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In the past few years, the government has slashed translation activity by more than 30 per cent – forcing most independent translators to take radical steps in order to survive.
On another stone-cold January day in Ottawa, Jannet Soler is patiently organizing daily work assignments for dozens of colleagues at Masha Krupp Translation Group (MKT).
In her fifth floor operations room, Soler – head of client services – collects translation requests from the Canada Revenue Agency, Agriculture, Finance and other federal institutions. These give MKT the go-ahead for translating press releases, technical papers, staff documents and social media.
Part of Soler’s role is to match jobs with MKT’s most appropriate translators. There are 85 full-time specialists on staff, and most of them work in this small office tower along Merivale Road.
“We have all kinds of specialties,” Soler says, referring to company translators with expertise in taxation, science or finance. Soler also keeps track of which employees have translated what department’s documents in the past – to ensure consistency. And she makes it her job to know which colleagues are prepared to work late, or who can be persuaded to do so.
“We have a lot of after hours work because we are open 24/7,” Soler notes.
Jannet Soler of Masha Krupp Translation Services
MKT and its competitors exist in part thanks to the 1969 Official Languages Act and 1982 Charter of Rights – which guarantee the right to federal government services in French or English for millions of Canadians, most notably in the National Capital Region.
Yet, despite this legal and constitutional underpinning, the fact that MKT’s translators are still busy these days is something of a miracle. Few of this city’s workers have been hit quite has hard as its language geeks.
Five years ago, the federal government shelled out $265 million to make services available in English and French. Last year, it spent just $192.5 million. The number of words translated slumped even faster – from roughly 675 million per year to 450 million annually over the same period.
Stunningly, the public seems scarcely to have noticed. Equally astonishing, nearly all the industry’s decline has taken place on the backs of private-sector translators. The Translation Bureau – the federal agency responsible for the bulk of this work – has witnessed only a marginal decline in its activity.
***
There have been relatively few complaints about a lack of access to government services in either official language, according to Graham Fraser, Commissioner of Official Languages.
Fraser says he has discussed the drop in translation activity with Donna Achimov, the head of the Translation Bureau. The upshot: this so far is little ado about not much. Fraser’s office has had complaints about the translation policies of the federal courts as well as the decision of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal to post decisions in just one language. More recently, Fraser has called attention to unilingual tweets by federal cabinet ministers. But there has not been what you’d call a groundswell of discontent.
Vlad Fox, the owner of Fox Translations, says he can detect no pattern in the drop in volume. “It’s really been across the board,” he says.
So how has the government managed to lose 225 million translated words annually with few people outside the translation industry even noticing? Many things have contributed.
Smaller government means less paperwork – and fewer words. Companies and federal departments are also getting better at using technology to avoid translating the same words or phrases over and over again.
Some departments are using bilingual staff to avoid having to pay either the Translation Bureau or private sector translators. The words are still being translated, in other words, just not showing up in government’s statistics.
It’s also the case that the Translation Bureau until recently wasn’t very efficient. Inspired by multi-year budget cuts, that’s finally changing.
**
In theory, the Bureau’s influence should be relatively small by now. Twenty years ago this April 1, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien transformed the Bureau from monopoly to special operating agency – a move that allowed departments to bypass the Bureau and tap the private sector directly for translation services.
Federal managers had every incentive to do so: the Bureau charged significantly more than private firms, and was less productive.
Translation services in the federal government
Yet, surprisingly, the Bureau in 2010 still controlled the vast majority of the federal government’s translating business – most of it through its own staff (1,700 employees at the time) but also through a network of hundreds of private sector sub-contractors. Many of the latter operated out of home offices.
The rest of the industry – representing nearly $50 million in annual billings – was made up of dozens of private firms such as Masha Krupp Translation Group, Société Gamma, Fox Translations and CLS Lexi-Tech. These companies contracted directly with federal agencies — including Canada Revenue Agency, Finance, Parks Canada and Statistics Canada – willing to bypass the Translation Bureau in search of economies.
When the Conservatives began squeezing government spending in 2010, private-sector translators were confident even more federal departments would take advantage of their lower-cost services. The independent firms offered easy savings – charging only 25 cents per word compared to more than 60 cents per word at the Translation Bureau.
