Translating in Beijing

This week I will begin work on my next translation project, which is entitled 外援在中国, or foreign aid in China. It's a book about the history of foreign aid in China.  As someone who's a little bit obsessed with history, it should be a delight. This project is the first project where I am a member of a group of translators all working together on the same book. The group was assembled through an email group called Literocracy, which until now has primarily served as a discussion group for translation/literature related topics.

This work structure is unique and innovative in a few ways. First, the delegation of the entire translating task to a "translator collective" is not typically the way these things are done. Sometimes the editor of the book, who is working for the publisher, would supervise the selection of suitable translators.  Sometimes, as with one of the projects I worked on last Fall, an independent organization pays for the translation and supervises the whole process. The current model is different from both of these because every aspect of translating has been left to the group to delegate and organize. The bid for the project was decided through discussion. The wages of everyone involved are transparent and equal (and still enough to be attractive). Could this be the start of something good?

Translators in Beijing are often caught between a rock and a hard place. Larger translation companies typically do not pay rates that are attractive to good writers, which is what leads to so many people becoming freelancers.  A freelancer can support oneself finding work and establishing clients by him/herself, such as I have done over the past six months.  However, one disadvantage is that a single freelancer cannot accept a really large project, such as a four hundred page book, without taking at least six months.  Thus, freelancers are barred from the most profitable and steady type of projects because they cannot compete on the time frames that publication cycles demand. Well... that's not entirely true.  Freelancers can participate, but they must be found by the person in charge of organizing the translation.

So this model puts Literocracy in charge.  If this model is going to be used in the future, there are still a lot of things to figure out, such as how to select who is an editor and who can participate on what projects, but the foundations have been set.  There's a lot to be done.