State of industry

Hello, fellow translators!

I am a English-French/-French/English translator who did a lot of corporate work in the late 80s and early 90s, primarily through a company in the New York area. I then changed my career focus and worked in banking for the past 15 years or so. I'm now interested in getting back into translation, but wondered what the general state of the industry is, since I believe things have changed since I was involved in it.

- Is there still a lot of corporate work out there?
- What is the effect of machine translation? Are you doing a lot of rescue jobs? Have you lost jobs to machines?

Gracias!

Hello Lisette,

My situation is, in some way, similar to yours.

I did English/Spanish/English translation in Mexico for several years, but moved to the USA 11 years ago to start my own family, so I quit translating. I have now retaken translations, but it's being difficult to find new clients.

It might be easier for you if, somehow, you have kept in touch with your former clients; otherwise, be patient.

I personally think is getting harder since there is a lot of competition out there (at least for the language pair I know), and machine translations are becoming more popular. From my point of view, it could take years to build a good client portfolio.

¡Buena suerte!

Xóchitl

Hello Lisette,
Machine translation is being used more and more now, and the quality of the translations has improved considerably in terms of getting the general idea of a regular text (not scientific or highly technical). However, machine translation still needs to be fixed by human translators.

There are also CAT tools (like Trados, Omega T, Wordfast) that reduce turnaround times a lot, you should get them and use them if you want to get back in business.

I have to say, I'm really not worried about machine translations for the time being. Some of the problems with machine translations are their often literal approach, their inability to comprehend many phrases, and other odd syntactical devices, and the fact that a machine will never be able to reproduce a person's style with any degree of accuracy. So I agree with Andrea; they have improved and and can-often-transmit a general thought, but I don't think we humanoid Translators have anything to worry about, at least for the time being.