Language and Communication within the Translation Industry

The American human translation industry is quite like many other industries within the country; it has witnessed and experienced some very noticeable, if not altogether radical changes in the past half century or so. The way professional translation firms and freelance translation services have evolved for the last fifty years demonstrates that age-old human translation practices are not immune to the ubiquitous influences of modern technology.
Although machine translation remains too crude for standalone use by professional translation companies, it’s still quite easy to see how technological advances in the field of translation services will cause some of the most noticeable and extreme changes in the translation industry as a whole. However, this article isn’t here to discuss about how technological innovations have brought about the modern-day translation process.
History of Trivialization
A century ago, seventy-five years ago, fifty years ago, and to a limited extent, as recently as twenty-five years ago, the business of American translation (namely, the translation service companies or translation bureaus) was being handled by the purported "merchant-translators" who combined lingual abilities with a small amount of business savvy. These merchant-translators were mostly educated in humanities and the natural sciences and sported backgrounds in linguistics.
Several of them integrated their language skills with backgrounds as varied and divergent as engineering. The bottom line here is that these so-called "dinosaurs" of the translation industry never lost sight of the core elements of language and communication when it came to translation. Now let’s fast forward to the nineties, where merchant-translators still had a firm grip in the U.S. translation domain, but were slowly being usurped by the "spawns" of the graduate business schools of American universities.
America’s new darlings of commerce, the MBA holders, didn’t care a whit about the nuances, intricacies, dogmas, tenets, doctrines, or science behind an excellent translation process; what they did care about was streamlining the translation industry and making it churn out its wares a la an industrial factory.
The Present State of the Translation Industry
The forgotten core elements are now left to those whose tastes leaned towards the ethereal and esoteric that is, theorists, philosophers, thinkers, and university professors who long for the bygone age of translation quality over quantity and number-crunching.
In and of themselves, the changes in translation approach and methodology provide a much more interesting topic of discussion when compared to how they came about; to be more specific, the way translators approach language and communication nowadays is a good indicator of how different the translation process has become when compared to just five decades ago.
The change of approach came about because of the ever-growing attitude of subordination (that even connotes to outright belittlement) of the abovementioned core elements to the demands of finance, commerce, business, marketing, and whatever else is commonly linked with such monetary endeavors. There are many indications and signs that prove how language and communication have been brazenly subordinated by the translation community whose whole raison d’être is language and communication.

Aunes Oversettelser AS has been in the business for 26 years, and we are specialized in technical translations. We are specializing in the Nordic languages, and can offer services into Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The premier translation agency for Norway and the Nordic region! Technical translation services for businesses in the Nordic countries and translation agencies world wide.