The primary concern of all translators in the past and the present is how to translate well. Speaking from the vantage point of an experienced (and quite successful) academic translator, I would like to boil down the secret of survival in the jungle of global competition to the Machiavellian motto ‘the end justifies the means’—the skopos rule—as the key to open the gateway to success in translation. The skopos rule prescribes that the translator should translate a text to meet the skopos (purpose) of the target text (TT) and its function for the target audience (TA). Whenever a literal or semantic translation fails to achieve the purpose and fulfil the function of the TT, the translator tries to solve the problems posed, using his/her cultural awareness and linguistic sense in the target language (TL) and all available external resources. For a ‘skopos translator’, any means is justified, provided that it serves the purpose and function of the TT, meeting the needs of the TA and conveying the author’s communicative intentions. To put it differently, the TT is free from the source text (ST) syntax and semantics to make itself meaningful to the TA as intended by the author.  This TT- and TA-oriented approach was pointedly summarised by Vermeer in his statement that the source text (ST) is ‘dethroned’. 

In dethroning the ST, skopos translators now have a mighty weapon, namely, the Internet, to win any battle. If translators used to tackle recalcitrant problems with swords and spears in the pre-Internet era, they can now conquer such problems with radar detectors and magic wands, of course not instead of, but in addition to, their intrinsic and trained qualities such as SL and TL proficiency and linguistic and cultural sensitivity, with the vast knowledge base of humanity at their fingertips. All the facts and figures necessary for accurate translation can be retrieved from the Internet as if from the translator’s own memory, which makes him/her an ‘instant’ expert in any given subject. Using the Internet as an external memory always ready to be retrieved for error minimisation and accuracy maximisation, an internet-savvy and quick-learning translator can produce an optimally customized TT, smoothly switching from literal to free translation whenever a translation faithful to the SL syntax and semantics disturbs the natural flow of the TL and fails to convey clearly the author’s communicative intentions to the TA.. A translator equipped with internet proficiency as well as intellectual acumen, strong problem-solving skills, and a native-level TL proficiency can thus assume the authority of an expert and linguist possessing all necessary knowledge and skills to produce a TT  that meets the needs and expectations of all interested parties.  

A CAT tool is to be recommended insofar as the translator uses it to accelerate the translation process by using translation memories.  As far as the translation quality is concerned, however, I see no advantages of using a CAT tool. For example, Google Translate outperforms by a wide margin all other MT services, including those offered by the most famous commercial CAT tool, presumably because it looks out first for any existing TTs or corresponding sentences from parallel texts instead of ‘translating’ as other systems seem to do, as in this example (a sentence from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human): [Google] If an evil befalls us, we may either get over it by lifting its cause, or by changing its effect upon our feeling. [SDL] When a Uebel, so you can either be on the same boundaries, that his cause lifts, or so that the effect which makes it on our perception, changed. [Yahoo] When a disease hits us, so you can either so get over the same, that one raises his cause, or so that changing the effect which makes it on our perception.

Besides, CAT becomes counterproductive the moment the stored memories prescribe how the translator should translate, overriding translator’s own lexical/syntactic choices and styles, with every piece of creativity or constructive input by a translator punished by the ST-centered quality assurance system embedded in the CAT tool. Unfortunately, an increasing number of translators receive a ‘project package’ from their agencies, whereby a great portion of the sentences are pretranslated (100% match) or provided with fuzzy matches and terms to choose from, such that translation has become a part of a great machinery. Just as the Internet is the best ally of skopos, CAT tools can be its worst enemy if used for commercial purposes. Translators are increasingly forced by agencies to use a certain CAT tool. This CAT-based large-scale commercialisation of translation is flooding the translation industry, and translators are increasingly assessed by their editing skills. The opposite camp is kept by translators outperforming such CAT editors. 

