GOOD  morning  and  welcome  to  this  presenta5on  provided  to  you  as  part  of  the  ProZ.com  2015  Interna5onal  Transla5on  Day  celebra5on.      

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My name is Claudia Brauer and I am the owner of Brauertraining. I was a translator and interpreter for 35 years in Latin America and the United states and now I am a trainer of translators and interpreters via webinars at ProZ.com and my web-based school for translators and interpreters at Pathwright.!

Today  we  will  talk  about  the  trends  we  need  to  follow  to  prepare  for  the  next  five  years.    We  will  talk  about  the  evolu5on  of  communica5on  and  how  it  affects  you  professional.    We  will  try  to  understand  how  we  have  to  face  the  challenges  ahead  in  a  world  that  requires  more  and  more  of  us  every  day  and  con5nues  changing  at  an  amazing  pace.  And  finally  I  will  talk,  yes,  once  again,  about  the  need  for  translators  and  interpreters  to  become  technologically  savvy  in  order  to  ensure  our  professional  survival  in  a  world  that  is  moving  forward  at  the  speed  of  light.  

So,  lets  review  the  housekeeping  issues  

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Please  close  any  other  program  you  are  currently  logged  to  because  other  programs  may  interfere  with  your  sound  or  video  recep5on.  

This presentation is being recorded and you will have full access to your free copy during 90 days so that you can review it in more detail if you wish to do so!

Lets  start    

The  future  is  here.  All  the  things  we  have  been  talking  about  for  the  past  30  years  are  no  longer  the  maQer  of  science  fic5on  but  a  part  of  our  daily  reality.  So  the  ques5on  now  is,  are  you  ready  to  remain  compe55ve  in  a  professional  and  business  world  that  looks  absolutely  different  to  what  it  was  just  20  years  ago?  If  you  are  not,  what  do  you  have  to  do  to  catch  up  with  the  tsunami  of  changes?  That  is  the  core  message  of  my  presenta5on  today.  

Let  me  tell  you  that  in  the  course  of  this  presenta5on,  you  will  hear  several  concepts  repeated  mul5ple  5mes.    This  is  so  because  there  are  some  very  important  ideas  I  want  you  to  keep  in  your  brain  and  understand  from  different  perspec5ves  and  under  different  frameworks.    So  when  I  repeat  a  concept  is  because  I  believe  you  need  to  hold  on  to  it  once  this  session  is  over.  Also,  some  5mes  I  will  simply  remain  silent  so  you  can  read  the  screen.      

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The changes in the means of communication have changed accessibility to information, volume of communication, the style of communication and even the nature or content of our communication

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To quote the term coined by TAUS, translation is more than ever becoming a utility, just as water or electricity, a service that is available to all beings in a society and those who do not have access to that utility are indeed underprivileged. This is another pivotal change in our history. Until very recently, translation and interpretation services were the domain of only a few who had the resources and the specific need for it. Today it is becoming more an more a universal right that every person is expecting at all points of contact.

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One of the byproducts of this titanic change is the merging of translation and interpreting. Where the borders between both were clearly defined just five or 10 years ago, today they are becoming progressively blurred and interpreters are every day more needing to have the tools of translation at their fingertips and translators are having to learn the complex process of verbal transfer of meaning.

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The world is now truly a digital global village. Companies have headquarters in China as well as London, Egypt and Australia and they expect to conduct business seamlessly in real time regardless of geographical or time barriers and now they are also expecting that the language barrier disappears as well. But individuals have exactly the same expectation of connection in real time via the hundreds of social media sites where they are connected and communicating with each other 24 hours a day.

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The fact that there are no more geographical barriers, that cultural barriers can be transcended, that time zones are no longer an impediment to communication and that language access is seen as a right and not a privilege has created all sorts of new business models.

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These needs of the digital global village creates the need for instant communication in every person’s language of preference, regardless of time or place. And this need has boosted the mechanization of translation to be able to keep pace with the huge growth in the volume of translation needed around the world.

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We humans speak as children many years before we learn to write. Many today are still oral languages only. Verbal communication is in our DNA. The world is starting to expect instant deliver of interpreting services at all points of contact regardless of time, geography or topic.

