Anybody can do anything. Right?!

A couple of months ago I had a high-level interpreting assignment. Everything went smoothly and the head of delegation told me he was very happy with my services. Nothing really special about that, just another day in the life of an interpreter.
A couple of days ago they contacted me again, because there will be another important meeting, requiring the services of an interpreter. I was very pleased to have another returning customer - until the contact person asked me to teach her interpreting in private lessons. Her boss, who was the head of delegation, thought it would be a good idea to have a "multi-purpose" employee who could step in as an interpreter. At first I was appaled - I thought it showed a lack of respect for the interpreting profession. As if anyone could become an interpreter in no time. Who cares that interpreting is something people study at university level for years. Who cares that a good interpreter has to work on a regular basis, to keep up with the demands of the job.
But then, I calmed down and realised there was no bad intention on the part of the client.
For, if you're doing a good job as an interpreter everything seems easy as if no effort went into the task at hand. You take your notes, you can easily read them, you look at your client, don't hesitate and speak with a clear confident voice. Easy - anybody can do that, what could possibly be difficult in this job. All it takes is to speak two languages and have a notepad.
Or, you're not doing a good job, you don't know how to take notes, you have a hard time remembering what was said if the intervention was longer than one or two sentences, you make grammar and content mistakes and mumble instead of speaking clearly. Well, anybody CAN do that. It's easy to be a lousy interpreter.
It seems interpreters can't win. Either we're too good for our own good, or we have to suffer because of all those who aren't good enough and damage the reputation of the entire profession.
What makes a good interpreter anyway?

Off-shoring Translations?

When I started as a freelance translator and interpreter, the business was almost always strictly local. Even though working with languages obviously has an international dimension, back then in the early 1990’s we had no emails to receive files to be translated. We had to personally pick up the hard copy of the text and deliver a floppy disk and a printout afterwards.

However, times are changing and nowadays, our clients could be anywhere in the world. And some clients do search for their language service providers virtually anywhere, price apparently being the only criterion they consider.

Or would you search for a service provider on a web portal, where anybody can claim anything in their resume and the only reliable information is the price they charge?

I think I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t if what I needed to have done mattered. And if it didn’t matter, I probably wouldn’t have it done in the first place.

So yes, I checked out Proz.com and TranslatorsCafe and what have you. I even registered but never really felt comfortable to compete on lowest rates.

And then, one fine day, I received an email that a job for my language combination has just been published. I was of course curious, so I immediately logged in to check it out. I was not prepared for what I found however.

Obviously, I’m familiar with the idea of off-shoring or outsourcing manufacturing jobs to cheaper countries. I guess this is a trend we cannot stop let alone reverse. However, I’ve been under the impression that some jobs cannot be off-shored due to the fact that they are very closely tied with a particular market. I thought that for a translator with Slovak as a mother tongue, there would be no cheaper market than our own, so I would only have to compete with my fellow Slovak linguists living in cheaper parts of my country.

How wrong I was! The job posted for my language combination was by an Indian agency, asking for “best rates”. And this is something I find rather intriguing. I fully understand that clients want the cheapest possible price and that they think India is a country full with cheap service providers. So far, so good. However, I have serious doubts that there are many translators with Slovak as a mother tongue living in India, thus able to accept lower prices, due to lower costs of living. Consequently, any agency in India would have to find Slovaks living elsewhere in the world, Slovakia probably being the cheapest option anyway. So why would a potential client not contact a Slovak agency instead?

I cannot possibly imagine a scenario, where an Indian company can provide a better service and quality at a lower price than a local agency in Slovakia that has many translators in their database to start with.

I guess, I’ll never find out.