Review: The Prosperous Translator, Compiled and Edited by Chris Durban

Are You Worried About Being Replaced by Computers or French-Speaking Vietnamese Freelancers? Raise Your Rates!

The Prosperous Translator: Advice from Fire Ant & Worker Bee
Compiled and Edited by Chris Durban

Michael Binkley, a character in Berke Breathed's Bloom County, was a precocious, neurotic and celebrity-obsessed ten-year old who was regularly visited in his sleep by creepy crawlies from his "anxiety closet." I imagine that if you opened the average freelance translator's anxiety closet, you would find a rogue's gallery featuring crowdsourcing, machine translation (MT), pressure on rates from the larger agencies, outsourcing to lower-wage markets, the industry's knock-off cyberevangelists and just plain dismal news about the world economy. These are just some of the anxieties that keep linguists awake at night, endlessly pondering the fight or flight dichotomy.

But are the only options open to the stressed-out freelancer either "Remember the Alamo!" or signing up for an MT webinar?  

The publication of The Prosperous Translator, a selection of twelve years' worth of a regular advice column on the translation business written by Chris Durban and Eugene Seidel, is timely. However, it probably will remain useful for some time to come, despite the daily drumbeat from some corners that technology is shaking up everything ("soon you will be working with a Bing app on your iPhone!" "Uh... why?"). Even the messages from some of the columns that are now more than a decade old remain relevant. Reading the book feels like sitting down and talking shop with experienced practitioners of the treasonous craft. And mostly from the point of view of dollars and cents, which is so yummy but so infrequent because of what the authors call the "poverty cult." As in any good semi-structured conversation, the truly memorable comments are serendipitous. And not just valuable for people taking their first baby steps. The book is well worth reading even for the experienced translator.

One pearl: "[T]here is not one translation market, rather a multitude of segments, including those driven by rock-bottom rates and/or lightning turnarounds, with quality a distant third" (p.75). Why is there always someone ready to charge less than me? "In translation, the barriers to entry are so low as to be non-existent. Every single day new people are coming in hoping to undercut you and take away your business" (p. 106).

So, are you stuck in the lower-end of the market and frustrated by increasing pressures? One of the authors' central messages, reiterated gently but frequently, is to go upmarket: "[U]se this as an opportunity to detach yourself from the clutches of slap-dash agencies like this one and go after your own direct clients" (p.179). Throughout Fire Ant and Worker Bee's interactions with their readers, a recurrent theme is to strike out on your own, be more entrepreneurial, and seek greener pastures when the current ones become overrun by penny-a-word crowdsourcers. And they do this with varying degrees of softness or grouchiness. Witness one reply to a Ph.D. with almost two decades of translation experience who complains that direct clients are not beating a path to his door: "What you seem to want is a fairy godmother to wave her wand and bring you high-paying work without you having to do a thing. And maybe give you a little kiss to make it all better" (p. 120). Ouch.

Tough love. Because the authors aren't selling an easy or guaranteed road to success. Translators faced with worsening conditions:

bite the bullet and raise prices high enough to earn a decent living. They specialize. They invest in marketing and advertising, and they accept that they are full-time entrepreneurs with all the risks and benefits that entails (p. 92).

The authors don't address faddish buzzwords such as crowdsourcing and machine translation, because they don't really need to. When you take a step back (and this book helps), the barbarians at the gate all really come down to the same phenomenon: commoditization. If you're stuck in the subprime side of the market, the pressures are only going to increase. You only have two ways out. Ape the machine. Take the MT webinar. Try to ride that hamster wheel faster and faster. Reach the goal of picking 10,000 words a day from the cotton fields. Until the next wave of pricing pressure comes along.

Or follow Fire Ant and Worker Bee's advice. Swim upstream.

After all, if a company is paying a supplier $0.40 per word today, do you think they're really going to be interested in the output of a post-editor with a humble undergraduate degree and no knowledge of the industry? If you are paying top dollar, even MT that improves 200% will still not fit the bill. You pay top dollar for that little extra something. The machine translation push is designed to vacuum up the pennies-per-word segment. And that is OK. Probably 90% of the text produced for commercial translation is well-suited for commoditized outsourcers, some of which will be driven into the ground by slightly better machine translation.

It is not a moral issue. If you are an independent translator working for direct clients and you want to use machine translation, that is up to you. It is a business decision. Just like using translation memory.

"Damned dirty apes!"

Now, if you're down in the holds of an LSP trireme, bound and shackled and forced to use the MT oar (because it is just soooo much more productive than that old wooden oar), it is a whole 'nother ball game. And that can be scary as heck. But as The Prosperous Translator  reminds you, the commodity end of the market is not the whole market.

My intuitive view is that anyone charging below $0.20 per word is a future victim of the subprime barbarians. I'm not quite there yet. But I'm tryin', Ringo. I'm tryin' real hard. Because every time I hear that computers won't replace translators, I think: "Yeah, and that's the problem!" Those bells are tolling mighty hard and methinks they toll for thee and me.

I am not a libertarian. I realize that jumping overboard is not that simple for someone who depends on the trireme for a large chunk of his or her income. And the whole "you're free to reject our crud" from vendor managers is appalling. I fully realize that. Believe me, I find the sleaziness of large outsourcers contemptible too.

But the metaphor of being chained to the trireme is just a metaphor. If you're reading this, chances are good you live in a free society. And you are free to strike out on your own. If you hail from Eastern Europe or from places like my native Venezuela, you probably know (or at least have heard of) people who literally went to prison to bring you that kind of freedom. Don't underestimate the value of that.

Is jumping overboard a sure-fire road to success? Hardly. The downside of liberty is the liberty to fall flat on your face. "For the record, we've never said that creating a successful translation practice is easy. It takes language skills, business savvy, hard work and a willingness to strike out in new directions" (p. 120). As Durban and Seidel soberly intone: "There are no guarantees, no magic formulas. Failure is always possible. But there is no alternative" (p. 92).


Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Cultural Learnings of Translation Market for Make Benefit Glorious Company Lionbridge

You shouldn’t Google yourself. I read an entry in one of those small business blogs about your “personal brand” and about keeping up with how your “brand” is reflected on the Internet. “Good idea,” I thought, like the idiot I am. So I decided to Google myself on Blog Search.

Bad move. Bad, bad move.

It is rambling. It was not proofread. It is stilted. The prepositions are all wrong. Was it written using Lionbridge’s real-time translation app?

It is signed by a member of Lionbridge’s vendor management department. A lady called Monica Oliveira. On one hand, she at least has the courage that her male colleagues lack and defends her company with her first and last name (although stressing carefully that she doesn’t speak for the company...). On the other… well… see for yourself (skip down to comments section). (Sigh.)

So, OK, here we go.

Gremlin Translation Booths

There is apparently an oversupply of translators. And there is apparently some sort of positive correlation between the number of booths at the ATA and the number of unemployed translators.

Is it perhaps because booths are used to mate by this species? Or is it that the booths spawn the translators? We are not told.

In my personal opinion, what is bringing the prices down is the large supply of translators in the market. This year, at the ATA, there were 5-6 booths representing universities. In the recent past, you would only find Monterey Institute and Kent University. It does not matter in [sic] which side of the political spectrum you are, supply and demand works and there is not much we can do about it.

“Oh my God! So many booths! It’s like… first there were two booths. And then there were four booths and now there’s an ocean of booths! There are, like, five… or SIX booths! I don’t know! Booths as far as the eye can see! So many booths! You can’t count them on the fingers of one hand! Where will it all end! Why won’t anyone think of the children!”

Conclusion: Don't spill water on your translators and, for the love of God, don't feed them after midnight.


Lionbridge Eat World

Ms. Oliveira then goes on to bloviate on the economics of the translation industry. Probably without knowing it, she is parroting a machine-translated Cliff’s Notes version of John Malthus printed on low-quality paper, dropped in a puddle on the way to class and then transcribed using Dragon by a special needs child. This brings to mind Keynes’s dictum that “practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”

The imagery becomes decidedly nutritional and (dare I say) cannibalistic.

What I see happening is that the large customers (on the top of the food chain) will keep pushing down the prices until students (on the bottom of the chain) lose interest on [sic] becoming translators because of low pay. Prices, then, will go back up because there will be only enough translators for the amount of work out there. This happened to nurses in the USA, where, today, the medical industry is giving all kind of incentives to people who are willing to become nurses and teach in nursing schools.

Now, I don’t know diddlysquat about what happened to nurses in the U.S., but this is far from the way supply and demand works.

Under the Oliveira model, Lionbridge’s Irish-potato-famine wages winnow the weakest from the herd, who drop out of the labor force, emigrate to America with “Ma” and “Da” or fall back to positions as drug pushers on housing projects. Eventually, the process goes too far and too few people are left who are capable of living with less than 1,200 calories per day and at the same time continue ponying up the myriad fees that LIOX demands. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts at hooking up (formerly) bilingual corpses to Translation Workspace, Lionbridge decides it has reached “the limits of what anal probing can teach us” and raises rates. A freelance Golden Age ensues.

Except that Ms. Oliveira’s grasp of supply and demand is tenuous at best. Yes, the weak and stupid are thinned out of the herd by Malthusian starvation or Lionbridge’s Victorian vendor policies, as Ms. Oliveira claims. Eventually, a better crop or higher wages leave the hardy survivors better off, but then the contrary wave begins.

Pace the Lionbridge vendor manager, a positive equilibrium never persists. Peasants begin to breed bigger families and some of the heroin pushers are coaxed to drift back into Lionbridge’s database, lured by the shiny, new above-subsistence rates. And then the process begins anew, as Lionbridge retightens the screws again and so on and on.

But that is not the case. Lionbridge is always engaged in a massive experiment to find out the slimiest depths to which it can lower its wage bill. The experiment is independent of any world economic recovery or slump. Lionbridge is a boot stamping on a human face… forever. Come feast or famine.

Goodbye, Lenin

Oliveira then channels Hegel:

Translators are wasting their time and energy with [sic] vilifying the big LSPs, which will take [sic] them nowhere. Only an objective analysis will allow translators to make the right decisions for themselves and for the translators’ community. My friends and I boycott Walmart and this is not preventing it from being one of the largest companies in the world. Forgive me, but Miguel Llorens [sic] rhetoric reminds me of myself as a student in Brazil, in the 80’s, throwing eggs on [sic] the US Embassy walls, protesting against the American big corporations [sic] exploitation of South American countries. Translators need to focus,[sic] and put their energy in the right place. Have you seen anyone survive swimming against the current?

(Uh, excuse me, but isn’t there an entire species of fish whose very survival is founded on the activity of swimming against the current?)

For the record, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the egg-throwing left. I attended a Jesuit university, where one didn’t have the luxury of being stupid. Or of missing class to deface public buildings. And as an adult I’ve had to march against an authoritarian socialist government enabled by the sort of fuzzy ideology that spawned that kind of egg throwing. Yes, I’ve marched for freedom of enterprise. And freedom is freedom. Even for those who abuse it, such as Lionbridge.

No, my contempt for Lionbridge is not fueled by ideology but rather morality, as uncool as that might sound. And this contempt is heightened by lame rationalizations from liberals who think personal responsibility is passé and simultaneously take paychecks from sweatshops.

The Lion and the Bridge: Worst Narnia Chronicle... Ever!

But, hark, what light through yonder window breaks?:

Translators have been working with 2 wrong assumptions: 1) translators that charge less are not good [sic], and 2) there is plenty of work that pays what the well established translators can charge.