When I translate articles for journal submission, I tackle each manuscript in the order of introduction, methods, and results, and then revision of these three parts, followed by discussion, abstract, and conclusion. I do as much research as necessary to equip myself with a thorough understanding of the subject matter while translating the introduction part, which usually involves reading some 50 search result pages as well as some 50 pages from the linked or cited articles. Then I do a second round of research, not so intensely as the first, while I reread the three translated parts. For the rest of the paper, I do the minimum necessary research. The translation time ratio of the introduction part to the rest of the paper is usually 1:2 when the length ratio is 1:6. By then I understand the topic at an insider level.

With the Internet-mediated potential for producing a target-language text at the native-speaker/expert level, the role of a translator is goes beyond merely bridging two languages. In academic translation, in particular, a translator should focus his/her efforts on producing a manuscript acceptable to the journal rather than just a translation faithfully reproducing the source text in the target language. Manuscripts (representing their authors) do not mind receiving radical plastic surgery to improve their chances of being accepted by or even featured in a journal. Authors prefer unfaithful beauty to faithful ordinariness if faithful beauty is not among the options.

As an example of the contribution a translator can make beyond the pure linguistic realm, here's an episode of one correction and one recommendation I made in a 12-page manuscript I recently translated. One of the words the author copied from a cited paper was "discharge" when describing the water entering a fishway installed beside a dam. Actually, upstream water is discharged downstream through spillway gates and flows into a fishway through its entrance. I checked that there was no mention of fishway in the cited paper and put "inflow" next to "discharge" in square brackets because quoted wording should not be changed. The other term of concern was "visual predators." Reporting that some of the fish species were using the fishway from dusk until dawn, the author stated that this pattern was not explicable because there were no "visual predators" among the fish species using the fishway. I felt something wrong in his reasoning because birds -- not other fish species --  are usually visual predators of fish. After confirming my suspicion in the cited paper, I offered the author an alternative explanation.

A question may arise as to whether such translator intervention is necessary or even allowed. Personally, I think intervention belongs to the basic duties of translators living in the Internet era of knowledge sharing and profiting from open-access resources. Authors may not have adequate knowledge of the target language and will quote insufficiently or inadequately understood content from target-language literature. Translators, insofar as they have access to the related papers, should ensure that the content quoted from those papers is not distorted in the manuscripts they translate. In this sense, translators play an active role in the knowledge-sharing global community of academia and industry. There is no room for debates over translation theories, such as formal or communicative translation, because it is the accuracy and impact of the resulting work that matters beyond the linguistic aspect of how faithfully or fluently the source language is rendered in the target language.

Bilingualism, intelligence, and sensitivity are basic aptitudes that translators should bring to their profession in order to be placed at the top of the food web (job market). It is not the perfection in all these qualities that matters, but basic skills in making use of them to produce natural-sounding, brilliantly explained, and adroitly edited translations. With the ubiquitous and almighty Internet Guru ready to help all translators in the world any time, any place, translators have the best editors and professors the world can offer like numberless genies in a bottle. You open the bottle, type and click, and they come out and solve all your problems.

Bilingualism is not something that can be learned -- it should be acquired through direct 'immersion' in both languages. If a language is learned using another language as a medium, it is at best a second language with near-native proficiency. A great consolation for non-native translators can be derived from the fact that nobody is born as a native writer. It is neither uncommon nor surprising that non-native translators can translate as well as or better than bilingual translators, especially because skillful Internet search and research bring solutions to every linguistic question that may arise during translation. Yet, the advantages innate to bilingual translators will remain out of their reach.

What is a lot more important than bilingualism is brain. The Internet is a treasure house of knowledge abounding with high-quality target language texts containing all expressions and information you need to translate like a super expert irrespective of disciplines. But they are of little use if you do not have the brain to learn and absorb anything instantaneously and apply what you have understood to your translation. It may sound cruel to translators and  translation aspirants who are perfectly bilingual but have moderate IQ's; truly and honestly, however, they will have more satisfaction in other professions. IQ is a measure of capacities to grasp ideas and solve problems, which are two main ingredients to prepare a delicious dish of words and thoughts. Memory and creativity, two key condiments in the kitchen of a translator, are additional composing elements of the armamentarium of a translator. The capacity to learn in the sense of problem solving (translation is actually a series of problem-solving tasks) is indeed the most important translation tool in this Internet era. A translator well-equipped with this wonderful innate capacity becomes a temporary expert in any topic from any academic discipline while translating.