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What all this means is that technology is no longer an option if you are a professional translator or interpreter. Because technology is now a vital part of your trade. It is a requirement for your professional survival.

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Finally, crowd sourcing has emerged a response to the need of translation and interpreting at all points of contact.

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One of the most important changes I have observed in the entire market of buyers of translation and interpreting services is that for many, getting the Gist is just enough. Quality is optional and will be paid for only when it is absolutely necessary. So we need to understand this and understand how to live with it and where we as professionals fit in the mix in order to make a living.

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Lets  look  at  each  of  these  trends  individually  in  detail.  

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Dr. Marshall Poe, Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa, delivered a lecture speaking on the topic “From Grunts to Tweets: Communication and Human History”.

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Communication itself is one of the basic needs of human beings, serving to give information to others and to get information from others. Innovations in communication have followed with exponential speed. It took our species some 150,000 years to go from only verbal communication to writing but only 5000 to invent the printing machine and then only 500 years to develop television and just 50 to invent the internet.

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Writing was not really natural to humans and very few within an early society ever learned to read or write. But even printing in the beginning was used by elites only and those elites just produced information for other elites. It must be noted that even today, Americans claim to read only one book a year.

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Television, on the other hand, was a tremendous democratizing influence because it broadcasted information at all levels of society. It is easy to understand and we humans have a special love for watching and listening. But the Internet has been even more democratizing at all levels of society everywhere in the world.

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I want to tell you a real life anecdote to stress this point. One of the slogans of Pope Francis’ visit to Cuba in 2015 is that he hopes to impact the availability of food, jobs and the internet for the Cuban people. Now, the fact that even a Catholic Pope puts the Internet at the same level of priority as food and jobs tells you how vital instant communication is to the progress of any civilization in the 21st century. This is a tool that you need to learn to master as you mastered your language skills.

To some degree, we still use most of the forms of communication we have used for tens of thousands of years. Each has represented improvement in the ability to communicate. Nearly all humans learn to speak with ease. But what we have always sought is to conquer the limitations of space and time. T

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Everything is now connected or will become connected. This trend will accelerate in the immediate future: every device, from the television to your phone to your fridge can now have a web address. That web address will connect to content that will be available in multiple languages.

Smartphones represented the latest development in communication. With the smartphone, to quote Dr. Pope, “you don’t have to be lonely, you don’t have to be ignorant.” As a form of computer, it is what all previous forms of communication were tending toward — it can handle any sort of information.

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75 percent of American workforce and 45 percent of the global workforce is mobile. There are more than 1.3 billion workers in the world using mobile technologies.

*silence*

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The International Federation of Translators is also celebrating international translation day with a very interesting article title the changing face of translation and interpreting

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As the world changes, so do many aspects of the work of translators and interpreters. Young translators and interpreters of today can barely believe what they hear when I tell them about the conditions under which I worked only 30 years ago.

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IFT’s article also states that we have a plethora of tools to enable us to translate faster and more consistently. For clients, too, translation has changed. No longer do they battle to find a local translator to meet their needs, they find them literally with a keystroke.

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They can send out a text before leaving the office in the evening and have the translation waiting when they come in again next morning, thanks to communication over time zones. They balance their costs and target audiences over different projects by using translators in different parts of the world

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They use telephone interpreters to talk to their own clients on the other side of the world and remote video interpreters to consult with a doctor in another country. They can run a text through a machine translation program and get an immediate idea of what the document is about.

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We are dealing with an explosion in content needing translation. The Internet, coupled with the slow death of printed material, has brought about a dramatic increase in the amounts of texts being published on websites, Blogs and social networks. There are not enough professional translators to keep up with all of this demand.

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The massive explosion of informal content needing translation is mind-boggling. This includes emails, blogs and their comments, tweets, user-generated content and high-volume websites.. This informal content is not yet well catered for by the traditional translation industry but the desire to translate this content is pushing the development of new tools that will impact the entire industry.

