Nominalization Leads To Commoditization

One of the causes of the huge problem with rates in translation is the commoditization of our work.

We are no longer authors, we are more akin to factory-line workers in word mills. Credit is rescinded, rates are reduced, contracts get uglier by the minute, as does the manner of address in ads and inquiries.

... And yet translators embrace commodity-market routine willingly, as if following construction industry's habit and custom validated them and infused with new vigor.

Even freelancers pose as 'Doe Translations', as though they were each a small agency, ever ready to outsource, to let a million-page deal across twenty languages in and parcel it out.

LSP, Vendor, TEP, what the heck?

But even the word 'translation' is commoditizing when used as a noun unnecessarily. I'm no fan of 'Peggy Translates' kind of wacky verb use, but nominalization breeds commoditization. Because you stop talking about translating and you start talking about translations. Or marketing translation, legal translation, business translation and more of the same noun with a qualifying adjective. Nouns make products, and nouns make commodities.

A product stylization might actually be better to your PR/marketing/branding than pure service-sector placement, but it's relatively hard to build a satisfactory brand on them when they're sold by the kilogram, or by the container ex factory.

(There is a chance you don't get commoditized when your product is a commodity — unlike with commoditized services.)

You still need to tell clients what you do, but load up a couple of law websites and you'll see practice areas, client industries and more, but not Services => Title Checking, Document Review, Will Writing and other things lawyers with higher aspirations hate to do.

For a translation agency such a method of presentation makes perfect sense. They do offer defined services and products like that, generally removed and cut off from the identity of their authors. But you won't win against agencies if you compete in their field.

For a translator it may be a better idea to quit designing packages that compete sometimes on features and usually on price and instead use the translator's personality to win clients and find work.

In any case, it's easier to use a translator's existing personality than to give personality to generic products or services.

Translator-to-Translator Marketing

The idea came in the form of inspiration from the title of this thing by Tom Kane popping up in my reading list. I'm not even reading it before writing this.

In short, we don't always market to professions. In fact, we often market to semi-professionals and to outright layfolks, sometimes outright ignorants who not only lack the knowledge but don't care to think logically and get some conclusions on the basis of the general knowledge and common sense that everybody has or should have (which does include a lot of PMs these days).

Translator-to-translator marketing is not what you'd normally associate with marketing, largely because the people involved are typically friends or at least acquaintances. Only in rare situations will you end up talking to an agency owner or project manager who actually does happen to be a translator (which doesn't actually always guarantee a certain desirable modicum of common sense and professionalism).

Those guys will be your friends, your acquaintances, your classmates, and everybody else you meet while procrastinating or sharing your misery in this masochistic profession with others.

Those guys know what they are talking about. Usually. And most of the time they know better than the usual layman anyway.

If they work, or have in the past worked, in your own pairs and fields, then chances are they are in a position to form a judgement of the quality of your work. If you have worked together on some projects before, they are likely to know whether you are reliable or not or if one can get along with you better or worse. Or what the clients, PMs and others said about your work.

Finally, people who always end up in the same forum and Facebook discussions with you generally know something about you, such as whether you seem to be a smart person, or conscientious, whether your suggestions to others seem sound, whether you can structure an argument logically in a foreign language or actually struggle with understanding what people say to you in your own (at least before you hit the reply button). They may remember the stories you share, and the sentiments.

Working with them — or through them — is similar to referrals from previous clients. They should also be treated accordingly, as just because you're friends doesn't mean the job is any less demanding (itself or, say, its deadline or some other important characteristics that go beyond the text itself). Thanking them and making sure they aren't embarrassed in the end by having recommended you is basic courtesy that I shouldn't normally need to be mentioning.

Don't neglect fellow translators as a potential source of jobs — they are rarely the ultimate source, and if they are then they typically don't have deep pockets, but from time to time they are in a position to co-opt colleagues or recommend substitutes. If you've been around for a longer while, you will know.

Fellow translators know you. Make sure you take this factor into account.

Finally, those can some of your best jobs. A fellow translator in a position of power can prevent the client from making unreasonable demands or asking silly questions and effectively doubling your work time without compensating you accordingly. He or she may also be able to negotiate better pay, nicer deadlines and some other conditions that generally put you in the premium league as opposed to the typical struggling-to-get-along situation.

