Twenty years ago I got rid of all contracts with translation agencies except for two. Beginners used to compile databases of translation companies and use those to generate personalized mail-merge letters offering to work for very little. When IBM and Microsoft released DOS 3.3, the Proprinter 2 and QuietWriter 3, translation shifted from Europe to America, and “very little” was pretty good. Over time, Europeans learned code pages and bought Windows and the market flattened with the entry of pauper labor.
The recessions that followed the Biden/Reagan Crash of 1987 and the Bush Jr Asset-Forfeiture Crash of 2008 wrecked the profitability of most middlemen. Yet translators are mostly stuck in a time machine, relying on pestering spam instead of personalized mailmerges. Every day I get propositions like:
Salutation: Dear “Hey You” Attachment: some dreary CV in Word, which is a vehicle for macro viruses Qualifications: no test passed, no language degree from a real university and no knowledge of math, physics or chemistry
All of these go straight to the trash. Once in a blue moon someone will address me by name, but instead of a link to their website or blog, they attach a dreary PDF. The truth is that anyone with enough language skills and entrepreneurship to be worth asking for help already has his of her own website and writes his or her own bids and NDAs. Translators who want to be taken seriously by law offices, engineering, geology, mining or oil companies, or doctors, manufacturers or what-have-you need websites with taking bilingual CVs, not spam with attachments.
I have boilerplate bids I have used for 20 years, and for a fee make these available to colleagues who will do me proud. Same goes for NDAs. For more on this see A Beginner’s Guide to Handling WIYRdos.(link) Don’t send me “Hey You” spam with Word attachments and no proof of ATA certification or a website. Instead, make your own website and/or blog–and make it attractive.
Mine have served me well for 20 years and freed me from ever again signing lengthy, one-sided “agreements” that never commit to actually paying me–much less doing it on time. Be an entrepreneur, live by your wits and build up clientele by offering satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Pretty soon beginners will be sending you spam with Word attachments begging to be exploited.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
Does the altruistic initiation of force in defense of socialism make germ warfare attacks OK? (link)
Reason magazine had been my trusted source of news I can afford for four decades. Their investigative journalism is top-notch and often diametrically contrary to the findings of the looter press. Remember the Love Canal crisis? Of course not! Reason reported that government officials forced the owners of the sealed pit to hand it over or they’d take it by force. That was how a coercive bureaucrats got to put a children’s playground on a chemical dump. They and the Kleptocracy media then blamed laissez-faire greed when a state agency tore open one end of the pit causing leaks. That got memory-holed in a hurry.
The communist dictatorship from which the epidemic spread will not allow foreign physicians and real scientists to test blood samples of Wuhan lab workers. To the Kleptocracy media, the dictatorship controlling China–like ecclesiastical bodies of older religions–is a credible and reliable source of objectively true information that it won’t allow to be verified for reasons of faith. But isn’t China also the dictatorship that–by altruistic coercion no less deadly than that practiced by Germany’s brand of christian national socialism–killed an even greater number of people than its German counterpart?