Instead, something very strange occurred: the federal government slashed the amount of translation work by roughly one-third, and nearly all the decline took place in the private sector.
The Bureau achieved its dominance in part simply by keeping more translation work in-house. “As business volume declined,” a spokesperson for the agency says, “the Bureau reduced its use of private sector capacity and maximized the use of internal employees.”
That’s understating things. During the four years ended last year, the number of words translated annually by Bureau staff fell only marginally to 270 million from 277 million. Meantime, private sector translators operating under contracts assigned by the Bureau saw their workload shrink to 83.5 million words from 203 million over the same period.
At the same time, private firms operating outside the Bureau’s orbit lost nearly 100 million words annually – for a total decline of roughly 225 million words in the federal government’s purchases.
The National Capital Region is the epicentre for the application of the Official Languages Act. Government service in either French or English is guaranteed, forming the underpinning of the translation industry.
***
The Bureau’s shift to using in-house staff has caused no end of pain among small firms and individual translators. This has become apparent during the Bureau’s ongoing efforts to upgrade its list of pre-qualified translators.
In order to be included on the new list, for instance, translators must show they have translated at least 300,000 words involving general and administrative federal text over the past five years. This requirement prompted the following response from a Bureau subcontractor:
“Many excellent and highly experienced French-English translators got less than that amount of work over the last five years because the Bureau basically stopped sending them work due to cuts,” the subcontractor wrote. “In some cases, such as mine, we entered into contracts for more than 300,000 words, but didn’t get the work. Some of us barely got 20% of the contract volume. The remedy is to go back farther in time and allow relevant experience in other fields to be used.”
The Bureau’s response: It would not amend the procurement. In a follow-up query by The Citizen, the Bureau said it had established the requirements after consulting the translator industry and that “close of half of the 124 pre-qualified suppliers are individuals.”
Translation firms working with federal departments that have opted not to use Bureau staff have not fared well either. “With this kind of drop (in federal translation contracts) everyone has had to make cuts,” says Vlad Fox. “We reduced our staff and restructured the whole operation in order to stay afloat.”
Public accounts data suggests federal government spending on independent translation firms – that is, excluding the Bureau and its subcontractors – shrank by 50 per cent from 2010 to last year to $24 million. The number of words translated also plummeted.
Two of the industry’s better-known firms – CLS Lexi-Tech and Société Gamma – adapted by merging with much larger language industry multinationals headquartered in Boston and Paris respectively.
This leaves MKT as the largest Canadian-owned independent supplier to the federal government. It is run and owned by Masha Krupp, a former translator for the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The 23 year-old firm rose to fame on the strength of its 2004 win at the Canada Revenue Agency – which sends MKT more than $4 million worth of translation business annually.
Translation Bureau executives doubted the private firm could handle the job. That is, until MKT won the follow-up contract as well – which with extensions will run until late 2016. More than one-quarter of the firm’s nearly 90 employees are dedicated to serving the tax agency’s account.
Despite the stability offered by a few big clients, however, Krupp has also had to accommodate a shrinking industry. MKT’s employment levels are down from 2010 and the firm has had to drop prices in order to keep winning contracts.
“The price per word of translation has dropped significantly,” Soler acknowledges, “but volume has been increasing because we have more government clients.”
Indeed, the firm has landed enough new business to keep staff occupied and to justify pay raises. Last year, for instance, MKT won an initial two-year contract at the federal department of Finance valued at $1.4 million. This was at the expense of Société Gamma, the department’s longtime supplier of translation services.
Soler adds that social media such as Facebook and Twitter have also increased the demand for translation services, albeit at the cost of quick turnarounds.
“It adds a little bit to the pressure on translators,” she says, “but we make it happen.”
Krupp notes that her key government clients have been getting smarter about how they use her company’s services. For instance, they are organizing their translation projects so that more of them can be done during regular work hours at MKT – rather than in a rush over weekends when the firm charges more.
“There’s also less duplication,” Krupp says, explaining some of the reduction in translation volume. “Everybody is watching their pennies.” Indeed, the pennies can add up to very significant savings. Her biggest client, Canada Revenue Agency, paid MKT a shade under $4 million in 2014 – down 21 per cent from four years earlier.
