I work as an editor at a publishing company that deals in foreign translated novels. We editors basically get paid shit while translators make about quadruple our pay.
I've always noticed that this particular translator's work was always chalk full of errors and inconsistencies, but I just thought maybe they weren't fully fluent in English and I was just doing my job fixing everything.
I take pride in my work and always did my best to edit everything to perfection despite the shitty pay for the sake of the original authors. I was doing way more work than what I was getting paid for. One day, a higher up told me I was cutting too much of the translations even though I explained to them that it was for the best. Just simple things like run-ons, excessive passive voice and weak verbs, clauses that didn't need to be extended with commas, etc. My edits were there for everyone to see. I don't know if those idiots even saw the difference. Another supervisor defended me, but the majority of higher ups wanted to prioritize word count and quantity over quality. (You can already tell how bad of a publishing company this is.) It felt like such a slap in the face and I felt so stupid for doing so much free overtime.
Anyway, after that I got a bit pissed and started doing the minimum amount of work. Just making sure everything was grammatically correct and made sense. I gave them their word counts. Then, of course, they started complaining that I wasn't doing enough edits. I politely said that I was still trying to find the right balance.
Meanwhile, in the back of my mind, I started wondering why they never got on the shitty translator's back. You know, I wouldn't have to edit too much or too little if the translations were actually good half the time. They just expect me to clean everything up even though I get the lowest pay.
Which brings me to the other day. I was recently editing a chapter and it seems like the translator finally slipped up. He accidentally left in a line that read somewhat along the lines of, “The following translation has been formatted in the past tense scheme.” And the following text was a paragraph of jumbled garbage for me to completely rewrite and make sense of like usual. I always had my suspicions, but all those silly mistakes and grammatical errors finally made sense. Fuck, all that pronoun confusion between characters.
I have no ill will against this translator and I have no idea how much machine translations they're using, but their work does suck objectively. I understand that translators use aid like dictionaries and I'm not sure where to draw the line with them using translation services/AI. I'm on the fence about outing them and don't know how big of a deal this will be. What they're doing does make more work for me and I do feel that it's unfair that only I get nagged about the work's quality simply because I have last eyes on it as the editor. What I'm given sucks to the point where I have to rewrite everything most of the time. I tell people that I'm basically a ghostwriter instead of an editor.
I'm already planning on leaving this sweatshop factory of a company. This will be my last novel for them.