Liu Yuanju is a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Finance and Law
Beethoven once said, "I will choke the throat of fate, and it will not be able to bring me to complete submission." Recently, the "Our Genius Son" that swept the screen all over the Internet is telling such a story.
After the death of his wife, jin Shengyong, an octogenarian father, told the story of his son Jin Xiaoyu, who suffered from bipolar disorder, who used his language talent to devote himself to translating foreign works, so as to save himself and fight against the cruel fate. The experience of their family not abandoning and supporting each other has touched many people.
▌ Too low remuneration for translation
This article has such a detail: Jin Xiaoyu's remuneration for translating a thousand-character Chinese character is only a few tens of yuan. This surprised and sighed many people, and they could not imagine that the remuneration for translation was so low.
This reminds me of Sun Zhongxu, a well-known post-70s translator who committed suicide due to depression in 2014. Sun Zhongxu has translated "The Catcher in the Wheat Field", "1984", "Animal Farm" and other works. A few years ago, Sun Zhongxu submitted an article to a newspaper, exposing from the ironic point of view the current practice of some publishing houses and book companies withholding translators' manuscript fees, entitled "How to Exploit Translators", but for some reason, it could not be published in the newspaper. After he died of depression, he triggered the call of public opinion to "protect translators and protect their rights and interests".
▲ There are many translations of "1984", including the Shanghai translation of Dong Leshan edition, Beijing October Liu Shaoming edition, Times Literature and Art Fu Xia edition, and Translation Lin Sun Zhongxu edition.
Zhao Deming is a professor of Spanish and a doctoral supervisor in the Department of Spanish At Peking University, and has been engaged in literary translation for decades. In an interview with the "West China Metropolis Daily" reporter, he admitted that these are all true, "The cost of literary translation is so low that it is so unreasonable that it has reached an outrageous point!" This is also an old problem for many years! With my decades of experience in literary translation, the standard of 20-80 yuan per thousand words has not changed for almost 30 years. You must know how many times prices and wages have risen in the past 30 years! ”
In contrast to the cost of translation, it is the fee for the original manuscript. Not to mention the attractive remuneration for competing Internet celebrity writers, even if the author writes in the traditional media, the price of three or four hundred yuan per thousand words for comments and columns is already very low, but it is still a grade higher than the translation fee, which can support the general urban life.
Some argue that it is not only the problem of the overly degrading environment, but also because individual publishing houses cater to the market, ignore culture, disrespect translators, set extremely low prices, and arbitrarily exploit their labor. Some people in the publishing industry once said that they like to find old translators because these people are embarrassed to bargain.
There is some truth to these views, but they are not the root cause of the low cost of translation.
The so-called "looking for people who are embarrassed to bargain" is because these people with professional ability are "embarrassed to bargain", but what if they are good at bargaining? Publishers actually have other options, and they will find others.
Ultimately, publishers act in nothing more than looking for the lowest price on the market given quality. This is not much different from haggling with a greengrocer in the market and comparing it to a decorator. Most of China's media and publishers have been marketized, and it is also natural to give prices according to market prices. So, morally, this behavior is vague, and even if it is not reasonable, it is difficult to say unreasonable.
So, whether it is the exploitative behavior that Sun Zhongxu satirizes, or the old translators being priced by the publishing house, in the final analysis, it is not the moral level of the publishing house, but why they have the ability to do so.
▌ Low marginal utility
After roughly translating the meaning of the original text, improving the quality of the translation is a thankless task, and if it is described by the concept of economics, it is that the marginal utility is very low.
The English-to-Chinese market is a market with a low threshold but a very high ceiling. A person with English level 6 can use a reference book to translate. With the continuous improvement of artificial intelligence, some irresponsible translation companies even rely directly on artificial intelligence translation and then modify when completing low-end business. Moreover, the quality of ai-powered translation is not bad now, relying on big data, translation tools such as Google Translate and DEEPL, which are even better than most people in many cases. Once, an economist in a group said that the quality of his paper was even better than that of a translation company.
Of course, this is a thesis translation. Not all translations can be translated by machine, especially literary translations, which are completely different. A good literary translator, when conveying the meaning between the lines, repeatedly ponders, the required qualifications and brainpower are not the same, from being able to translate to translating very well, the gap is very large.
The famous literary translator Wang Zhiliang once said that when he translated Turgenev's Prose Poems, the manuscript fee should have been calculated according to the number of lines, but in the 1990s, the editor of a publishing house was only willing to give him a manuscript fee of 20 yuan per thousand words according to the number of words, and for less than 40,000 words, Wang Zhiliang only took a total of 600 yuan in manuscript fees.
A portrait of Turgenev hanging on the wall of Wang Zhiliang's home is next to two sentences from his prose poem: "Do you want happiness?" You have to learn to suffer first. After reading these two sentences in Russian with deep affection, Wang Zhiliang laughed at himself, according to the manuscript fee given by the publishing house, translating this sentence, I can only get two dimes! It is good to be able to translate 20 lines a day, only 70 yuan, and the nursing aunt in the hospital is not paid more than when he is hospitalized.
