From the blog post time machine…How translators can communicate their value as cross-cultural communicators to give clients what they really want.

This post is adapted from a post I wrote on my old blog back in 2008, around six months after setting up my business. Gosh, my blog posts in 2008 were long!

‘The Translator as Strategic Partner’ conference, London, 22nd–23rd November 2008

One weekend back in November 2008, I attended The Translator as Strategic Partner conference in London.

Because 2008 is so long ago in internet terms, very little record of this translation conference exists today. I was into Twitter big time in 2008, and was live micro-blogging from the event throughout the weekend. 😮‍💨

Because of the live micro-blogging, my original blog post about the conference was an expanded series of tweets – each tweet providing a subheading for each of my main conference takeaways. Happily, if you click on each of the links below they will still take you to my vintage 2008 tweets. It looks like I’d yet to learn about hashtags, though. Hi there, past me! 👋

At the time, I felt the conference was a wake-up call in the world of professional translation. Many of the key messages it communicated are still true today, most especially that change is a constant, and that we still have work to do in communicating our value as strategic partners.

The conference started early. We started with a welcome address by Michael Benis on being quality driven rather than cost driven 10:14 AM Nov 22nd.

Michael set the theme of the conference, which was ‘a workshop conference for a changing industry’. The following two quotes basically sum it up:

‘For a communications industry, the translation industry doesn’t communicate very well’. 10:16 AM Nov 22nd

‘The client cares about their business objectives and bottom line’ 10:18 AM Nov 22nd

The translation industry needs to roll with the punches and adapt to clients’ needs in order to survive. As shy, retiring translators we often undersell ourselves, and, in Michael’s words ‘effective cross-cultural communication requires a strategic partner’. We offer more than ‘just’ translation, so why aren’t we selling that added value?

Next up: Ros Schwartz on client relations 10:33 AM Nov 22nd

I was really excited about this session, the title of which was ‘Client relations: Why and how to be proactive’. Ros argued that in translation nowadays, fidelity to the original is simply not enough. It has to be more than that; it goes without saying that clients expect us to be reliable translators, to meet our deadlines and stay faithful to the original message of their texts, but what will really make a difference to the ‘bottom line’ is that clients’ translated texts are fit for purpose. This was a crucial point, since cultural differences usually mean that what would be acceptable for one target audience would not necessarily make an impact on a target audience another cultural/linguistic community.

Copywriting skills: how they add value to your profile as a translator and what you offer to clients 11:02 AM Nov 22nd

I’ve already written about how as translators we are also writers, and we can hone these skills to add value to what we offer. We can also seek feedback from our clients to see where we can help them achieve their business objectives.

Working together as specialists to produce a project: be a problem solver 11:03 AM Nov 22nd

Ros went on to argue that clients have both articulated and unarticulated needs from their translators – as in, they may not even realise what they really need from their translations and it is our job to make that our business. As strategic partners and language specialists, we are able to identify and highlight blind spots for our clients.

It’s all about communication, guys. Truly excellent talk by Ros Schwartz 11:25 AM Nov 22nd

Bill Maslen encourages us to seek out feedback – ask to see the final product that goes to the client 12:34 PM Nov 22nd

Bill Maslen of the Word Gym was up next, with a session called ‘Strategic partnerships: principles and solutions, triumphs and tragedies’. Bill used a chart that neatly illustrated his point, and demonstrated the buy-in from the top-level people in companies throughout the product development process: right at the end, when the translation is commissioned, the buy-in from the top bods is almost zero. What does this tell us?

…seeing the final product will help you understand your client’s needs and the sort of copy they’re seeking for their target market 12:36 PM Nov 22nd

This session followed on nicely from the one before, again commenting that in terms of the perceived value of what we do, translation really suffers from an image problem. To improve it, we need to get more involved and really understand our clients’ needs better. We need to demonstrate how we analyse texts and the overall process. Bill encouraged us to ask to see the final product that is sent on to the end client.

What does a client look for above all in translation? Reliability, cost effectiveness, intelligent approach, and good working relationship 2:27 PM Nov 22nd

These were the words of Cate Avery’s client on what they look for in their translation service providers. In short, ‘reliability’, ‘cost effectiveness’, and ‘good working relationship’ shouldn’t be anything new, but ‘intelligent approach’ wasn’t something I’d heard before. It may be self-evident that translators should have an ‘intelligent approach’ to their work, but perhaps this needs to be demonstrated more clearly in how we approach our clients and in our marketing campaigns.

Paraphrased quote from Jay Kettle-Williams: ‘the days when we can call ourselves a translator, full stop, are gone’. 3:00 PM Nov 22nd

Jay Kettle-Williams presented a very entertaining and lively session called ‘It’s not what you want to give the client, it’s what the client needs’. This continued the theme established earlier in the day. A true expert on linguistics, Jay calls translators the ‘codebreakers’ for their clients; highlighting the fact that we often do so much more than simply ‘translate’ A to B.

Jost Zetzsche on idealised notions of translators. Jost asks, ‘does quality spell u-s-a-b-i-l-i-t-y?’ 4:20 PM Nov 22nd

Jost Zetzsche, of Toolkit fame, spoke about our age-old idealisation of the patron saint of translators, St. Jerome. We risk being constrained by this idealisation of a translator who, let’s face it, innovative as he was at the time, was born c. 347. Instead, we need to roll with the times and think about the true purpose of our texts.

A particular quote I remember from this part of the day was that ‘nobody is going to read your texts as carefully as a translator’ (I can’t remember who said this, unfortunately). How true that is. In 2023, this quote is still lodged in my memory.

Day 2 of the conference and I’m sleep-starved due to too much coffee late at night and an over-excited kitten. 9:10 AM Nov 23rd

Oh, and by the way, there is snow on the ground in London! 9:52 AM Nov 23rd

Very much enjoying a style workshop run by Ros Schwartz – very creative and lots of different approaches to learn from 12:55 PM Nov 23rd

As a solo worker, it’s easy to forget how beneficial it is to be able to pick the brains of other translators. I learned a lot from this interactive session about how best to approach creative translation for marketing texts, for example. It’s hard to know how much licence the translator really has to adapt a client’s text for the target audience, but this is reason #2059 why it’s important to have an open dialogue with your client.

After a very impressive Caribbean lunch, Jost Zetzsche from translators’ toolkit is up again to ‘set priorities straight’… 2:27 PM Nov 23rd

Jost Zetzsche did another presentation, this time on Machine Translation, called ‘Setting priorities straight: Us or the Machine?’ – a contentious issue!

In 2023, we all know that Machine Translation, and now AI, continues to be highly contentious.

Quote from Jost: ‘how can we get back behind the wheel?’ 2:31 PM Nov 23rd

Jost said that we needed to acknowledge that progress was being made in Machine Translation (MT). OK the MT output was often extremely silly, but we needed to bear in mind what clients need their translations for. It may be in future that some of us would take on ‘post-editing’ of machine translated-text as part of our portfolio, but the important thing was for us to regain some control over how this pans out. We need to be drivers of change, rather than the passengers. This was a point I believe is fundamental to the future of our profession (or any profession, come to that).

So, in 2023, do we still think translation might have an image problem? Comment below 👇

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