The name and nature of regenerative translation
In the end, it’s all about the soil.
Sorry, some context is probably needed here. This is the third or fourth time I’ve tried to write this blog. Every time I end up getting side-tracked by trying to provide a potted history of the organic/regenerative/agroecological movement, or to disentangle the complex thicket of terminology that has grown up in this space. All in an attempt to legitimise the idea that I want to lay out, to “show my workings” - in other words, to give what I recently learned on a copywriting workshop are called “reasons to believe”. But each time, it just descended into waffling. So now I’m going to try and follow one of the tutor’s other tips: get to the point.
And the point is this: It’s all about the soil.
Except, of course, the soil is not just about the soil. These holistic approaches to food production acknowledge and celebrate the interconnectedness and interdependence of every component of the system - from the hedgerows and other ‘static’ infrastructure of the farming system to the birds, bees and other wildlife that meander through the fields, pollinating crops, eating pests or just sharing these spaces. And that gaze doesn’t just take in the larger, macro-components, it zooms right down to the microscopic level, to understand all the bacteria and other tiny lives that inhabit the soil and sustain its fertility and productivity.
And more than simply acknowledging and trying to understand what’s going on in the soil, these ways of farming understand that this fertility is not a given. It can be damaged – or even destroyed – by the extractive practices of conventional industrial farming. Crucially, though, it also understands that, through proper care and attention, this fertility can be restored (or regenerated, in the terminology of regenerative farming).
“All very interesting,” I can hear you saying, “but where is he going with this?” Well, I’ll tell you. A thought has been bubbling away in the back of my mind ever since I heard Helen Brown, head of the Soil Association, speak at the EA Sustain Festival about the challenges of being an organic farmer in a world dominated by industrial farming. So many of the things she had to say about the state of organic farming – not just as a practice, but as a business – seemed to echo the challenges I see in today’s translation industry.
This is surprising, don’t you think? In many ways, the two things could not be more dissimilar: agriculture supplies products, whereas translation delivers services (you may not agree with this – we can fight about that another time). And the products that agriculture provides are essential daily needs, whereas there are many people who would probably claim they never interact with translation at all (again, that’s a battle for another day) – translation is therefore a luxury, not a necessity like food. And where agriculture (of all kinds) is subject to environmental factors that are beyond anyone’s control, like the weather, the translator’s working environment is theoretically much more under direct control.
All of this may be true, but I can’t help but feel a certain kinship with the farmers I meet in the organic, regenerative, agroecological etc. farming space. It’s a difficult feeling to put into words, but if I had to sum it up, I would put it something like this:
Translators are the soil of the translation industry.
What do I mean by this? Well, I think there are two key things:
Translators are at the heart of the translation industry.
The intensive business practices at work in the translation industry are harmful to the long-term interests of its most vital asset (i.e. translators).
I should hope that point 1 does not require much justification. Without translators, there is no translation profession, which means there can be no translation industry. A shell of it might persist for a while, but the highly mechanised world of MT- and AI-driven language processing will only ever be suitable for certain parts of the translation market. And these parts will continue to grow, but what they do will – I think – look less and less like translation over time.
Point 2 is trickier to prove, and I have to acknowledge that I am relying on my own subjective judgement here. I could point to the latest ITI survey, which found that translators’ positivity about the overall business environment is only continuing to fall (from a peak of 58% in Spring 2022 to 30% in Autumn 2024 – almost halving), for example. But honestly, I’m going purely by the number of experienced colleagues I’ve seen move into other fields or professions because they don’t like the way the industry is heading, and by the frustration expressed in the translation circles that I am privileged to move in. Can these frustrations be traced back to an intensification of the translation process for the sake of productivity and speed? Well, I have yet to see any objective evidence in the form of a survey or similar – one of the disadvantages of such a freelancer-heavy profession is that there are no exit interviews. So it is, theoretically, possible that we’re looking at correlation without causation here. I leave that up to your judgement.
But what exactly do I mean by ‘intensive’?
