(1) The Business of Handling Language

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The business of translating is affected by the rapid progress being made in the development of automated translation technologies. Today, automatic translation is at the level of the language skills of a seven year old. In two years time automata will be linguistically as skillful as a fourteen year old. 

In the medium term, reasonable money is to be made only by those who combine their translating skills with specialised knowledge while preferably being in a position to efficiently support the building and dissemination of content. 

This is why it may be a good idea for a translator to extend her business portfolio to include research and writing. 

This could give her the capabilities needed to accompany the work flow by which the content a client wishes to disseminate is built from the stage when the messages are identified through to the delivery of end products (speeches, internal messages, articles, seminar and other study materials, web content, research papers, books, etc.).

Perhaps the most critical issue here is that a company's content building work flow is shot through with power relations. These may either keep an external provider out of the flow altogether or make her contributions less effective, ineffective or even disruptive. Ownership of content building may prove to be just as jealously guarded a privilege as other forms of controlling power.

Typically, being accorded a high degree of trust by the client is the prerequisite for an external writer-cum-translator to effectively enter the content building work flow.

How does one earn this trust?

One strategy is to become part of a team that has already won a client's trust. (1) This could be a team that does not specialise in writing and translating but has a demand for these services — again, even in this context, content ownership will always be a highly sensitive issue, within the provider and vis-à-vis the client. (2) Or it may be a team that is offering these services and is looking for a new team member. Later one may use the experience of working in such a team to attract one's own clients.

Specialised competence (say in the ETF business), ability to research relevant related topics, generate content drafts or add to drafts proposed by the client — for instance a speech to be delivered by the ultimate content owner, the CEO.

Being involved in content building and delivery on all fronts lends consistency to the overall corporate message-scape, creating a distinct linguistic culture which may be translated into a consistent yet varied offering of content, targeting specific purposes and groups.

The job profile covers requirements that stand in tension to one another: you will want a creative individual(ist), a linguistic authority holding clear views about good and inadmissible writing, an iconoclast with ideas that strike others as novel or helpful in a way they would not have been able to come up with. At the same time, there is a need for humility, tolerance, empathy for the thoughts and the language style of other persons.

Continued here.