How do you measure a year? Or even five years?

They say you can’t monitor what you can’t measure, and that’s as true for translators as it is for sustainability professionals.

For reasons that aren’t important right now, I recently listened to the German version of the song “Seasons of Love” from the film Rent (1996). If you’re not familiar with the film, or have forgotten, the song asks ‘How do you measure a year?’ and starts by reciting the number of minutes in a year. You might be wondering how well ‘525,600 minutes’ translates into the German version’s ‘525.600 Minuten’, and the answer is ‘surprisingly well’ - the phrase comprises 13 syllables in both languages, though the way it spreads out over the rhythm of the melody makes the middle bit (‘fünfundzwanzigtausend’) perhaps a bit more of a tongue-twister for the German cast.

Now, I’m not going to pretend that this blog post addresses issues anywhere near as serious as the AIDS crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. However, it still poses an interesting question: How do I measure what I have achieved over the past five years and what progress I have made?

Five years in five figures

I’ve always wondered where exactly I should trace the start of my career to. I registered as self-employed in August 2018, by which measure I am well into my sixth year at time of writing. But then, it took a few months to establish myself as a reliable professional with repeat clients (probably November-ish 2018) and a few months after that before I was bringing it anything like a regular income (January-ish 2019), so the five-year mark is more of a ‘guideline’ than a fixed point. For our purposes here, however, we’ll round to five, and below are five stats about what I’ve achieved in the last five years. If you’re reading this well after November 2023, some more recent figures are available here:

1. No. words translated: 1.07m, or approximately 200k/year.
   For context, an average novel is (supposedly) around 80k words, so that’s 5 novels/year translated. For context, a Pew research study found that Americans read an average of 12 books/year (though the median was 4).

2. No. words edited: 1.74m, or approximately 348k/year
   The vast majority of this was editing non-native speakers writing in English for one reason or another. It’s a skill I take great pride in and work I really enjoy.

3. No. hours of continuing professional development (CPD), excluding professional contribution: 318 or 63.6/year
   The Institute of Translation and Interpreting (ITI) and Chartered Institute of Linguists (CIOL) both recommend 30 hours of CPD per year, so I’ve more than doubled that. The largest type is subject knowledge (151.6 hours or 30.3/year), and I have started posting monthly summaries of my subject-knowledge CPD for you to see the sort of things I work on.

4. No. hours of professional contribution CPD: 114.6 or 22.9/year
   I like to separate this out because I’m rather proud of it. This represents how much time I spend per year working to ensure the future of the profession. It mainly comes from my work for the East Anglia Network and the Membership Committee of the ITI.

5. No. weekend days (Saturdays + Sundays) worked: 198 or 36.6/year
   I’ve included this to recognise the reality of freelancing. And it sounds like a lot, right? It equates to about 18 weekends/year or 1 in 3 of all weekends. There are a few things concealed in the data though. Firstly, the course I teach for the University of Westminster takes place on a Saturday afternoon, and I normally give myself the following Monday off as compensation. More importantly though, this figure has been coming down since it peaked in FY 2020/21 (61 days), when I made a conscious decision to set clearer boundaries. It hovered at about 30 days/year for the following two years and is on track to come down to about 10 days/year in FY 2023/24.

Five years in five landmarks

If you’re reading this, you’re probably well aware that figures can be the bones of a good story, but they are not the story itself. Instead, a story has to have a sense of progression, so here are some ‘waypoints’ that have felt important to me over the last five years:

1. October 2019: started teaching translation at University College London
   Teaching postgraduate students is an enormous responsibility and a challenge, but I’m so glad I started doing it. My teaching style and responsibilities have evolved over the years, but one of the things I’m most proud of is the joint project between the UCL Centre for Translation Studies and the UCL Rare Dementia Support service.

2. April 2022: The 2021/22 was the first financial year that I made more money through my freelance business than in my last employed position.
   A little mercenary perhaps? But it was an important milestone for me because it meant that I hadn’t taken a step backwards by stepping away from the more stable world of full-time employment!

3. July 2022: launch of Source2Target, the podcast for new and prospective translators
   This has been - and remains! - a real labour of love, and one that I think again represents my commitment to the future of the profession.

4. June 2023: Admitted as a Qualified Member (MITI) of the Institute of Translation and Interpreting
   The ITI really does set the standard for translators and interpreters in the UK and beyond, so it’s a huge honour to be able to put ‘MITI’ after my name.

