Yesterday I saw a post in a social media where the author tried to devaluate skills of translators. He believes that “simple knowledge of a foreign language” should not give you any privileges and there is no need to pay reasonable money for your work because today anybody can easily do the same or the AI will do it for them.

Eh, what? Seriously? Why on earth I was so sure that most people finally could see difference between speaking a foreign language and being able to translate. But it looks like I probably live in some filter bubble and most of us really don’t know anything about professions other than theirs.

So, here I am — writing basic things on translation and fair payment. *Sorry if they seem too obvious for some of you.*

• Any job should be paid fairly. If a translator spends 5 hours localizing your video content, they should get fair payment for these 5 hours of their time! If you think that this job is easy enough and it can be done by anyone speaking the language or by machine translator — no problem! Hire the first available person ready to work for food or use AI — and be satisfied with the result you get (I’m not sure your audience will be satisfied though). But if you hire a professional translator specializing in the field, you should be ready to pay: for their knowledge, expertise, and quality output.

• We all hear about AI too much these days. Yes, translators are among those who are under threat. But most of us forget that there are a lot of languages in the world and machine translation can cope only with a few language pairs at a decent level. Moreover, the list of topics suitable for AI is also quite limited due to specifics of terminology, style and many more nuances clear only for experienced translators. I’ll get back to this sensitive AI topic later, in another post.

• You know this thing, when a housewife’s job is never noticed if it is done well, but always noticed when it isn’t done? Absolutely the same happens with good translation. People rarely give translators credit while reading great text or enjoying great movie. And still, we always notice when translation is bad: we stumble over awkward phrases or wrong terminology, laugh at literal translation of idioms, miss the charm of cinema because of low-quality translation or swear when our favorite mobile games get poor localization.

Yet through it all, a lot of us still think that translator is not a profession worth solid compensation, it’s just a regular skill like ability to talk or walk.

Unfair, isn’t it?

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash