The Death of Borders and Naïve Technological Determinism

One very superficial way of looking at the present is to think that everything is changing very quickly and that the pace of change is only set to increase. The problem is we view progress as a straight arrow. This is because—after God and Joe DiMaggio died—our religion is technological progress. I am wary of all religions, but I'm particularly suspicious about secular ones.

Take the closure of Borders, for instance. Aha, the naïve technologist tells us: The book is dying. The sale of books is a moribund business. No one will read within 30 or 40 years, right about the time we are uploading our brains into Kurzweil machines. And if any reading occurs, it will be done from a screen. Although by then advances in speech software and optical character recognition will mean that most of our “e-reading” will probably be auditory. We will be listening to a computer program simulating the voice of Al Pacino as it reads to us A Tale of Two Cities (“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times… HOOAAAAH!”). Unless, of course, we get our reading material uploaded immediately into our brains, a la The Matrix (“I know Dostoyevsky!”).

But that is not how technological change works. People who don’t know anything about literature or history extrapolate from their present time. And usually they get it wrong. Dead wrong.

Let’s return to the closure of Borders. For readers not familiarized with the United States, it was a mega-chain of bookstores similar to Barnes and Noble. (For a cultural reference, Borders and B and N were the real-life equivalent of Tom Hanks’s Fox Books chain in You’ve Got Mail, which ended up mercilessly crushing Meg Ryan’s little children’s book shop.) Now, of course, the Borders bankruptcy is driven by changes in the book industry (although massively bad management also played a part). The thing is “change” is such a pedestrian category for looking at society that it is almost tantamount to saying nothing. Open any history book at random about any period and you will find that “the thirteenth century was a time of upheaval” or “the Iron Age brought about a revolution in the way human beings lived.” Whenever I read a sentence like that in a history book, I wish I could throw the damn thing at the lazy bastard who wrote it. It is such a tired trope. “You will not bathe twice in the same river” (because both the river and you are not the same). It was probably already a commonplace thought by the time Heraclitus wrote it in Ancient Greece. Yes, change is the substance of humanity and society. Tell me something I don’t know, Einstein.

As a bibliophile, believe me, I will not mourn the passing of Borders. Chains like that seemed intent on hiring the most ignorant sonsabitches they could find. The disappearance of seven-foot piles of books by the latest spazzmo or in-the-closet-but-fooling-no-one celeb who placed third or fourth on “American Idol” are nothing to lament. The passing of Borders means that another example of vulgar, mass commercialism has gone on to meet its forefathers. That is nothing to cry over.

Instead, the really interesting development is that independent bookstores still exist. In the naïve vision of the technological determinist, e-books and Amazon should have blown away first small bookstores and later Borders. But it was Borders, with its mega-balance sheet, its bloated ranks of middle managers, its relentless commoditization of the book, its ruthless exploitation of razor-thin profit margins to squeeze competitors… yes, this monstrosity was the company that bit the dust first. In the mean time, better-managed competitors and smaller bookstores are thriving in the midst of this soft version of the Great Depression we are currently living through. The New York Times reports the following:

Barnes and Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, said that comparable store sales this Thanksgiving weekend increased 10.9 percent from that period last year. The American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independents, said last week that members saw a sales jump of 16 percent in the week including Thanksgiving, compared with the same period a year ago.

That is the really fascinating development. The likeliest thing is that the retail book industry will be a barbell. Amazon will be one of the dumbbells, sucking up revenue like a vacuum cleaner and driving down the prices for everything. Behind Amazon will be a bloated Barnes and Noble, huffing and puffing under the weight of expensive rental contracts as it tries to reinvent itself as a tech company. And, on the other end of the barbell, a smaller dumbbell will consist of thousands of tiny, niche bookstores, providing a service to local communities. So, please, go out and celebrate. Buy yourself a book from your local bookstore staffed by one of those impossibly arrogant people who inexplicably still work at a bookstore. Luxuriate in the rudeness of their snooty contempt. Reality is always more interesting than ideology.

