Spanish freelance translator Alicia González López offers an impressive number of language pairs through her business, Prêt-à-translate. Here, she discusses how she got her start in localization and how she has charted a long career in the industry.

Why do you enjoy reading MultiLingual magazine?

I like that it’s a magazine focused on people. I also like that it talks a lot about minority languages and cultures. It’s essential to talk about them to preserve them.

How did you get involved in the translation business?

I studied translation and interpreting at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Although it took me some time to decide I wanted to study this degree, once I made the decision, I knew I wanted to work in this business.

While at “uni,” I did an internship with the SDL office in Granada. I delivered the translations by email, and they sent me their feedback. The topics were varied, mostly localization and medical devices, but I also translated contracts, marketing texts, and video games. It was a short internship, but very comprehensive in my opinion. I enjoyed it a lot. One day, two people from that office came to my university to make a presentation on translation tools, and I introduced myself. I told them I wanted to move to Granada, and they told me to visit them once I was there. In September 2001, I moved to Granada, and I started working there that December.

Since you entered the translation industry, how has the business landscape changed?

There’s no doubt that machine translation (MT) and now artificial intelligence (AI) have been the biggest innovations. I remember a time when everybody was experimenting with MT, and the results were horrible. Then, when I started my freelance translation business “Prêt-à-translate” in 2016, I noticed a decline in the use of MT. Companies noticed that it wasn’t always worth running it through MT and wanted to have a more human touch in their translations. Now, thanks to the progress made and the implementation of AI, there seems to be another boom and everybody wants to automate their translations — but many companies are still in an experimentation phase.  

Could you share your experience working with your first client or on your first project?

When I opened my freelance translation business eight years ago, my first client was a person I had met at AJE Málaga, the young entrepreneurs association in Málaga. She worked in a marketing company, and we had tried to collaborate several times when I was working at a translation company as a business development manager, but those projects didn’t materialize. When she knew I had gone freelance, she contacted me and offered me an opportunity to work translating social media content for a local shopping mall. That showed me that, no matter how big a company is, people buy from people.

I guess that, even if not all the contacts I made in those years resulted in business, I did a good job leaving a good impression on people. Today, some of my first clients are still with me, and those who have moved to other companies have contacted me again. I couldn’t be more honored and proud.

Do you believe it’s a good time to enter the translation business?

I don’t know, to be honest. It depends on my mood. I sometimes think I wouldn’t even recommend that people study translation, unless you want to work only on MT post-editing (MTPE) projects. Other days, I think that translators are still needed despite the progress being made with AI, and that they can offer many other things to companies besides their language skills. I try to make this second thought the norm, basically for my own survival in the business 😂. 

Where do you see yourself professionally in the next 10 years?

I’d like to see myself retired, but in 10 years I’ll still be far from the retirement age in Spain, so that’s not an option. So, my plan B is to continue working with clients who value my work as a translator and as a language consultant — who use technology as a tool and not as an excuse for lowering rates that, for my language pairs, have already been low for more than 10 years. 

I like advising clients on technology and processes, as there are still many companies that are new to translation. Not all companies have a translation department — they don’t even know we use translation tools — and I see myself working with them, helping them reaching new markets thanks to the power of language and culture.

What predictions do you have for the future of the translation industry?

I see translators working more on the strategic side than on the linguistic side (I don’t like it, but we can’t go against progress), and I see translation as part of a bigger project. It has too often been seen as an isolated, reactive task, but I think companies will take it into account more at the beginning of the product or campaign development process. I have already seen it with some clients in marketing. They have meetings with us translators before they even create the assets in the source language, so that we can foresee where there will be translation issues. I think this will happen more often.

Also, I may be a bit naïve, but I think the world is very big and there is business for everyone: those who want to do everything automatically, from quotation to project management and delivery, as well as those who still want to work with people — knowing there’s a person they can reach whenever they have an issue with their project.