MKT and its private sector rivals do not appear to be losing sleep at least over improvements in translation software such as Google Translate.
“Google Translate is good for getting the gist of something,” says Gerald Woodard, a senior translator with 13 years experience at MKT. “but you need a live person to go over it after.”
Gerald Woodard of Masha Krupp Translation Services
Translation software is usually too literal, causing it to miss idioms and misinterpret polysemous terms – words with multiple meanings. Indeed, the error rate is so high (see sidebar) that certain requests for proposals issued by federal departments prohibit the use of Google Translate.
“Until they figure out how to make software that thinks,” adds Woodard, “I’m not worried about my job.”
***
But MKT and other private sector firms do face a tough longer-term battle with Translation Bureau, which is showing signs of getting its act together. The Conservatives several years ago gave the agency a mandate to “modernize operations” and cut prices “to be more in line with the private sector”.
While Bureau prices are still well in excess of those charged by private firms, the agency justifies the gap by offering “value-added services” such as “strong quality assurance”, certified translation for legal and engineering text, security clearances and lexicons tailored for particular government departments. Of course firms such as MKT provide similar services, suggesting that what the Bureau is really offering is a level of comfort – government agency to government department.
The Bureau’s prices are at least moving in the right direction – it expects it will charge 34 cents per word by 2020 compared to more than 45 cents currently. And it is certainly becoming more productive. Staff levels – which include interpreters and administrators, as well as translators – declined to 1,400 last year from 1,700 in 2010. The agency translated roughly the same number of words each year. The Bureau anticipates its head count will slide further to 1,100 by March 2017.
Nevertheless, the Bureau’s flexibility in trimming expenses is hampered by the fact its employees – unlike private sector translators– enjoy union rates of pay and benefits, and are members of the Public Service Pension Plan, which offers fully-indexed pensions. The agency last year shelled out $111 million in salaries and benefits, representing more than 80 per cent of the organization’s expenses, excluding what it pays to subcontractors.
The Bureau has coped with government cutbacks during the past several years by looking after its own staff at the expense of subcontractors. It some cases, federal departments have declined to move to private sector translators because they wanted to see the work stay with fellow public sector workers.
But there are limits to this approach. For one thing, it’s not clear whether the Bureau’s employees can or will continue to ratchet up their productivity. This could become an issue as the decline in translation activity finally reaches the stage where the government risks running afoul of legal and constitutional requirements – and the cuts have to stop.
At this point government managers will have to ask themselves if the Bureau’s higher rates are worth paying. This is the long-term danger facing the Bureau and its remaining employees. In the meantime, the private sector translators are doing everything in their power just to survive.
jbagnall@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/JamesBagnall1
Official Languages Act
Why Google Translate is not yet a threat to professional translators:
Original French in Le Parisien:
Kadyrov, qui dirige la Tchétchénie d’une main de fer, avait appelé à “une manifestation populaire et solidaire” contre les representations de Mahomet.
Google translates as:
Mr. Kadyrov, head of Chechnya with an iron hand, called for a “popular and solidarity demonstration” against depictions of Muhammad.
MKT’s Gerald Woodard translates as:
Mr. Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya with an iron fist, called for a “public demonstration of solidarity” against depictions of Mohamed.
Original French in Le Parisien:
Ils étaient “plus de 800.000” manifestants, a affirmé à l’AFP le ministère russe de l’Intérieur tandis que les autorités locales, citées par les agencies russes ont avancé elles le chiffre d’un “million de manifestants”.
Google translates as:
They were “more than 800,000” protestors told AFP the Russian Interior Ministry while local authorities quoted by Russian news agencies, they advanced the figure of a “million demonstrators.”
MKT’s Gerald Woodard translates as:
The Russian Ministry of the Interior told AFP that there were “more than 800,000” demonstrators, while Russian agencies quoted local authorities as suggesting a figure of a “million demonstrators”.
查看原文...
On another stone-cold January day in Ottawa, Jannet Soler is patiently organizing daily work assignments for dozens of colleagues at Masha Krupp Translation Group (MKT).
