| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13] > | Off topic: In my craft or sullen art: JA-EN financial translation Thread poster: Dan Lucas
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Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | I spy the Three Bears | Jan 20 |
Having come back from lunch and looked at what I have written, I thought it would be as well to clarify that I am approaching a seasonal peak - because reporting cycles are driven by quarterly filings - and that I'm not this busy all the time.
As I have mentioned in other parts of the forum, I think it is very difficult to achieve a good balance of work that lies between the two extremes of "too much" and "not enough". Over the course of the year, I have enough work. Over the course... See more Having come back from lunch and looked at what I have written, I thought it would be as well to clarify that I am approaching a seasonal peak - because reporting cycles are driven by quarterly filings - and that I'm not this busy all the time.
As I have mentioned in other parts of the forum, I think it is very difficult to achieve a good balance of work that lies between the two extremes of "too much" and "not enough". Over the course of the year, I have enough work. Over the course of a day or a week I may well have nothing, or at least very little, to do (the well-known "feast or famine" phenomenon noted by many freelancers). To put it another way, on a day-to-day basis I am not in a Goldilocks position where my porridge is neither too hot nor too cold but just right.
I am increasingly beginning to think this is not possible in my niche, because my own experience suggests to me that clients do require a certain level of quality, but once they are confident on that point they prioritize availability, speed of turnaround, and general ease of handling.
Assume that we have two freelancers, A and B, with similar levels of ability. For whatever reason, A has average availability of 20,000 characters a week, and B has average availability of 10,000 characters a week.
I suspect that the ratio of work allocated by the client to these two translators is very different to the relative availability ratio of 2:1. It probably comes out at something like 20,000 and 5,000 (4:1), because the client just throws a ton of stuff at A in the knowledge that A will say "Can do" twice as often as B. If you think B is going to decline the job anyway, why bother asking them first? Why not offer the job to A, and only go to B if A is busy?
If this hypothesis is correct, it means that A will usually have first pick of the available jobs. By extension, A will be busy most of the time and wondering why they can't achieve a decent work-life balance, while B will be short of work most of the time and wondering why they can't make a decent wage even though they have similar levels of raw translation ability.
I think that this dynamic also leads to project managers sending work that may lie outside a freelancer's immediate specialities, because they think "Oh, A seems pretty capable and always takes a positive approach, I wonder if she can handle this legal document." And they try her, and she says yes, and she does a good job. So she gets even more work.
Back when I worked in the financial industry I knew a certain electronic parts company that did everything it could to prevent a single customer from accounting for more than 5% of its annual sales. This gave it tremendous resilience in the face of business fluctuations, and a very strong negotiating position.
For a while I thought that this approach might be applicable to Japanese to English financial translation. Now I no longer believe that's the case. These days I am convinced that the less you depend on a client, the less they in turn depend on you, the less they think of you when they have work to allocate, and the weaker your negotiating position is when it comes to rates and deadlines.
You need clients who use you enough to feel slightly dependent on you, so that they give you favorable treatment, while avoiding being dependent on them yourself to the point that you cannot negotiate with conviction. That's a very fine line to toe. Perhaps there simply is no Goldilocks point in this industry, and the only porridge set out by the Three Bears is either very hot or very cold. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
This morning it is 9.1°C when I leave the house with the dog a few minutes after 6 AM, significantly warmer than it has been for days, and windy. After heavy overnight rain excess water is running out of the field gate over the track rather than through the drainage pipe, which is blocked with leaves. I clear it with my stick. As usual the dog excitedly tries to help dig out the pipe and just gets in the way. When I drive him off he bounds over to the pipe outlet on the other side of the track ... See more This morning it is 9.1°C when I leave the house with the dog a few minutes after 6 AM, significantly warmer than it has been for days, and windy. After heavy overnight rain excess water is running out of the field gate over the track rather than through the drainage pipe, which is blocked with leaves. I clear it with my stick. As usual the dog excitedly tries to help dig out the pipe and just gets in the way. When I drive him off he bounds over to the pipe outlet on the other side of the track and tries to bite the oncoming surge of released water. We go on. The light of my torch glints on surface water here and there, and the dog's paws make squishy noises as he tracks back and forth with his nose to the ground.