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The translation industry is experiencing what many industries have in the past when there is some sort of  revolution happening in their field. That is why it is so important that translators are informed about translation automation in general. Translators will be trans-creators, post-editors, editors, terminologists, quality assurance advisers, etc.

How  do  you  eat  an  elephant?    One  bite  at  a  5me.    What  this  means  is  that  you  cannot  do  all  you  need  to  do  at  the  same  5me.    You  need  to  start  somewhere.    You  need  to  start  small.  But  you  need  to  start  soon.    Because  ea5ng  the  elephant  is  a  5me  consuming  task.    The  same  is  with  becoming  technologically  savvy.    Learning  the  NEW  ropes  of  your  trade.    It  is  not  an  impossible  task,  but  it  is  a  task  that  does  require  bi5ng  small  bites  at  a  5me  judiciously  and  progressively  improving  your  skills  for  the  new  millennium.  

I recently found a story flagged by Jared Tabor in the ProZ forums where it was brightly stated that there are three things that you need to change. You need to change your business skills. You need to change your translation skills. And you need to change your mindset. In essence, really, you need to change everything you are doing right now.

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This is the essence of what is happening in today’s world of translation and interpreting. The way we used to do business does not work any more. The skills we used to have to be translators or interpreters need to be revamped and updated. The mindset we used to have about the profession is not in tune with what the language industry requires of us today. And the most important word that you will hear me say today is practice. BECAUSE THE ONLY WAY TO DEVELOP A SKIL IS BY PRACTICING IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN.

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You have to schedule time for learning and plan a budget to acquire software and training

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You need to make some decisions quickly and those are decisions that will have a profound effect on your professional future because we cannot be it all or offer it all, so whatever we decide right now is what we will be kind of stuck with for the coming years. If you are a translator in 2015, you need to determine what are the new skills sets that you need to remain competitive in the coming decade.

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But that is not all. You will also have to look very closely at your infrastructure in terms of the hardware and software that you have because it might already be obsolete for the needs of the near future. You have to look at the tools of your trade, which in this case are your computer and your software and decide what you need to continue being competitive in the market, what you need to change and what you need to acquire,

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You need to decide what type of training you need and where to get it. Remember that you will not achieve proficiency right after you start your training. There is always a peak of inflated expectations and disillusionment before you reach the expected productivity. Expect a bit of frustration during your learning curve. It is part of the learning experience in technology.

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and you have to set aside time, a lot of time again, to deal with your learning curve. Remember that it is only through repetition that you acquire a skill. Be judicious in setting aside the time you need for your training.

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Your training has costs associated with it. They are an investment in your ability to earn a living. You make an investment and hopefully it will pay off in the near future by way of increased productivity and efficiency, which in turn should become an increased earning potential.

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SO, HOW DO YOU UPDATE YOUR BUSINESS SKILLS?

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You look for training sessions that help you fill the void. Whatever your void is. Whether it is to start thinking as a small business owner or to improve the efficiency of your sole proprietorship or how to negotiate rates with the larger players in the industry. Today’s sessions in ProZ for example have a wide range of topics that address these concerns. All of these are available in recorded videos for 90 days. And, by the way, I am not employed nor am I paid by Proz to say this. I am telling you this because it is good for you, not because I gain anything at all by telling you this.

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You can also go to the forum section in ProZ.com or in Translators Café or in any of the forums of the associations and look for information on the business of translation and interpreting

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There are so many courses and training videos out there that you really need to take advantage. Not only in Proz but all over the internet and in local colleges in your communities. The Small Business Administration also provides a lot of free resources.

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We talked about the fact that our client base has changed because there is a very large percentage of potential clients that really are not ready or not able to pay for professional services. So you have to find the clients that are willing to pay for your services. You need to learn to market your skills and penetrate whatever niche it is you want to pursue.

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In this context, it is not enough to be simply highly skilled in languages. Now you need to learn to network with peers, potential clients and dozens of individuals at different points of the client’s production chain.

HOW DO YOU UPDATED YOUR TRANSLATION SKILLS?