Believe it or not, I’m not actually talking solely about AI here. If anything, AI has de-intensified the translation industry in a way by taking a lot of the high-churn work away (for transparency, this is another subjective statement of opinion on my part, I make no claim to this being demonstrably true). And some argue that AI offers new, creative working methodologies for actually doing translation (see for example, S3E9 of my podcast, Source 2 Target, where we talked about AI and the potential benefits to translators.)
But what AI has done, I think, is accelerate a trend that had already started: the shortening of deadlines for translators whilst nevertheless expecting the same quality at the same price (or even a lower one). Again, I cannot produce any objective evidence for this, but I can tell you that over the nearly eight years that I have been working, I have seen the timeframes being offered for work contracting, especially, but not exclusively, when it comes to translation agencies – especially large LSPs. This is not universal, of course, but it does seem to be a general trend.
And there is a logic behind this, isn’t there? Theoretically these sorts of tools (not just AI, but also MT) offer all sorts of efficiencies, both in the actual translation and in the admin and project management around it. (Incidentally, I was recently reminded that ‘true’ augmented translation practices “lights-out” project management – i.e. there are no human project managers, just an AI system that takes a text and decides how to allocate the words in it across its database of linguists. I don’t know how many project managers realise that they might be the next victim to be efficencied out of the system…). Logically then, if these tools help achieve efficiency, it follows that the same level of quality can be achieved in a shorter period of time, in which case the translator can afford to do it for cheaper because they have time freed up to take on additional work. Sounds reasonable.
The problem is that this is a fundamental misunderstanding – or even corruption – of the famous time-quality-price (TQP) triangle (AKA the project management triangle). It seems to work under the assumption of there being one minimum acceptable quality and that this is what translators should aim for in order to optimise their productivity. In other words, it channels the translation process towards achieving the minimum functionally acceptable quality in the shortest possible time. Time, then, is not so much one of the counterbalancing factors in the TQP triangle but rather a component of quality itself, and any translation completed within a human timeframe is inherently a lower-quality translation simply because it was done more slowly (less ‘productively’?), no matter the level of skill or cultural knowledge deployed in the actual translation.
Now, it is at this point in the argument that someone usually throws out some sort of straw-man angle to undermine my point. To be clear, I am not saying that there is no such thing as an urgent translation – of course there is: If a patient is crossing a border for an urgent surgery, the doctors performing the operation need the patient’s medical records translated with a minimum acceptable level of accuracy and within the shortest amount of time. Nor am I saying that every translation needs to be a top-notch masterful rendition of the source text, there are times when the budget airline will do – it may not be as comfortable, but it gets you there, and that’s fine.
(This is, incidentally a major difference between what we might call organic translation and organic agriculture – the ultimate logic of organic agriculture is to eliminate the ‘organic’ qualifier altogether and to replace conventional industrialised farming entirely so that all farming is by definition organic. I, on the other hand, can accept that there is a place for the sort of intensive translation I’m describing here in certain limited circumstances. The real question is whether it can leave space for the way I prefer to do things.)
What I am saying is that this should not be the default way translators are expected to work.
Insisting on this form of speed-based understanding of productivity as opposed to a quality-based understanding of productivity is the essence of what I mean by ‘intensive business practices’. And the pursuit of this goal has led to certain trends that do, I would argue, echo at least two of the unsustainable practices inherent in intensive agriculture:
Ramping up external inputs as a way of compensating for the weakening productivity of the soil
In this case, rather than the external inputs of synthetic nitrogen fertiliser and pesticide that provide temporary boosts in soil fertility, the integration of the external inputs of MT and LLM/AI content into the translation process can in certain circumstances boost translators’ productivity (and indeed, I have used MT content in translation in the past). But at what long-term cost? To be clear, I’m not saying that these sorts of synthetic linguistic resources do not have their use, but we need to apply them intelligently to make sure they are not causing long-term harm. We also need to acknowledge the issues surrounding the sourcing of this content, just as we need to be aware of the environmental impact of producing synthetic fertiliser.Offering ever cheaper at the cost of supply chain sustainability
One thing that seems to come up time and again in the organic/regen/etc. spaces I have spent time in is frustration over supermarket pricing. The concern seems to be that in their race-to-the-bottom pricing, supermarkets are not the ones bearing the impact of reduced prices. Instead, those costs are passed up the supply chain to the producers, who are seeing their margins squeezed and squeezed until many are forced out of business. Does this sound familiar to any translators out there? But the thing is, producers argue, supermarkets are not simply passive stakeholders responding to market forces (“price-takers” in the jargon), they are actually price makers – they have power that can influence price trends, if they would only use it with their entire supply chain in mind.
