Is Freelancing Over?

Is Freelancing Over? Many people think translation is simple and should therefore be cheap. Maybe this depends on the very high number of persons searching for a second job in translation or resorting to translation as a way to cope with the harshness of a supposedly temporary situation. On March 6, Jim Axelrod of CBS Evening News reported that the number of freelancers in the United States has reached 40 million since the beginning of the crisis two years ago, approximately one third of the total population. Europe makes no difference. Self-employment covers 35,7% of jobs in Greece, 26,1% in Italy, 24,5% in Portugal, 17,7% in Spain, 17,2% in Ireland, 14,8% in Belgium, 14,3% in Austria, 13,6% in the UK, 13,2% in the Netherlands, 12,6% in Finland, 11,9% in Germany, 10,6% in Sweden, and 10,8% in France; only Denmark and Luxembourg are below 10% with 9,1% and 7,2% respectively. The demand for translation is growing: in the “Language Services Market: 2010” report, Common Sense Advisory calculates that the market for outsourced language services was worth US$23.267 billion in 2009, that is growing at an annual rate of 13.15%, to reach US$38.12 billion in the coming five years. The growth of demand is coupled with the steady decrease of rates due to the changing in the nature of content. A varied bouquet of expertise and skills is required to be at the top of the market, and benefit of less competition, higher rates, and better terms and conditions, while language knowledge is still essential but no longer pivotal. Moreover, a number of companies knowingly use non-payment or delayed payment to finance improperly. To address the consequences of late or non-payment, a substantial cash flow is necessary, and freelancers should only accept small, regular, and quickly and well paid jobs. A wide customer base should also be necessary, but it is generally the result of intense and increasingly demanding marketing and customer relations activities. Today self-employment requires a long list of skills and different roles to play, while freelancing is still tied to an outdated and anti-historical romantic approach. Therefore, a shift in the paradigm of translation practice seems necessary. Maybe freelancing is no longer the best or the only option for translators to be in the market place, and a new approach should be devised that takes advantage of the opportunities brought by the latest technological innovations. Luigi Muzii has been working in the language industry for 28 years as a translator, localizer, technical writer and consultant. He is visiting professor of terminology and localization at the Libera Università degli Studi per l'Innovazione e le Organizzazioni – LUSPIO in Rome, Italy, the author of a book on technical writing, and of many papers and articles on translation, and localization. He has been one of the founders of the Italian association for terminology and of Gruppo L10N. The translation market is a mature (competitive) market. In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. In the translation industry, unit cost is close to zero and will continue to decline as a consequence of shortening production and industry chains with the raise of “freeconomics.” Basic services will increasingly be given away for free or almost for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features (freemium), making freelance translators an endangered or at least threatened species. In “Beggars at the Globalization Banquet” (late 2002), Common Sense Advisory reported that the GILT industry was equal in value to the bicycle industry. Can you recall the name of a global bicycle company or two? Do you need to know the production process to buy a bike? How much is the price important to you? Do you go to a convenience store, or to a specialized shop, or to a sport store, or to a hypermarket to buy a bike? Copywriting and marketing services are important, and yet customers buy a combination of expertise, knowledge, consultation, teamwork, and advice, with a flavor of convenience. “Freelancer” carries negative or substandard connotations. The term “free-lance” was first used by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe to describe a medieval mercenary indicating that the lance is not sworn to any lord’s services, not that the lance is available free of charge. Working for yourself is the ultimate dream for many, and the freedom that can come with it is incomparable. Still, many fail to make the leap from being employed to self-employment due to the countless risks and uncertainty involved. In many cases freelancing is not a choice. The number of freelancers in the United States has reached 40 million since the beginning of the crisis two years ago, approximately one third of active population. Businesses increasingly use self-employed workers to escape the constraints of permanent employment in a highly regulated labor market: to evade social security contributions, to hold workers to ransom with the threat of dismissal, to underpay professional workers, as a lawful form of undeclared employment. According to Common Sense Advisory’s report on Translation and Localization Pricing, most LSP’s, regardless of size, manage a virtual workforce of hundreds or even thousands of freelancers. Therefore, it is no coincidence that leading companies in the translation industry “hire” dummy freelancers to have them carry out the typical tasks of typical employees; a good way to circumvent hiring a professional translator is also known as cost reduction. Many people think translation is simple and should therefore be cheap. Maybe this depends on the very high number of persons searching for a second job in translation or resorting to translation as a way to cope with the harshness of a supposedly