Thanks to globalization, demand on the translation market grows significantly year after year, yet, despite this, prices and quality levels keep falling.
Written after the conference held in 2019.
The conference “How to deliver quality language services in practice”, organized by Syncro Translation Services, set out to bring face to face absolutely all the players in the field: professional freelance translators, interpreters, translation agencies, DTP and technology and digitalization specialists, and representatives of publishers, to discuss the problems of reaching quality standards in language services in what was shaping up to be a very challenging 2019.
Every participant openly expressed their point of view, and the challenges are clearly numerous. The threat of artificial intelligence and the army of virtual freelancers who are simply volatile are just some of them. We took these “threats” apart one by one, with simple solutions.
We identified very many solutions for as many challenges and found a common denominator: educating clients, and with them the market, through effective communication at every stage of the project, especially in the preliminary stage, the quoting phase. The experience shared by every participant was extremely valuable. We all understood that we can use state-of-the-art technology and artificial intelligence to our advantage to increase productivity and quality, and that we can in fact deliver exactly the quality wanted if we manage to communicate effectively at every stage: the client does not know they need a certain quality for a certain type of document unless they are told, and does not know they must provide a lot of information before an interpreting session unless they are told. A translator cannot turn an ugly source text into a beautiful translation without understanding exactly what has to be achieved.
And so most challenges can be solved easily through open communication between all the parties involved – communication staged live at this conference.