In her fifth floor operations room, Soler – head of client services – collects translation requests from the Canada Revenue Agency, Agriculture, Finance and other federal institutions. These give MKT the go-ahead for translating press releases, technical papers, staff documents and social media.
Part of Soler’s role is to match jobs with MKT’s most appropriate translators. There are 85 full-time specialists on staff, and most of them work in this small office tower along Merivale Road.
“We have all kinds of specialties,” Soler says, referring to company translators with expertise in taxation, science or finance. Soler also keeps track of which employees have translated what department’s documents in the past – to ensure consistency. And she makes it her job to know which colleagues are prepared to work late, or who can be persuaded to do so.
“We have a lot of after hours work because we are open 24/7,” Soler notes.
Jannet Soler of Masha Krupp Translation Services
MKT and its competitors exist in part thanks to the 1969 Official Languages Act and 1982 Charter of Rights – which guarantee the right to federal government services in French or English for millions of Canadians, most notably in the National Capital Region.
Yet, despite this legal and constitutional underpinning, the fact that MKT’s translators are still busy these days is something of a miracle. Few of this city’s workers have been hit quite has hard as its language geeks.
Five years ago, the federal government shelled out $265 million to make services available in English and French. Last year, it spent just $192.5 million. The number of words translated slumped even faster – from roughly 675 million per year to 450 million annually over the same period.
Stunningly, the public seems scarcely to have noticed. Equally astonishing, nearly all the industry’s decline has taken place on the backs of private-sector translators. The Translation Bureau – the federal agency responsible for the bulk of this work – has witnessed only a marginal decline in its activity.
***
There have been relatively few complaints about a lack of access to government services in either official language, according to Graham Fraser, Commissioner of Official Languages.
Fraser says he has discussed the drop in translation activity with Donna Achimov, the head of the Translation Bureau. The upshot: this so far is little ado about not much. Fraser’s office has had complaints about the translation policies of the federal courts as well as the decision of the Canadian International Trade Tribunal to post decisions in just one language. More recently, Fraser has called attention to unilingual tweets by federal cabinet ministers. But there has not been what you’d call a groundswell of discontent.
Vlad Fox, the owner of Fox Translations, says he can detect no pattern in the drop in volume. “It’s really been across the board,” he says.
So how has the government managed to lose 225 million translated words annually with few people outside the translation industry even noticing? Many things have contributed.
Smaller government means less paperwork – and fewer words. Companies and federal departments are also getting better at using technology to avoid translating the same words or phrases over and over again.
Some departments are using bilingual staff to avoid having to pay either the Translation Bureau or private sector translators. The words are still being translated, in other words, just not showing up in government’s statistics.
It’s also the case that the Translation Bureau until recently wasn’t very efficient. Inspired by multi-year budget cuts, that’s finally changing.
**
In theory, the Bureau’s influence should be relatively small by now. Twenty years ago this April 1, the Liberal government of Jean Chrétien transformed the Bureau from monopoly to special operating agency – a move that allowed departments to bypass the Bureau and tap the private sector directly for translation services.
Federal managers had every incentive to do so: the Bureau charged significantly more than private firms, and was less productive.
Translation services in the federal government
Yet, surprisingly, the Bureau in 2010 still controlled the vast majority of the federal government’s translating business – most of it through its own staff (1,700 employees at the time) but also through a network of hundreds of private sector sub-contractors. Many of the latter operated out of home offices.
The rest of the industry – representing nearly $50 million in annual billings – was made up of dozens of private firms such as Masha Krupp Translation Group, Société Gamma, Fox Translations and CLS Lexi-Tech. These companies contracted directly with federal agencies — including Canada Revenue Agency, Finance, Parks Canada and Statistics Canada – willing to bypass the Translation Bureau in search of economies.
When the Conservatives began squeezing government spending in 2010, private-sector translators were confident even more federal departments would take advantage of their lower-cost services. The independent firms offered easy savings – charging only 25 cents per word compared to more than 60 cents per word at the Translation Bureau.
Instead, something very strange occurred: the federal government slashed the amount of translation work by roughly one-third, and nearly all the decline took place in the private sector.