On the return leg of the morning loop I can hear from some distance away the wind soughing in the little stand of Sitka spruce that is the remnants of a once-substantial coniferous plantation. When we get underneath them, the lower branches are being tossed and bullied about by the wind. The stars are not visible, so presumably it is cloudy, and rain is forecast for later...
No translation work for me today, though I do expect a job to be handed off to me tomorrow.
While I have the chance - updates will be much briefer next week - I want to return to the argument I made yesterday that freelancers with a high level of availability probably see rewards, in terms of work allocated, in excess of what one would expect from a simple comparison of the amount of time they have available.
I asked you to imagine two freelancers, A and B, with similar levels of ability with average capacity or availability of 20,000 characters and 10,000 words or characters a week, respectively. That is an availability ratio of 2:1.
Now imagine that the client has 25,000 words of work to allocate. You might think that this would be allocated in a ratio of 2:1, so freelancer A would get 16,666 words and freelancer B would get 8,333 words. Yesterday, I suggested that what tends to happen is that the client gives priority to freelancer A simply because they tend to have a lot of availability, resulting in freelancer A getting 20,000 words and freelancer by getting 5,000 words.
That's a ratio of 4:1. To put it slightly differently, A is getting 20% more than you would expect from simple capacity figures and B is getting a walloping 40% less than you would expect.
On top of this you have the issue of how aggressive A is when it comes to pushing beyond their theoretical capacity in the short term. For example, although they may have 20,000 words a week of availability, for a few days they may be able to translate an extra thousand words a day, bringing the total to 25,000. So if the client has more work than A has capacity, in the short term A may actually receive even more orders than one would expect, especially if B has a hard limit on their working hours (for example, translation may be part-time work they do alongside their full-time job, or they may have parenting commitments).
Ultimately, availability depends on many things, including the willingness and ability of the translator to work long hours, their raw translation speed, their general efficiency, and so on. (Just as a reminder, in the scenario above we posit that both translators work at roughly the same speed and produce similar quality work.)
If this hypothesis is accurate, it suggests a kind of polarization among freelancers. Those who do well, do very well. Those who are equally capable but are not able to take on as much work, or take three hours to respond rather than three minutes, may find themselves with much fewer orders than they might reasonably expect.
My tentative view on this is that for in-house translators this would not apply because the client would have a very good idea of what the translators were working on and how much excess capacity the translators had. Both would end up working their full hours.
When using freelancers, the client would not have any detailed knowledge of the freelancer's schedule. In a sub-market where the client feels that supply and demand are in balance, or that supply is tight, the client would be aware that they are competing with other clients for the time and attention of the freelancer, and there would be an incentive to "lock in" the supplier quickly.
Obviously the situation is a lot more complex than this. Clients will have more than two freelancers available to them for areas in which they do a lot of business, and they will also want to avoid becoming too dependent on one or two translators (although they may not always succeed if supply is tight and demand is strong).
But perhaps availability really is a competitive advantage in and of itself. And perhaps all this discussion demonstrates is how little we understand the market at a micro level. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | What about Translator C? | Jan 21 |
Meanwhile Translator C gets to choose a deadline for the entire 25,000 word job.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Nice work if you can get it | Jan 21 |
Christopher Schröder wrote:
Meanwhile Translator C gets to choose a deadline for the entire 25,000 word job.
I'm sure such jobs exist in the more tranquil areas of the markets and I congratulate those who have succeeded in finding them, a group that unfortunately does not include myself.
The bulk of my work consists of one kind of filing or another. When private-sector companies are facing a hard deadline determined by statute (a subject I will come to another day) for a document incorporating input from a dozen pairs of hands, humble freelancers like myself don't get to dictate terms. I make a decent living from translation, but I do have competitors to whom my clients can turn if they think I'm developing prima donna-ish tendencies...
To be fair, my clients are sensible people and they will usually indicate if the deadline can be adjusted or not, but usually we are talking about a few hours or one day, not a week.
