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Specialisation is as specialisation does
Michael Benis takes a look at specialisation and some practical ways in which we can develop a specialist service to advance our careers
Why the increasing interest in specialisation?
Ten to fifteen years ago, specialisation was the exception rather than the rule amongst professional translators, but as the market has grown the situation has gradually started to change. Nowadays, almost anyone progressing through a translation course, whether at a university or run by any of the major professional associations, will be encouraged to think about specialisation. Three reasons are generally given for this. Firstly, specialising makes one more likely to stand out from the crowd and therefore more memorable to translation company project managers. You are much more likely to be remembered as the new English-to-French translator specialising in wine than the yet another translator working from several languages in a dozen and a half subject combinations. Likewise, contacting a potential "direct client" is more likely to be successful if they understand that you concentrate your professional services specifically on the language combination and subject matter of interest to them. In other words, specialising can make it easier for you to get work.
The second reason given for specialising is that you will generally be able to increase your productivity if nearly all of your work is in just one subject area you understand so well that there is very little need to stop tapping away on the keyboard to research terminology, concepts and technology etc. The third reason is basically the reverse side of the same coin, that specialising allows you to charge more for your work if it is clear that overall you offer better value than your competitors because your specialist knowledge means you can be relied upon to deliver translations that will need very little, if anything, by way of correction and can be deployed effectively by the end user. This is only true up to a point with translation companies, which tend to work with a very tight margins. With direct clients, on the other hand, specialist translators and interpreters can often charge many times more than their freelance colleagues and even respected translation companies.
The Unique Selling Points (USPs) which these professionals use to convince their clients regard not just fitness for purpose, which they are able to guarantee in a way a non-specialist cannot, but likewise that even a reputable translation company is unlikely to be able to compete with them since someone offering their degree of specialisation simply wouldn't be prepared to accept translation company rates. They are also likely to emphasise that they offer a degree of consistency that translation companies very often cannot since they are generally unable to guarantee that the same translator will always be handling a given client's work, even if they are an exception to the modern trend and have a large in-house team of their own.
Put like this, of course, it all looks exquisitely tempting. If specialisation makes you more memorable, more likely to obtain work and more likely to achieve higher earnings, what on earth could anyone have against it? That's not a rhetorical question. Although many translators and interpreters do claim to specialise, the number of specialisms offered is often so numerous as to belie the claim. Just a cursory glance through any of the increasingly numerous online directories will turn up endless cases of professionals claiming to work across several languages in ten and more so-called specialist areas. So, why is it that so few of us specialise in practice? The answer is fear and lack of confidence.
The fear regards what I call "sweet shop syndrome". It's a fear that if we only sell jelly babies in our sweet shop, rather than also offering mint humbugs, chocolates and a full selection of confectionery, then we simply won't get enough business. The lack of confidence, on the other hand, regards our initial uncertainty about when we have actually gained enough knowledge to be able to claim that we are specialists at all. This article takes a look at both those fears in some detail, but particularly the latter, not least of all because it allows us to examine precisely what we mean by specialisation rather than taking it for granted. One very good reason for this is that if you talk to colleagues about specialisation, opinions tend to be very polarised. If I were to put 20 translators and interpreters together in a room I wouldn't be surprised to find a marked split between those who claim that specialisation has transformed their working lives on the one hand, and those who claim it has made very little difference, or just "hasn't worked" on the other. On the surface this would simply seem to be a difference of opinion, but if we probe further and actually ask those people what they mean by specialisation, I am equally confident we would find a parallel split regarding what they have actually done in practice. To that extent, specialisation is like marketing: to work it has to be a planned and sustained activity. Hence the title of this article: specialisation is as specialisation does. So, let's take a look at what this involves.
Planning specialisation - Follow your head and your heart
Perhaps the biggest problem is that those who aren't able to make specialisation work for them regard it as an ambition rather than a plan. The first problem for many is, not surprisingly, knowing where to start, which is to say not having a clear idea of what one's specialisation is in the first place. Many professionals believe that what one really needs to do more than anything else is to pick a potentially lucrative subject area. This can be a risky long-term strategy. It's certainly worth being cautious about an area that looks particularly attractive for no other reason than that it's going through a sudden boom. Don't forget it could equally suddenly collapse. Many who put a lot of time and resources into exploiting the telecoms boom fifteen or so years ago, for example, found themselves in a very difficult position when the market subsequently fell flat on its face. This was even worse for those who only offered an intermediate level of specialisation and didn't really have a great interest in the subject (things that often go together) - and yes, there were people like that.
So, the most obvious message should be that you need to choose a subject area which is close to your heart as well as your intellect. On a practical level, it's all very well to see your productivity rise as your familiarity with a subject area increases, but if it's not an area close to your heart in one way or another, the likelihood is that boredom will subsequently see your productivity drop, not to mention your morale. It should likewise be obvious that a subject which fascinates and enthrals is not your best choice for specialisation if for one reason or another you find it incredibly difficult to understand.
