Motivation and de-motivation in a government translation service: a diary-based approach

Abstract

The article discusses events that motivated or de-motivated one translator working in a government setting over a period of two weeks, based on a diary. The disadvantages of diary-keeping are discussed, as are its possible advantages over questionnaires, interviews and focus groups. The diary entries are compared to lists of motivators and de-motivators prepared by two translators four months before the diary was started.

Keywords:

• motivation
• translators
• workplace
• government
• institutional translation
• diary

Biographical Notes

Brian Mossop is a Certified Translator, recently retired from the Canadian Government's Translation Bureau. He is the author of some 50 articles in Translation Studies journals as well as the widely used textbook Revising and Editing for Translators (3^rd edition, Routledge, 2014). He leads revision workshops for professional translators in Canada and abroad and teaches revision and editing at the York University School of Translation in Toronto.

Notes

1. When I prepared the diary and wrote this paper in 2013, I had not yet planned my retirement, so the question of what might happen in the future was a real concern. In early 2014, I decided to retire, and did so in June.

2. Some of the papers from the conference (‘Translation in Contexts of Official Multilingualism’) will appear in issue 59(3) of the journal Meta.

3. My thanks to Ellen Garmaise for preparing a list.

4. Recognition may come from managers, from clients or from peers. I find that only the latter is truly motivating, coming as it does from people in a position to appreciate what I have achieved. Recognition from clients I find motivating if it is very specific: ‘thank you for getting this item translated so quickly, well ahead of our deadline’. Recognition from managers is typically written in hackneyed phrases that leave me cold: ‘Brian is always ready to serve the client’.

5. I myself identify firstly with the profession of translator and secondly with the particular segment of the civil service where I work (the Translation Bureau); I do not identify at all with the government services ministry (under which the Bureau falls) or the civil service/government in general.

6. Some texts are translated because the constitution or a statute requires it, or a court has so ordered, but many translations are requested for other reasons. Koskinen points out (2000, p. 51) that sometimes the mere existence of a translation (into Finnish in her case) has symbolic value, affirming the equality of the small European languages, regardless of an absence of readers. That does not apply to my own translations into English, though it may apply to the translations done by other translators for the English-speaking minority in Quebec, and this may be motivating for them.

7. I have noticed no improvement in this attitude over the past 40 years. More amusing than de-motivating is the not infrequent provision by the client of a machine translation ‘which may assist you’. At least this shows an awareness that translation is not mechanical word replacement!

8. In 2012–13, the last financial year for which final figures are available at the time of writing, my unit had 14 translators and six other employees; the Translation Bureau had some 1500 full-time employees (translators and others); the government services ministry had 12,000 employess and the civil service as a whole 280,000.

9. ‘to make it possible for the Government of Canada to operate internally in both official languages and to communicate with Canadians in the official language of their choice’. The phrase ‘operate internally’ refers to the fact that about two-thirds of federal civil service positions have no bilingualism requirement, so that translation is required to enable unilingual French and unilingual English speakers to work together on government programs.

10. During one year at the beginning of my career, I worked in the same building as the users of my translations (employees of Canada's weather service) and regularly interacted with them in person, which was highly motivating. Since then, I have had practically no face-to-face contact with clients. They are just names on an electronic request form or an email; most live in other cities, and they keep changing. On the relationship between contact with clients (and end users) and translators' ‘happiness’, see Liu (2013).