Speaker 1: Hey, hello, welcome back to this series of videos for translation students by me, Dr. Jolly here at Missouri State University. In today's lesson, we're going to take a look at the language services industry and focus in on what it means to work as a T&I, translation and interpreting professional. So little overview of what I'll be talking about today. First we'll define the language services industry. What is it? We'll take a look at how it works. Who are the players and what's the game? In very broad strokes, very general terms, lots of exceptions that we won't get into. We'll talk about the different contexts where translators and interpreters work. Talk a little bit about how to become, how individuals become translators and interpreters. Again, we'll go over the skill sets of translators and interpreters, which are quite different. And we'll talk a little bit about how once translators and interpreters are in the T&I industry working professionally, how do they improve? How do they get better and how do they stay connected? So we'll talk a little bit about networking, professional associations, and things like that. And then finally, I'll leave you with a few websites that provide good information about the industry, the translation and interpreting industry. So let's get started. So first of all, what is the LSI, the language services industry? We're going to hear lots of acronyms or see lots of acronyms in this presentation, T&I, LSI, language services industry, LSP, language service provider. So let's take a look. What do people mean? What do people mean when they say language services industry? Well, and this is a quote from a book by Renato Beninato and Tucker Johnson called the general theory of the translation company from 2017. And they write that the language services industry includes any and all businesses related to helping language services buyers, LSBs, to adapt or create content products or services in order to better compete in the global marketplace. This includes translation, internationalization, localization, interpreting, both in person and over the phone, global market research, multimedia adaptations, such as voiceover dubbing and subtitling, marketing and brand localization, deep breath, international consulting, software localization and related services, language testing, et cetera. So again, the core of their definition is, right, any and all businesses related to helping language service buyers, customers, adapt or create contents, products or services in order to better compete in the global marketplace. We're going to focus in this presentation on translation and interpreting, two core pieces of the language services industry. So again, with that narrower focus now on translation, interpreting, things like that, how does the industry work? You might be thinking, wow, I want to be an interpreter. I want to be a translator. How does it, how does the business, the industry actually work? Well, this in broad strokes describes a lot of it. First in terms of the players you have, like was mentioned in the previous definition, these days in the 21st century, a global multilingual marketplace. So there may be somebody in Spain or China or Brazil who has a product or a service that they want to offer in another language or multiple other languages. That's the world we live in. Those are the language services buyers, the LSBs as in boys, language services buyers or consumers, the clients. You also have the language service providers. You can Google this term and you'll, you can find information about who some of the largest LSPs are, language service providers, what services they offer and things like that. And then you have the language professionals. Those are the translators and interpreters, the subtitlers, the dubbers, the multilingual voiceover artists and things like that. Okay. So the people that work in the industry, how does the game work again? Don't criticize this video too much. If you're a professional, this is meant for students and it's just a broad overview. So in broad strokes, again, generalizing a lot, you have the companies, the language service buyers that need language service, need language services. What they do is they contract with these usually large, some multinational, national, regional language service providers. Those are big language service companies. The language service providers, the LSPs, what they do then is they go out and hire the language professionals. So they contract with or hire the translators and interpreters. And then they charge the client for the project and they pay the language professional a percentage of that fee. Again, that's generally how it works. So who are these language professionals? Well, typically they're either individuals, freelancers, independent contractors, or, so those people might be working as freelancers. They may have their own very small one person LSP, but they'll also do work with an agency I forgot to mention that another word for agent for LSP is agency, translation agency, interpreting agency, et cetera. Often they're called agencies, especially when at the local level. So you might be wondering, this is very important, obviously. How does the independent contractor, the translator, the interpreter, the freelancer, how do they make their money? How do they get paid? And this again is a huge generalization and there's lots of resources where you can look up information. Translators typically when they work, they are paid per word. So it might be 6 cents, 8 cents, 10 cents, 12 cents, depending on many factors, right? The length of the document, the turnaround time, the degree of technicity, right? How technical is the document? All those things can impact the per word rate of a job. So that's translators typically get paid per word, usually source text word. Interpreters are usually paid by the hour or in some cases on a half day rate or a full day rate, court interpreters, legal interpreters, things like that. So again, super, super general. You can look up more information if you're interested. And then to a much smaller extent, there are some large companies, organizations that do employ and pay salary to what are called in-house translators or interpreters, okay? So just really quickly, if you're a translator, where will you be working? Well, if you're a translator, keep in mind, you're probably, odds are, an independent contractor, a freelancer. That's the same thing basically in the United States. Freelancer is what we usually say. Independent contractor is what the IRS calls us, right? We have to pay our own employment taxes, social security, and things like that. You may have your own company of one. It might be like Professor Jason Jolly's Language Services Company, right, or agency, but it's really just me. And I work for an agency, medium-sized LSP, for example. Or if I'm an in-house translator, first bullet point here, I may be working, and