Take care of your image inside your own circles.

As for the how-to, you are finally talking to people who understand what you're talking about — usually — so it should come to you more or less intuitively. I'm not encouraging any sort of solicitation among your remote acquaintances, unless there is some sort of mutual consent to helping each other out and a general will to learn about each other's practice, as is sometimes the case in networking. But the most beautiful thing is that in this you don't need to wonder how to reach people who don't know or care what you're talking about. So this is most of all a casual, everyday opportunity that you shouldn't waste.

You're already on the right path if your reputation grows, if your expertise is widely known, if people listen to what you say and you generally say things that are worth listening to or reading. And if you don't do anything particularly silly to estrange them — unlike in consumer or consumer-like relationships, even eccentric weirdos are respected for their competence within their own circles as long as they're good at what they do.

Positive Thinking is Overrated

This is something I've been meaning to write about for a long time.

You may've noticed that sometimes groups of translators or even the entire translator public may seem to be divided into two groups: positive thinkers and negative thinkers. The ranters and the bright people.

Except it's not that simple. Positive thinking can do wonders, but you can't make things happen by just wishing them in. And the circumstances in which you act are influenced by your actions but not metaphysically shaped by your will. There are things you can change and things you can't.

There seems to be some cathartic value in taking the blame on one's own shoulders, or on the shoulders of one's own profession while disclaiming it personally (which means the person putting the blame on colleagues claims to be different), but the truth is that translation really is a difficult market in which a lot of irrational things are currently going on.

The fact that prices are decreasing and pressure for discounts and lower rates is increasing despite the growing demand can't be denied. Price compression is a fact, as is buyer control and the prominence of middlemen with cutthroat, red-ocean competition among them, which takes some really serious business skill and effort to leave behind. Because it means successfully building and asserting a unique brand while not being a business or marketing specialist, nor having any serious financing to rely on.

It takes skill and possibly 'luck'. Like I always say here, luck does not exist, but as much as such a thought may feel inviting, neither are everybody's starting chances or opportunities met along the way truly equal. They just simply are not, it's a romantic-capitalist-idealist-whatever notion. Nope.

Fields, pairs, types of texts, translator and client demographic brackets, all of those things impose some difference in the circumstances (beginning from such simple fundamentals as affecting the balance between supply and demand), resulting in a different outcome in each case. Some cases can be categorized and compared better than some others.

Whether you're currently financial or otherwise successful or not as a translator, while it does depend a great lot on your qualifications and the effort you put in, it definitely is not as simple as positive thinking vs negative thinking, despite all the motivational appeal of such a proposition. A wrong proposition lacking sound basis. It's a white lie of sorts. Even though positive thinking does do wonders.

Even where your attitude influences things, it's mostly about your work ethic and your attitude towards others, the relationships you form with your colleagues and current and potential clients. But you can't wish things in, nor will you become a more successful translator by making yourself believe — in defiance of facts — that the 'industry' is in a good shape or translator-friendly.

The fact is that in some markets (in this case the U.S. market) it takes a celebrity translator to get close to what an accountant charges (about $200/hour), forget lawyer or doctor (closer to $300, but much higher hundreds are still normal). By contrast, the average translator bills $30-40 per hour and 60 for a more recognisable name or more pricy specialisation.

Thus, even a somewhat average clinical therapist will bill, say, $180 per hour, while I'll be majorly surprised if the highest-grade freelance medical translator or interpreter that can realistically be found gets to charge more than a third, a half perhaps if more assertive. (Although translating 500 words at $0.18 per in 1 hour does result in $90/hour.)

For the record, there's a good chance that in-house translators bunkered up in law firms command much higher hourly rates than the freelance average, even though still in the paralegal league. Naturally, they don't personally earn as much as the firm bills the client for their services, but as a freelancer you're also the firm that bills you, not just the wage-earning employee. You still have an effective hourly rate, which is less than the rate you bill.

Plus, some weeks ago I had the opportunity to read a discussion of $200/hour translation. Some things which were mentioned there as supposedly required at those rates included basically round-the-clock availability, a 'yes, and?' approach (a pretty silly exaggeration of a concept if you ask me — there's a difference between being an enabler and being a yes person and actively soliciting your client for more demands within the same rate you charge), and business consultancy. And talking to CEOs or at least board members as opposed to normal managers like normal translators do.