The Bureau achieved its dominance in part simply by keeping more translation work in-house. “As business volume declined,” a spokesperson for the agency says, “the Bureau reduced its use of private sector capacity and maximized the use of internal employees.”
That’s understating things. During the four years ended last year, the number of words translated annually by Bureau staff fell only marginally to 270 million from 277 million. Meantime, private sector translators operating under contracts assigned by the Bureau saw their workload shrink to 83.5 million words from 203 million over the same period.
At the same time, private firms operating outside the Bureau’s orbit lost nearly 100 million words annually – for a total decline of roughly 225 million words in the federal government’s purchases.
The National Capital Region is the epicentre for the application of the Official Languages Act. Government service in either French or English is guaranteed, forming the underpinning of the translation industry.
***
The Bureau’s shift to using in-house staff has caused no end of pain among small firms and individual translators. This has become apparent during the Bureau’s ongoing efforts to upgrade its list of pre-qualified translators.
In order to be included on the new list, for instance, translators must show they have translated at least 300,000 words involving general and administrative federal text over the past five years. This requirement prompted the following response from a Bureau subcontractor:
“Many excellent and highly experienced French-English translators got less than that amount of work over the last five years because the Bureau basically stopped sending them work due to cuts,” the subcontractor wrote. “In some cases, such as mine, we entered into contracts for more than 300,000 words, but didn’t get the work. Some of us barely got 20% of the contract volume. The remedy is to go back farther in time and allow relevant experience in other fields to be used.”
The Bureau’s response: It would not amend the procurement. In a follow-up query by The Citizen, the Bureau said it had established the requirements after consulting the translator industry and that “close of half of the 124 pre-qualified suppliers are individuals.”
Translation firms working with federal departments that have opted not to use Bureau staff have not fared well either. “With this kind of drop (in federal translation contracts) everyone has had to make cuts,” says Vlad Fox. “We reduced our staff and restructured the whole operation in order to stay afloat.”
Public accounts data suggests federal government spending on independent translation firms – that is, excluding the Bureau and its subcontractors – shrank by 50 per cent from 2010 to last year to $24 million. The number of words translated also plummeted.
Two of the industry’s better-known firms – CLS Lexi-Tech and Société Gamma – adapted by merging with much larger language industry multinationals headquartered in Boston and Paris respectively.
This leaves MKT as the largest Canadian-owned independent supplier to the federal government. It is run and owned by Masha Krupp, a former translator for the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. The 23 year-old firm rose to fame on the strength of its 2004 win at the Canada Revenue Agency – which sends MKT more than $4 million worth of translation business annually.
Translation Bureau executives doubted the private firm could handle the job. That is, until MKT won the follow-up contract as well – which with extensions will run until late 2016. More than one-quarter of the firm’s nearly 90 employees are dedicated to serving the tax agency’s account.
Despite the stability offered by a few big clients, however, Krupp has also had to accommodate a shrinking industry. MKT’s employment levels are down from 2010 and the firm has had to drop prices in order to keep winning contracts.
“The price per word of translation has dropped significantly,” Soler acknowledges, “but volume has been increasing because we have more government clients.”
Indeed, the firm has landed enough new business to keep staff occupied and to justify pay raises. Last year, for instance, MKT won an initial two-year contract at the federal department of Finance valued at $1.4 million. This was at the expense of Société Gamma, the department’s longtime supplier of translation services.
Soler adds that social media such as Facebook and Twitter have also increased the demand for translation services, albeit at the cost of quick turnarounds.
“It adds a little bit to the pressure on translators,” she says, “but we make it happen.”
Krupp notes that her key government clients have been getting smarter about how they use her company’s services. For instance, they are organizing their translation projects so that more of them can be done during regular work hours at MKT – rather than in a rush over weekends when the firm charges more.
“There’s also less duplication,” Krupp says, explaining some of the reduction in translation volume. “Everybody is watching their pennies.” Indeed, the pennies can add up to very significant savings. Her biggest client, Canada Revenue Agency, paid MKT a shade under $4 million in 2014 – down 21 per cent from four years earlier.
MKT and its private sector rivals do not appear to be losing sleep at least over improvements in translation software such as Google Translate.
