For those interested (cue sound of pin dropping), translation is carried out today in a much more efficient manner than was the case in the era of typewriters, tippex and telex.

Firstly, a job request will arrive in the translator’s inbox. After raising an eyebrow and sipping from a mug of caffeinated liquid warmth, they will proceed to open the message with an ever-sceptical eyebrow held in position. If the job passes the bogus-client test, the translator flies into a flurry of finger-tapping. The response must be dealt with urgently as 4 other translators are at the very same stage of the very same process at that very moment.

The reply is sent. The retort is positive. Purchase Order in hand, the translator downloads the document. If it’s a text file, great; if it’s a scanned PDF, sigh. Scanned PDFs are fossilised remains of a bygone era where translation memory tools that save a translator’s every keystroke didn’t exist. Scanned PDFs mean not being able to re-use any work from this job to speed up future jobs of a similar nature. They also mean reformatting the document to follow the original style. Time consuming and not translation.

But this is our plucky translator’s lucky day. It’s a text file. It is promptly loaded into the translation memory tool and the first sentence is stared at inquisitively. Who are we up against this time? The battle begins, a scene filled with the cries of pain and suffering - the tutting of a thousand translators at the awkward scrawlings of the original author.

The final text is emailed home with a digital invoice. If all goes to plan payment follows sometime in the near future. Sometime before the translator’s next local solar eclipse.

And thus the cycle continues.

Future developments

Machine translation is the ever growing threat to a translator’s livelihood. Of course, no machine can yet translate anything to be used professionally but if that did come to pass, future translation may look something like this:

- Future job request arrives.
- Future translator approves.
- Future translator turns machine handle for 5 minutes.
- Future job is returned as a 140 character tweet.
- Future client updates their online status as:

Very satisfied with quality and turnaround time of translation that I have no way of understanding, yet for some reason the foreign client is still not clear on how our anti-gravitational differential gearbox mechanism works. Perhaps should have proofread? Lol.