Nowadays, much of the work done by Taiwan's translation and interpreting industry is business-related. Translation for legal, technical or scholarly purposes is also common. Translation applies to written documents, while interpreting deals with verbal communication. For most of the period following World War II, the United States was Taiwan's No. 1 trading partner, and English has been the foreign language most often handled by the country's T&I professionals.
John Lin, vice president of Elite Translation Co. Ltd., gave a breakdown of his company's workload. "Chinese to English is 16 percent; English to Chinese is 36 percent," he said July 4. "The rest includes many language pairs such as Chinese into Japanese, Japanese into Chinese, English into French, German, Italian, Spanish and so on. We do more than 20 language pairs."
According to George Ho, founding chair of the Department of Translation and Interpreting at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in Kaohsiung City, Taiwan's T&I industry has some distinct strengths but also notable weaknesses.
"There are some high-performing translation companies in Taiwan, many of which have set up branches in China for further development," Ho said July 27. "These companies take the initiative to interact with educational institutions for translator," he noted, adding that many college T&I departments employ professional translators to serve as full- or part-time teaching staff, and have state-of-the-art T&I laboratories.
Translations produced in Taiwan vary widely in quality, according to Paul Cox, an American who has been a full-time translator in Taipei for the past 17 years. He is also the head of the translation department at Winkler Partners, a Taipei-based law firm.
"Taiwan's translation industry on the whole is relatively strong in English-to-Chinese translation and weak in Chinese-to-English translation, as there is a much smaller pool of competent C-E translators than E-C translators here," Cox explained Aug. 2.
"A core of good C-E translators does exist, but has been slow to grow. The relative dearth of qualified C-E translators is partly due to English being a second language in Taiwan, partly due to strict government controls on foreign labor and partly due to the relatively low prevailing rates for translation in Taiwan compared to Europe and Japan," Cox stated.
"People in Taiwan do not respect translators enough, so the professional status of translators is still low," according to Sung Kang-tzu, who researched Taiwan's T&I industry as a part of his graduate studies at the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University in Australia.
In his 2005 paper "T&I Labour Market in Taiwan," Sung argues that the quality of translations is adversely affected by several factors, including pricing.
Fierce competition between firms has led to an overall decline in the quality of work, he found. Buyers of translation services are, by definition, unable to fully understand either the source text or the target text. The source text is the document to be translated, and the target text is the final product rendered in the client's native language. "In Taiwan's translation market, prices usually replace the quality of translations and clients always regard price as guidance," he stresses.
Competition has led to a reduction in translation rates in the Taiwan market, Sung writes. "Some translation companies want to earn higher profits, so they employ untrained and inexperienced translators."
Other factors undermining translation quality include the lack of a universal accreditation system for translators, and the fact that many translators are part-timers looking to supplement their regular income, rather than full-timers trying to build a career in the field, according to Sung.
"Another characteristic of the translation market in Taiwan is business process outsourcing," he states, adding that if a company faced a large volume of work, it would assign projects to outside translators. Companies often rely on free-lancers because their caseloads fluctuate constantly, Sung writes.
Cox elaborated on that theme. "Many translation agencies cut costs by outsourcing to unqualified free-lancers, for example to students who may have little experience or interest in translation except as a means to make some extra spending money," he said.
"In recent years, this problem has increased as agencies have begun outsourcing over the Internet to even less qualified translators overseas," Cox explained, pointing out that this problem is not unique to Taiwan. "In work done by these 'translation mill'-type agencies, clients are lucky if their translations get edited in-house for quality before delivery. Meanwhile, the free-lancers hired by such agencies are often underpaid, and have little chance to develop their skills as they get no direct feedback from in-house editors."
"There is a tremendous problem in Taiwan with people failing to view translation and interpreting as a genuine profession, especially in a place where just about everyone knows 'some' English, and just about everyone thinks he's an expert," Terry Waltz said July 5. An American, she has been working as a full-time free-lance translator since 1987.
Waltz, who translates Chinese and Spanish into English, first lived in Taiwan between 1993 and 2000. In 2002, she returned to the island and did a master's degree in T&I at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei County. Now back in the United States, she works for clients there and in Taiwan.
"The going rate for work into English in Taiwan is probably between US$0.02 and US$0.08 per word. By comparison, the going rate in the United States is something like US$0.14 and up. I myself charge and easily get US$0.18 per word," Waltz claimed. These rates are for the length of the target text.
"There are some Taiwanese clients willing to pay international rates for international quality, but most will not or cannot, and end up with Taiwanese translators going into what is for them a foreign language," Waltz explained, who is adamant that translators should only translate into their native language, not vice versa. "Some organizations are willing to combine translation and editing fees to raise the price. But it's still a per-word rate much lower than what's going on the international market."
"Our prices are higher than the market average, but we are still influenced by the market," Lin said. "Persuading a new customer to accept a price that's higher than the market rate can be difficult. We show potential customers the assets our competitors usually lack," he stated. "We have 100 employees in our Taipei office and 70 in China. Our in-house information-technology department has eight employees. We have proprietary software tools and systems we use to manage the translation process. Elite has more than 20 editors responsible for quality assurance. These factors help convince our customers, and it allows them to rely on us."
"Most of our customers have been using our services for a long time," Lin explained. "These customers have more experience working with various translation companies, so they understand more clearly the importance of quality and service."
One reason for the severe price competition is that translation industry has extremely low barriers to entry. Anyone looking for translation work can post their resume on websites like ProZ.com, which describes itself as "the world's leading enabling and sourcing platform for language professionals," or TranslatorsCafe.com. Since they use the Internet, translators can work from home and communicate with clients via e-mail.
As of August 2007, ProZ.com listed details of 7,523 English-to-Chinese translators and interpreters, and 4,459 who say they can do Chinese to English. These individuals are located in Taiwan, China and other countries. Among those listed in both categories is Tracy Wang, who lives in Taipei and has a master's degree in T&I from the University of Bath in England.
"It's easy to start a career as a translator," Wang said July 8. "If you have an academic background of language training, or your language skills are good enough and you happen to get a chance to translate something and gain recognition, you can be on your way to become a translator."
"It isn't easy to make a good living if you want to be a free-lancer. Price is definitely the issue," she stressed. "If you translate books for publishers, the price they offer is normally pretty low and not flexible. If you translate documents for companies or things like news releases for public-relations companies, the price is better but the quantity of work is relatively small."
"Therefore, a broad and stable client base is needed. I think clients also pursue quality for sure, but they don't want to pay more," Wang said. "When most of the translators in the market accept low prices due to competition, there isn't much room for price negotiation."
Ho believed that the local T&I industry was shrinking, because many international companies were now focusing on China. "A lack of job opportunities has forced some talented T&I graduates to go overseas or to China to find a brighter future," he said.
Translation would seem like a field where a great deal of work could be outsourced to China, where salaries and overhead costs are much lower than in Taiwan. The difference in writing systems is a major stumbling block for the PRC, however. Taiwan uses traditional characters while in China, simplified characters are dominant. "For translation from English into traditional Chinese, there is little competition from China," Lin said.
Copyright 2007 by Steven Crook
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