Know what I thought? My first thought was: '$200/hour is a lousy rate for someone who's allowed in the boardroom.' A rookie associate in a law firm, with fresh ink on his J.D., charges more, even though he doesn't effectively make near as much.

This is not negative thinking. These are facts. Wishing them away won't work, while a wish to do away with them is, of course, at least still a start.

Benefits of Working with Agencies

Imagine you're on your own. This will be easier to accomplish if you have a large share of direct clients. What rates do you charge them, per average?

Now subtract your marketing and advertising budget from those rates.

Subtract the hard costs it took you to get (to) those clients. And the soft costs. Everything. Not only for the marketing that worked: Include the marketing that did not work, which means you didn't see a penny for your efforts.

Include lost profits: How much would you approximately have made if you had simply accepted agency jobs instead of trying to pull off a PR coup with direct clients?

Suppose you didn't exactly turn down agency jobs to free up time to write copy, stalk conferences, spam social media and play rockstar. Still, what if you had simply harvested another batch of agency contacts for the familiar routine of hi, see CV (enclosed), my rates are so and so, got a test? Or, in fact, replied as you best could to the inquiries already in your mailbox?

Now client service. What time and money do you need to invest in a satisfied direct client as opposed to a satisifed PM or agency in general?

Many direct clients are less hassle than bureaucratic agencies, true, and going to great lengths for your own client may feel less a chore, but look through the fog of emotions and see the time and money invested in the client relationship as figures.

Don't forget lunches and blawgin' and all the other stuff you do to engage them. You possibly engage PM's too, but how much compared to direct clients? Or the events where you go not for CPD but only for the hope of client acquisition.

Do you provide any added services within your standard rates for direct clients? Any freebies? Any 'added value' which takes time or money to produce (as opposed to something passive like a qualification)? Great, include them too. Perhaps you haven't looked at them in this light yet? Don't forget proofing and editing yourself 10x when you're the last person who sees the text before the client.

Now include the risks averted by QA interventions: how many times have they prevented a serious crisis or at least an unpleasant consequence such as losing a client, having your translation rejected, incurring a penalty, taking a reputation hit? How many times has a PM pulled you out of trouble, for example by negotiating a raise, extension, reimbursement or pardon, or got you some input from inhouse translators, called in a favour at a university or otherwise helped you big time with a terminological query?

So the question is: How much do you really profit from n cents from a direct client as opposed to n cents from an agency?

We could end right here, but I'd also like you to consider the fact that a serious, established agency has the infrastructure to provide all the added value and complementary services which make it easier to sell your translations — at all or at higher rates.

An agency has more synergies, scope and scale to make it possible to provide them at a reasonable cost. For example think about inhouse salaries versus normal B2B fees. There is also quite a chance that the agency's marketing is more efficient than yours, possibly because it isn't managed by a part-time non-marketer who has no other choice.

Naturally, these things get tricky as you become more and more established. However, it's still possible that optimised agency-specific marketing could bring you better results if you put in the same time, effort and money as you would in landing a direct client. Don't get stuck in thinking you shouldn't have to. Think what could happen if you actually did!

Possible mistakes and biases include:

• Forgetting that agency rates are really net values. They are net of client marketing and client service and everything else an agency does which otherwise you would need to do.
• Thinking that the everything else an agency does should come free. Seriously? If it did, we'd be out of business, totally beaten on added value.
• Forgetting that all the things you do for your clients — or to win them — eat into your income even when they don't cut into your revenue. This means not seeing that there exists an effective rate which you pay yourself out of the rate you collect from a direct client. This is similar to a company owner's salary.
• Thinking John Translator would be working for the same clients as Old Agency, Inc. Or making them equally happy. Not impossible, but I'm not holding my breath.
• Not considering what could happen if you gave agencies the same investment you give direct clients.

Possible cures include:

• Honest self-to-self maths on the cost of and return on your direct-client business.
• Honest head-to-head with a PM about what it takes to win and keep clients.
• Thinking how much you may be losing in not capitalising on existing opportunities to position yourself the right way with the right agencies, using your existing knowledge of this sector, just like you would with a direct-client sector. Again, try putting in the same effort as you would for a direct client — which may be easier if you think about agencies, figuratively, as just a type of clients on part with everybody else (which they aren't, but the simplification can be useful).