Dan
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | The perils of living in a woodland | Jan 22 |
A busy morning here, with a dozen emails of various kinds confirming, handing off, and offering jobs. The latter is a slightly urgent project for the minutes of a meeting held by senior executives of a very large multinational, and I feel somewhat obliged to take it on.
To be honest, I would prefer not to be doing anything this morning, since Storm Isha left this little present for me: a windblown oak tree completely blocking the track and preventing vehicular access. It also took o... See more
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
There is not much arable farming in this part of the world, at least not since machinery began to replace horses for agricultural work a hundred years ago, which obviated the need for oats and other grains to feed them. One aspect of mechanization that is little-appreciated today is that it freed up a good deal of agricultural land that had until then been used for equine fodder. Tractors don't eat oats.
The relative rarity of such crops here in West Wales means that we tend not to ... See more There is not much arable farming in this part of the world, at least not since machinery began to replace horses for agricultural work a hundred years ago, which obviated the need for oats and other grains to feed them. One aspect of mechanization that is little-appreciated today is that it freed up a good deal of agricultural land that had until then been used for equine fodder. Tractors don't eat oats.
The relative rarity of such crops here in West Wales means that we tend not to see huge flocks of wood pigeon descending on fields as they do in parts of England, although smaller numbers can still damage what newly seeded land there is. Still, we have a robust local population of wood pigeon and quite a few collared doves.
These were the thoughts that came to mind this morning when, as the dog and I passed by, a couple of members of the columbae family burst upward from the trees in which they had been roosting, clattering their way through the smaller branches and off into a starless and moonless night sky. I glanced up quickly enough to see them go, the undersides of their bodies white in the light of my torch.
It has always seemed to me a bit of an odd tactical decision. Given that they are off the ground and out of the reach of any normal predator, why not just sit tight, as so many birds will? Is it really safer to fly off into the dark? But I suppose we cannot expect too much from a bird with a brain the size of a pea.
Yesterday my morning was absorbed by the unexpected need to chop up trees, and my afternoon used to take an elderly relative to the hospital an hour's drive away for an appointment, waiting for them as the NHS ground through its procedures, and then taking them back home. By the time I myself returned home it was 5 PM, and I got very little work done after that.
But my deadlines haven't changed because I have had personal matters to attend to, and I have two documents to submit by midnight tonight. Today I will need to deliver close to 7,000 characters, so I'm going to be busy.
With regard to the overall flow of work, I have had my first cancellation, a relatively small 1,500 character project. On the other hand, a separate client has offered me three minor jobs at the end of the month, all for one end client, and a different client again has asked me to accept an additional 1,500 characters for another job. All in all, it tends to even out.
Now, time to get my nose back to the grindstone. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
7,000 characters or so translated, as expected.
Deadlines duly hit.
Tired, but hopefully a lighter day tomorrow.
Dan
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
A dry but windy morning, not particularly cold. As we leave the house a full moon is glowing in a cloudy sky, creating a kind of halo effect reminiscent of a John Atkinson Grimshaw painting. A couple of hours later the sky behind the hazel trees in the hedge lightens into a glorious dawn of gold, blue and peach.
Meanwhile, back at my desk, the view is less inspiring. A 2,000-character project has been reduced to less than 400 characters, but the PM apologises and says they will try to find something to compensate. Sure enough, in a later email I see that they have offered me a different 700-character project, which I accept. Another PM at the same client lets me know that their project has come in slightly larger than expected, and can I confirm that the files are all okay. I log in to their portal, download and check, then send an okay.
A PM at a second client has emailed me confirming receipt of yesterday's project and letting me know that the additional portion they asked me to do, and which they have just handed off, is a relatively small 500 characters. At the same time they ask me to prepare for another tranche of up to 2,000 characters starting tomorrow, on the same project. An addition to the addition, if you like.
A third client enquires about the possibility of translating a small project for one of the end clients are usually cover, right at the end of the month. That period is starting to look crowded. I say yes, and create a new directory to represent it in my schedule.
Looking at my work folder, the current state of play is that I now have one job to be delivered by tomorrow morning (Thursday) and five jobs to be delivered by Friday morning. Of the latter five, two have yet to be handed off to me. I have another 24 projects looming in the background.