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Of course I will plug in here my school, where I have more than 50 different courses and workshops. But Just as I offer these courses and workshops, so do many others in the industry. You just need to know what it is that you want to learn and then pursue the best venue that services your needs and your budget.

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For example, for those of you who need to update your skills with CAT tools and other translation software, yesterday’s sessions provide very good tools and information

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I want to highlight to you that ProZ has a fantastic resource where they compare and explain many of the most popular CAT tool, alignment tools and machine translation tools.

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Just as Proz offers so many courses and workshops and webinars on topics that you need for your professional career, so others in the profession also do. ATA for example also has a very comprehensive list of courses. And the other associations too. Research your topics and find your training and commit to training. You need it. Believe, you need.

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Research freeware, which is computer software made available for use free of charge and for an unlimited time.

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Servicing 20th century clients is totally different than servicing 21st century clients. In the 20th century, a client would give me a 10,000 word translation and if I gave them a 10 day turn around they would be more than satisfied. Today they send 10,000 words and they want it for tomorrow or the next day. How do you compete with translators that are providing that sort of service?

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HOW DO YOU CHANGE THE MINDSET?

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We have traditionally associated literacy with the ability to read and write. But in the 21st Century we are seeing an equal need to have visual global and digital literacy. We need to develop visual literacy and global literacy and digital literacy.

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We now need to develop the ability to communicate digitally with an expanding community; we need to be able to read, interpret, respond and contextualize messages from a global perspective; we need to have the ability to use computers and other technology to improve our productivity and performance; and we need to develop the ability to understand, produce and communicate through visual images; plus the ability to find, evaluate and synthesize information.

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You need to understand what are your current limitations in terms of accessibility. What hardware and software do you need to access the resources of the global community that you need to do your job in an interconnected world? But more importantly, what do you need to make yourself accessible to your current and future clients and peers?

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The other gigantic change in the translation and interpreting industry is in volume. Although the volume has increased exponentially, translators and interpreters income keeps dropping. You need to find the right level of efficiency to handle the new volumes of work, be competitive, provide excellent service and at the same time make a decent living.

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The other change is in the style and nature of the translations and interpreting assignments. 30 years ago I would receive translations which were only come from large international corporations or the legal field or the military and government. Today I have been involved in interpreting conversations for brides by mail, just to give you an example of the change.

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So the question again is, what do you do if you earn a living as a translator or interpreter and you see all that is happening. Well, you have to change your mind set to face the challenges of the 21st century with a 21st century mindset. You have to understand the needs of your clients, the niche market you want to service, the technology you need and the business skills you require. And all of this is in ADDITION to all the language skills you needed in the first place to become a good quality translator and interpreter.

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*silence*

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TAUS coined the concept of translation as a utility. What is a utility? Electricity is a utility. Running water and sewerage is a utility. Phone communication is a utility. In the world of tomorrow, translation will be seen as a utility. People today expect to have everything around them in their language of preference, whether in print or verbal format. At all points of contact.

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If you don’t know what cloud computing is, make sure research it and understand it because it will impact the profession as it is the platform that enables globalization and virtualization. Consumers will start gravitating to personal cloud services and things like streaming libraries from the cloud, media archive access and full-featured data synchronization.

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Many cloud based systems such as dropbox or Google drive allow you to share files and work anywhere, having permanent access to all your information and files. It allows for collaboration in real time with tracking of multiple contributors, just to cite one example.

Two of the dominant cloud based translation solutions are XTM Cloud and Memsource Cloud which allow translation, update and localization of large volumes of content and may be used by large organizations or individual freelancers

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Web-based interpreting is also gaining ground as one of the futuristic options that allow large corporations and government agencies, including the military, to access the services of Transinterpreters for many different types of scenarios all over the world. For example, Transinterpreters may be provided without any personal danger for war zones and combat situations. ,

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The other big change here is related to new cloud intranets that are communicating thousands of workers around the world. An intranet is a private network that is contained within an enterprise. Transinterpreters are being called to actively participate in the everyday interactions that are taking place within intranets all over the world between workers of a same company who speak many different languages.