Possible tasks include:

• Write a brochure, website or some other copy targeted for agencies, which your direct clients don't necessarily need to see (you can use a different domain). Don't be afraid to use space, it belongs to you. Show that you understand them. Don't thousands of other translators also understand them? Sure, but they rarely put it to use the same way as you're about to. When was the last time you saw an explicitly for-agencies translator?
  
  Make the copy about them, not about you. Again, this is just the same approach as with a direct client. Discuss the benefits you bring in rather than outlining your features (although a feature cheat sheet can still be useful because agencies may know how to translate them). Use the same advanced techniques as you would with valuable prospective direct clients, including innovative Blue Ocean strategies and Why-based writing.
  
  If you have the budget, tag a copywriter and a graphical designer along, especially if you would do the same for your direct-client materials. Either way, research agencies and PM's even deeper, but meanwhile gather what you already know, down to case studies. Read your testimonials again for inspiration, recall war stories. Also use your understanding of direct clients to your advantage, including your understanding of the methods of finding, winning and keeping them! And the fact that you actually understand and care.
  
  Part of the background here is that, as you may have noticed, agencies try to pay significantly less than their bottom line — just like translators try to charge more than their bottom line. This means that agencies have a contingency budget they don't wand to spend unless it's a special circumstance. Therefore convince them this is that special circumstance, and better still if you can position this spending as not even a justified cost but a valuable investment.
  
  Intially, they can be a bit lethargic, stagnant, suffering from inaertia and burnout. No wonder, their market can be pretty awful. Give them the light for their spark and try to make them at least suspect that using your translations they could possibly do better than they are doing now. Perhaps you're just the translator they need to liven up their business. And they can probably bring in more business than you can, even in their battered state.
  
  Bonus:
  If you deliver it well, a smart person in the agency can connect the dots and single you out for image-sensitive materials, and those pay better (this is easier to achieve with a small agency which has a smaller translator base). This can help position you as a marketing-conscious translator. If it reads well and is impeccable, you can unwittingly position yourself as an editor or reviewer. For ethical reasons, though, don't lead them on — you should be able to able to produce translations of the same quality as the copy which won you the job. Don't bait and switch.
  
  If the agency sees you as an enabler, you will be able to get away with more. You can get better rates and better contracts and better jobs. If you can get agencies to think outside the box, they will start from your price and add their markup on top of it instead of trying to fit you into their existing competitive pricing scheme. Be the driver of change, and guess who'll be their favourite translator.

If you aren't convinced, fair enough, but you can still just look at it as an investment in passive advertising. This means you can make a one-off expense and continue to profit for months thereafter.

The short way would be to send your CV and a clear vision of goals to a copywriter and graphic designer, along with the relevant information about translator-agency relationships and agency business which they may not have.

The longer way:

Optimise your CV if you haven't yet — Marta Stelmaszak can tell you how. Her 33-page free e-book already contains a couple of my precious tips I wanted to share, so I won't be repeating myself here. You can probably run the final result through Marta for a reasonable consulting fee. Send that CV to the copywriter along with background information and clearly set goals, i.e. the type of positioning you want, the rate range you want to achieve as well as your other goals, for example securing certain terms which make your work more comfortable.

Important: Choose a copywriter who is familiar with the Blue Ocean approach (discuss this before!) and will help you carve a one-of-a-kind niche instead of the usual game of numbers and cutthroat competition. Competitive writing will still have its uses if you can nail down a clear-as-day advantage which is easily expressed in numbers, graphs or other such data. But you can still use it to create a new niche rather than fighting for one that already exists.

This may sound like a long process now, but after you spend the time and money (you can spend less time if you are willing to spend more money), the copy will continue to work for you. If it brings you a large contract, raises your rates by 10-20%, enables you to specialise more, get nicer jobs or better terms, it will be well worth it — with very limited involvement on your part.

Note that you will still need to live up to your promises and the vision you will have created in that copy. Copy doesn't pick up calls, or translate for that matter.