You tell me…
Good Reading: The Adventures of a Physicist, by Luis Alvarez, is available without leaving your chair on Amazon Kindle. This is the scientist who invented the detonator for the Nagasaki bomb that ended WW2. With his geologist son Alvarez also developed the bolide impact theory of mass extinctions. The dinosaurs–and most other species–were wiped out suddenly. Alvarez explains how a meteor or comet the size of Manhattan or Tinian can again wipe out ignorant or lazy species. Remember that before voting to elect looter politicians who peddle influence and seek to ban human engineering from the solar system.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
After the takeover by freelancers in 1980, once successful passage of a translation test became a requirement for the privilege of voting in association elections or running for office, the ATA de facto became the American Translators Association. Suffrage was also offered to translators of extremely rare languages for which no tests were available, on recommendation of two active members. The primary upshot was that actual translators of verified competence were put in charge of making ATA policy after earningthe accreditation of their peers. The disadvantage was that owners of translation agencies could no longer make policy unless they first passed a translation test. Thus began the Golden Age of the American Translators Association, thanks to Ben Teague and Patricia Newman.(link)
Unhorsed translation agency owners made it clear they were discontented, and wanted their unquestioned authority restored. Individuals not competent to pass a written translation test were just as unhappy as people who drop out of college, and for the same reason. These two disgruntled classes were soon exploited by the American Society of Association Executives, which proceeded to retask the bylaws, install its own well-paid Executive to supervise ATA board meetings and make sure that our “elected” officers never receive so much as a penny for their efforts. Regular mail-in ballots used by similar associations were abolished by repeating unsubstantiated assertions, and a “proxy” system was installed so ALL votes are basically handed over to boardmembers. The ASAE also made sure that its own attorneys and soi disant “experts” were consulted on all policy matters. The new order’s big project sought to undermine our translator testing program and burden the ATA with its salaried hirelings. The ASAE itself advertises a staff of 47, not including attorneys–whose particulars are not easy to find.(link)
People unable to pass a simple translation test and too stuck-up to admit the fact, pestered the board members until “peer review” opened a loophole through which passed a flood of people unwilling to sit for a test–including some translation company owners. Agencies were thereby able to regain voting control over the Association as the ASAE tightened its own control over the the board of directors, orchestrating a series of single-candidate “elections.” Members who had earned the right to vote by passing a written test were shocked to discover that it suddenly cost over $350 a year to keep credentials they maintained for $50 during the 1980s. Younger members were pressured to buy tickets to conventions, etc., “or else” lose their credentials through added continuing “education” requirements which, to some of us, were not unlike extortion.
A so-called ASAE expert was paid 55 cents a word to produce an essay recommending that non-members be allowed to take the test. They could then qualify for exploitation by translation companies as certified translators. Almost nobody able to actually translate and vote thought this was a good idea and the motion failed. The extent of decay is such that of ATA members claiming the ability to translate Portuguese, only 1% have passed the tests from and into that language. Wannabees and beginners lacking ability yet inveigled into joining are clearly numerous enough to outvote actual translators who have clearly-demonstrated ability. A board appointed via single-candidate elections and run by a representative of a “Society” that staffs it with multiplying staffers it selects and puts on salary–is anything but a representative democracy.
The ASAE and the translation agencies it represents never let go of the idea of making translation tests serve their own purposes rather than those of translators. Instead of financing their own separate association with an independent testing program, they cling like brood parasites to the existing pool of tested-and-true translators. ASAE/agency plans to debauch the renamed certification testing program into a rubber-stamp handmaid service for agencies backed by an Orwellian managerial corporation is still at the top of a single-minded agenda that does NOT benefit professional translators.
Now they are back. As before, they are selling yet another ill-dissembled attempt to attain that purpose, papered over with insincere assurances and undisclosed “criteria” for packing the membership by adding pliable voters. And no wonder! The current germ lab viral epidemic has crippled the ASAE Executive’s ability to draw income by mandating attendance at conferences. It therefore comes as no surprise that a story was packaged-up with yet another attempt to “restructure” to favor volume and quantity at the expense of ability and quality. If you haven’t seen their pitch paper, write me.
If you believe colleges should hand diplomas to students who flunk exams, then put them on the Board of Regents, you’re what they want. If you believe that discrimination on the grounds of ability is baaad and that a goood rabble in ignorance is what the ASAE and translation companies need to help keep translators in their place, they have found their minion. **
But if you perceive that the ASAE resembles a vampire herding a large mob of potential translators into empowering a minority of middlemen to exert control over the tiny core of actual certified translators that make the association worth having, then reject the puppet board’s latest rewrite of the usual gambit. I will gladly sign a petition to be rid of ASAE control and management and hire and to pay actual tested translators suitable remuneration for their valuable service on the board–once they win a real election with at least two candidates in the running. –J Henry Phillips, thrice-certified Life member, now in my 33rd year with what was, when I joined it, a genuine translators association worth keeping alive.
Footnote ** “All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.” —George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham (link)
Clarity isn’t oversimplification
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
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