"Starting a company is jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down,” says LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Entrepreneurship is more than business projects; it's an opportunity to follow your passion that shapes your identity and devote your time and effort to an activity that resonates with your aspirations. As a passionate successful entrepreneur, you add to your national economy. In other words, you fight unemployment and economic crises, create job opportunities for yourself and others, and generate new wealth for yourself, your family, and your entire community. There are various fields in which you can kick-start your project or business and achieve remarkable success. However, you should be ready to exert your utmost material and human effort and capabilities, which will pay off greatly if well invested. Nicole Martins has listed 20 promising sectors that will flourish in the entrepreneurship world in the upcoming decade, including marketing, services, e-markets, websites, blogging, content creation, app development, and, notably, translation, due to its freelancing nature. Nonetheless, is freelancing a type of entrepreneurship? Is every translator an entrepreneur? If so, who are the most remarkable entrepreneurs in translation?
Is translation a type of entrepreneurship?
Entrepreneurship is defined as "creating a creative and risky freelance business" (Al-Shamimri and Al-Mubayrik, 1440 AH, P. 26). Accordingly, entrepreneurial work has three main pillars: freedom, risk-taking, and creativity. Looking at the translation profession, we see a profitable career option for students and fresh graduates. Moreover, the language service sector jumped in the past ten years from USD 28.34 billion in 2011 to USD 56.18 billion in 2021, according to Memsource. So, workers in the translation field have two options: opting for jobs, such as teaching or working in translation and tourism offices, or freelancing as independent translators managing their projects by themselves. Translators, especially juniors, prefer freelancing due to the limited number of available opportunities and the high unemployment rates in the middle east, based on a study conducted by a team of researchers at Trgamah. In view of the foregoing, the translation profession is characterized by freedom and independence.
The second pillar in entrepreneurship is the proactively planned and studied risk that should bear the consequences, whether negative or positive. Risk is not only related to financial matters; it also includes other aspects, such as the risk of introducing a new idea that may not be welcomed by the community, like translating Western content that is inconsistent with Arab and Islamic cultures. However, the main purpose of translation is to reproduce this content in Arabic for those wishing to study it. The risk may be in competing peer companies or convincing clients of their company's advantages. It also may be in translating a book that may not yield the aspired returns, especially in freelancing. A freelance translator cannot be defined as an entrepreneur simply for the risks taken for he has to be creative and offer distinguished translation works. Creativity may be a tangible commodity, such as a technological innovation or an industrial product that serves translators. It may also be manifested in providing intangible services, such as translating literary and theoretical works in various fields or creating new methods and approaches for providing exceptional services to clients.
Is every translator an entrepreneur?
Tirosh, 2014, says that some researchers believe that we cannot consider all translators as entrepreneurs because entrepreneurs are known for dabbling in multiple businesses or sectors, while translators tend to stick to their chosen field. Others see translators as entrepreneurs due to the remarkable common characteristics of translators and businessmen. A report by the UK Centre for Policy Studies on super entrepreneurs states that they have a particular set of characteristics, including, creativity, work ethic, ambition, optimism, self-confidence, leadership qualities, adaptiveness, ability to deal with failure, and good social skills. Similarly, research conducted by the University of Vienna to determine the characteristics of translators found that 80% of translators work freelance, and that many are highly qualified, creative individuals with a strong sense of social norms and professional ethics. Since both groups are individuals who are self-employed, self-motivated, and goal-oriented, we can define successful translators as linguist entrepreneurs rather than business entrepreneurs.
Most remarkable entrepreneurs in translation:
Examples of successful entrepreneurial individuals and organizations in translation include:
Understanding entrepreneurship can help people realize the value of their contribution to world development. Entrepreneurs add to the national income by creating job opportunities for themselves and others, aspire to change the world for the better with their products and ideas, and generate new wealth for their country's economy. Entrepreneurial work has unique characteristics that we find in translation freelance works, and numerous freelance translators have the characteristics of entrepreneurs, which leads to us say that freelance translation and its related innovative projects are highly entrepreneurial. Moreover, the translation sector is a seedbed for investment, especially in the Arab world. It requires a major boost from innovative entrepreneurs to organize and develop it to increase cultural and knowledge exchange, enrich Arab knowledge content with translated works, and create opportunities for many unemployed translators.
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