
The Expendable Translator - tintinnabula
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/03/28/the-expendable-translator/
======
whatevorama
I can tell you I have worked as a translator and it used to be that the hourly
rates were respectable. Nowadays you make the same as an admin assistant.

Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology. I ended
up learning how to code and I am working on something now that uses language
and programming (NLTK)and oddly, I found programming to be much easier than
learning languages (I speak 6 human languages ) because it is a lot more
predictable, stable and less dependent on context.

Translators should learn how to code. There is a lot of demand now for people
who can do NLP.

~~~
geomark
"Translation is one job that has already been disrupted by technology."

For some language pairs that is true. And that's one reason people aren't
willing to pay decent rates for human translation. But for other language
pairs machine translation produces nonsense. I've run a small translation
agency addressing one of the latter language pairs and have stopped focusing
effort on building it since there aren't enough customers willing to pay for
decent translations. I even get people who send me text that came from
automatic translation and ask me to proofread it, saying it should be quick
and low cost to do so because it is "already translated". In fact it is worse
than starting with the original and doing the translation because it is mostly
nonsense.

~~~
whatevorama
I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not
work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't
need super exact translations. What I meant by my comment was that it used to
be that knowing many languages was a valuable skillset, i.e. "you can get a
job easily". That is no longer true. One reason for that is the rise of
"translation agencies" which have taken a big chunk off of the pay rate.

I am learning Chinese and a bit of Russian but it will take about three years
to become fluent in these two since the alphabets are different.

Translation gave me the ability to see abstract patterns in text which is
something I only realized when I was randomly attacked by what appeared to be
bots on Quora. I could tell the language patterns buried underneath the non-
sense and I could see through their code. This was useful but unexpected.

That is when I realized that language is related to form (syntax) as much as
it's related to meaning and that's how it is connected to programming (or how
I experienced this connection, I am not sure if there is an "official"
explanation somewhere).

------
kbutler
The "replaceable" nature of the translator is the key.

As long as publishers can easily get a different person to do the work with
little effect on the success of the piece, translation compensation will be
low.

Yes, it is a creative effort. Yes, an excellent translation (especially of
poetry!) is difficult, and is a much better final product.

But if the translator's name doesn't drive sales, translators won't be
compensated as if it did.

------
visarga
Old books have been translated many times, new books compete with millions of
other books and are easily overlooked, and have to compete with FB feeds and
online articles. That's why it's hard to get good pay in translation. There's
an overabundance of content in all domains: text, image and video. We have
reached an age of post-scarcity with digital content.

------
throwayedidqo
Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill.
In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently.
Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

You're not going to get paid well for a job that close to 15% of the
population can do with no training

~~~
dang
First, this is the sort of shallow dismissal we need less of on HN.

Second, please don't routinely create throwaway accounts to post with here.
It's fine if there's some specific purpose, e.g. something personally
sensitive, but we ban users who do it routinely. Hacker News is a community.
Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other
users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no
community, and that would be an entirely different forum.

~~~
ue_
To be fair, community can and does develop without usernames at all, it's just
that people aren't on a personal basis with one another. To be honest, I
recognise or even look at most usernames and I doubt many others do. It's
similar to reddit, in which someone's username will only be noticed if they
are extremely popular (very rare) or have a novelty username.

The effect is lessened here because the prominence of one's posts is not tied
to how many points they have (like on old forums) because a person's points
are not immediately visible. But anonymous messaging with optional usernames
works just fine as seen on 2channel, 4chan, 8chan and the 'old chans' (now
defunct).

I don't think community is at all dependent on usernames being used or not.

~~~
dang
No, I have to insist on this. Some people want the kind of forum where there
are no usernames, and that's just fine. But HN is not that kind of forum.
Users who want that are welcome to find (or create) such a place, just not to
turn HN into it.

It's important to draw clear lines around what HN is and isn't, and this is
one of those lines.

~~~
ue_
I agree totally that HN is not that kind of forum, I was more picking up on
the point that community does not require names to exist. Sorry if you weren't
trying to make that point!

~~~
dang
Ah I get it now. Yes, that's a valid distinction.

