slick for your own good.
So, does the man have horns and a tail? No.
Does he smell of brimstone? No. He is a charming, affable person with a big
personality. However, if he gets flak from random bloggers, it is probably due
to his lack of awareness about the heterogeneity of the audiences you reach now
on the Internet. A message on a blog or a video uploaded to YouTube is pushed
out to an audience that is difficult to predict, much less control. That will
be the case until the Internet becomes a more textured place broken down into
apps or dominated by more regulated spaces unreachable via the flatness of the
search engine. I told him that. Once again, he completely brushed off this
suggestion. However, I reiterate my belief that if you venture out into the
Internet, you have to be prepared to be misunderstood. I write a niche blog
read by a tiny audience of 200 people, and the variety of reactions always runs
the gamut from utterly fascinating to completely baffling. We have to learn to
live with that.
So, in closing, I thank him for the invitation
to lunch. He was also gracious enough to invite me to the ELIA networking event
free of charge a couple of days later, an invitation I accepted. But
differences of opinion remain and don’t necessarily have to be drowned in bonhomie
and red wine, since they can be insightful. My two main messages, which I would
like to reiterate, is first of all that translation will probably come to be
dominated by a barbell, with large agencies on one end of the barbell and
cottage providers on the other. The contrasting views and philosophies of the
two extremes will become increasingly more divergent, a divergence which will
on occasion sound rather bitter. That is unavoidable. Secondly, there is an
emerging sleaze problem as some unethical companies scale up.
About both of these opinions he was unsurprisingly
dismissive. He cheerfully waved them off, like the eternal optimist he probably
is. I accept these as very real, like the over-analytical pessimist I am.
We must, therefore, agree to disagree and
hope for the best, because—to answer Peggy Lee’s melancholy question with a refrain
from funk-salsameisters Los amigos invisibles—that’s really all there is.
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.