temporary situation. Moonlighters also include those who define themselves as translators, but are or claim to be trainers, developers, marketing consultants, etc. How many freelancers are actually full-time self-employed professionals, and how many are simply moonlighters? Moonlighters are professionals or amateurs? Is 48% an exaggerated percentage of moonlighting translators? What distinguishes professionals and amateurs? In the translation market, MLV’s are wholesalers, SLV’s are retail establishments or department stores, traditional LSP’s are convenience stores, while freelancers are shopping outlets or local shops for local people. The translation industry workforce supposedly consists of 87% of women. Is this the image you would like to represent you? Yet it is still the one most commonly associated with a freelance woman (not necessarily a translator). When a freelancing business is defined as cheap specialized work that is produced every time, at all hours of the day, without boundaries, contracts or any typicality of a successful business, clients will define it the same way and bring those expectations into every project. But is fairly-priced freelancing business possible and real? A freelance translator could not count on his/her own personal teams of accountants, marketers, salespeople, IT experts, and admin staff. Besides being almost an expert in the field s/he covers in his/her daily work, a freelance translator needs to become knowledgeable in all these other fields to run a successful business, and be capable of ’wearing’ different hats, at least as thinking habits. This expertise costs for developing and maintaining, every day more and more. What is the threshold of sustainability? Translation is number 3 on the list of retirement jobs that can be done from the beach. We all know that being a professional translator requires education, training, experience, dedication, time, and a lot of patience. Nevertheless, publications everywhere suggest otherwise. Is this due only to wrong perception, prejudice, or ignorance? Dana Forsythe wrote a forty-four-page book, Start a Business in Language Translation within 24 HOURS: Own a Business Today and Be Successful with No Prior Experience! Businesses always try to make profits by saving money through cheap transactions. Businesses always try to exploit people’s willingness to work for cheap, and yet such opinions and conducts have never misled the business community; they have only led translators to bemoan for their invaluable work being so poorly appreciated. A T-shirt saying “my cleaning lady earns more than I do” is no humorous way to point out that translators are poorly paid. It is not bemoaning nor protesting, it is connivance, if not complicity, with those who belittle, discredit, delegitimize translation, most of whom are proud freelancers. Actually, they are losers. Ironworkers earned less than their employers/designers/administrators. Yet their contribution was essential and their job was hard and dangerous. What have freelance translators in common with ironworkers? The difference between translators and ironworkers is the same as that between Charles Clyde Ebbets and his subjects. The risk is the same, not the way to use it. Others offer services. Translators apply for jobs. Others make business offers. Translators submit resumes. Others create visibility and awareness. Translators create ProZ profiles. Are you offering what you sell, or selling what you offer? One is about value, the other is about cost. One is about relevance, the other is utility. One is service, the other is commodity. One is long-term relationship, the other is short-term transactions. The following data from ProZ surveys speaks for itself: 31% never charge extra fees; 87.9% do not charge a fee for late payments; 56% do not belong to any professional organizations; 43.7% do not feel the need to charge anything when a job is canceled; 22.7% do not require a purchase order; 40% report not having enough work; 21.9% do not have payment terms; 20% do not enforce them; 75% will work even if they are really sick; 57% are almost fully dependent on agencies for work; 41.5% often work on weekends; 13% accept all projects they are offered. Who’s the culprit? The problem is the approach to translation that is definitely not economic, and this is fatal because most translation educators are not real translators; they are mostly linguists, scholars and literature devotees. This is a problem when it comes to translation industry. For the sake of their careers, translation educators will keep on teaching the same bullshit for a long time, until they will eventually change their perspective into a more economic one that makes them aware of the business view of translation. And this will come, as usual, from the customers, those who pay for translation, for the product, not for the hermeneutic process. Language is no longer pivotal in translation. Knowledge, skills, and tools are now. Language is a tool that is to be combined with specialized knowledge, and technical and technological skills. The proof is in the continued growth of the demand for language services at a rate of over 13% per year while the price of “basic” services has been dropping. Are 23,000 vendors across the globe offering translation services too many or are the most of them simply not capable of providing buyers with the services and the value they want at the best price, where best does not necessarily mean lowest but balanced? Smaller LSPs and freelancers bundle services in their pricing, while leading vendors break them out in their proposals. At the last Techonomy conference, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt said that “There was 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003, but that