you can see on the photo on the left, I may be working in an office. Here in Springfield, Missouri, I know an individual, he works for O'Reilly Auto Parts. It's a huge national, international chain. It's headquartered right here in Springfield, Missouri. And my friend Felipe, he works there full-time as a translator. So there are in-house translators. If I'm an independent contractor, freelancer, working for an agency, and I get projects, you know, sporadically or pretty frequently, I might have a home office. Or if I get sick of my home office, right, then I might go to Starbucks because I can work anywhere where there's an internet connection, okay? So that's where translators work. Let's take a look at the interpreter side. There are more contexts in which interpreters work, and I've covered this in a previous video. Of course, some of the large hospital chains, for example, they have in-house interpreting staff, okay? Or they may contract with a large LSP to get reliable interpreters in on volume. Typically interpreters are going to go to the job, right? So they're going to be working in a hospital or a clinic. If they're a legal or court interpreter, they're going to be working in lawyers' offices, courtrooms where hearings are held, boardrooms where they might take depositions, but basically courtrooms, right? Community interpreters, so they might accompany a social worker on a visit. They might go into a public school. They're going to be in community contexts. Obviously, conference interpreters are going to be working, you can see that photo there of the guy turning around from his equipment in a booth. And then you also have liaison or escort interpreters who will accompany trips that are traveling for business. Again, I cover this on my video on overview of interpreting. Point is, you're going to be working, you're going to be out, right? You're going to be driving a lot, and be sure to charge for that travel time if you can get away with it. Increasingly, though, interpreters are working on the phone. There's something called OPI, right, over the phone interpreting. And there's also something called VRI, video remote interpreting. So increasingly, this in-person or on-site presence is being supplanted or replaced with technology. And that's not necessarily a bad thing if you're able to do both. So how do you become a translator or an interpreter? You're interested, you want to work in the language services profession, you speak more than one language, you write more than one language proficiency, how can I become a translator or interpreter? Well, there really are, the way I understand it, and this is, again, a sweeping generalization, two sort of pathways into the profession. I call one the proficiency plus circumstances. Those are individuals who may be immigrants from a country where another language is spoken, or they may be native speakers, right, immigrants, or heritage speakers, individuals who are born here, but they speak another language in addition to the dominant language. So they're bilingual, highly bilingual, highly proficient in speaking and writing in English and one other language. Oftentimes these individuals, if you look down to that second bullet point, they'll be asked to do a favor, hey, I know that you're a native speaker of Spanish, would you mind taking a look at this birth certificate that I need to send to the immigration service and help me translate it? So they might start out doing favors. Those are the circumstances. They need a job, right? And they say, hmm, I'm going to put my language skills to work. And so they start taking, doing small favors, taking volunteer work, and pretty soon they figure out, wow, I can make a living or at least have a significant second stream of income by doing either translation, interpreting, or both. Typically, the real pros do one or the other, but that's a topic for another video. The second route, so that's the proficiency plus circumstances, kind of the native speaker I fell into this profession. Now I like it and I'm becoming really good. The second is what I call the formal training pathway. And that's what most of you who are my students watching this video might be considering because you are language students. You're studying a language, Spanish in this case, or perhaps French or German. And you may have taken a class or two in translation or interpreting. And so that's the formal training pathway. You decide, hmm, I'm going to sharpen my skills. I'm going to take some more classes. I might even do a master's degree, Middlebury Institute at Monterey or something like that and really sharpen my skills and become a professional interpreter or translator. So again, what typically happens is however you acquire that bilingual ability, whether it's because you were born in another country, came to the United States, you're a heritage speaker, you're a second generation immigrant, your parents came here, you grew up and you learn Spanish at home, or whether you're an L2, right, learner of your language and you go through that formal pathway. Typically what happens is you start out doing small jobs, favors, volunteer, and then you decide, hmm, I'm going to make this a substantial stream of income and I'm going to start to professionalize my services. And that's kind of what this video is about, how to professionalize yourself. And so kind of a third point here is you can increase your opportunities once you do decide to become an interpreter or a translator, a language services professional, you can increase your opportunities and your income by gaining certifications, becoming a certified translator or interpreter. For translators in the United States, that basically boils down to passing the American Translators Association written translation certification exam in your language pair. So for example, English to Spanish or English to Chinese, Chinese to English, Spanish to English, you have to pass the test in a specific language pair in a specific direction. For other types of interpreters, there are also certification programs and they're extremely important. For medical interpreters, there are two or three different certifications. You can look those up, you can Google those, just Google medical interpreter certificate or certification programs. And then obviously, if you want to be a court interpreter, certification is extremely important. Most people will start at the state level. So Google your state, in our case, state of Missouri court interpreting certification, something like that. You'll find information. For community interpreters also, although usually certification isn't required, there are some really popular and well-known and good community certification programs like Bridging the Gap, to name just one of many. All right, since we're talking about becoming, right, a good certified translator and interpreter, I just wanted to review the information on this slide again, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time here because I've already presented this in my video on the overview of interpreting. But keep in mind that typically language services professionals, they either become translators or interpreters. They may dabble a little bit as the circumstances of their life and profession dictate, but typically they're stronger in one or the other. And the reason for that is, look, the skills are completely different. Of course, look at the blue box, whether you're a translator or an interpreter, you need to have very high native-like proficiency in both your source and target languages. And you need to also develop a specialist knowledge of at least one area of expertise, whether it's surgery or construction, information technology, to be an effective translator or interpreter. So that's what the two professions have in common, but that's really where, that's really all they have in common. So take a second, look at those bullet points. It's easy to be a good translator. The emphasis is on reading comprehension, writing skills, researching skills. You also have time and you can use tools, right? Machine translation, translation memory, term management, parallel text alignment. So you have the luxury of time, although you might be on tight deadlines. Interpreters on the other hand, don't need to be good writers, don't need to be good readers necessarily. Again, I'm generalizing, okay? But you do need to have, to be an effective interpreter, excellent listening skills, really good speaking skills, and that runs the whole gamut, right? Annunciation, projection, discourse structuring on the fly very quickly. The ability to interpret interpersonal or nonverbal cues as well. So really good interpersonal communication skills. I should say that for both professions, you do need deep cultural knowledge and sociolinguistic awareness. Interpreters need an excellent memory because whether you're doing simultaneous or consecutive interpreting, you really are working your memory, okay? And note taking skills, because that's all you can rely on, your memory and your notes. You don't have access to machine translation or parallel text alignment tools or anything like that when you're interpreting. Okay, I said I wasn't going to dwell too long on this and I did. Let's move on. Moral of the story is two completely or very different skill sets and things to work on and improve. Speaking of working on and improving your skills, I thought, what are some things that I know from my contact with professionals in the T&I industry that they do that helps them to get better and to stay connected, right? And really to make more money, okay? Obviously you're going to make more experience, you're going to make more money over the course of your career, right, as you gain experience. Translators and interpreters who are just starting out make less money. They have fewer skills. They're just developing. So gaining experience is kind of a no-brainer. Don't be frustrated. Take your time. Be patient. While you're doing that, though, you need to be working on increasing your ability, your accuracy, your speed. And I think that keys to doing that are specializing in one field or subfield or two, study and constantly preparing, reviewing glossaries if you're an interpreter, right, medical glossaries for specific procedures even. I know they do that. But also, especially if you're a translator, really building up your technological savvy, right, your ability to use those computer-assisted translation tools like, you know, translation memories, machine translation, term management, all of those different things, okay, because you really do need to increase your speed without sacrificing accuracy, okay. As I just mentioned on the previous slide, of course, getting those certifications, whether it's an ATA certification exam, a medical interpreter certification, a court, federal state court certification is key and sometimes necessary to get a job. Another thing you can do both to improve but also to stay connected is to join and to be active in a professional association such as the American Translators Association here in the United States, which represents translators and interpreters. There are some other organizations, national organizations, and also there are some regional chapters of the American Translators Association. And I can't stress enough how important it is to get connected to those colleagues that live close to you because, fifth bullet point, then you can do some real networking. I belong to the Mid-America chapter of the American Translators Association, MICARA. I'm a board member, proud to say, and I've probably learned more from interacting with my colleagues and having one-on-one discussions with them and serving on the board of this association than I have by reading books and teaching about translation and even doing translation in some cases. These national and regional and local associations, they typically put on professional development events, whether it's a small meeting, a webinar, a workshop, but sometimes full-blown conferences like the American Translator Association Conference or Convention. So I really, really recommend that to get better, to stay connected, and to stay current in the profession that you be active in a professional association, national, regional, or local. Okay, that's about all that I had to share with you guys about the language services profession and the T&I industry. I'm going to leave some of these resources up on the screen just for a minute. The United States Government Bureau of Labor Statistics has a really interesting website about interpreters and translators. Check it out. It talks about how much money they make on average, the types of contexts that they work in, training, some of the same topics that I discussed in this video. Of course, the American Translators Association has lots of resources for translators and interpreters, and lots of news and information about the profession as well. Interpret America is an organization that is co-run by a friend of mine, Barry Olson, who is a conference interpreter educator. And he and his partner put out a lot of really amazing, up-to-date, current information about the interpreting profession. So I highly recommend reading their blogs and articles. There's a professional association called GALA, or GALA, the Globalization and Localization Association. A lot of good resources on their website, just basic definitions about the industry. And then finally, there's NIMDSI, which is a really interesting language services market research firm. They put out all kinds of reports about the status of the profession. So again, I hope that this has been informative and useful to you, and you feel like you have a little bit more information about the language services profession and how the translation and interpreter industry works. Thanks for watching.