Translation as a Profession (Benjamins Translation Library)

308 Translation as a Profession– it is much cheaper and easier to resort to freelance sub-contractors than to facethe additional investment, overheads, charges, taxes and red tape that salariedstaff usually imply.As has already been said, a significant number of major translation companieshave chosen to reduce the number of their in-house personnel, retaining only theproject managers and the commercial department plus those translators who, fortechnical or commercial reasons or, even more so, for reasons of confidentiality,are absolutely not expendable. This is all the easier as it usually simply means‘converting’ salaried staff into sub-contractors – former employees keep doingwhat they used to do in-house, but as self-employed freelancers. This is part ofa universal trend whereby individual service providers are expected to bear thecosts and risks that the companies are no longer prepared to shoulder.1.13 A never ending quest for productivity gainsThe gradual (or, in some cases, not so gradual) move towards industrialisationis a direct result of the continuing quest for higher productivity, generally (andregrettably) measured in terms of the number of words that a translator can/musttranslate in a given length of time. This is the driving force behind all the changeswe have been describing, but it can also potentially be synonymous with decliningquality: in the area of translation, enhanced quality and increased productivityrarely go hand in hand all the way.1.14 Division of labour and operator specialisationThe division of labour has been made possible by increasing operator specialisation.In order to rationalise work processes and to optimise the work done byeach operator, translating is now often segmented into a number of different operationseach of which is carried out by a different ‘expert’. This is particularly thecase when the provision of a global translation service requires special skills (when,say, an IT specialist extracts the different components of a Web site before translationor a technician cues the time-codes on a video before the subtitles are added).But this kind of specialisation also occurs in large translation companies, wherethe source material will be broken down or disassembled so that it can be dealtwith successively by an information retrieval expert, a terminologist, a translator,a proof-reader, etc.