I suppose it is possible, ironically, to make yourself a blue-ocean niche by pulling agencies out of the red waters they're in. And have a good laugh when you see it happen.

Afterword

Please note that a blue-ocean niche with agencies — or basically a functional relationship — would obviously require more than just higher rates. The entire domination mindset would need to go, along with the commodity-based approach and bureaucracy. For starters:

• No construction-contractor-style contracts.
• No agency name replacing your name on book covers and credit pages.
• No total cessions of moral rights (with a specific mention of waiving your right not to be subjected to derogatory treatment).
• No gagging clauses explicitly stating you shall not make negative comments about the agency (a nice way to make a high BlueBoard average, isn't it?).
• No making your pay effectively an ex gratia payment in the sole discretion of the agency or its client.
• No extensive hold-harmless clauses effectively making you the agency's insurance provider.
• No money-making penalty schemes, obviously.
• No long tracts of U.S. legislation you guarantee compliance with (at your own cost, including attorney fees, which are 10-20 times your own hourly rate).
• No domination and total subjection language. In fact, polite language.

Positioning yourself better means you can avoid much of the above, though perhaps not all. Frankly, it would help if agencies took a reality check and reassess their relationship with their 'vendors' or 'suppliers'.

Of Low and High Charging Translators, Undercutting, and Local Variables

The global village is an illusion, all the more so for all the elements of truth it contains. The market is more fragmented than one may be inclined to think. Due to this illusion of a global village, created by instant (real-time) communication all across the globe, we may neglect the fact that each of us live in a different economy, with a different local balance.

The rivers and hills

In the translation world, markets in whch one can consistently charge more than 0.06 p.s.w. (per source word) are islands and caves and high hills. If you and a neighbour live on the same island or hill, or in the same cave, it makes it natural that both of you share the same experience and roughly the same perspective, as then do your neighbour's neighbours and so on within a couple of miles radius. This confirmation around you produces reinforcement and in the end it makes your experience appear to you as the most natural, default state of things, one which either really is or should be the same everywhere else in the world. But then there are the lowlands and the vast plains and fields of corn, and the rivers, and forests and meadows, and the low hills where the perspective is similar to but not quite the same as that seen from a real mountain. The landscape is not uniform.

Real-life example

I spent much of my Friday two weeks ago researching the competition for webdesign clues. This is because I like to see at which stage they are, and occasionally they hire a smart designer that comes up with something new and inspiration. But I still did look at the Pricing tab whenever one was available. Their rates fell anywhere from just under €0.03 p.s.w. to just under €0.04 p.s.w. (where EUR 1 = PLN 4.23). I'm not talking about rookie translators or rates charged from agencies. The search string I used was 'Polish sworn translator', a qualification which requires a master's degree and a notoriously difficult bidirectional exam, and the prices were inteded for direct clients. My own Polish clients pay noticeably above that range, but how far can you really go above what everybody else seems to be charging? Especially if those who charge so little are also qualified translators?

The high earners

On the other side of our illustrative Polish spectrum there are certainly some translators who can get away with charging more than I do. Those are usually — but not always — significantly experienced colleagues with strong portfolios and good connections, meaning a considerable group of stable relationships with direct clients and higher-paying agencies. Then, there are supposedly some high-paid specialists who score in the range of €0.14 p.s.w. before any rush fees — this in a country where the average wage in the business sector is €799 per month and falling. At a rate of €0.14 p.s.w., an entire gross salary of €799 could buy you 5700 words of translation, which means that having paid all your taxes and bills, buying food and so on, you'd be lucky to afford 2000 words. The minimum wage — in a month's scale — could buy you 2850 words if you didn't have to pay tax and bills, probably meaning less than a half of the number in real life. At that point needing your CV in a different language is a very painful event in your life.

Local variables are relevant

As I hope you have seen by now, there are local variables at play here. Those local variables are what makes the different corners of our global village really different. Anybody can register an account on Proz.com — though there are certainly places in the world where the membership fee is a fortune — or TranslatorsCafé, anybody with some basic computer skills can start a website and write a blog like this one (or better). Gifted and driven individuals can do so much more, write inspiring copy and have magnificent search rankings due to SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). But to get inside the fertile enclaves of good rates — which may be barren wastes to someone else — one needs to have clients willing to pay those rates. This necessarily requires access to such clients, and the clients must actually exist in the translator's languages and fields of expertise. The existence of such such clients, and their level of affluence, depends on economic factors, while access to them also depends on relevant cultural issues, for example appetite for outsourcing, willingness to trust freelancers rather than large provides, openness of businesses to solicitation or their energy and ingenuity and diligence in procuring the best services they can, the social perception and standing of translators, and some more.