much information is now created every 2 days, and the pace is increasing...” The demand for translation is growing. In the “Language Services Market: 2010” report, Common Sense Advisory calculates that the market for outsourced language services was worth US$23.267 billion in 2009, that is growing at an annual rate of 13.15%, to reach US$38.12 billion in the coming five years. The growth of demand is coupled with the steady decrease of rates due to the changing in the nature of content. A varied bouquet of expertise and skills is required to be at the top of the market, and benefit of less competition, higher rates, and better terms and conditions, while language knowledge is still essential but no longer pivotal. The plunge in rates has come largely because translators are inadequately trained to provide what customers need and, thus, increase the perception that their work has little value, and in Dana Forsythe’s words, “As a translation broker you have the ability to build a lasting business doing something that’s easy and requires no experience.” Who should grant sustainable fees for translators? Translators do not create their own markets, and this goal won’t be achieved by whining about the various online portals and begging for minimum rates to be set or anything of that flavor. What is a sustainable fee? Translators still charge a rate per word, rarely depending on the nature, size and urgency of a project. The average human adult reads prose text at 275 words per minute. An average computer user reaches 19 words per minute for composition. This gives a service daily word rate of 122,880 words. Translators still require roughly the same amount of time that they did 25 to 50 years ago to deliver a page of new text in the target language. Service levels and industry pricing models have not kept pace with changing customer needs. How is a sustainable fee made? The change in the nature of content caused legions of amateurs and enthusiasts join professional translators to fill in the gaps with their “good enough” translations, like those produced by machine translation. Even lawyers are changing the way they compute their fees. The billable hour is no longer a totem. Many people ask for alternatives because different needs call for different billing structures. Clients are not merely trying to screw down fees, but rather are aiming for predictability and fairer, not just lower, bills. The most sought-after alternative to the billable hour is automating all the automatable stuff. This is a smart solution to bill also the hours experts and surveys estimate between 10% and 30% that are never billed by overworked, tired, and maybe bored attorneys who cannot keep track of every piece of work they do. Automation is a viable solution, not additional “reserves” for the profession, or limits to competition. While clients and users perceive translators as inadequately trained to provide what they need and, thus, consider their work of little value, the continuing complaints and claims for reserves are causing the lack of respect of many of their customers. In both cases, the outcome is the belief that translation is unjustifiably expensive and that translators benefit from a privileged position. At the last IMTT Vendor Management Seminar in Las Vegas, Arturo Quintero from Moravia said that his company does not employ translators as they depend on SLV’s, and that Moravia’s vendor management goal is to get the best quality translators at the lowest price. On the same occasion, Ting Zhuang from Enwisen said that her company’s supplier selection criteria are: cost/technology, people/culture, experience/references, quality/service. What makes best translators, then? However, in this business, often competitors don’t play fair. For example, always at the last IMTT Vendor Management Seminar in Las Vegas, Marie Flacassier from BeatBabel, said that accounting should be integrated in vendor management to play no games with payment, but we all know that the use of non-payment or delayed payment to improperly finance cash flow is common practice. To address the consequences of late or non-payment, a substantial cash flow is necessary, and freelancers should only accept small, regular, and quickly and well paid jobs. The translation industry is governed by regular market forces, and by others, which result directly from the conditioning, perceptions, isolation, and preparation or lack thereof that shape the average translator’s profile. Why did, and indeed do, translators need online clearinghouses like Aquarius, ProZ, TranslatorsCafé, etc.? To reach and offer themselves to LSP’s. Therefore translators have helped turn the client-provider relationship inside out, letting clients lead the way and dictate rates. Translators, not LSP, were and are mistaking. On the other hand, those clearinghouses were and still are somewhat necessary. In business the best product doesn’t always win. An inferior product with superior marketing often trumps a better product that is poorly positioned in the minds of consumers. Historically translators proved to be generally incapable of marketing themselves. Winning often comes down to those who execute the better strategy and connect most effectively to others, not to those who has the best or most talent. A problem arises when all the players on a marketplace boast the same unique selling proposition that makes any differentiation impossible. In fact, the unique selling proposition has an original defect: the offer must be exclusive; to be strong enough, attract new customers, and retain existing customers, competitors should not make the same proposition. On the contrary, quality is the common unique selling proposition of the translation industry. But if everyone is selling quality, where is the