The third pillar of good translation is sensitivity. Without a highly sophisticated linguistic sensitivity, a translation can be correct, but never attractive. As is true of any other texts, a translated text should keep readers interested in it and make them inclined to absorb its contents. Clients whose writing skills leave much to be desired are not keen at all to see their clumsy sentences faithfully reproduced in the target language so that the target audience would have the same impression as the source audience, one of the main principles of conventional translation theories. Going a step further, translators should not hesitate to use their academic acumen to improve the quality of the manuscript. Clients are not insulted at all when their errors are corrected and contents are upgraded. For them, what really counts is not how faithfully their manuscripts are translated, but how appealing and persuasive the translated texts are. Why not producing a native-level high-quality target text rather than translating the source text as well as possible? This makes translation a high value-added activity for the benefit of the knowledge-based world community. 

There is nothing more frustrating and less rewarding than trying to give an exact rendering of a bad source text. According to some translation theories, equivalence is the main purpose of and best criterion for good translation. When it comes to scientific and technical translations, however, the importance of equivalence should be minimized in favor of logic and correctness, i.e. in the honorable (if not holy) name of reality and scientific truth. Text parts lending themselves to misunderstanding and misinterpretation should be rewritten for academic clarity and correctness. All authors will appreciate a knowledgeable and skillful co-author who endows their papers with improved contents and envelope. In this Internet era, any good academic translator can be an expert in any fields of research mid-translation. He/she should be then in a position to correct or complement inadequate or insufficient contents. This is even a core element in my translation practice, and I have never received any complaints regarding such surgical intervention.

To make it clear that many clients do not expect equivalence, but excellence that goes far beyond their expectations, let me give an example from my repertoire of unusual interactions with clients. In an IT-related manuscript of a standard journal article length, I complemented the main author names with 'et al.' (if need be) and publication years. After a dozen of such incidences, I gave up this overfriendliness to meet the deadline and added instead (...). The client evaluated the flawless translation as a translation failure (equivalent to a full exemption from payment if proven justified), arguing that two different translators had worked on it, exactly pinpointing the page where I started to translate in faithful compliance with the 'equivalence' criterion -- alas not enough, for he rightly pointed out that (...) was not in his manuscript --, and asking for revision. Of course, I would have completed my good Samaritan deed if he (I am far from being a feminist or sexist, but I still suppose that only men are capable of such extreme martial arts) had asked the 'first' translator to correct the 'errors' committed by the 'second' translator. Not being a master of the art of the-other-cheek kind of meekness, however, I refused it and added a comment that I would not guarantee the correctness of this and all other interventions of mine (there were many improved parts) in order to secure my safety in case he would sue me for misappropriation and malpractice. 

The lesson from this unfortunate experience is either performing the plastic surgery to the end or keeping the scalpel in the tool box. In this sense, I understand such a preposterous reaction. Though very extreme as an example, yet it is singularly representative of the clients' general expectations going far beyond the masterfully performed equivalence. In this special case, by the way, there is another aspect worthy of consideration. I should not have become an 'accomplice' towards this unhealthy academic practice of citing unread articles, as evidenced by the inexact descriptions of the cited articles. It's a matter of balancing between keeping my academic conscience clean and rendering unmerited assistance for science's sake.  ​

The declaration No. 2 of my code of ethics that there are no bad source texts, but only bad translators, aims at highlighting the self-imposed role of a translator to turn a beast into a beauty (yes, there are such extreme cases). In technical translations, in particular, authors are often engineers and technicians far from having academically polished words or specialized terms for experimental and statistical methods at their disposal. A translator should often add informative values to the essential ideas and give more clarity and coherence to the process of reasoning and elucidation while unfolding the ideas towards presentable results and conclusions. In other words, a space has to be created where the substantials and circumstantials of the source text are liberated from the constraints of coarse expressions and ambiguous or crooked reasoning and repacked into an attractively remolded harmonious frame. The results are typical 'belles infidèles' (unfaithful beauties), but in a highly positive manner. 

