News >> The Top Five Idiosyncrasies of the Present Translation MarketThere is no doubt that translation market has been subject to considerable change during recent years. Below are the main idiosyncrasies of the present translation market.
Online, Online, Online!
The present translation market is above all marked by its online nature. Nowadays, a large number of translation jobs are sent via email to freelance translators across the globe. Clients post their jobs on online translation portals and translation companies as well as freelance translators all over the world can quote and get the jobs.
Tight Deadlines
The present translation market is also marked by its tight deadlines which imposes its own limitations on translators. In today’s translation market, translators may seldom have the luxury of time to spend hours searching for either the right person or material to help them with the projects at hand. For instance, when a freelance translator gets a translation project of a few thousand words on Laser Surgery equipment that must be delivered within a few days, it would be very unlikely for him/her to go to the library to find a book on the subject to gain some background knowledge. Surfing the Web to read some relevant online texts seems a better option here!
CAT Tools
A lot of clients require translators to work with CAT tools such as Trados, Across and Logoport. Some of them may even provide translation memories and ask translators to make use of them in their translations. This is especially true for large companies with multimillion-word translation projects.
New Demands
One of the gradual changes happening in the present translation market is that translators are required to do tasks they may not have been trained for. For instance, the need for translators to work as editors or technical writers is rapidly increasing. As the current trend indicates, the future of translators’ job will rest more than ever in revising machine translation outputs, editing and technical writing.
Not so much of Specialization
In today’s translation market, professional translators generally work with variety of texts and text types. For instance, as regards freelance translators, the more specialized fields they can get into, the better chance they have in the market. This requires translators to have an encyclopedic knowledge of various specialized fields or else have the necessary resources to gain such knowledge when the need arises.
In fact, the current translation market requires translators to be prepared to deal with translation of various specialized texts rather than focusing on translation of just one or two genres and text types. Therefore, it seems that having flexibility to adapt to translation of various specialized texts is more important than having in-depth knowledge in one particular field.
