Accurate Professional Translation – Cheap

This post includes partial results from a survey we conducted in April 4. The survey includes questions about rates and areas of expertise. We want to get a complete picture of the translation industry worldwide. So we collected 2018 answers.

Respondents include the translator and interpreters from every continent, area of expertise and level of experience. In today's article, we cover the most popular areas of expertise in the translation industry.

The origin of the respondent

Of the 401 linguists who filled out the survey, the majority lived in Europe (55%). Up to 18% of respondents are from South America and 13% are from North America. Regarding the rest of the continents, 3% of respondents live in Central America. Furthermore, 4% of respondents are from Africa, 6% from Asia and 1% from Oceania.

The most popular fields of specialization

Technical translation seems to be the most popular among different types of specialized translation such as training and manual translation. In addition, any text dealing with the practical application of scientific and technological information is considered technical.

Technical translation involves the use of a “control language” for which machine translation has been shown to perform well. However, our survey proves that human technical translators are not going anywhere! In contrast, the results show that the field appears to have more work. Therefore, most of the respondents chose technical translation as their specialty.

The field has few specialized translators

Areas with few specialized translators are diverse, including literature, tourism, transcription, audiovisual/entertainment and video games. However, these specialties do not have as many linguists as the fields of technical translation, legal, or marketing.

Something worth thinking about

We quote Charles Martin in his Professional Translation article:

"Everyone in the translation industry seems to agree that translators today must specialize. There are mainly two reasons why this demand has been increasing in recent years.

Firstly, it is an exponential expansion of knowledge to know about any particular topic and many new topics to know. No one translator can have the necessary knowledge to translate all types of documents. Therefore, you should work alone and within a reasonable amount of time.

Second, the Internet is why specialization is increasingly needed. Because the Internet helps translators deliver translations quickly to customers anywhere in the world. They can promote special skills and services beyond the local market.

Thereby, the global site has made it much easier for translators to specialize. Furthermore, by putting a wealth of information at their disposal, it helped them to venture into new and more specialized fields. But the Internet has also increased competition helping those with translated documents find someone who can meet their specific needs or prices."

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