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I am going to talk now about a trend that is a difficult one to swallow for many of you, so I will give you a few seconds to process it in your mind. *

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*SILENCE** Last year I coined and published the new term Transinterpreter, a union of a translator and an interpreter. **silence**

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I believe that the technology revolution in our profession will also drive both arms of this one body to work in unison and in a couple of decades there will be no differentiation as to the role of the translator or the role of the interpreter but rather, both roles will complement each other in a professional called the TRANSINTERPRETER. I believe that in the 21st Century translators will need to also have some of the skills reserved for interpreters and interpreters will have to develop some of the skills normally associated with translators

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Transinterpreters are also being called to work as translators and interpreters in real time in all sort of chatting environments. \

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Transinterpreters now not only participate in multilingual webcasts but additionally those webcasts may be sharing documents among attendees and several of the interpreters might be be requested to interpret the content of documents that are being shared.

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There is also a whole new segment of interpreting that is dedicated to instant interpreting of written texts over the internet, for example emails, so the person calls you, shares their screen, shows you the email and you read it to them in the target language; just as you would for example complete a sight translation of a patient consent during an interpreting in a hospital.

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Voice recognition technologies are becoming more sophisticated and able of receiving voice messages in a source language, transferring it to text automatically, performing some machine translation to the target language, and returning that text to voice. Voice to text to voice and text to voice to text

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The other huge trend that I see coming is that machine translation paired with voice recognition technologies edited by a transinterpreter.

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Even the United Nations is sponsoring simultaneous translation apps for adobe connect. This just to show you that these technologies are very close to becoming mainstream

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Software such as Dragon naturally speaking are changing how we work because many translators are no longer typing their translations but interpreting them and speaking them out to the computer and then editing them in writing. This is the perfect example of voice to text technologies that are becoming very common in our world.

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There is a panel discussion on leveraging voice recognition technology for greater efficiency. It may be interesting to check it out.

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Finally, Katherine Allen and Barry Olsen had a session today on the emergence of hybrid communication models. I would recommend that you listen to that session if you did not already because they express in a very articulate way some of the points that I have been making for several years.

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Let me challenge you to do some research once this chat is over. Google globalization and digitalization and educate yourself on these trends.

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In the translation and interpreting industry, the main drivers of today are availability and speed of access, followed by cost and volume. Consistency and quality are still important but not as high in the table of needs as they used to be 10 years ago.

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There is a shift in the balance of powers in terms of •  A shift in the number and type of Internet

users and web markets. •  A shift in the number and type of Non-native

speakers throughout the world.

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•  A shift in the amount of Investments in the language industry.

•  Changes and regulations in industries such as healthcare and legal.

•  Expansion of military industry and defense needs in multiple languages

•  New needs in the world, such as Refugees and speakers of non-native languages

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The new Transinterpreter in the 21st century will probably work as a trans creator or a localization or will be working in website translation, which is a totally different animal than a paper translation, or will be asked to work as a microsite creator or might be working in translation reviews or post editing of machine translation

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The new transinterpreter will see the merging of text and speech, will have to be both translator and interpreter in real time live chat rooms and similar environments, will be working on the translation of live captioning and sight translation under the a camera, or will be expected to meet quick turnover of email content or traverse the world of multilingual subtitling of short segments that are subject to time constraints.

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Historically speaking, translators and interpreters are loners. This is true no more. Collaboration is the new term. We are now part of a very active team of collaborators in a highly interactive relationship.

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There are many different platforms for collaboration, which enable teams to work to get the right people in real time with no concern for geography, in a virtual or physical space, with the right information and in the right context to make critical decisions. In our interconnected world that speaks and writes in hundreds of different languages, translators and interpreters are pivotal to the efforts of these collaboration efforts.

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The other big development to keep your eye on are the different platforms for collaboration, which enable teams to work together and are central to how organizations will reap value. Platforms of collaboration are all about getting the right people at the right time - real time or asynchronous - in the right place - virtual or physical - with the right information and in the right context to make critical decisions. Now then, if we are talking about an interconnected world that speaks and writes in hundreds of different languages, translators and interpreters become pivotal to the efforts of

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*silence*

In today’s language services industry, we, the translators and interpreters, are but one phase of the entire process. We know our work is the one vital portion, but this graph shows that we may be just one of a dozen people who participate in the process in the 21st Century. .