(For an essay making a similar point to mine, visit this blog. Our naïve ideas of the past and the way technology changes things are at the heart of the misperceptions described there as well.)

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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

There is no Great Stagnation: 3D Printing Technology, Voice Recognition and Machine Translation

Well, one more WTF moment, courtesy of the l10n industry. Check this out:

PRESS RELEASE

InterPrint to revolutionise language industry

At LangCon, the language industry’s annual trade fair held in Los Angeles last week, Mattel, 3D PrintSystems and TripleDutch Translations announced that they have joined forces to develop the greatest innovation the language industry has seen in more than a decade: the 3D printable interpreter.

Interpreting is said to be one of the oldest professions in the world: from prehistoric tribes, to the conquistadores, to the Nazi trials in Nurnberg, interpreters have played a crucial role in many of humanity’s defining moments. Nowadays, you are likely to find interpreters in blue-chip boardrooms or the innards of the European institutions. However, their exclusive status comes at a cost: hiring a team of interpreters will easily set you back $1,000 a day.

InterPrint is now set to revolutionise this industry: by combining cutting-edge 3D printing technology and the latest speech recognition and machine translation software, clients and agencies alike are able to churn out interpreters fit for any meeting, and a shoe box! Modelled after the classical Ken and Barbie dolls, the ‘his and hers’ pint-sized linguists only measure about 23 cm in length, yet offer the same services an ordinary team of interpreters, and more!

Cutting interpreters down to size

“Using our printed interpreters provides real benefits to our customers”, says Kees Dooms, CEO of Amsterdam-based TripleDutch. “Their smaller size means that you can fit them into smaller meeting rooms. You can also save on transport costs: the secretary of the meeting can carry the interpreters to the venue in her bag.” Another advantage is that you can store the interpreters in the meeting room overnight, instead of having to put them up in the fancy 5 star hotels many of their human-sized counterparts demand. “The catering costs are also eliminated, as our dolls have no digestive system”, confirms Kees. “And the fact that other parts of their anatomy are also missing might help to improve the philandering image of the profession”, he adds jokingly.

Unique opportunity

“At Mattel, we have been wondering for years how to tap into the high-margin corporate market”, explains Paul Lewis, Business Development Manager at the US doll manufacturer. “We believe this product will be a real winner: one-off clients can order the language pair they want after which the dolls are shipped from InterPrint’s headquarters in Amsterdam”, adds Lewis, “at a fraction of the costs of an ordinary team of interpreters”. Customers regularly requiring interpretation can buy a special printer and cartridges from InterPrint to manufacture their own teams. Says Lewis: “No more scrambling for interpreters for a last-minute job: you can print your own set in under 3 hours.” True to form, Mattel offers various accessories to make your interpreters look as life-like as possible: for the male dolls we have smart, pin-striped suits with clashing woollen socks and for the female dolls pink pumps and leopard-skin mini-skirts and see-through tops.

3D printing: cutting-edge technology

3D PrintSystems, which provides the printing technology behind InterPrint is very excited about the opportunities: “3D printing has been around for a few years, but the industry is struggling to find a use outside of niche markets. Printing interpreters is just the creative solution this industry needs to gain momentum”, explains CEO Bob Winkler. “We are improving the design on a continuous basis, meaning that you will be able to use your dolls longer. The current models have a lifespan of about 2 days, which is sufficient for most clients’ needs. If you water your interpreters sufficiently frequently, you may extend their useful life to four days, although by the end, most of what they produce is just gibberish.” Winkler provides yet another advantage: “if your meeting is not going well, or if you’re not happy with the quality of the translation, you can now really go to town on your interpreters. For instance, you can throw them out of a speeding van, something you are not yet allowed to do to their human counterparts in most European countries.”

Note: This, of course, is just a light-hearted satirical piece that was sent to me by Belgian intepreter Toon Gevaert. He asked me to share it as a guest post and I agreed that it might give the readers of this blog a chuckle. Three-dimensional printing is already a reality, but, alas, the Ken and Barbie mini-terps are not. However, maybe this is the little spark that some entrepreneurial mind at a revolutionary company such as Lackuna needs to get the creative juices flowing.


