I have been a freelance translator specializing in medical and pharmaceutical translator for over 15 years now —I also translate books, but I have no problem there, only maybe the lack of more of these projects—. For Pharma, my main client in all those years has been a renowned and infamous global agency.
First of all, big #translation_agencies have always used #CAT tools to their own advantage, so they would only pay you for new words and a percentage of the “fuzzies”, none for the 10% matches (segments already stored in the client Translation Memory).
This is the premise on which these companies made a tremendous and unprecedented profit in the translation business.
It was not ideal for translators, especially when you realized that there were still people who charged for every word they worked on and not only for the new and fuzzy matches, even a higher rate you are getting for only the new.
On top of that, the rates, take as a reference the rate per new word, had been declining steadily year after year.
I remember the days when I lived in the US (Providence, RI) and I was getting 15 (USD) cents per source word, when people who lived in Boston told me I could get 25 there.
So years go by, I move to Spain in 2001 and keep working for Providence agencies. I stop getting assignments, because we all prefer (used to?) to work with local people. Not only that, but the agency that was my main client at the moment found it an advantage to pay 8 cents to Spanish-speaking locals just fresh out of high school, of course.
I do my thing, have my odd salaried jobs while I translate part-time. I get experienced in the pharmaceutical field by proofreading, at a decent rate per hour, jobs for a friend translator who works in the other direction, Spanish to English. I remember her telling me not to worry about the specialized vocabulary, she knows that’s fine, so I only need to focus on the purely linguistic stuff, typos, etc.
But curious as I am and practical and a bit neurotic, I do want to know what those things out and I find out, alright, either by asking her, by induction, or by my own research. Later I also attend workshops by the highest authority in #medical_translation in Spain, Fernando Navarro, whose dictionary is virtually the bible of medical #translation.
So this company, the Big Bad Agency, as I was fond of calling it in my FB wall, comes along and asks me to take a test on the bio-sciences area. Which I pass, so I get jobs. The first job I get is a track changes job (you don’t want to know about that, even if you do know). It’s a long Word document, a clinical trial protocol. If you know the amount of memory and resources that go into making changes –and comments– in tracks, you will know that the document is bound to freeze and suffer all types of practical accidents.
So it gets to a point in which the pages, say 80, start to multiply like a virus and I cannot stop it in any way. I think I gave up and declined to go on with the job, losing the time I had already spent. Or something like that.
After that, things get back to normal and I think I even got the 15 cents I stated as my rate maybe ONCE, for Christmas. After that, let’s say my rate was 10.
And it declined steadily. I remember when I was advised by “provider manager” that I lower it to 0.08 or 0.09 since that would increase the chances of my being chosen. Year after year, a new system appears in which they post the jobs and you can accept or negotiate. Sometimes #negotiation is not allowed. So they don’t need to tell you to lower your rate in order to be “chosen”. It’s up to the market and the fear of not getting a job if you negotiate.
Then #MTPE started, calculated per hour (estimated time that it will take you to edit the machine translation output) but with a new decline of the rate per hour, 10 bucks less than when I started.
So now it is down to negotiate lower and lower rates and deal with more and more complicated jobs. Dealing with #translation_memories that are messed up by the new linguists that come in with no experience in pharmaceutical translation and hey, I almost understand, “if this is the pay, it must be this easy and fast”, and they do what they can.
But here’s one translator that stayed there, negotiating as hard as I could. Doing “third party reviews” for them when the client comes back with complaints or with changes, and you have to make sure the changes are ok. At least in this capacity —however I dislike the task because it reminds me, it evidences, that the system is corrupt—, at least I get paid per hour I use. At my rate per hour, which is the same they used 15 years ago.
And even so, I am burnt.
Decided today, should have decided a looooong time ago, that I am going to put my effort in finding new clients, direct clients, new venues, new fields and companies. Hopefully more work in the #publishing_industry that will never be affected by the MTPE madness.
Well, I’ve seen hints, but in any case the rates there were low anyhow, and I rather work on long set projects that you can time at your convenience than negotiating a thousand small quirky jobs a month and have to answer “final eye” questions after you have forgotten about them.
So yes, one thing or another, I will survive, because I am good, and I have lots of capacities.
Amen