Translators with lower variables

The working bees and zombie workers of our so called 'translation industry' — those being, for example, people who charge below €0.03 in Poland and perhaps €0.06 in the more affluent western countries — not only lack such privileged access to clients (not considering here whether that's their own fault or not), they may also lack the more glamorous and well-selling qualifications that their more prosperous colleagues have, or the imagination, or drive, to sell them well. Finally, they may lack a certain basic level of business skills or awareness of what's going on in the industry (e.g. due to isolation), or something which we could refer to as being quick on one's feet. Especially the latter failure perhaps results from some sort of passivity which a downtrodden translator could theoretically break free of, but that is — naturally — easier said then done. More so among people exhibiting certain particular personality traits, or types, which are further affected by their native or host culture, education, beliefs and so on. There's a reason why most people are not entrepreneurs, just like there is a reason why most people are not managers, even among the most qualified specialists. Not everybody is a leader, innovator or organiser. There is a reason why business coaches are necessary, why agents and middlemen are in demand. Not all people can handle — mentally, emotionally, intellectually, physically — either some general aspects of business acumen such as organisation, planning, marketing, or some particular challenges that they face; of those who actually can, still not all eventually find it in themselves to do so.

Bottom line

Translators who, in abstract numbers, charge a fraction of what other translators are paid are not necessarily undercutting anybody. Neither are translators who charge higher rates, in abstract numbers, necessarily better off economically than someone who charges less in a market with smaller prices. Even where there actually is some undercutting, then it's still not necessarily done on purpose but often the result of those lower-charging translators not doing their utmost to improve their business and marketing skills and performance. Are all translators who charge in the region of €0.10 p.s.w. in the most developed countries really doing their utmost in this regard? Comparing rates taken as abstract numbers makes no sense. After the inclusion of factors such as spending power, costs of living, prices, wages and so on, it may turn out that somebody somewhere in the world who charges, let's say, half the rates, is effectively making twice the money. Conversely, those high rates earned in higher paying but more expensive economies don't look as attractive when you look at the cost of living there.

Ending on a twist

I hesitated whether to include this last paragraph, but after leaving it out intially I felt I was depriving some of my potential readers of a useful piece of knowledge, a tip which could perhaps change their professional life for the better, at least for beinners. Without further ado, if you have a nagging suspicion that your rates may be low due to your not having the business or marketing skills to take them higher (or to find better-paying clients), there are books and trainings which can help you address that weakness, as well as counsellorsand coaches and marketers and specialised web designers and graphical designers and other people who can help. Such assistance usually costs money, but it is a job just as yours, which is why it's professional assistance. If resources are scarce perhaps at least you have some free time to read about things and try them out. There are many free resources out there online, such as Marta Stelmaszak's presentation from TraduEmprende or the Latitudes Blog, free website content management systems such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla to build a professional-looking website in, with free or low-cost themes that are customisable and in any case better overall than most of the websites our colleagues are currently sporting. Most translators could and should put more effort in their online professional image, making it easier for them to convince clients of the value they provide, making it better for us all in the greater scheme of things. They can't find you if you aren't visible, and it's hard to believe someone who doesn't look credible. If you increase your rates successfully, not only will you earn more, you will make life easier for your colleagues.

Machine Translation Will Not Be Sending Us Packing

You can achieve amazing results if you commit a lot of computing horsepower and countless man-hours of software engineers, linguists, coders and consultants with hybrid backgrounds, and supporting personnel. It is even possible to achieve some semblance of 'recognising' linguistic and communicative contexts. Still, on the technical side, what the machine does is parse the original text against an automated checklist and perhaps subsequently validate the results in some sort of a QA procedure (e.g. another checklist, back-translation and so on). When we get to the bottom of it, it comes down to two things: 1) instructions, 2) data.

