Translation as a Profession (Benjamins Translation Library)

284 Translation as a Profession– The potential market for any translator or translation company is now global.Anyone can offer his services to any potential work provider or employer whohas access to the worldwide Web: it just takes a home page and a resume.– Anyone with a translation need can now appeal for offers worldwide. Anyonecan put in a call for tenders and, up to a point, even put up non confidentialdocuments for translation to get quotes, then simply sit back and wait fortranslators to put in bids for the contract and send samples of their work.– A translator living in a rural village in Brittany (Western France) can intheory find clients in Colorado or Copenhagen, just as an English to Frenchtranslator from Wuhan (China) or from Madeira can find clients in Paris.The globalisation of the translation market means that clients and translatorscan be located anywhere in the world where there is an Internet access – andthat is just about anywhere. It also means that the possibility now exists forwork providers to systematically compare prices the world over and go for thelowest bidder.– The Internet also allows translators (and revisers) from different parts of theworld to work on the same translation contract under the same project managementsetup and even to translate and edit the same document collaborativelywithout ever meeting each other face to face.– More directly, being an international medium of communication, the Internethas helped to increase the global volume of translation worldwide – asdemonstrated by the expanding machine translation market in this sector.This raises the question of ‘human’ vs. ‘machine’ translation. In fact, time willno doubt show that the massive invasion of rather poor machine translationspublished or obtained via the Web will contribute towards the disrepute ofmachinetranslationandhelptoplacetheemphasisongoodqualityhumantranslation.Still, it must be noted that, if more than 95% of machine translation is ‘poor’,the remaining 5% is astonishingly good: it concerns technical documents processedby translation engines into which major corporations have pumpedhuge amounts of terminology, phraseology, translation memories, and algorithmsthat can be taught to correct their mistakes. Also, if ‘human’ translationis to have a bright future, translators must be able to adapt very quickly to thenon-standard demands of all those who need to access information.– In fact, everyone wants his information up on the Web and everyone looksfor information from the Web and this generates business both ways fortranslators.Given that English, the worldwide language par excellence, is a prerequisitefor visibility on the World Wide Web, translators are called upon to translatemore and more from all varieties of English into any other language (so thateveryone ‘gets hold of’ the other people’s information) and from any language into