By Letícia Carvalho Pereira Pasqualotto
Historically speaking, the field of work for language professionals is increasing every year. There are new areas of work rising and traditional areas being adapted. This means we also have to adapt ourselves in order to grow in our profession and keep doing our best work for our clients.
One of the language professions that is most changing right now is the translation industry. Many of these changes are because of globalization due to the increase of internet users and content these users create, in addition to its massive technological growth. The translation industry became dependent of technology, and with the internet, translators sought ways to enhance their work and expand their field of action, besides having an increase in the demand for this job.
Nowadays, the translator must be familiar with information technologies like CAT tools. Therefore, we need to adapt and develop complementary competences or we will be left behind by the constant evolution of this business. The CAT tools functions as a conjunct of translation memories (TMs) and machine translation (MTs), they are linguistic database that help us by optimizing our time and maintaining the translation content coherent. However, it can be a double-edged sword since it can stagnate the target language and interfere in the creative process that the translator might need to fulfil his job.
The CAT tools are very useful instruments; still we have to know when it will improve our work and when it will interfere with it. For example, when working with technical content the translator will need a more specific terminology and therefore the use of a CAT tool is recommended. However when we work in projects that need a little more of creativity like in the translation of literary content or video-games, we use the localization process which means adapting something of the source language to the target language and the use of those tools will do more harm than good.
The work of the translator is no longer simply transferring a content from one language to another. We are constantly working with locales, this means that the knowledge of a foreign language is not enough anymore; we also have to know about the social and cultural aspects of the source language and target language, and this is a concept being recently studied in the translation academic field. We no longer can separate localization and translation since different cultures see the world in different manners and the contrasting traditions of these cultures might accept some things that others do not.
That creates more work fields for the language professional; the need to deepen ourselves in a different culture makes the translator capable for many other jobs. The globalization created a more demanding market for translators and interpreters not only in the context of literature but of products as well and thus in the marketing and advertising industry. Therefore, the more the globalization increase, the more the translation and interpreting area increases creating new opportunities for these areas of work.
Presently, we have translators working in areas like localization, subtitling, transcreating, internationalization, telephone interpreting, video interpreting, etc. This only in the linguistic fields, however, since the marketing industry is a very immediate area, the freelance work for the language professional is becoming each time more difficult and demanding. So, translators are no longer interested in working alone, in this matter we see a great increase in the translation agencies with the purpose of divide the work therefore being more efficient in time and quality since double checking the work is also easier inside an agency.
The creation of these agencies transform the translation industry in a much more corporate profession. Thus, translators are becoming entrepreneurs in order to be self-sufficient and manage projects in a much larger scale than when working in solo projects as freelancers. Therefore remodelling the translation industry into something more affordable, the necessity of a multilingual professional capable for leading a project may be the solution for marketing in different cultures where different approaches are necessary to better advertise some product, literature or idea.
Entrepreneurship is a necessary evolution of the translation and interpret industry that allows language professionals to fulfil their job with more quality and efficiency. Meaning, the expansion of this area if work generated a necessity for the development of a more organized system where translators work together creating a network to supply the high demand of the job without losing quality. Consequently creating new environments for language professionals to work and capacitating them for the consequences of the globalization we are subjected by the technological boom of the XXI century. We can say that the language professional needs to develop additional competences besides keeping up with the fast changes of the internet world in order to provide a fast and fair service as well as evolve in other areas of work.
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