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Moreover, if we look at the different tasks involved, where each of the above circles may involve one or more individuals, you can clearly see that there is a conglomerate of people in today’s translation process that require collaboration and coordination.

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. And the interpreting cycle is not that different because you have scheduling issues and attendance issues, and transportation and logistics, confidentiality and multiple actors to deal with. .

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Today, language service providers and corporations use a translation management server or a translation workbench to manage their translation workflow and to ensure that the adequate resources, terminology and translation memories are used, that the handover of work from user to user is completed quickly and without mistakes introduced by the process itself.

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There are several innovative technologies now made available to interpreters to provide relatively easy access to larger global market by offering interpreters a platform to work remotely from their homes.

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There are several market disruptors and just as an example, one is Duolingo. This graphic shows the 28 different language pair combinations that they are currently offering at any given time. This goes to the heart of why technology in the form of video, phone and web-based technologies is growing at an exponential pace. It is really impossible in terms of the economics for any organization to have 28 or more interpreters in different language pair combinations available to respond immediately to the growing multilingual demands placed on any organization.

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Audiovisual Translation or Subtitling requires skills in a variety of registers and styles and the market is growing at very fast rates.

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Subtitling is one of the voice-to-text options that has made transinterpreting popular in communities that do not speak a dominant languages. Many of the films that come out of Hollywood are seen in other countries with subtitles for non-English speakers.

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Finally, translating audiovisual material for voiceover and dubbing pose other challenges to the transinterpreter but the demand is on the rise.

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I have a difficult paragraph that I have been submitting every year to Google translate since they appeared on the scene. This year, it translated it about 70% as good as my original human translation 5 years ago. That is how good it has become.

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The Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council of the United States have stated that one of the Grand Challenges of the 21st Century is to find an automatic, highly accurate and real time translation between the major languages of the world to greatly lower the barriers to international commerce and collaboration.

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To this purpose, the White House directly challenged the Translation Industry to innovate, a challenge that comes with cash for research as an incentive.

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The stimulus package of the White House then included money for innovations in the translation industry. I wanted to bring this to your attention because that push for machine translation is already six years old and it has been compounded with the other huge investments that IT and tech companies such as Google, IBM, Apple and other giants have been making in these technologies.

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Automated translation is the translation of text by a computer, with no human involvement. Remember that quality is no longer as important as it used to be. For many users, it is “acceptable” if they can get the general idea about the content.

Machine Translation technology has been improved over time to produce results of acceptable quality.

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We have gone from paper to word management like MS word to CAT tools like dsl to machine translation as Moses and now we must become proficient at post editing.

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Post-editing, or hybrid translation, is a combination of manpower and machine output and is increasingly popular – translators proofread and edit automated translation results.

Post editing machine translation is one of the next steps that I would recommend you look into very close as part of your learning curve because in my opinion this is where most of the work will be for translators in the coming decades

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Light post‐editing involves taking the raw MT output and performing as few modifications as possible to the text in order to make the translation understandable, factually accurate, and grammatically correct..

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Full post‐editing is a slower and more in‐depth pass to produce absolutely accurate translations that consistently use correct and approved terminology. The expectation is high: full post‐edited content that must be equal to human translation in all aspects.

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One of the sessions today is entitled the beauty of machine translation. Just to bring that to your attention.

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*silence* Just as translation has undergone these huge transformations, the delivery systems of interpreting services have also turned upside down in the last few decades.

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Lets then talk about Interpreters of the 21st Century. Keep in mind what we talked about the transinterpreter, this is, if you are a translator do not simply discard this section because you are not an interpreter at present. You might soon find yourself in need of these skills.

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Today, Interpreters work in person, over the phone, remotely by video, or using web based technologies. I believe that Face to Face interpreting will progressively be replaced by remote interpreting except for some few niches like surgeries, complex litigation or high stake political meetings, and other very specific and sporadic assignments. Most interpreting will be done over the phone, or using computer video or the web.

