Translation as a Profession (Benjamins Translation Library)

312 Translation as a Professionwhere work providers will nevertheless insist on service providers sticking tothe original deadlines.5. The growing industrialisation of the translation process and translation toolshas meant a division of labour and sharing of responsibility along threemain lines:a) A division of tasks between various specialised operators working togetheron a same project (i.e. the pre-translator, the terminologist, the translator,the proof-reader and the reviser), which can sometimes cause difficultiesin terms of co-ordination and homogeneity;b) A division of responsibilities between brokers and agencies on the onehand and external operators (or sub-contractors) on the other hand.Further divisions can be found when the broker farms out the work totwo different service providers: one doing the translation and the othercarrying out all the technical operations on compound material prior toand following the translation proper, or when the broker himself carriesout whatever operations return higher value-added.c) A division of statuses between the high value-added, high-tech operatorson the one hand, who carry out the pre- and post-translation tasks usingsophisticated technology and the low or no value-added operators on theother hand, who carry out the translation armed with ‘nothing more’than a word processor and what has now become an implicit standard:a translation memory management tool.Wherever effective, this kind of division has perverse effects, by deprivingtranslators of overall control over their work, and even, in many cases, ofan overall vision of the project they happen to be working on. In this case,translators have no contact with either the client or the contractor, or evenwith the other people working on the same project. They tend to becomeoperators working on a virtual assembly line withnooneelsebutthe‘online’project manager in touch (and not even in sight). And, apparently, what thefuture holds in store is the translator translating segments that are pushed orpulled onto his workstation by some workflow management robot with nocontext at all.The industrialisation of translation tools and procedures is largely responsible forthe appearance and the development of the rift between three separate translationworlds, i.e. ‘industrial’ translation, ‘craft’ translation, and ‘amateur’ translation,which coincide with the different markets described in Chapter 4 (Section 7.8 –Volume (large vs. small markets)a) The main features of industrial translation (whether completely industrialisedor still undergoing the process) are large volumes, multilingual projects,