All that a computer does is execute logical operations on data. Computers can appear to 'design' their further operations on their own, or to 'learn', except that they don't really have a creative or learning process. They still execute a program which — in result of going through a flow chart of conditions and commands – generates another program with its own set of conditions and commands. At the end of the day all of it rests on some core instructions implanted by a human engineer. Any creative spark came from that engineer.

A machine does not 'know' anything which you haven't previously either: 1) outright handed to it as data, or 2) equipped the machine to generate as the product of its procedures. Even those machines which supposedly 'learn' still operate under these same natural constraints. Try subjecting language to a mathematical analysis and you'll know how limiting it is when logical operations and input data are your sole guides to language. Or look what happens when humans attempt to reduce the law to a set of syllogistic rulers. Computers do 'think' much faster than humans do, except they don't think but compute, or calculate, which is the meaning of computing. On a conceptual level they are a glorified calculus. A tool. The rest is magical thinking on the part of their users and the lay public in general.

Thus, you can certainly take not even dictionaries but also grammar reference, convert it into flow charts — algorithms — and ultimately program code. And data banks. You can certainly process the Bescherelle or Murphy in this fashion, and dictionaries have long been transcribed at the expense of many, many hours of work — work which could have been used elsewhere, just like the money paid for that port could have been spent in other ways.

Perhaps it's worth noting here that machine translation may be cheaper than a human translator once you have it, but it takes resources to get to the point where a machine can even begin to offer a very imperfect and supervision-unfree alternative to human translation. Many times more that time and those other resources — with a geometrically diminishing return the further you pursue perfection — would be required to get it to the point where it can pose a serious challenge in terms of quality.

Those were hours of either menial typing or inventive designing with the goal of avoiding menial labour — where an engineer who designs ways of reducing the labour also charges more for his services than a humbler labourer's wage — but in any case it takes man hours and other resources. No matter if you type, scan manually, construct a scanner with a conveyor belt and huge throughput, improve the OCR software, it always comes down to just having to commit the resources. MT doesn't grow on trees. Plus, apart from the cost of any investment that does eventually yield a profitable return, there is also the risk of a negative return when you get side-tracked.

So, with all that huge expenditure and risk, after being done with dictionaries and simpler grammar books you could then proceed with more advanced, scholarly works on grammar, syntax, punctuation and other aspects of either language or translation, meaning — in practice — more complicated flow charts for you and your machines, more nuanced rules, with even rules for rule conflict resolution (meta rules), exceptions and overrides and what else have you, all in order to avoid blunders (perhaps similarly to how a non-native speaker or writer tries to avoid them) and simulate the 'recognition' of non-standard usage and common mistakes that a human would probably not be fooled easily by whereas a machine — being a strict prescriptivist by nature, as all it does is execute instructions — could totally misinterpret by applying correct grammatical rules in an unbending fashion, failing to decode even the most obvious substance where the form fails to comply.

Just as long as the rules of a given language or translation method or procedure are logical and explanation exists for them which is reasonable and lucid rather than fuzzy, arbitrary and whimsical, then you should be all right most of the time (well, what if you need to be safe all of the time?). This is all the easier now that you have multi-core processors clocked in the 2–4 GHz range, working with operational memory in the teens of gigabytes and cheap terabytes of storage even for home compusters. Still, even if the software hypothetically were to stop needing to be baby-sat by a human, the fire would still burn on the root spark of creativity left by a human engineer. Whole teams of such engineers, to be precise.

Back to language, though. A computer does not get to work with the benefit of the social, cultural and other experience from start, which a human being starts learning even before its birth and continues till its death. A computer can operate a whole laboratory to analyse samples in compliance with predefined procedures and in this way expand its data banks and fill its memory. It certainly can 'analyse' faster than a human, often more reliably, without suffering from exhaustion or a limited attention span, but intuition, the subconscious, nope, it will have none of those.

You could make a computer simulate the thought process of a person with a specific personality, education, beliefs, mental disorders, but it will be… simulation. Which it was supposed to be from the beginning. Bottom line, a machine, for all its tremendous computing power, still runs on 1) algorithms written by humans (or derived from such algorithms), or 2) data either either filled in by humans outright or arrived at by the machine using instructions left by humans. There is no 'awakening' point at which a computer takes full possession of its enlightened self previously dormant, i.e. taking a nap in its printed circuits.