None of the six jobs for today and tomorrow are particularly large, but it is easy to find yourself in a difficult situation if you have many small projects, because the cognitive burden of switching context frequently does tend to slow one down. With that in mind I will try to complete at least two of those jobs today, and make a start on the third, which is also the largest.
In general my schedule is looking uncomfortably full, which is the way it should be, because (as noted above) many jobs will come in slightly or significantly smaller than expected. Occasionally a project will be larger than expected, but in such cases the client will be understanding regarding deadlines.
Japanese financial translation has a pronounced seasonal cadence, which results in work being compressed into four periods spaced evenly throughout the year. Due to this seasonality, demand often pushes up against the limits of supply. At such times there is a certain art to keeping the whole thing in balance, and usually there is one project in each busy season that will throw this carefully arranged schedule out of kilter and require me to scramble to return it to some kind of equilibrium.
In terms of non-work tasks, I need to find the time to get the chainsaw out again to clear away the remains of the trunk of the tree that fell on the track the other day.
Dan
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Forestry shop sold me the wrong kind of bar for my chainsaw.
I did query it last week, but they were adamant it was fine.
So I took it back today, and somebody who knew what they were doing ordered me the correct part.
There's a lesson there, something about competent suppliers saving you time and money...
Dan
[Edited at 2024-01-24 17:25 GMT]
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
A damp morning, but not cold outside.
Clients are rampaging back and forth in my inbox, so that by 7:20 AM I have already received - and responded to - 15 new emails. A cancellation here, a new request there, a clarification for this, some supporting documents for that, a request to check these, a request to adjust those... All in all, I have about the level of volume I thought I would have, but the first 10 days of February is looking increasingly tight.
The important ... See more A damp morning, but not cold outside.
Clients are rampaging back and forth in my inbox, so that by 7:20 AM I have already received - and responded to - 15 new emails. A cancellation here, a new request there, a clarification for this, some supporting documents for that, a request to check these, a request to adjust those... All in all, I have about the level of volume I thought I would have, but the first 10 days of February is looking increasingly tight.
The important thing is not to forget to put every firm offer of a project into my schedule, otherwise I might end up double-booking jobs, and that would be painful.
Lots to do today. I have five jobs to deliver by midnight, of which three are small, and the fourth is an addition to an ongoing job. The fifth job is not large, but it is for a company (end client) that that I do not know well. A long day ahead.
In addition to all this, another client wants an ISO 17100 declaration signed and returned...
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | We're very wide awake, the moon and I | Jan 26 |
A much colder morning, with a moon just past full, very bright in a clear sky and appearing quite still and serene without a backdrop of clouds against which to sail.
She borrows light, that, through the night, mankind may all acclaim her!
And, truth to tell, she lights up well; So I, for one, don't blame her.
On the long open track that makes up part of our walk I switch off the torch and am able to see quite easily, with my shadow stretching long behind ... See more A much colder morning, with a moon just past full, very bright in a clear sky and appearing quite still and serene without a backdrop of clouds against which to sail.
She borrows light, that, through the night, mankind may all acclaim her!
And, truth to tell, she lights up well; So I, for one, don't blame her.
On the long open track that makes up part of our walk I switch off the torch and am able to see quite easily, with my shadow stretching long behind me on the wet earth. I sense spring is no longer far off.
Back at the office, I have a dozen emails from clients, of which five are simple acknowledgements of delivery. There are no new proposals of work, but three booked jobs have been handed off to me. I busy myself downloading and checking files before giving an "all is well" to the respective PMs.
I have a total of four projects in hand, two of which are small, so I have enough time today to pick up the chainsaw bar that should be arriving at the forestry shop today, and also go for a session with my trainer, whom I haven't seen since before Christmas...
My goal for today is to finish the two small jobs I have just received. These are for an end client that only began taking a systematic approach to translating their documents last month, an effort in which I was closely involved, so I know the material reasonably well. I also want to make a start on the larger job, which is for an end client I have not dealt with before. That will probably be slow going at first. Call it 3,000 characters in all.