Aha! Fear not. There is hope. Low wages do not imply poor standards. Chimpanzees may eat peanuts and fling feces at each other, but they can still paint a Jackson Pollock if you tie a brush to their hairy little paws.

But who exactly decides that “translators that charge less are not good”? Who sets the quality standards for the recruitment process over at Lionbridge?

Off the top of my head, I’m guessing that the Lionbridge vendor management department.

But after reading in disbelief how Ms. Oliveira, her boss and her boss’s boss deploy language and logic, please allow me to be a little skeptical about their judgment.

And my recommendation to Lionbridge vendors: Swim upstream! 

Jagshemash!




Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Backed-Up Comments Reposted

The comments to the Didiergate posts, which I had backed up in a slightly exotic format, have been reposted. Many thanks to Hacène Dramchini, a French-English translator whom I met through the AIPTI, for converting the files into a usable format.

The posts with the most comments are:

http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/personal-response-to-lionbridge-vp.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/lionbridge-ceo-rory-cowan-explains.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/it-rubs-translation-workspace-on-its.html
http://traductor-financiero.blogspot.com/2010/11/empire-writes-back-response-to.html


They include the long comment from "Rory C", whose recommendations are well worth reposting. Including his final advice: "But my real advice to all of you is that you are probably best served by finding new people (SLVs too) to work with, who treat you with more respect and fairness and realize that in this industry quality is accomplished through human partnerships. Working with people who recognize and acknowledge your value always makes for a better life. Right?"



Rory C wrote:

One way to possibly escalate this concern for fairness is to make more powerful stakeholders who will care what this mean for the future of the company.

Identify all the research analysts that cover LIOX and inform them in a clear and dispassionate tone how this move will very likely cause the best translators to refuse to work with LIOX and result is lower quality for many services provided by LIOX thus resulting in customers leaving and a lower stock price. Remember that these are the guys who publicly quiz the executive management about how things are going every quarter and also write reports to inform interested investors what they think about the company and its future.
Identify the Investment Officers at their largest institutional investor firms and inform them why LIOX may be a bad investment and why their stock price is likely to fall, again in a dispassionate and clear way so that they understand that there is a real risk of the stock price collapsing and staying in the gutter.

This link provides a list of all their largest Institutional Investment holders http://finance.yahoo.com/q/mh?s=LIOX+Major+Holders 
Find their addresses/emails and make sure they hear about this from you and all your best friends who disagree with this policy.

Write them all an email explaining the role of the translator in the localization supply chain making sure they understand that quality comes from good translators who are likely to work best when they feel fairly compensated. You could also explain how alienating good translators will undermine LIOX quality in the long run.  LIOX will probably have a story on how easily translators are replaceable -  it is important to explain that like in any other profession, the best translators are not so easily replaced.  Give them examples of how bad translators undermine product and services offered by LIOX.

Then attach a link to all the blogs that explain why this is unfair / bad strategy etc.. There is a good summary of the LIOX Crowdscorning with many links at http://t.co/ArVJtc7   I suggest that an even and considered tone like the one employed by Kevin Lossner will be the most effective way to make your point. Angry people are tiresome and best ignored.

Make sure that you and a 100 of your best friends send some form of this summary to anybody who is interested in investing in LIOX stock or currently owns a significant amount of LIOX stock.

Make it clear that this is likely to cause the following:
•    Loss in service and product quality
•    Increasingly lower quality translators working for Lionbridge which will be reflected in their deliverables
•    Imminent and sustained drop in LIOX stock price (i.e. it will be very hard for the stock to rise again)
•    Continued losses as some large customers realize that they have so much ill will that it is going to affect their ability to deliver services and choose to find other suppliers who have better relations with the supply chain
•    Perception of LIOX as a sweatshop which will make many blue chip  customers shy away and avoid LIOX as a supplier

If you do this, I think you will at least have the satisfaction of knowing that you have done everything you can to let the authorities know about this. If you are lucky this will even cause Rory and Didier to get a severe hand slapping from the investors and possibly even issue an apology to all the people who received the infamous letter. Even if there are no visible signs of remorse I suspect there will be some back room chats that will make the boys tread much more carefully in future.

But my real advice to all of you is that you are probably best served by finding new people (SLVs too) to work with, who treat you with more respect and fairness and realize that in this industry quality is accomplished through human partnerships. Working with people who recognize and acknowledge your value always makes for a better life. Right?

Good Luck.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Review: Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

Sleepwalk with Me: and Other Painfully True Stories

Mike Birbiglia

Laugh at the Little Pains and Aches of Everyday Life

I have been a fan of Mike Birbiglia since listening to his piece about how running away sometimes works (included in this book) on This American Life. After that I downloaded both his comedy records, My Secret Public Journal and Two Drink Mike, and enjoyed them immensely. So I was clearly looking forward to his book, although with a certain sobriety to forestall disappointment. You see, the secret about Birbiglia is that his material isn’t what is funny: it’s his delivery. When you break down a lot of the anecdotes from My Secret Public Journal, there isn’t that much that is inherently funny there. What cracks you up is Birbiglia telling you about it.

So how did his stuff make the transition to the printed page? Quite well, I am happy to report. You get some of his old material, along with plenty of fresh stuff. Some of it is far more personal than anything he has ever done, except perhaps a piece (not present here) about a car crash he had some time ago. What surprised me was how different some of the stories sounded when reading them (as opposed to listening to them). A lot of the genuine pain that underlies these stories shines through a lot more poignantly. When you hear Birbiglia tell them as a stand-up or at a reading, he is laughing off the pain. When you read them, it is harder to giggle about stuff like a break-up or being rejected by girls. The sleepwalking anecdote that gives the book its title is a good case in point. Only after reading this do you realize that it isn’t simply a funny story to tell your friends but rather a serious, life-threatening illness.