20 lines of poetry, the Chinese translation will not exceed 600 words, if the translator is not responsible, maybe an hour is enough, but if the translator is serious and responsible, repeated deliberation, it will take a lot of time and energy, in fact, this is already a re-creation process. On the other hand, it can be seen that there is a world of difference between the job of translation and the way it will be done well.
But unfortunately, the effort and level of the translator are difficult for the reader to perceive.
Literary translation can be said to be a typical example of the small marginal utility of improving the quality of translation. The background knowledge and literary accomplishment required for literary translation undoubtedly require long-term accumulation, but it is difficult to have objective standards for the final effect. "Monk pushes the door under the moon" and "monk knocks on the door under the moon", the artistic conception of painstaking deliberation is not something that everyone can understand.
▌ High reader tolerance
High tolerance here refers to the reader's tolerance for inferior translations.
Readers who read Chinese version generally do not read the original version, and in the case of opaque information, it is difficult to judge the quality of the translation from the perspective of the intention of the original author and the potential meaning between the lines.
The reader can judge only whether the sentence is smooth and fluent. Even if the translation is smooth and fluent, or even the sentences are difficult to speak, but Chinese is after all the reader's native language, the reading process of the incidental debugging ability is high, so the inclusiveness of the quality of the translation is also high, generally will not produce a large complaint. Even if they complain about the crooked teeth, the buyer is mainly aiming at the content of the original book. This means that the quality of the translation does not put too much pressure on the publisher.
Moreover, a foreign language book can be introduced into China by a publishing house, either the author is famous, or the content is worth reading. Many times, these selling points obscure the efforts and fame of translators.
In addition, many Chinese translations are the only one. For example, Wang Zhiliang's translation of Dickens's "Our Mutual Friend" is the only Chinese translation at present. Even though there are several translations of public literary works, not everyone will repeatedly compare the translations when buying a book.
▲ Cover of "Our Mutual Friend". © Shanghai Translation Publishing House, January 1998
▌ The essence is that the market price is low
Another reason worth mentioning is that with the improvement of the level of English for all, many translators themselves need to read through the original text either out of interest or because of their work, and translation is only a side thing for them. There is no doubt that their asking price will be lower. To some extent, it is amateur translators like Sun Zhongxu and Jin Xiaoyu who are interested or incidental, driving down the price of the entire translation industry. It is a mutually causal thing, and those who are interested have the ability, because they are interested, the price is lower; in turn, the lower price eliminates those translators who are not interested.
There is also such a situation in the field of photography, where the average enthusiast does not make a living from it, but sometimes needs to train models. Although this does not affect the high-end photography market, it is a devastating blow to the low-end daily art photo market, and the price is even pulled to free, which is the so-called "mutual encouragement" (mutual encouragement, of course, if you want to be optimistic, it is mutual encouragement). Some people on the Little Red Book discussed that such a shooting should be the photographer asking the model to drink milk tea, or the model asking the photographer to drink milk tea? It may seem like a joke, but the economic principles behind it are the same.
Therefore, in the translation market, good products, cultural value, social benefits are very high, labor costs are very high, but unfortunately, the market value is destined to be very low.
The law of the market is objective, and it can be referred to that the income of American translators is not high. According to a report released by the Authors Guild on the state of translators in the United States, 65 percent of literary translators earned less than $20,000 in 2016, and only 8 percent earned between $60,000 and $100,000.
The data that can be used as a reference is that, according to a report released by the U.S. Census Bureau, the median household income in the United States increased by 3.2% in 2016, from $57,230 in 2015 to $59,039, the highest value on record. In other words, the income of a family of two translators is not yet in the median household income in the United States.
Mary Raschenberg, executive director of the American Writers Guild, noted that the association's legal staff developed a model contract for literary translation to address the income and work issues presented in the survey. The contract is published as part of the Fair ContractIntitiative program, which the association is implementing. It's a method similar to the industry union's uniform pricing, but conceivably this approach won't be too effective because it's not mandatory and some translators are outside the association. If it becomes coercive, it becomes a monopoly.
▌ Possible improvements
In fact, it is difficult to fundamentally change the problem of market regularity. However, this is not to say that some improvement efforts cannot be made.
In general, publishers are able to drive down translation costs because the quality of information conveyed is inefficient. Then, promoting the transmission of translation quality information can help the market information transparency, thereby increasing the remuneration of excellent translators.
First of all, fame is an important factor in transmitting the quality of translation, and translators must emphasize their own signatures and build their own brands, such as the older generation of Fu Lei. After Jin Xiaoyu broke the circle and became famous, he himself is the value mark of the work, and the remuneration for translation will definitely have an increase.
Secondly, industry associations can collect readers' evaluations of the translation quality of foreign language translation books through some websites, public accounts, and Weibo accounts, establish a fair evaluation of translations by publishing houses, and also engage in some awards, establish logos, help readers perceive the quality of translations, or reversely, use the form of similar "Golden Raspberry Award" to criticize publications with extremely poor translation quality. In short, promoting market information transparency and establishing a translator brand can promote the remuneration of translators, and then promote cultural exchange.