difference? Quality should be a prerequisite, a condition of existence on the market, not a selling proposition. Route 66 was the “Main Street of America” or the “Mother Road.” It went from Chicago to Los Angeles and was a major path for the economies of the communities through which it passed. In 1985, it was officially removed from the highway system, and now it is completely abandoned. Freelancing and old style translation could undergo the same fate as Route 66. A wide customer base should also be necessary, but it is generally the result of intense and increasingly demanding marketing and customer relations activities. Today self-employment requires a long list of skills and different roles to play, while freelancing is still tied to an outdated and anti-historical romantic approach. A combination of quality optimization, workflow management, and machine translation integrated with human translation and editing skills is the next stage to increase efficiency in translation. A shift in the paradigm of translation practice seems necessary. Freelancers are now the easy preys of global sharks or panting on neighborhood markets. The future does not seem to be more brilliant. All the major forces that are driving the market are outside the professional translation world, and freelancers do not have the means, the strength, and the capabilities to counter them. Content requiring translation is growing very fast: any company with a serious intention to grow must have a presence on foreign markets in all the different languages. This is actually one reason why machine translation is being developed: there are just not enough human translators to go around and there are translation jobs that would not be paid anyway. Machine translation is and will increasingly be used to convert large quantities of otherwise undecipherable texts into actionable information. The easiest job in the translation industry has to be the one disparaging machine translation. Some dismally poor translated output of a free online translation service fed with random text is shown along with some savory observations about the dangers in using such a service. Actually, this attitude could easily be translated by every reflective customers as a pitiful effort to hide the ignorance about the potential or proper application of machine translation, and the fear for the threat of being replaced if required to translate something poorly written with no context or glossary, and the wrong type of human knowledge. Any debate starting with the “machine translation is definitely bad” refrain has only led translators to be left outside the development of machine translation engines. Unfortunately, this also led to have freelance translators without any proper training or experience in machine translation. With still too many translators who offer a sloppy quality, not much better than that of a machine translation engine there is no surprise if customers are not willing to pay for it. The translation industry is still immature even though the translation market is perfectly mature. In a commodity market, products present no meaningful qualitative differences. Translation service providers often struggle to make a convincing case to justify translation costs while buyers are willing to pay for the “perceived value.” Can you really say there is a meaningful qualitative difference from one major vendor to another major vendor? When a translation company cannot demonstrate real and strong value-add, it spells “commoditization.” The outsourcing model itself has become commoditized, and companies are migrating to a managed service model to improve time-to-market and ROI, while reducing the risk and exposure. In this scenario, translators are the only ones left who see translation as a service. Buyers see it definitely only as a product. Too many people, not only in the Web business, think crowdsourcing means to hire a mass of volunteer users to do a job instead of paying someone to do it professionally, thus allowing for huge savings. Sometimes crowdsourcing works quite well, except when the effort to exploit users rather than paying a professional takes over common sense. Outside the translation world, crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia continue to flourish, while efforts to crowdsource translation have been a mixed bag. Facebook has also encountered problems with crowdsourcing in quality control; not just errors and misspelling, but profanity in the place of correct translations. Anyway, crowdsourcing is not going to go away, and translators will only lose out by trying to ignore it. Many organizations are successfully using crowdsourced translation, despite its flaws. Last spring, for example, may figure as a tipping point: for the first time, more contributors to Wikipedia appeared to be dropping out than joining up. What if the explanation were as simple as disruptive like most people simply don’t want to work for free? Wikipedia shows how the practice of crowdsourcing worked because of the collective fever of the early Web. Now that Wikipedia is virtually complete there is no longer match for sloth. Crowdsourcers depend on enthusiastic free labor and are scrambling to retain it, by offering elaborate appreciation programs that reward their unpaid people and keep users engaged. Prizes are a start: cash is not so far behind. Therefore, a savvy approach could be trying to exploit the potential of crowdsourcing to transform it from a parlor trick for getting free translations into a way to build translation communities, and stop feeding wholesalers and retailers. The supply chain in the professional translation world still goes from the global enterprise content creator to internal localization department to the MLV to the SLV to freelance