The fourth job pertains to an end client whose materials I have translated every quarter for the past couple of years, so I know them well and will be interested to see how their business is developing, but that can wait until later in the weekend.
Between now and Monday I also want to investigate the Talon voice recognition software that is being discussed elsewhere in the forum.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Five, six, pick up sticks | Jan 26 |
A cold but lovely day.
Somebody found a stick in one of our fields.
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Quentin NEVEN
Belgium
Local time: 08:12
Member (Jan 2024)
English to French
+ ...
Hello Dan,
It's an interesting format, quite refreshing on Proz!
I encourage you to keep posting pictures with your posts, I personally find them more engaging.
Keep up the good work
P.S. Have you ever considered writing a blog?
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Long ago and far away | Jan 27 |
Quentin NEVEN wrote:
P.S. Have you ever considered writing a blog?
Yes, I ran one for about 12 months in 2011/2012, but it was tightly focused on Japanese equities and the autos and auto parts industry.
The background was that when I worked in the stock market I pretty much lived in Microsoft Excel, but by 2009-2010 I had become dissatisfied with its visualization capabilities, which became apparent after I had moved to a new role in which there was a great deal more data available for me to work on. Ironically, considering your comment above, I was well known among my colleagues for using graphical data to make my points, rather than reams of text. This was long before Big Data and visualization became commonplace.
I bought my own licence for Tableau and experimented with that from about 2010, but although I liked the dashboards, at that point - I think version 5 was the first version I used - I found it wasn't very good for generating graphical data without a lot of fiddling about. Good for one-off images, but not for my purposes. (Tableau is of course well known these days, but I think you may still have been in elementary school when it was launched, so you may find this old article on the software interesting; note name of journalist...)
So then I started looking around for more flexible visualization tools and found that the state-of-the-art was the R statistical language and ggplot2. At the time I coded mostly in Perl and VBA, so I found R a bit different, but it was effective. That blog has long since been archived and put away, but it would be things like this ↓. These are called small multiples, and are very difficult to achieve with conventional tools. This particular one shows how the stocks of certain auto parts suppliers in the US performed relative to the S&P 500 in the first half of 2012.
This sort of thing ↓ is easier to create, but because it was programmatically generated it was a great deal simpler to perform updates than it would have been in Excel. I could simply add a bit of data to a CSV file, and run the program, and all the images would be remade with the latest figures. When necessary, I added annotations digitally using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Illustrator.
Based on my own experience, then, a blog is difficult to monetize, and requires a lot of time and energy. If I were a student or retired or something then I would probably have both, but I am very busy with the "real" work of helping paying clients. As for pictures, this is a thread primarily about Japanese to English financial translation (on which there seems to be a dearth of information generally), and I therefore plan to keep non-relevant imagery to a minimum. To put it another way, I stick the odd photo in here and there, but it is not the focus of this discussion.
Cordially,
Dan
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:12
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Steady as she goes | Jan 27 |
I had a fairly strenuous workout yesterday afternoon, and then after I got back I had to spend an hour or so clearing the tree trunk that was still lying on the track to the house. The wood was unusually dense and hard, so the chainsaw work itself was tiring, and the individual rounds were large and very heavy and needed to be lifted onto the verge.
By the time I had finished I had created enough room to enable vehicles to pass normally, but my back was aching and I desperately need... See more I had a fairly strenuous workout yesterday afternoon, and then after I got back I had to spend an hour or so clearing the tree trunk that was still lying on the track to the house. The wood was unusually dense and hard, so the chainsaw work itself was tiring, and the individual rounds were large and very heavy and needed to be lifted onto the verge.
By the time I had finished I had created enough room to enable vehicles to pass normally, but my back was aching and I desperately needed a shower and a rest. For that reason I didn't get started on the project I wanted to begin yesterday, but I did of course submit to projects due on Saturday morning.
Today I will start the job that I didn't look at yesterday, which I need to submit on Monday morning. All in all, it looks like being a quiet weekend, which is fine by me. I have quite a few non-financial translation tasks to work on.
Regards,
Dan ▲ Collapse
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