5. November 2023: launch of this website!
   The fact that you’re reading this demonstrates why it’s a landmark for me, but I’ll come back it further below.

What about love?

The song’s answer to the question is that you should measure your year in love. A tricky proposal for any statistician, though a quick look at scientific journals suggests that a few people have had a go. The challenge of quantifying fundamentally qualitative data is one that will be familiar to those working in sustainability reporting, so I don’t need to elaborate on it here. For me, I suppose the question is: Do I still love what I do?

The easy answer to this of course is ‘yes, absolutely’, but that’s only half the story - or rather two-thirds of the story. I still love doing the actual work. By this, I’m not referring to translating, revising etc. specifically, but to the overall core of what I do: helping people with good ideas to communicate effectively. I’ve said many times on this website that I think about the future a lot, and that can feel like a terrifying thing to do at the moment. Contributing my skills to the people and organisations that are working to build a better future is not just comforting in the face of a scary future, it’s profoundly empowering. I get to the end of most days feeling like I have made a positive contribution, using what I am good at for a larger purpose. Where I used to fear an empty day in the diary, I’ve also learned to love these as an opportunity to sharpen my skills and knowledge or contribute in other ways.

What about the other third? I hesitate to broach it publicly, so I will start by saying that this is not a criticism of any one person or organisation, but rather of the translation ecosystem as a whole. It seems to me that we are going through a period of what you might call ‘expectation creep’. By this, I mean that translation users’ and buyers’ expectations are being driven to ever more unrealistic heights by forces that actually have very little to do with translation. AI is the biggest obvious candidate here - the large language models on which AI translation tools are based have more to do with statistics than with linguistics, and yet they are exerting an extraordinary influence on the language professions, exacerbating a spiralling of expectations surrounding how much time translators need, and how much we need to charge. And I do mean exacerbating - AI has accelerated this expectation creep, but it was undoubtedly already there. I had already noticed (anecdotally!) deadlines for translations getting shorter and shorter, especially for the revision stage. The shortening of revision windows is particularly concerning, since it reduces the revision stage to more of a ‘once-over’ than an actual detailed checking of a translation. I could go on about how this is contrary to the principles of ISO 17100 and how it unnecessarily increases the stress on revisers, but I think the point that ‘less time = lower quality’ doesn’t need belabouring.

It’s tempting to think that this is inevitable. The world is getting faster and faster, and convenience is king, so why should translation be exempt? Particularly when suggesting that technology is not the answer to all of our problems sounds like Luddism or perhaps ‘Refusenikism’. But I believe that we must resist this narrative and see through what Kahneman might call ‘the illusion of inevitability’ to the actual choices in front of us. It is ultimately, I think, a question of priorities. Despite how it might seem, I think there are circumstances where machine/AI translation are perfectly acceptable - they can produce adequate translations of functional documents, for example. But when what you need translated matters, you still want a human involved. And when dealing with a human, you need to treat them like one, and that means accepting that we can’t work at the speed of a machine, and we certainly can’t do it for the cost of a machine. This is, in my view, the crux of the matter - if your work matters to you, then the translation (and ergo the translator) should too, I do believe that this view will win out in the end, but we are in for a bumpy few years of overinflated expectations and inevitable disappointments in some quarters in the meantime.

That sounds like a bit of a downer to end on, doesn’t it? Make no mistake - these frustrations are real, but they are not as all-encompassing as the above may lead you to believe. I deal every day with people who understand that humans will always be essential to good translation and communication, and I don’t see any sign of that changing.

In my experience, you need two things to build a happy career in translation:

1. A clear understanding of your own red lines.

2. Faith that turning down work that crosses those lines will not result in your business crumbling.

It’s taken me a long time to develop these two things, and even now I have the occasional wobble, but as I have said before and will continue to say, I believe in a better future - and that includes the future of my own profession. I listed the launch of this website as a major landmark for me, and one of the reasons for that is that it marks a very public statement of intention about what I want to work on going forward, and more importantly, who I want to do it with. I hope that the messaging on this site will act as a sort of self-selection filter, leaving only those who, like me, believe in a better future and who understand the importance of collaborating with their translator(s) in a partnership of equals. That’s the future I dream of.