translators. This means that the translation industry is still at a vendor management stage, that freelancers are still considered as a necessary ill, and that fees will keep on plunging. According to Gresham’s law, commodification is expunging the best resources while holding the worst resources who are the only ones that are able to sustain it, mostly moonlighters, not actual freelancers. Given the huge increases in global content and the growing collaboration infrastructure, many are rethinking the traditional supply chain. Collaboration could reduce intermediation but it will hardly lead to disintermediation. For a real disintermediation in the translation supply chain, the translation market should be highly transparent to allow customers be aware of supply conditions (e.g. pricing), and find a viable and sound alternative to traditional channels. In a technology-driven disintermediation, buyers could simply purchase from wholesalers that would resort to individual translators instead of using SLV’s as intermediaries but would require to pay less. Anyway, buyers won’t start going directly to SLV’s or freelance translators as this would require efficient processes and a collaboration technology infrastructure, and MLV’s could redesign their production workflows to tie translators rather than to pursue efficiency. In this scenario, translation management systems and even desktop translation memory software will become over-expensive for the value they provide. Machine translation engines and shared translation memory environments would be used to boost productivity, and the new paradigm could be “do more with less for less.” Freelancers, however, will still be the weak link in the supply chain. Anyway, a different model is possible based on competitive intelligence. However, no freelancer alone could define, gather, analyze, and distribute intelligence about customers and competitors. Along with the proceeding digitalization of our environment and the spreading of the Internet, our society has increasingly changed into an on-demand society, as people become more and more accustomed to things being available right away. The new frontier could be translation as a utility, an always-on, on-demand, streaming translation service that can translate high value streams of content at acceptable quality for reasonable rates. What is acceptable and what is reasonable, though? Who decide it? TaaS is already a reality, introduced by a labor as a service company with a network of roughly 25,000 workers around the globe, with a subsidiary offering translation services at $19.95 per page for 24-hour delivery. A customer submits a job and the service will farm it out to eligible translators who can also access it through a Facebook app, where they can pick available jobs and arrange payment. With each job completed, a translator earns a credibility rating that determines the types of jobs s/he is offered. Translators having no rating yet are assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Today, speed and agility are the drivers, costs become truly important only when these two requirements are met. Speed is for volume, and agility is for content type, while quality is a prerequisite and is given for granted, even though different thresholds are commonly envisaged. Therefore, translators need to become real language service providers and differentiate their service offerings to accommodate the trends in content and arrive at different levels of quality to meet their customers’ needs as appropriate to speed, cost, content type and quality. Shall translators go in and fight for unitized rates, or shall they rather redirect themselves to empower solutions to these new trends? A possible solution could be to create and support communities on demand to maximize knowledge reuse and increase speed. The few translators who engage early in thinking up improvement strategies will probably lead the way for the many by teaching other translators to engage in a constructive and economically beneficial way. Continuously flowing content streams demand translation production lines. Translators could turn collaborative models in their favor since these will still require quality management and intelligent work assignment. Domain expertise and competence with technology and collaboration platform will become a differentiating factor for LSP’s in the future. There will always be room for small LSP’s and freelance translators for neighborhood shops in the market, even though small customers never lead or make the market. The future, however, is for wholesalers; even retailers, at least the smaller ones, will be expunged from the market or marginalized. In fact, customers are now irreversibly accustomed to go for one stop shops that can meet all their needs. On the other hand, new business models are necessary for LSP’s of any size and nature. Unfortunately, in these circumstances, any new model would be implemented starting from rates. Are translators ready to abandon rates? Is the industry capable of rethinking its pricing and payment practices at their roots? Customers ask LSP’s to be relevant to their processes, and with the great changes in content, even in smaller clients, this is becoming increasingly hard even for a mid-size LSP, let alone freelancers. Maybe freelancing is not dead, but it is agonizing, because it will soon be no longer sustainable, and the freelance translator is a dinosaur marked for extinction. Freelancing is no longer the best or the only option for translators to be in the market place, and a new approach should be devised that takes advantage of the opportunities brought by the latest technological innovations.

Is Freelancing Over?

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Is Freelancing Over?