Survey invitation: study on the professionalisation of freelance translation Thread poster: Mariah Hussain
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Mariah Hussain
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:25
French to English
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Hello everyone!
I am a PhD student from the University of Leeds evaluating the professional attributes associated with the freelance translator profession. If you are a translator, then you are invited to participate in my online survey which should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. The survey will ask for your opinions regarding the impact of modern translation practices and attitudes on the professionalisation of freelance translation.
You can access the s... See more Hello everyone!
I am a PhD student from the University of Leeds evaluating the professional attributes associated with the freelance translator profession. If you are a translator, then you are invited to participate in my online survey which should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. The survey will ask for your opinions regarding the impact of modern translation practices and attitudes on the professionalisation of freelance translation.
You can access the survey via this link: https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/professionalisation-of-freelance-translation . The link will open to an information sheet detailing the aim of the research, and you can access the survey by clicking “Next” at the bottom of the page. Please note that participation is voluntary, and feel free to share this survey with your colleagues.
At the end of the survey, there will be an invitation to participate in a follow-up focus group that will provide you with the opportunity to discuss the issues addressed in the survey with others. Please note that this is also voluntary.
Thank you in advance!
Kind regards,
Mariah ▲ Collapse
| | | | Tom in London
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:25
Member (2008)
Italian to English
At last! A serious, well-configured survey. I've done it and I recommend it to others.
| | | | Mariah Hussain
United Kingdom
Local time: 20:25
French to English
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TOPIC STARTER | Thank you for responding! | Nov 14, 2023 |
Thank you kindly for responding to my survey. Feel free to circulate it!
Tom in London wrote:
At last! A serious, well-configured survey. I've done it and I recommend it to others.
| | | | | Tom is right | Nov 15, 2023 |
But what did you mean by professional and deprofessionalisation?
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| Should you be permitted to translate if you haven't been through academia? | Nov 16, 2023 |
Christopher Schröder wrote:
But what did you mean by professional and deprofessionalisation?
I suspect this survey is trying to ask those who have studied translation in an actual university if they feel bad about us dirty folks who just walked into the profession from the streets outside. It almost, almost made me abandon the survey.
I did set foot into an actual university at least during a while and can confidently say that whatever I learned about my languages by reading, spending time in the country where the language is spoken, listening to music, watching movies, talking to people in these languages, plus my knowledge in my specialty areas, plus my computer knowledge all contribute more to being efficient as a translator than any academic merit in linguistics or translation studies.
You don't really need a university to divide capable from incapable translators. But you will get bad translation quality even using capable translators if you force them into some platform (or should I say dystopian localization assembly line) and make them translate out-of-context text snippets for cheap.
If you let AI write or translate your texts, they will be *nearly* as good as the real thing. If you want your text to be as good as the real thing, you can hire a real person to fix the AI-generated shit, or hire a real person to produce the real thing in the first place.
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Anna Sarah Krämer wrote:
I suspect this survey is trying to ask those who have studied translation in an actual university if they feel bad about us dirty folks who just walked into the profession from the streets outside. It almost, almost made me abandon the survey.
I didn't get that feeling at all. The questions were all very open-ended I thought.
I didn't and wouldn't associate "deprofessionalisation" with university education. Maybe it's because I'm from the UK (also where the survey is from) where translation education is available, mostly in the form of postgraduate diplomas, but are by no means required of translators and don't carry much weight with employers. In Denmark, however, a five-year translation degree is de rigeur.
I thought - but wasn't sure - that "deprofessionalisation" referred to the use of MT and AI and TMs and agency pricing and all the other things that (a) make it harder to deliver professional quality, (b) make it harder to earn a living and (c) encourage amateurs to come in and do things they really shouldn't.
| | | | | Clarification | Nov 16, 2023 |
Christopher is partly right - until 2016 a five-year translation degree was required if you wanted to be a State Authorized Translator in Denmark. The title, Translatør in Danish) was protected. For English the degree was a cand. ling. merc. from Aarhus or Copenhagen University.
Anyone else could set up a business and translate, qualified, professional or not, but they had to use a different title, Oversætter. That is in fact the generic Danish word for a translator, but t... See more Christopher is partly right - until 2016 a five-year translation degree was required if you wanted to be a State Authorized Translator in Denmark. The title, Translatør in Danish) was protected. For English the degree was a cand. ling. merc. from Aarhus or Copenhagen University.
Anyone else could set up a business and translate, qualified, professional or not, but they had to use a different title, Oversætter. That is in fact the generic Danish word for a translator, but there you go.
In 2016 the protection was lifted, so now anyone can call themselves Translatør. However, out of respect for the ´real´ ones, or out of habit, many still use the title of Oversætter.
This covers anyone from respected and highly professional colleagues - usually with degrees and training that are not precisely the one required for State Authorization - to people who just think they know enough to try, and all those in between.
Many, like me, have degrees from other countries, with or without diplomas or other qualifications from Danish universities.
I do not consider a degree in translation as the only way to professionalisation. My father, a mathematician and theologian, was a Bible Translator, and many of them were highly professional, but there was no direct training in translation in his day.
I learned a lot at university, but my training in librarianship and Business Information Management was an important part of it.
I think professionalism in translation is an approach, which you may learn at school or university, or may gather intuitively from reading and studying in real life. Usually it will be a combination of both.
Professionalism is an awareness of language and ability to handle it, but not the same as an advanced knowledge of linguistics, etymology and language theory etc. (That is no hindrance, but not automatically a help either!)
It is hard to pin down ... and some gifted amateurs can produce beautiful translations.
[Edited at 2023-11-16 20:20 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Kay Denney 
France
Local time: 21:25
French to English
Christopher Schröder wrote:
But what did you mean by professional and deprofessionalisation?
Both Anna and Christopher are right.
Personally I see more of a threat from Marie in Accounts who worked in a bar for six months in London and thinks she can English, than from MT and AI. They're the ones my clients tend to listen to. They know just enough English to confirm that my translation sounds nothing like the French (because it shouldn't, because I use idiomatic English the way native English speakers do) and to confirm that it could have been translated literally, after all Word doesn't underline any of the words in red.
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Zea_Mays
Italy
Local time: 21:25
English to German
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I have found the survey quite biased, which is a no-go in research. Some questions are also a bit naive.
On the "professionalism" point I agree with Christine.
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