I hope the book sells well but not too well. When Birbiglia becomes a big shot, he will lose the perspective he needs to continue chronicling the minor humiliations of everyday life.


Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Lower Translation Rates: *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion and the Idiocy of Averages

"...averages and extreme values (as abstractions and unrepresentative instances respectively) often provide only partial, if not downright misleading, views of a totality's behavior."

Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

There seems to be a meme whereby any discussion of lower rates in the translation industry is immediately, or at least eventually, appended by the coda that, “of course, this is partly due to the increased usage of machine translation (MT).” The curious thing is that this is also accompanied by the meme that “the volume of material that needs to be translated has mushroomed exponentially.” Allegedly, we are facing a case in which demand for a service has expanded fantastically but the price per unit of that service has dropped. Surely, there can’t be any parallel for such a trend anywhere else in the history of the world economy since the first caveman traded a pelt for a sharp-edged stone with another caveman.

It is truly stupefying to note how even intelligent discussions of machine translation sooner or later crash into the lower rate/greater demand conundrum and come limping out of it with the “machine translation” crutch.

At first blush, this appears absurd. Supply and demand dictates that greater demand and stable supply breeds higher prices. If demand for translation services is rising but the price of translation a single word is going down, something odd must be happening. Our fuzzy thinker jumps to the conclusion that somehow an advance in productivity is making it cheaper to translate the average word despite the demand rise. Baboom! Machine translation comes to mind. And thus is born the questionable thesis that “greater adoption of machine translation is driving down the price per unit of a translated word.”

This way of (wrongheaded) thinking is so seductive that it is hard to disentangle the sleight of hand that our 21^st century way of thinking plays upon our own poor reptilian cortex.

Step back for a moment and think about this situation critically. Imagine for a moment a world in which all translation was done by post-editors. They charge a fraction of a penny for every word they edit or they charge by the hour. The crucial point is that the entirety of all the translation work carried out in this hypothetical world is first done by a computer and then processed by a human being who does post-editing.

In this hypothetical word, any improvement in the technology naturally feeds higher productivity. Any profit increase from this productivity improvement is swallowed by the creator or owner of the technology, albeit with perhaps a slight lag. A period of adjustment ensues, after which the post-editor drops her rate slightly to accommodate the greater productivity. Crucially, she still makes the same amount of money every day. But society benefits because a greater amount of work is done for the same amount of money. The same amount of money buys a greater amount of output. In this scenario, the average rate per word has dropped.

Return for a minute to the basic components of this model:

A.    Demand for translation/machine translation technology/population of post-editors/stable output of translation/x cost per unit

Let us tweak it slightly, by improving the quality of the technology:

B.    Demand for translation/BETTER MT technology/post-editors/GREATER output of translation/x cost per translated word DROPS

Let us tweak that slightly again by hypothesizing a concurrent increase in overall demand for translation in this world:

C.    HIGHER demand for translation/BETTER MT technology/post-editors/GREATER output/unit cost per word of translation STILL DROPS (if, and only if, the productivity boost outstrips demand growth, which is not necessarily the case)


In cases B and C, it is perfectly reasonable for the average price per word to drop. And also for the post-editor to charge less per word. Otherwise, there would be no incentive for the investor in the technology to fund the research necessary for improvement. If the post-editors brake a trend toward lower per word rates under conditions of higher productivity (say, through a worldwide union of some sort), society in general is harmed. While higher productivity is ensured, the incentive for better technology is hijacked by a hypothetically all-powerful Brotherhood of Teamsters and Post-Editors and no further improvements are likely to occur.

This is unconsciously the model we are thinking of when we say price per unit is going down because of machine translation.

The problem is we still live in a hybrid world of both post-editors and translators, or, to put it another way, translators who process MT output and translators who don’t. As we proceed, let us take as a given the premise that the price per unit of non-post-editing (i.e., human translation) is going down.

I hope that by now it should be clear to the careful reader that a massive cognitive conflation is occurring here. Leaving aside borderline cases and grey areas, post-editing and translation still remain two distinct activities. To say that lower cost of post-editing (since that is the proper name for the activity, not machine translation) is driving down the cost of translation is tantamount to claiming that the invention and massive adoption of frozen dinners in the United States of the 1960s drove down the average salaries of chefs in Paris during the same decade.

We’re not talking apples and oranges here. We’re talking apples and moon pebbles.

What machine translation might be doing is driving down the average cost of a word that is translated (or, perhaps more accurately, machine translated).

But “translated” here has to be rendered here with an asterisk. Perhaps also a skull and crossbones, but my word processor doesn’t have that emoticon… yet! (as machine translation enthusiasts like to exclaim so mischievously).

So let me restate the thesis thusly:

Machine translation might be driving down the average cost of a word that is *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ed.

Wherein “*ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion” refers to the activity of creating sequences of words in one language that are conceptually and stylistically equivalent to other sequences of words in another language. This is done either through the processing by so-called post-editors of linguistic output produced by a computer or via the more traditional process of “translation” (now often referred to as "human translation"). While the two methods of *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion bear some distant family resemblance, they in fact belong to two widely divergent genera.

Without this neologism (the “‡” is silent, by the way), the idea that machine translation can have any sort of impact on "human" translation is quite frankly questionable. Although the cost of servicing a mortgage in many countries has gone down drastically and some commodities such as oil have plummeted from their dizzying heights of 2008, the cost of translating texts (essentially equal to feeding and clothing one human translator and his or her family plus a little extra cash on the side for incidentals) is essentially the same as in 2008. Ditto for 2005 and 2000. Perhaps even 1885 after adjusting for inflation.

So are translation costs really plummeting? Is this really what is happening?

Completely unnecessary picture of Sofía Vergara

As Sofia Vergara would say: “I don’t think so, papi.”

Or is it perhaps something else? Something perhaps more complicated… or perhaps simpler?