This may seem like rather obvious advice, but you'd be surprised to know how many people specialise in an area that they have never been particularly fond of and have grown to loathe over the years. Equally, I have come across more than a few professionals who have been encouraged to take on a particular specialisation either because a translation company they worked with frequently needed it or a colleague encouraged them and offered support, despite which they were never able to get on with the subject and subsequently abandoned it. None of this is to say that you shouldn't bear in mind how marketable any potential choice of specialisation may be, in fact it would be foolish not to, particularly since such choices are no longer a matter of "hunch" but can be based on solid data, allowing us to make an informed choice.
Get the facts to confirm your choice
In the past, anyone contemplating a particular specialisation would have had to make an educated guess, based on demand from their existing or potential customers, together with feedback from colleagues. But now we have access to the statistics collected by ITI from the searches of its Members' Directory on the highly-successful ITI website. If, therefore, we are uncertain whether to choose between Law or Economics as our specialisation, for example, we may well be influenced by the knowledge that there were 6,207 queries regarding the former during the 12 months to 1 February 2006, compared to just 730 for the latter. ITI members received the first news of this extremely useful initiative in a summary of the results that were sent out with their membership renewal papers in March, and the full report can now be accessed by all members of the public on the ITI website (www.iti.org.uk).
Anyone planning or reassessing their specialisation would do well to consult these figures to ensure that their business strategy is well founded. They would also be well advised to build up figures of their own, monitoring their productivity in different subject areas as well as the amount of time they dedicate to each and the income they obtain. The ExactSpent time-tracking software reviewed in the last issue of bulletin is a very useful tool for doing that. Sometimes there's no substitute for hard facts. Indeed, they can often be quite surprising. Certain areas may be much more lucrative than you had expected and vice versa - something that needs to be considered over the course of the year, not just a good week or month, so that you can factor rates, productivity, stamina and demand into the equation.
Those starting out in translation and interpreting shouldn't be discouraged if they don't have a clear idea of where best to specialise from the very beginning. You may at best only have identified a range of promising areas in terms of your own capabilities. That's a perfectly valid starting point. Experience will subsequently tell you where your abilities are greatest, or you may find that client referrals effectively make your mind up for you.
Alternatively, of course, it may be that neither of these things happen. If that's the case, a spot of speculative marketing could be what you need to find out which way the wind is blowing. The objective is to identify just one or two areas of specialisation in which you have a special interest and then see if you encounter an encouraging level of market interest. Testing the water like this is an especially good idea if you receive more than enough work as a generalist. Indeed, it can sometimes be necessary to help a successful generalist break the mould and take their career/business development one step further. As always,. though, don’t expect instant results. You should contact potential clients in a sustained series of waves and maybe try out several of your subject areas.
Specialisation + marketing = success
Let's get back to our sweet shop, but not for long - for the simple reason that our situation as a freelance, especially in this day and age, is very different. A sweet shop is in just one location and generally relies on passers-by popping in on the off chance that they will find a range of sweet and savoury suckable, chewable, munchable, crunchable delights to satisfy their latest urge. We, on the other hand, can cast our net widely - indeed worldwide over the Internet - not only posting information about our services on a wide range of sites and directories, but also contacting hundreds of translation companies and prospective direct clients far and wide. If we are prepared to put the work into marketing ourselves intensively over a period of time. If we are determined to build up a distinctive image for ourselves with our specialism. If we leave no stone unturned to satisfy expectations and concentrate effectively on that area, the chances of success are almost guaranteed. The many prospective clients we have contacted will not only be aware of us, but will also remember us for our one specialist service and, when the need arises, contact us confidently, knowing that we will be sure to meet their need.
Unfortunately going into further detail about marketing is beyond the scope of this article. But now that we've got the sweet shop behind us, it's certainly worth emphasising that successful marketing is an ongoing activity that needs to be developed and increasingly targeted in tandem with our specialisation, career interests and ambitions, as our lives progress and change. It is likewise worth remembering that marketing can be used speculatively, as above, not just to promote a specialisation plan you have already decided on, but to help you fine-tune your plan, testing the water as you go.
Looking in the mirror to identify your specialisation strategy
Another common pitfall and weak point in many a specialisation plan is to forget that specialisation is not a matter of choosing a subject area but of planning how to develop a business, which means developing every area. Even a so-called "generalist" needs to develop their research skills, planning skills, marketing skills, interpersonal skills and negotiating skills. To do so you need to have a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror - just as a personnel officer would scrutinise a member of staff in order to offer them the best possible support. You need to assess your own performance in the same way, asking questions such as: What have I done to identify the best possible customers? Have I marketed myself actively enough to build up a complete picture of the deadlines, support and promptness of payment that different companies offer? Have I developed a plan to increase my work with the more rewarding companies identified? Have I increased my rates in line with my experience and inflation? Am I able to end negotiations so that both parties always feel satisfied with the outcome? How effective am I at planning deadlines so that I don't find myself working late at night and during weekends to deliver work on time? Have I done any systematic work to identify which languages and subjects are my most productive?