Executing logical operations on data is actually not so far from how language works in a human brain – perhaps even more similar to a non-native speaker's reliance on interlanguage – but it's still just like Deep Blue's game of chess in the best cases. A chess program will typically beat its own creator at the game (due to the calculating advantage), but a computer still can't play chess unless you – the human – 'teach' it the rules, supply it with the data to crunch. You can even equip the machine with a checklist to analyse its records of games played, so that it will expand its repertoire with time and become better prepared to handle what human opponents can throw at it.

If the machine brute-forces its way through the 'analysis' of billions of possibilities, validating hypothetical choices with further analysis before committing – something which a human brain could possibly require millions of years to process — then yes, the machine can do marvellous things. It can already translate some easy texts on par with human translators, even translate them more reliably than a messy or underqualified translator, but this is all the product of countless time invested by humans. And there are still limitations anyway because — as we've already taken notice — a computer is a tool and not a master, a glorified calculus.

To draw a different parallel, yes, you could construct androids capable of typing on a keyboard. But it would still be cheaper to hire even multiple typists, there are obviously better ways of making two machines communicate and you don't need an android for what a bot can do anyway. And it doesn't even pay to get a bot to do something which is not repeatable. Research and development costs money, and the investment must bring a sizeable return. Otherwise it's a waste and it doesn't pay. This applies to machine translation as well. Even if there were people who really wanted to put human translators out of business — as opposed to making translation cheaper, which is another matter — those guys wouldn't be working with unlimited resources, their creative staff and other workers, and equipment, would still cost them.

Back to the chess parallel again, language is not a board of 64 fields populated by 32 pieces and governed by a relatively short list of consistent and transparent rules with great potential for analysis. Chess was designed for that sort of nutcracking, language was not. Language wasn't.

Now, to deal with the fallibility of human translators, that fallibility often results from thinking just like a computer 'would'. Their blunders are not unlike a human player fooling the AI in a war game when knowing its routines. For example, peppering a line of infantry with some arrows from archers to bait them into loosening their formation so as to them up with a quick charge of cavalry in a wedge formation. When a human gets fooled into the wrong choice it isn't worlds apart from tricking the AI's check: IF condition THEN command. A case-insensitive computer check works just the same as a translator who fails to recognise proper capital letters in a text printed all in the uppercase: he will not know the VAT on wine from a wine vat, at least not without parsing the text for clues elsewhere.

In fact, such checks are not unlike QA procedures already used in the translation 'industry'. Human proofreaders also effectively parse their entrusted texts for errors, occasionally producing false positives or false negatives when something pops up which isn't covered by their procedures or doesn't occur in their data banks, for example when their knowledge of the applicable rules is not complete or when they fail to execute the call to a reference book, as a programmer would say.

So, yeah, there are similarities. This is definitely true. However, not unlike amateurs versus professionals or junior professionals versus senior professionals (with individual exceptions), computers are always one step behind humans. They don't have anything they didn't first receive from humans or produced with the procedures humans gave them. They can't fully simulate a human being. Unlike human students and teachers, the divide between humans and their computers is more fundamental. Guns send bullets, but guns don't kill people.

For all the human frailty and computing horsepower, MT will always need at least some PEMT-ing (post-editing of machine translation), even if we give it thousands of years. Sure, there will be fewer traditional human translators and more PEMTors. Perhaps there will be a preference to use linguists and their skills in MT design works and not in actual translation assignments, other things being equal. Perhaps some companies interested in that kind of thing will stubbornly overinvest in the pursuit of the goal of making translators no longer needed, hoping for a huge long-term ROI in spite of the continual loss in the short term…

… But no one in his right mind is going to invest hundreds of hours of R&D in a one-off bespoke job, and the ROI curve is nasty enough even on somewhat repeatable or commonplace assignments in specialist translation and copywriting. Ironically, we are just simply cheaper than machine translation, as long as more than an appearance of translation, or a gist of meaning, is sought. The sad part is only that machine translation plus light post-editing may become the standard for easier tasks in popular languages within a couple of decades, perhaps sooner, and obviously not all of us would welcome a role change or the need to work solely on the harder cases, with an increased mental strain.