Over the phone interpreting is now being used by most large hospitals, social service and government agencies, major retailers, the financial sector and even the courts. To become a phone interpreter you need special skills to work without the visual cues of a face to face encounter and you need to learn to deal with a large amount of interferences that do not exist in the personal encounter.

Video remote interpreting is quickly becoming one of the tools of choice of corporations and large organizations. Additionally, the availability of video remote interpreting using mobile technologies has expanded this service to the common citizen all over the world. Again, special skills are required to handle the static video transmission along with a high understanding of technology to be able to solve the many technical issues that may arise during each call.

Web-based interpreting is also gaining ground as one of the futuristic options for large corporations and government agencies, and here Transinterpreters will be the norm.

There are basically two modalities of interpreting. Consecutive and Simultaneous.

David Frankel of ZipDX talked about bringing simultaneous interpreting to virtual meetings and the unique requirements of a virtual or remote multilingual interaction with technology as the cornerstone to successful communication. David states that making the magic of simultaneous interpreting available to the much broader international audience through teleconferencing and videoconferencing and webcasts can avoid the time and expense of travel and the need for specialized equipment.

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And recently a new modality has emerged, called Sim-Consec. Ester Navarro and others have developed and are actively teaching it. It is a combination of simultaneous and consecutive with the use of portable technology and it is quickly becoming the technique of choice in many settings, including the courts.

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We need not only learn about the technology but more important than that, we need to practice with it to acquire the skill needed to work with the technology. That takes time and money and we need to be ready and available to make that investment. Technology is no longer a option, it is a requirement of the Digital Age, at least in the world of business.

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I also believe that learning technology is equivalent to learning another language. Technology in itself is a whole separate language that we need to learn in order to perform in the digital age. Just like another language, you need to study it and you need to practice it to be able to master it.

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Please make sure you understand the need to be well versed in CAT tools and Translation memories.

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Joana Gough of the University of Surrey is researching the way translators work on the 21st Century as part of her research for PhD. She has already published some preliminary results which I believe you might be interested in because it is a quick overview of what the translation industry is looking today, from the point of view of the translators.

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Just to give you an example of what is going on in technology. A client portal is an electronic gateway to a collection of digital files, services, and information, accessible over the Internet through a web browser. In today’s world, translation and interpreting assignments are being assigned and managed via client access portals instead of phone calls or emails or the traditional means of communication.

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Many interpreters are even way behind translators in the need to improve their skills in terms of technology. Interpreters need to become highly comfortable with computers, software, and all the technology tools of today. This is becoming ever more important and interpreters who don’t do so will be left behind, regardless of their proficiency as linguists.

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And translators who think they do not need to know how to manage verbal interactions are, as we have seen, going to have a hard time unless they come to terms with the new requirements of the future of the profession.

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In the past 50 years, business in general have undergone huge technological changes and changes in the associated processes. Many other professions, such as medicine and journalism as well as the music industry, to name just the same, are nothing similar to what they were 30 years ago. Translation and interpreting were insulated during decades of changes but now we must play catch up.

For example, there are so many webmail providers out there that you should learn which provider is the best for your specific region of the world. Wikipedia has a very interesting comparison of webmail providers if you want to visit that page.

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Video chats and video conferencing will take over the workplace and social interaction. The days when we had to be physically present somewhere are long gone. Transinterpreters who can be interpreters but also translate on the spot documents or short texts are on the rise.

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Virtual classrooms allow web conferencing in real-time and share all kinds of resources, such as slides, documents, electronic whiteboards, shared applications or even whole desktops live polls, questions, surveys, break-out sessions and record-keeping. All of this in multiple languages across continents.

I am now going to go quickly over some of the topics you should be familiar with or become proficient.

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Adobe *silence*

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More and more we are seeing presentations in PowerPoint sent for translation, so this is a program that you should become really familiar with.

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Excel is another program that is now starting to appear more and more as source text for translation because strings can easily be copied to excel documents. You should be at least familiar on how excel works.