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Some Light Shed on the “Failed to Leverage Segment” Error in Wordfast Pro

In September I posted a negative review of Wordfast Pro. One of my major complaints was the repeated recurrence of the following error message:

"Failed to leverage segment. The following error occurred: *.txt: Failed to leverage segment. Unknown Wordfast  escape."

The error was particularly frustrating because it occurred on segments that I knew contained an exact or at least a similar match inside my translation memory (TM). In other words, the main reason you use TM technology was being negated.

It turns out that, in my case, the problem’s cause was completely unexpected and, for me at least, difficult to explain. My memories contained thousands and thousands of corrupted lines that were interfering with the adequate functioning of the program. After opening the TM in a word processor, a typical translation unit (TU) turned out to look like this:

20040529=191302      MIGUEL LLORENS  1          ES-EM            "A comienzos de los 90 y hasta el 95 los milicianos protegían el barrio, y ya después robaban y mataban.    EN-US "In the early nineties, up to 1995, the militias protected the neighborhood, and later on they began killing and stealing."   \sectd\linex0\endnhere\sectlinegrid360\sectdefaultcl\sftnbj ; o llamando al (440) 449-9669.  Sherman          - P.V.P:          - P.V.P:

20061127=201125      Miguel Llorens           3          ES-EM            "Es probable que las personas no recuerden exactamente qué hizo o qué dijo usted, pero siempre recordarán cómo los hizo sentir".    &'96; Fuente desconocida  EN-US "People may not remember exactly what you did, or what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel."    &'96; Source Unknown        \sectd\marglsxn900\margrsxn920\sbknone\linex0\sectdefaultcl\sftnbj ; &t=};usando su SSN o hablando directamente con un operador    ******           Source - P.V.P:

The highlights in yellow are simply gobbledygook pulled from other TUs and metatags. I suspect it was generated during TM conversions from Trados to Wordfast or vice versa. I have heard comments that the .tmx standard, which theoretically should make memories easy to transport from one program to another, is still more of an aspiration than a reality. Perhaps this is a symptom of that.

In any case, the problem is relatively easy to fix. Simply open the TM file with Word. Select the gibberish in one of the units, and copy and paste it into Replace. You have to include the tabs and any random formatting garbage in order to make the cleansing complete. Leave the “Replace with” window blank and run the function. This will wipe the gibberish from your memory.

In my case, with my mother-of-all-translation-memories, each replacement wiped tens of thousands of instances of the corrupt lines from the memory. However, in my case, there were many different types of corrupt lines. So I had to scan the file manually and spot the bad lines. The cleanup took several hours from my life which I’ll never get back, but the program works about 80% better now.

In general, I still have some quibbles about the program's speed and the frequency with which Wordfast freezes up. But at least it is not the horror show reviewed several months ago. While I still wouldn’t recommend it, I am now looking forward to future updates to see whether it matches its previous degree of usability.

The Lionbridge Situation: A Moderate Proposal for Constructive Action

It's been seven hours and 20 days since Lionbridge VP Didier Hélin took the translation world by storm with his love letter to the profession. The response has been overwhelming.

The question is: What can be done about it constructively, aside from complaining? It is a testimony to how courteous and professional the worldwide translation community is that the comments to my blogposts are often more moderate than the posts themselves (believe me, I take on board all the suggestions... even the one from a very irate Polish gentleman who helpfully suggested I "get a job").

Aside from my lame suggestion to take a week to think about it, several commentators to the blog contributed more intelligent and thoughtful proposals for constructive measures translators can take as a community. The most detailed came from someone called "Rory C," who I'm guessing 1) is not Lionbridge CEO Rory Cowan and 2) is very knowledgeable about the industry. He basically called on people concerned about the situation to write to the company's major shareholders and the equity analysts who cover the company, listed on the company's Yahoo! Finance profile. Well, I would like to second the motion.

I hear some of you asking: Why would this change anything? First of all, Lionbridge is a publicly traded company. The wealth of information on the Yahoo! profile must be disclosed legally. Secondly, since the company's value is a matter of public knowledge as its share price goes up and down daily on the stock exchange, it must make an effort to cultivate a positive image. The generalized perception of Lionbridge as a sweatshop could depress its value and lead management to at least consider some of its more salacious corporate practices. It is even possible that some investors are not aware of the company's low reputation among its supply of vendors and freelancers.

What I propose. My view is that freelance translators (regardless of whether they work for Lionbridge or not) can exert pressure on the company to renounce some of its worst policies by communicating to so-called stakeholders (fellow translators, shareholders and analysts) the message that the company runs the risk of doing irreparable harm to its public reputation. The concrete actions I recommend:

First
Do not work for the company unless you absolutely have to (obvious for some, difficult for others now dependent on the company for regular income). 

Second
Communicate to colleagues (whether publicly, through blogs and forums, or privately) your opinion that Lionbridge is a low-wage, low-quality provider and that collaborating with or working for a company that is viewed negatively carries a stigma (yes, "Alan Walsh," a stigma).

Third

"Lionbridge is whaaaat? That's enough to make a saint curse!"

Write six letters to the addresses of analysts and investors listed below to communicate your opinion as an individual that Lionbridge is generally viewed as an irresponsible corporate citizen that is increasingly seeking to squeeze lower and lower wages from its vendors both directly (through unilateral demands for discounts) and indirectly (by demanding that its providers use its subscription-based online GeoWorkz Translation Space and setting up a job distribution platform in which translators pay additional fees for getting preferential treatment in the assignment of projects). Also, convince friends and collagues to write to these analysts and shareholders.

Add your opinion that while a company must always seek the best deal it can for the services it purchases, Lionbridge has taken the effort to an extreme that creates: 1) a continuous revolving door as translators become disillusioned with the company and leave it as a client of last resort, forcing the company to engage in a constant drive to find new translators who tend to be less qualified and experienced; 2) the need to compromise quality, which will eventually depress the company's performance; and 3) a generalized perception of Lionbridge as a third or fourth class corporate citizen.