“Google Translate is good for getting the gist of something,” says Gerald Woodard, a senior translator with 13 years experience at MKT. “but you need a live person to go over it after.”
Gerald Woodard of Masha Krupp Translation Services
Translation software is usually too literal, causing it to miss idioms and misinterpret polysemous terms – words with multiple meanings. Indeed, the error rate is so high (see sidebar) that certain requests for proposals issued by federal departments prohibit the use of Google Translate.
“Until they figure out how to make software that thinks,” adds Woodard, “I’m not worried about my job.”
***
But MKT and other private sector firms do face a tough longer-term battle with Translation Bureau, which is showing signs of getting its act together. The Conservatives several years ago gave the agency a mandate to “modernize operations” and cut prices “to be more in line with the private sector”.
While Bureau prices are still well in excess of those charged by private firms, the agency justifies the gap by offering “value-added services” such as “strong quality assurance”, certified translation for legal and engineering text, security clearances and lexicons tailored for particular government departments. Of course firms such as MKT provide similar services, suggesting that what the Bureau is really offering is a level of comfort – government agency to government department.
The Bureau’s prices are at least moving in the right direction – it expects it will charge 34 cents per word by 2020 compared to more than 45 cents currently. And it is certainly becoming more productive. Staff levels – which include interpreters and administrators, as well as translators – declined to 1,400 last year from 1,700 in 2010. The agency translated roughly the same number of words each year. The Bureau anticipates its head count will slide further to 1,100 by March 2017.
Nevertheless, the Bureau’s flexibility in trimming expenses is hampered by the fact its employees – unlike private sector translators– enjoy union rates of pay and benefits, and are members of the Public Service Pension Plan, which offers fully-indexed pensions. The agency last year shelled out $111 million in salaries and benefits, representing more than 80 per cent of the organization’s expenses, excluding what it pays to subcontractors.
The Bureau has coped with government cutbacks during the past several years by looking after its own staff at the expense of subcontractors. It some cases, federal departments have declined to move to private sector translators because they wanted to see the work stay with fellow public sector workers.
But there are limits to this approach. For one thing, it’s not clear whether the Bureau’s employees can or will continue to ratchet up their productivity. This could become an issue as the decline in translation activity finally reaches the stage where the government risks running afoul of legal and constitutional requirements – and the cuts have to stop.
At this point government managers will have to ask themselves if the Bureau’s higher rates are worth paying. This is the long-term danger facing the Bureau and its remaining employees. In the meantime, the private sector translators are doing everything in their power just to survive.
jbagnall@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/JamesBagnall1
Official Languages Act
- Every federal institution has the duty to ensure that any member of the public can communicate with and obtain available services from its head or central office in either official language, and has the same duty with respect to any of its other offices or facilities
- (a) within the National Capital Region; or
- (b) in Canada or elsewhere, where there is significant demand for communications with and services from that office or facility in that language.
Why Google Translate is not yet a threat to professional translators:
Original French in Le Parisien:
Kadyrov, qui dirige la Tchétchénie d’une main de fer, avait appelé à “une manifestation populaire et solidaire” contre les representations de Mahomet.
Google translates as:
Mr. Kadyrov, head of Chechnya with an iron hand, called for a “popular and solidarity demonstration” against depictions of Muhammad.
MKT’s Gerald Woodard translates as:
Mr. Kadyrov, who rules Chechnya with an iron fist, called for a “public demonstration of solidarity” against depictions of Mohamed.
******************************
Original French in Le Parisien:
Ils étaient “plus de 800.000” manifestants, a affirmé à l’AFP le ministère russe de l’Intérieur tandis que les autorités locales, citées par les agencies russes ont avancé elles le chiffre d’un “million de manifestants”.
Google translates as:
They were “more than 800,000” protestors told AFP the Russian Interior Ministry while local authorities quoted by Russian news agencies, they advanced the figure of a “million demonstrators.”
MKT’s Gerald Woodard translates as:
The Russian Ministry of the Interior told AFP that there were “more than 800,000” demonstrators, while Russian agencies quoted local authorities as suggesting a figure of a “million demonstrators”.
查看原文...