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Most translators are using their software at less than 10% of what they could. You should spend some time learning all the fantastic tricks your Word Processor can do for you.

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*silence* The idea behind crowdsourcing is that ‘the many’ are smarter and make better choices than ‘the few’, and that the ‘crowd’ has a huge potential for which they often find no outlet. In previous years

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Crowd-assisted translation refers to employing large numbers of bilingual human translators who collaborate via social media. CROWD sourcing takes tasks traditionally performed by a contractor and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call.

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We need to adapt to encounters that are not face to face but remote, we need to learn to manage the technologies of this new brave century to enhance our professional knowledge, and use them for the appropriate delivery of our services. Just Facebook has over 750 million users and Tweeter over 150 million users speaking many languages.

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•  Social media and virtual means of communication are becoming increasingly preferred in business. All those users might need to communicate in many other languages than their own. We need to understand social media and social networks, because these are growing at a rate of 35% in the business environment, while email is decreasing at a rate of 8%.

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Gaming started to become a truly social experience during 2010. The trend is set to become a dominant one in the coming years and translation of gaming content is growing every day.

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Social commerce is people coming together to benefit from massive bulk-buying agreements, even though they have never met. You guessed it, interactions will progressively require communication in multiple languages.

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The media has been totally transformed from one-way communicators like magazines, newspapers, radio, TV or even the movies to the SHARING of content in two-way interactions with the inclusion of text and audio and images and animation. You not only “watch” or “listen” or “read” the news, you can blog with the journalists, receive tweeters, follow live streams, upload videos and content of your own. Again, in multiple languages simultaneously...

*silence* As we noted earlier, Servicing 20th century clients is totally different than servicing 21st century clients. Many of the new and even old clients do not want a totally professional translation and they simply want the gist and in many occasions good quality has become optional and it all depends on price.

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What then are the skills that you need to service 21st century clients who want speed and price over quality? That is what you have to decide. For some it will be to penetrate the post editing market. For others it will be to specialize to service very particular industries that still need high quality work. For others it may be to search for new opportunities in industries that did not exist before. Others may want to totally change their business approach and try new models of operation.

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So remember you need to decide what your niche market will be and what your special characteristic will be. What is it that you offer clients that no one else is offering? Why should clients go with you and not with someone else. Why should they pay you when they can get it cheaper? Those are the questions you need to start answering seriously,

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My final conclusion is that translation and interpreting has gone from being a sophisticated intellectual profession, which it was 30 years ago, to a language services industry of knowledgeable linguists using state of the art technology. Once all of us make peace with this fundamental change in the nature and scope of the profession, we will be able to move again into a position of strength to decide how to build a future for the profession.

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The changes present us with both new challenges and new opportunities. Speed, cost and volume are most often cited. But it is much more than that. For the practitioners they mean working smarter and being open to change, adapting to new changing roles, learning new skills and mastering new tools. But the basics do not change. You are still required to be the best linguist, to render your best work, to perform within the highest ethical parameters.

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Technology does not sit and wait for one profession or another to approve of it existence. It just goes forward. The faster that the old professions adapt to the new technologies, the faster they embrace them and start benefiting from its advantages, the further that they will be able to start influencing their own evolution and development. Otherwise, we will be simple spectators. It is not a matter of how translators and interpreters react to these changes but rather how fast we adapt to them so we can start steering the wheel of our destiny.

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What will the face of Translation and Interpreting be in the future? For millennia, living and breathing translators or interpreters have been the embodiment of unparalleled linguistic skills, specialized training, professional conduct and a passion for their work. Maybe it is true that machines will not replace translators and interpreters. But certainly other translators and interpreters using state of the art technology will replace them. You want to be in this group. Become tech savvy. Learn the new skills needed for the 21st century.  

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You  will  also  receive  a  pdf  of  this  presenta5on  with  the  materials  linked  from  the  ProZ  session  page  

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So, we have arrived at the end of this presentation.

In  a  few  minutes  we  will  start  the  live  por5on  of  Ques5ons  and  Answers.  

So  please  start  by  telling  me,  what  is  the  most  important  take  away  concept  you  have  learned  today?