Asking yourself a series of questions like this will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as well as any continuing professional development support you require. Never use your weaknesses as an excuse to tread water. If you are shy, submissive and poor at negotiating, for instance, there is always something you can do about it: there are strategies you can deploy and acting skills you can learn to make all the difference. Similarly, never fail to develop your strengths. In fact, that's what specialisation is all about. More than once, I have found myself in conversation with a translator or interpreter who has commented that they never really knew what to specialise in. Yet, a little later on it emerges that they do in fact have special strengths and subject areas they particularly enjoy (often the two go together). Sometimes, these areas are easy to identify because you have a related hobby, but sometimes the whole business of specialisation may have nothing to do with subject areas at all. I myself, for example, as an interpreter, had a fairly clear idea of my specialist subject areas, but still felt there was something missing. It took some time and quite a bit of thought to recognise that I was not only able to perform well in high-pressure negotiations and press conferences, but really enjoyed this work - a realisation that allowed me to specialise much more effectively.
Although mirror work, marketing and further experience will give you a clear idea where you want to specialise, they can't guarantee that you'll take your plans any further. In fact, it is often at this point that people's plans come to a full stop. Why? For the simple reason that it's here that the confidence factor kicks in. It's very easy for a successful generalist to simply keep on doing what they know, in many cases working exclusively with translation companies, rarely moving beyond their "comfort zone" and only doing so when asked to as a "favour", which reassures them about taking the risk.
Now, make no mistake, I certainly wouldn't want to insist that every translator or interpreter on God's earth will lead an impoverished and unfulfilled life if they don't specialise and market themselves to direct clients. Indeed, many prefer working with Translation Companies precisely because they don't want to bother with marketing themselves, or don't want to be under the pressure of always having to accept a job, which is much more likely to be the case with the former than the latter. At the same time, however, we shouldn't forget that in many cases quality is often impossible without specialisation. Just as we shouldn't overlook the many generalists who would like to improve their confidence in their work and their income, but find themselves caught in the vicious circle of their comfort zone.
So we're back to the confidence problem, except that it's really a memory problem. Because what we so often forget is that we have already acquired a wide range of skills and experience, generally applying a very successful strategy to do so that is in almost all cases exactly what we now need without our realising it.
You may already know what you need
Let's take a look at what practically every successful generalist will have achieved already. We have learnt a language, progressively venturing out onto new ground that gradually becomes solid underfoot as we learn more. Similarly, we have gradually acquired an understanding of certain areas of technology, law or politics etc, many aspects of which we may now be quite familiar with. A specialisation strategy in simply involves continuing precisely what we have already been doing, only increasingly pushing ourselves to focus in on a precise area rather than carrying on almost randomly with what we can get by with in many.
The way to do this safely is quite simply to push ourselves a bit at a time, checking assignments carefully before confirming our acceptance of them, and agreeing this in advance, likewise ensuring that we have negotiated a comfortable deadline for any area we know is going to involve research into uncharted territory.
If in doubt, refuse a job. You're under no compunction to say why, but you are under an obligation to deliver usable work on time. Similarly, however grateful a customer may be that you have accepted a job, they will feel very different if your translation is too late or too poor to be usable.
But let's take a step back now. As much as this is all good advice for developing a specialisation, these are, of course, also precautions that every professional translator should take as a matter of course. We should be doing it already. The quality of our work and business relationships depends on it. So what we are really looking at is how we deliver quality. Maybe this process is where specialisation actually begins.
Developing quality as the road to specialisation
In order to develop and deploy the type of strategy we have been examining, we need to establish the practices that it is built on. In other words, we need to identify our quality practices and quality strategy in order to subsequently develop a specialisation strategy and put it into practice.
My work correcting and rewriting translations for major European companies has been a sobering experience. The simple truth of the matter is that translation standards are in many cases unacceptably low, even where qualified translators are concerned. At their mildest, these problems involve the mechanical repetition of source language syntax and idioms to create what can only be described as gobbledegook in the target language. Shedding light on this problem, I have even heard well-respected translators lament that the source texts they work on are badly written. This may sometimes be the case, but more often than not it's simply a matter of different cultures expressing and exploring the same concepts differently. Even practices regarding the writing and presentation of technical manuals can differ, and yet many translators are simply unaware of these differences. In other words, the very people who should be bridging two cultures effectively don't have a sufficient foundation in the source culture or can't make a full transition to the target culture, or both.
Just as surprising, some of the translations I have come across have the most astounding terminological errors. Astounding because the resultant translations did not make sense and yet the translators were happy to leave them as they were. Astounding because the terms were available in some cases even in good non-specialist dictionaries. Astounding because the terms could easily have been verified on the Internet. Astounding because it means respected generalist translators are still making the most basic of quality errors.
So, let's remind ourselves what we need to avoid these mistakes and put solid quality practices into place, which will subsequently allow us to build our specialisation.
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First published in ITI Bulletin, 2006. |