In order for this kind of plastic surgery to be successful, a translator should have a well-assorted ammunition storehouse of razor-sharp logic, keen insights, analytical reasoning, and persuasive rhetorical devices, besides effective research skills. Such basic capacities coupled with zeal for perfection and attitude of service empower him to make unerring educational guesses to reshape a monster with no distinctive head or tail into a well-proportioned charming figure. This is by no means expecting too much of a translator. Once a translator has accepted the job, it is her responsibility to transform the source text into an understandable and enjoyable target text tailored to the target audience.

Upgrading a source text that may fall behind the standard expected by a domestic journal to a target text proving acceptable for an international journal, is as simple as using academically polished expressions and applying the ABC of research paper writing with which any competent academic translators should be equipped, provided, of course, that a certain brain part for this kind of intellectual challenge is well developed. 

Talking about intellectual challenge, the aforementioned basic intellectual capacities are not something attainable through training or experience. You are born with or without them. As a matter of fact, they are a determinant factor by far more important than linguistic proficiency or bilingualism when it comes to a decision-making whether to take up the career of a translator or not. A wrong self-evaluation can result in a life full of stress and frustration. Any linguistic uncertainties can be cleared up in a minute or less with googling or the like, but no help is at hand to make up for the  imbalance or/and insufficiency in logical and analytic mental process.

I would recommend that all translators who have those basic capacities venture to use their surgical skills as creatively as possible wherever applicable. In my decades of career, no single client has ever complained of being a beneficiary of an unexpected cosmetic surgery.  ​

The occupational group of certified or chartered translators was hit hard by the clout of cloud with no chance of recovery evermore. In this Internet era, a cloud-source translation yields a by far better result than a professional translation done by any highly qualified translators, simply by the sheer force of unlimited resource of global involvement. In a translation agency having a vast pool of high-performing translators, only those translators survive who deliver the best translations in terms of editor and client feedback. This world of pool is a perfectly democratic world of equal opportunity where performance is the sole criterion for success and certificates or academic degrees are mere papers both in literal and figurative senses of the word.

Translating as a freelancer since I quit my last salaried position as a trilingual secretary and translator in 2010, the best year of my personal story and history in multiple ways by the way, I currently translate for an agency specialized in academic translation and editing services, whose winning recipe is a well-tuned translator-reviewer-editor procedure. Its reputation for publication-quality English enables it to pay its freelancers more than what many other agencies even take from their clients. Yet, its rate is equivalent to about half the minimum rate of a professional translator. This is a chilling reality of a translator's life shadowed by the cloud, and it's all the more so since professional translators used to belong to the high-income population. Ideally, insofar as not employed at a handsome salary, a translator should have a clientele comprising both translation agencies and private clients in equal parts. In my case, the ratio is 4:1 by workload and 1:1 by income.

Apart from such chilling effects of cloud power on the profession of translator, the general working conditions cannot be better for freelance translators in this Internet era. They can work anywhere in the world, they no longer need to have shelffuls of reference books or ring up friends and experts for tricky terms, nor do they have to limit their fields of expertise according to their education and interest. This Internet era we are living in can be indeed called a golden age especially for translators in terms of work satisfaction and performance upgrading. Their basic qualification is not a certificate or training, but the learning and research capacity. If a bilingual translator of above-average intelligence delivers a translation falling short of perfection both in linguistic and field-specific know-how, it is indicative of the lack of either research skills or zeal for perfection or of both. At any rate, it has to be targeted to deliver a translation without leaving even a single word in doubt, and this target is not too ambitious a one, but rather a minimum performance standard, because there is nothing hidden in the ocean of the Internet, translators' guru better than the best of all linguists and specialists together.

This said, and before I go on with concrete pointers and examples for Internet-aided translation from my next blog post onward, I would like to share my code of ethics with other translators:
1. Add value to society with your translation talent.
2. There are no bad source texts; there are only bad translators.
3. Be generous with time; achievement is a more valuable currency than money.    ​