Recommendations from Other Translators & Interpreters are the Most Important Factor Considered by T&I employers

Recommendations from other colleagues is the most important factor for translation and interpretation agencies when determining which translators and interpreters to contract, according to a small survey of 10 translation and interpretation agencies in 2005.

The survey was performed by Adam Wooten for the paper "Identifying Online Opportunities to Serve the Translation & Interpretation Industry." The results were recently features in the 2007 ATA Conference presentation entitled "Breaking into the Industry: How to Gain Experience when Employers Will Not Give You Experience without Previous Experience." A partial summary of the survey results were distributed in handout form, and a slide presentation is also available.

The survey asked translation and interpretation agencies "How important would you rate the following factors when determining which freelance interpreters to contract?" (The same question was also asked about translators.)

• Government Certifications
• Association Certifications
• Education/Degrees
• Years of Experience
• Recommendations from other Interpreters/Translators
• Recommendations from other Agencies/Clients
• Outsourced Testing
• In-house Testing
• Personal Interview
• Security Clearance
• Recorded Samples Provided by the Interpreter / Written Samples Provided by the Translator

You'll see from the summarized results and the presentation that "recommendations from other linguists" was the factor factor for choosing freelancers that was rated the highest, and no other factor was rated "very important" by more respondents. Furthermore, not a single agency rated this factor as anything less than "important" on a scale that included the options very unimportant, unimportant, neutral, important, very important, and not applicable. 19 private businesses on the client side were also surveyed and produced similar results.

This survey was far from perfect. The sample size was not as large as it should have been, and the subjects were not selected perfectly at random, so the statistical significance of the results is still debatable. However, the results do seem likely, and it is interesting that two separate suveys (on the client side and the vendor side) produced similar results. T&I business believes that colleague recommendations are considered reliable simply because most translation and interpretation buyers do not speak every language that they buy. Thus, not being able to assess quality directly, it helps to have a recommendation from another trusted expert who has credibility as a witness.

There are many ways to evaluate if a translator or interpreter is a good candidate for a project. For example, Elanex, Inc. requires many qualifications of its linguists. The bare minimum required before Elanex will even look at a linguist's resume is:

• Native fluency in the target language
• Certification by a professional translation organization, or multiple years of full-time translation experience

And that is just so that Elanex will look at your resume. After that, you also need subject specialization that fits project criteria, and you need to be evaluated by an Elanex certified editor. Elanex has an intelligent translator selection system that helps match the best qualified translator candidates to appropriate translation projects, but Elanex has thousands of candidates to choose from, and a recommendation from a trusted colleague will certainly help a colleague to more quickly receive the opportunity to be tested and evaluated. And those tests end up essentially producing a recommendation from other trusted colleagues in industry, evaluators who have seen firsthand how well a linguist performs.

In summary, seeing firsthand how the translator selection process works at Elanex and other organizations that use translation, the results of the survey are very believable. Recommendations from other translators and interpreters are the most important factor considered when hiring linguists.