News Archive / Demand grows for niche translators 20.08.2010

Abigail Dahlberg realized she was a success a few years ago while explaining her unusual specialty -- translating documents about waste- management issues from German into English -- to a wide-eyed listener.

"I've heard of you!" the man exclaimed. "You're Trash Girl!"

He may not have known her real name, but that didn't bother Dahlberg, whose cheery British accent belies her reputation as an expert in all things ekelhaft. That's German for "yucky." In the burgeoning world of translators and interpreters (translators deal with written documents, interpreters with the spoken word) it's all about the niche.

"It's not just having the language skill. It's also having the expertise in the subject matter," said Dahlberg, whose story was striking enough that Nicholas Hartmann, president of the American Translators Assn., retold it during the group's 50th convention in New York. For four days, some 2,300 attendees networked, traded stories and listened in on workshops and seminars at a Times Square hotel.

Hartmann said demand for translators and interpreters is expected to grow by 15% in the coming year as globalization, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the worldwide green movement spur demand for information in myriad languages. E-mail, Skype and other technologies have opened the door to cross-cultural communications, but they alone cannot bridge the language gap.

"It's so easy to communicate, but once you find someone you want to communicate with, you find they don't speak your language," Hartmann said. And as Dahlberg's situation shows, it's not enough to simply speak another language.

"Translation is far more than words," said Hartmann, who specializes in translating German patents. It requires him to understand not only the context of words and phrases, but also the technical and legal issues involved. And his spelling has to be impeccable. The slightest error can cause extraordinary embarrassment.

Dahlberg -- who has a master's degree in translation and interpretation from the University of Edinburgh -- worked in Germany before moving with her American husband to Missouri in 2005. Now she does freelance work for, among others, companies that deal with battery recycling and sewage sludge. A recent job involved translating a report on the state of Germany's waste plastics market.

Some words and phrases she frequently encounters include die deponie (the landfill), die abfalltonne (the trash can) and, more recently, something familiar to Americans -- die abwrackpramie, which means "cash for clunkers."

source: http://articles.latimes.com

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