The concrete objectives would be to:
1.- Convince Lionbridge to provide any freelancer that works for it a free subscription of at least 80,000 words per month to GeoWorkz Translation Workspace. (Incidentally, this actually makes sense, if not from the viewpoint of basic human decency, from a purely commercial standpoint. If Lionbridge wants to increase the market share of its tool, what better way than to have thousands of its freelance providers become evangelists for the avowed wonders of its SaaS?)

2.- Convince Lionbridge to roll back its Job Posting Pilot Program, which requires freelancers to pay a subscription for viewing and applying for any jobs.

3.- Convince Lionbridge to suspend its policy of exacting a fee equivalent to two month's subscription from users wishing to cancel their subscription to GeoWorkz Translation Workspace.

4.- Convince Lionbridge to pledge a moratorium on further fee reductions until 2012.

5.- Revert to a net-30 day payment policy for individual freelancers.

6.- Convince Lionbridge to conduct fee negotiations on an individual, case-by-case basis and to refrain from sending mass emails to its entire database.

7.- Convince Lionbridge to update its database of freelance providers.

8.- Convince Lionbridge to pledge to improve its relations with vendors in general and affirm a commitment to both quality and competitive pricing.

Three closing comments. Firstly, please take the trouble to print out your letters and send them instead of simply emailing. It simply carries greater credibility, in my view. The second parting note is that I will post a suggested form letter as soon as I have a chance and leave it here for readers to make suggestions. However, if you come up with one before me, feel free to send it and I will post it, if you so desire. Lastly, please don't send letters to just the first six addresses. Mix it up so everyone shares in the joy of getting to know Lionbridge!

Please send your letters to six recipients out of the following addresses:

Major shareholders:

Head of Investment Management
William Blair Funds
222 West Adams Street
12th Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60606
U.S.A.

Head of Investment Management
Tocqueville Asset Management LP
40 W. 57th Street 19th floor
New York, NY 10019
U.S.A.

Head of Investment Management
Rutabaga Capital Management LLC

64 Broad Street # 300

Boston, MA 02109-4351

U.S.A.

Managing Partner
Glenhill Capital Management LLC
156 West 56th Street
17th Floor
New York, NY 10019

United States

Head of Investment Management

Wells Capital Management

525 Market Street, 10th Floor

San Francisco, California 94105

U.S.A.

Head of Investment Management

Marshall Funds Inc
111 East Kilbourn Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202
USA

Head of Investment Management

Franklin Resources
P.O. Box 997152
Sacramento, CA 95899-7152

U.S.A.

Head of Investment Management

BlackRock Institutional Trust Company, N.A.

400 Howard Street
San Francisco, CA 94105

United States

Head of Investment Management

Vanguard Funds

Vanguard
P.O. Box 1110
Valley Forge, PA 19482-1110

USA

Head of Investment Management

Dimensional Fund Advisors
Palisades West
6300 Bee Cave Road, Building One
Austin, TX 78746

USA

Head of Investment Management

Consulting Group Capital Markets Funds
222 Delaware Avenue,7 Th Floor
Wilmington, DE 19801
USA

Head of Investment Management

Goldman Sachs Structured Small Cap Equity Fund

Goldman Sachs Asset Management, L.P.

200 West Street
37th Floor
New York, NY 10282
USA 

Head of Investment Management

Fidelity Investments
P.O. Box 770001
Cincinnati, OH 45277-0003

USA

Analysts:

Kevin Liu

Senior Analyst
B. Riley & Co.

11100 Santa Monica Blvd., Suite 800

Los Angeles, CA 90025

Richard Davis

Managing Director, Research Department

Research Department
99 High Street, Suite 1200
Boston, MA
USA 02110

Joe Vafi

Managing Director, Equity Research

Jefferies & Company, Inc.
One Montgomery Street, 24th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94104

Vincent A. Colicchio, CFA

Senior Research Analyst

Noble Financial Group

6501 Congress Avenue, Boca Raton, FL  3348

Richard K. Baldry, CFA

Senior Research Analyst

75 Arlington Street

Suite 500

Boston, MA 02116

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

A Note on the Weekend Blackout and Blog Move

An apology to everyone who clicked on the links to the former address of this blog and got an error page. The problem is that last weekend (spoiler alert: completely unnecessary plug) I published the newest incarnation of my homepage. This involved redirecting the DNS address to the servers of the company that provides the service of (partially) hosting the site. This had the unfortunate consequence of crippling the WordPress site. I was dimly aware that this might happen, but I simply disregarded the little voice in my head that always tends to be right. Therefore, you have only my own incompetence to blame for the mess. Believe me, I am a reluctant techie and a times not a very good one.

Despite some teething pain, I was growing quite fond of the old WordPress incarnation, but now it is gone, gone, gone. The new homepage provider allows me to create another WordPress blog which is also redirected, but unfortunately it doesn't provide the same "theme" I was using before. This obliges me to pick a new theme and start tinkering with it, which will require a lot of time and patience that, for the moment, I simply lack. So for the moment, I have simply posted the Didier Hélin posts that have generated so much interest, sans comments.

Several readers asked about the comments. I know, I know. That was an integral part of the Didier Hélin posts. Fear not. Everything was backed up. The problem is that everything is in MySQL format and not easily transportable either to Blogger, which requires .xml, or to WordPress, which inexplicably requires something called .wxr. I successfully created an .xml from the .sql, but Blogger's import app simply laughed in my face. Therefore, I have to find some time and figure this mess out. In the meantime, if someone knows how to solve this difficulty, get in touch with me.