I could go on about these parallels, and I may well in future, but I’m trying to be as brief as possible. The key thing for the moment is that both of these represent a short-termist perspective driven by the logic of intensification, and both are, I think, relatively unrecognised by (or even concealed from) the ultimate recipients of the services, i.e. the customers/clients. And the impact of both lands ultimately on the translator.
So what would regenerative translation look like in practice?
Of course, it’s all very well to name the problem, but what exactly can we do about it? How can we establish a translation industry that is fair and sustainable for all of its participants? Well again, this could take up pages and pages, and these ideas need expanding and nuancing, but here’s a few initial ideas:
Stop competing on price and be honest with clients about what can be achieved in the time available
Again, this draws on the conversations I’ve heard in organic farming spaces. One thing that I’ve heard expressed time and again is the desire for consumers to understand the “real” cost of food – i.e. what food should cost if all of the damaging practices that keep the prices artificially low were stripped out. For organic food, of course, this is a bit of a sticking point. The general public have become so habituated to these lower costs that the “real” costs feel out of reach, and organic food becomes a luxury rather than standard. For translation, however, there would seem to be more room to negotiate, if we can only agree to avoid competing on price (and yes, find ways to support each other financially as we transition back to a fairer system).Counterbalance this acknowledgement of the “real” cost of translation with emphasising the added benefits
One way that organic farming attempts to deal with this is to emphasise the value-add of food that has been grown organically to consumers. And it is not just a case of avoiding harm – just as organic producers emphasise that organic food often has a higher nutritional content that industrially produced food, so too must we learn to emphasise the value-add of human-driven translation (even if technology is used in that process). It’s become fashionable to say that “good quality” is the minimum that a service provider should be offering, and therefore pointless to state, but that’s only because our notion of quality is so vague. Instead, we must learn to express what the higher quality of human translation is in practical terms and to present translation as an investment in the client’s success.Invest in the future of the profession
Speaking of which… investing in the future is not only a key outcome of any form of regen/organic/etc. farming, it’s inherent in them. The very purpose of the practices advocated by these movements is to protect and steward the fertility of the soil. In the same vein, in a regenerative translation industry, everyone – individual freelancers, LSPs, professional bodies etc. – should have one eye on the future viability of the profession in everything they do. And this doesn’t just mean avoiding practices that undermine that long-term viability, like pushing for pricing that makes it unsustainable for translators to continue to operate, it means actively seeking to build opportunities for new translators and creating infrastructure that supports new entrants into the profession.
The ITI’s Slow Translation Manifesto is one step towards this, of course. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the philosophical heritage of everything ‘slow’ can be traced back to the Slow Food movement. The emphasis in the manifesto is not just on the outcomes of the translation process, but also on the process itself – in other words, it places as much emphasis on the “how” as on the “what”. And I welcome it, of course.
One thing that I don’t see in the manifesto, however, is the notion of joy. Joy is a both a productive and a sustaining force, and one that I do worry is neglected in the way we train translators for their future work. When I attended the Oxford Real Farming Conference earlier this year, one thing I noticed is how much enthusiasm and energy there was in the room – and it wasn’t just as a result of being able to meet up and see old friends and make new ones and just generally be together. We do that in Translationland already, after all. It was the feeling of being united by a common purpose, a greater goal, a commitment to a certain way of seeing the world. It was invigorating and fortifying for everyone there, and it was profoundly joyful.
Is joy unprofessional? Well, if it is, I’m prepared to risk sounding unprofessional, because I don’t want to work in the efficient, joyless, high-automation, industrialised translation industry that I fear we are heading towards. I want to operate in a profession that feels like it is thriving and making a genuine contribution to the future – both our own, and the collective future.