When we polled 266 translation agencies late last year, we found that nearly three-quarters of these LSPs feel that translator certification is an important issue. However, not every LSP demands that the translators they employ hold professional credentials, much less possess validation that they are expert in a particular field or can even use the tools of the trade.

Since global websites, marketing, and product quality all depend on the capabilities of translators, buyers of language services should ask prospective suppliers what they do to guarantee quality translation from their employees. Recent industry activity shows some movement in professionalizing the role of translator:

• Industry groups such as the American Translators Association (ATA) can validate a practitioner’s qualifications, offering “objective evidence to both translator and client that the translator possesses professional competence in a specific language combination.”
  
• Technology suppliers such as SDL will verify a translator’s technical competence in using their computer-aided translation (CAT) tools. SDL said that its recently introduced Certification Program “satisfies the industry’s demand for a qualification recognized by all participants in the translation supply chain.” Successful participants will be able to “demonstrate competence in understanding the CCM Methodology and in leveraging the complete range of SDL TRADOS functionality, including new collaboration, filtering, QA checking and terminology management features.”

So the ATA can certify that translators can handle a given language pair, but it will not validate competence in topics like aerospace, life sciences, or flux capacitors. The translator must prove his bona fides through references and a portfolio of work (note: employers should check both).

On the question of technical competence, translators need to master an array of tools including e-mail, Word, file transfer, and whatever they use to manage their translation memory or terminology base. If a translator chooses SDL’s commercial CAT tool instead of Excel, the company can certify that he or she knows how to use it. However, the certificate won’t say that he is competent to translate or that he will efficiently and effectively use translation memories. The translator will have to prove his ability to use the tool in real production scenarios. Finally, the SDL program will create another small-population species in SDL’s GIM ecosystem, but in a market with low penetration of CAT tools among freelancers.

Certifying associations and vendors face a few big marketing problems: convincing translators they need to be certified, continuing relevance, domain-specific qualifications, changing technology, translator adoption of tools, and convincing buyers that the certificates matter. Given the uncertainty, we see two possible futures for translator certification: 1) Translators will have an alphabet soup of qualifications after their names, in addition to their language pairs; and 2) none of today’s tools will matter as newer technology outstrips the first-generation translation memories, so these certifications will look just like our once coveted Ashton-Tate dBase expert user diploma — now destined for the bottom of our bird cage.