In any case, once again: a thousand apologies. And thank you for the interest and forbearance.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

The Empire Writes Back: A Response to Lionbridge’s “Alan Walsh”

Today, my blog received a comment to the post in which I replied to Didier Hélin’s ukase to freelance translators about reducing their rates. It is written by someone who claims to be called “Alan Walsh.” He submitted a reasoned rebuttal of the shellacking Lionbridge has received over the blogosphere during the past week. Crucially, it is the only full-throated defense of Lionbridge, which has been universally decried as a subpar corporate citizen. I released “Alan Walsh’s” contribution immediately in the spirit of fairness, even though the email is clearly a fake address created for the sole purpose of enlightening me (rk45214@yahoo.com). (Although it could be a real name; perhaps “rk45214″ is how they spell “Walsh” in ye olde country, which is presumably Mars.) However, when I looked up the sender’s IP address out of curiosity: Lo and behold! I copy the results for your viewing pleasure:
(Look it up yourselves if you so desire: http://www.melissadata.com/lookups/iplocation.asp or at http://whois.domaintools.com/)

IP Address Location
IP Address 65.219.216.10
City Framingham
State or Region Massachusetts
Country United States
ISP Lionbridge Technologies.

Really, Lionbridge? Are you seriously that stupid? Lionbridge Technologies didn’t even take the trouble to disguise its IP address. (Dude, are you aware that the Whole Foods guy lost his job because of shenanigans like this and that it prompted an SEC investigation?)
I now proceed to copy the entire message:

Hello,

Peekaboo!

I thought that the initial post was entertaining, but I don’t understand the need to stigmatize a translation company that keeps several thousand translators busy full time. Although the tone of the request could have been improved, there is nothing wrong with asking providers to make an effort during difficult times:
=> the announcement preceded the company’s Q3 results, which were quite poor. Why refer to the Q2 results, irrelevant at this time?
=> although the company receives revenue in USD and EUR, it outsources mostly in EUR, so the weakening dollar will have a huge impact on its bottom line during Q4
=> large software companies are asking for 10% discounts to all its providers. There is nothing wrong with asking translators that receive work on a regular basis if not full time to temporarily make an effort (this is only a 2 month initiative!). Companies across many other industries are doing the same thing. Lionbridge invests huge amounts to secure business that keeps thousands of translators working.

Granted, the tone of the email could have been improved, but translators can simply choose not to accept the discount…
(Signed: Alan Walsh)

And herewith my reply:
Dear faceless corporate stooge:
May I call you “Alan Walsh”? I’m on a first-name-last-name basis with your colleague Didier Hélin and I think that is how you address each other over at Lionbridge. First of all, thank you for reading my doofy little blog, “Alan Walsh.” I know that it has been very popular in your company, judging from the hundreds of hits from your servers worldwide and the depressing reports about what it is like to work for you.
Permit me also to commend you on your courage, “Alan Walsh.” Anonymity in a person who has nothing to lose by defending his own company certainly highlights the pride you take in working at Lionbridge.
To begin, you ask why there is “the need to stigmatize a translation company that keeps several thousand translators busy full time”?
The stigmatization is partly due to your style, the style in which you both manage your collaborators and the style in which you communicate with them. This style is indicative of a certain way of viewing the entire profession of translation and the industry at large. The communications from your company, of which your anonymous literary exertions are just another shining example, are all of a piece, “Alan Walsh.” They are both impersonal and gauche (you have conceded that somewhat grudgingly). Taken to an extreme, they evince an almost Keystonian degree of incompetence for a company to which major corporations outsource their communications in other languages. When viewed with a more critical eye, however, a far more disturbing issue than simple imbecility rears its ugly head: dishonesty and cynicism.
Let me recap the salient facts of the Didier Hélin Sandwich. It is an astoundingly long series of dick moves which you have just compounded:
1.- A distressing message was sent from a dummy email entitled “IMPORTANT – DO NOT RESPOND.” (Dick move number One.)
2.- It was sent on a Friday afternoon in the Western hemisphere to ensure the longest amount of lag time between its sending and Monday morning, when your Asian collaborators would wake up to find that they had been slimed. (Dick move number Two.)
3.- It was sent during the ATA conference, when a lot of spokespeople would be distracted. (Dick move number Three.)
4.- It clumsily adduced two or three random economic data points that Didier Hélin or his assistant lazily fished out of The Economist to justify a completely arbitrary redefinition of the terms of the labor relationship between you and your contributors. The entire message denotes sloppiness (borne of, again, contempt) in a message that probably made a lot of people feel really bad. (Dick move number Four.)
5.-. A demand of a discount was phrased as a fait accompli. So, yes, it was an offer, as you claim, “Alan Walsh.” An offer like Michael Corleone used to make right before you got the bullet in the eye during a Swedish massage. (Dick move number Five.)
6.- You sent that obscenity to everybody, “Alan Walsh.” Your entire database, which is a massive dark hole encompassing happy freelancers, zombies, mythical creatures, half-real half-imaginary “Alan Walshes” and unsympathetic former providers. You did not even invest the modicum of care necessary to limit the unpleasantness to only the poor souls who actually have to put [up] with you. Not only do you make your own people feel miserable, you were generous enough to share the misery with many other thousands of colleagues, thus instantly becoming the poster child for an industry-wide problem. (Dick move number Six.)
7.- You sent it in 2010. (Dick move number Seven.) While your senior management is spewing hot air about the Web 2.0 and collaboration infrastructure, you’re still handling your corporate communications with the ineffable tact of a nineteenth-century robber baron. You basically got up on a soapbox on Friday while the steelworkers were clocking out and shouted through an old timey blowhorn: “From now on we pay you 5% less! Suck it! See you all on Monday. That is all.” Except now a few dozen of the hapless victims in your database have blogs and several thousand have Facebook accounts. So, this is basically the brave new world of social networking telling you to suck it, “Alan Walsh.”
Now, to reply to your specific objections:
1.- You complain that “this is only a 2 month initiative!”. But the quotes from your CEO clearly state that this is only the beginning. Moreover, how can anyone trust you to make it only a temporary move? The Valentine from Didier Hélin certainly didn’t promise it was temporary. You have no credibility left, “Alan Walsh.”
2.- You allege “that translators can simply choose not to accept the discount.” Call me crazy, but the Didier Hélin candygram was less accommodating. Textually: “we require all our partners to provide a 5% discount on all Lionbridge projects.” To me, that doesn’t sound like an invitation to a square dance. Was Czechoslovakia free to refuse Hitler’s Sudetenland ultimatum? And yes, the freelancers can choose to not accept and cease working from Friday to Monday. But many will inevitably be too scared or at the very least unprepared to object. So it falls upon people who are not dependent upon Lionbridge for its tardy payments to express their feelings openly.
3.- You roll out the tired nostrum about the declining dollar: “Although the company receives revenue in USD and EUR, it outsources mostly in EUR, so the weakening dollar will have a huge impact on its bottom line during Q4.” Once and for all, I would like to ask a few questions: Haven’t you idiots heard of something called currency hedging, “Alan Walsh”? You’re basically saying, “we are completely and utterly unprepared for anything but a rising dollar.” Heard of a thing called strategic planning? OK, OK. You’re not the sharpest crayon in the box (believe me, we’ve established that beyond the shadow of a doubt), but, come on, why should the translators pay for your incompetence?
This leads me to another, nay, THE question: if the dollar rallies versus the euro next year when Greece or Ireland explode like H-Bombs, will you share the proceeds with the translators? “Uh, no way in hell! Papa needs his forex gains!” So, basically, your translators have to share the losses due to your mismanagement but not the windfall profits from random world events.
4.- Which brings me to your final whine: Large software companies are asking for 10% discounts to all its providers. That is the final and ultimate dishonesty. Number one, you are not a software company. You are a monstrously bloated translation agency with a sales department and a handful of software engineers. Rolling out a second-rate CAT tool from the cloud does not make you one. Just as a kid who puts firecrackers on a dog’s tail is not an engineer. I know you want to fool investors into believing that, but you’re not. And a translator is not a vendor. He or she is a freelance provider of services. What you really mean is that your gynormous clients are squeezing you to give them a discount. And you’ve already cut expenses down to the bone, so the only place to keep cutting is the massive expenditure on freelancers. The response from your freelancers should be: And how is that my problem, “Alan Walsh”? Has Didier Hélin taken any pay cuts since this economic thunderstorm began? For that matter, have you, “Alan Walsh”? Of course not.
Reports indicate that you have relentlessly driven down rates since the global meltdown began. The latest slap in the face is only one more chapter in this saga. There is no end in sight to the “new normal.” You think that this is a bottomless well. You want to keep pushing down on that baby. Well, if you’re surprised at the backlash, might I suggest that this is reality telling you that you can’t push down on that lever any further, “Alan Walsh”? That the pebble thrown in the well finally hit rock bottom? In other words, the dreaded time has come when you may actually have to employ people who are not computer literate. Or, alternatively, you may actually have to become more efficient. Or do crazy stuff like adopting better project management practices. Or stop going for the lowest bidder all the time. Or start nurturing your freelance staff and agency partners rather than viewing them as potential cash cows. You know, insane, wacko, out-of-the-box stuff like that.
Which finally brings me to you, “Alan Walsh,” or, to call you by your real name, Dick Move Number Eight. Your anonymous message, your fake email, your lame pseudonym, your brain-dead arguments. Leaving aside the dishonesty of a large corporation using free email accounts to leave positive feedback on itself, there is a more important issue at stake. The common denominator to Didier Hélin’s October surprise, your CEO’s disingenuous replies to analysts and your clumsy comment on my blog is the same: ice cold contempt. You have such a low opinion of other human beings that you didn’t even bother to, at the very least, send this asinine attempt at damage control from your home PC. Because you think someone else wouldn’t know enough to monitor the visitors to his own website. Because you think I don’t know that a “trademark protection” company has been downloading anything and everything from my website and blog. Or that your law firm is sniffing around. (And if you think I’m the least bit intimidated, dude, you are sooooo wrong.) The problem is you think you’re smarter than the rest of humanity. But, believe me, “Alan Walsh,” you’re patently not.
When you’re finally ready to act like a man and use your own name to defend your company, you will be completely welcome to post your ramblings free of censorship.
So, anyway, thank you for your comment. Feel free to drop by at any time (not that I can actually stop you). Wardrobe suggestion: Next time, come as Batgirl or Catwoman. Since you’re into disguises…

Yours truly,
Miguel Llorens

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

“It Rubs the Translation Workspace on its Skin…”

“…or else it gets the hose again.”

Ok, we knew that you had to forcibly subscribe to Geoworkz Translation Workspace to freelance for Lionbridge. It is pricey, it is slow, it is outrageous.

Now comes the news, gleaned from ProZ.com’s forums, that there is no free trial of the tool.

Ahhh, but the first 30 days only cost $0.01.

A single cent. The problem is that no reminder is sent that your one-cent joy ride is about to expire. A perfect example of behavioral economics in action. People are innately hard-wired to follow the default. Example: when you buy a product, the option to get an unnecessary add-on or accessory or useless service plan is activated by default. It has been proven that only a minority acts against the default, i.e., deactivate the unwanted option.

By not sending a notice that the subscription is about to transition to the full price, the company insures itself that some unwilling buyers will lose some of their hard-earned money.

OK, Lionbridge, I promise to suspend my snarky blog posts if you make at least one symbolic, empty gesture at minimally acceptable corporate citizenship or basic human decency.

With these subscription policies,you have already fallen beneath the standards of the porn and gambling industries.

Seriously, guys, what’s next? Clubbing baby seals?

Please stop. I beg you. Please, Lionbridge… You are officially the worst company in the world. You did it. Please stop trying so hard.


Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.