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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

December Blog Newsletter: "Translation as a Commodity," "2011: Year of the Translator" and More

I just sent out this month's blog newsletter via MailChimp, with a round-up of highlights from this venue from the past month and links to two notable pieces on translation from, respectively, Robert McCrum, the author of Globish, and Henry Hitchings, the author of an upcoming book on the English language.

Here is the link to the newsletter: http://us2.campaign-archive1.com/?u=2cb3ecb1b8c0c133ad0ff361c&id=06e6268189

To sign up for the monthly newsletter, use the sign-up app at the top of this page's right-hand column or go here: http://traductor-financiero.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=2cb3ecb1b8c0c133ad0ff361c&id=2fd94c7285

(No need to point out that the sign-up forms are a glorious, befuddling mish-mash of Spanish and English, but blame the engineers and linguists at MailChimp, please. Even linguistic martinets like me are at the mercy of the crude stage of development of our multilingual Internet technology. Perhaps I'll write about it in some future post.)

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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

‘Let Them Eat Chinglish!’: Cheap Translation and the Two-Speed Internet

Whenever I have the disgrace of having to slog through Microsoft’s machine-translated support documents in search of some distant glimmer of insight into why its mediocre products are keeping me from shortening my work day, I come to realize that intensified use of post-editing and huge language corpora by more and more companies will create a two-speed Internet. Well-curated English copywriting for English speakers, on one hand. And Globish, Spanglish, Chinglish and Engrish for the unwashed masses. In other words, a Spanish-speaker will get garbled messages that sort of sound like your native language but are just not quite there. We are building a garbage-strewn desert and calling it the future.The poor man's universalism of l10n gurus is just that: a second-rate Utopia for a two-speed Internet.

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.

Common Sense Advisory Pummels Defunct Equine Mammal (More on the Content Tsunami… Sigh!)

The Common PlaceSense Advisory—which functions as a sort of propaganda arm for the Lower Quality Translation movement—has jumped on the bandwagon of the Content Tsunami lock, stock and two smoking barrels. In a breathtakingly unoriginal shill for cheap, low-quality translation, a press release from the think tank bleats that:

There is far too much content being created and far too few translators or money to translate it all – or even a tiny fraction of it. Independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory contends that translation automation tools such as MT promise to increase the volume and accelerate the pace of words rendered into other languages. “Translation strategies that rely on human output alone have already been overwhelmed by the explosion in content and the imperative to rapidly enter new markets,” says Don DePalma, Chief Strategy Officer at Common Sense Advisory.

About as subtle as a stomp in the face, isn’t it? Well, so much for independent analysis of the translation industry. Every time DePalma opens his mouth, a sales rep at Lionbridge gets sexually aroused. But, hey, peddling this sort of drivel as independent research gives the ideology behind cheap translation a thin coating of respectability.

At the risk of also beating a dead, decomposing horse, let me reiterate as briefly as I can the argument against the Content Tsunami: The amount of text that requires translation has not grown substantially. When we talk about a data deluge transmitted through the Internet, it involves mostly graphics and video, so the total giga and mega and googol figures breathlessly bandied about by L10N gurus are deceptive (often consciously so).

But let me rely on someone else’s words to drive home this point. In a New York Times review of James Gleick’s The Information, Geoffrey Nunberg comments on the conceptual mushiness of the term “information.” It can mean both “data,” which is meaningless, and “text,” which is meaningful (yes, even if it was written by Gertrude Stein). The slippage in and out of these two (radically different) conceptual realms is what allows charlatans to bang on about the dreaded Content Tsunami. To quote Nunberg:

When he [Gleick] describes the information explosion, he reckons the increase in bytes, citing the relentless procession of prefixes (kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, and now zetta-, with yotta- in the wings) that’s mirrored in the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, game consoles and windowless server farms.

 But there’s no road back from bits to meaning. For one thing, the units don’t correspond: the text of “War and Peace” takes up less disk space than a Madonna music video. Even more to the point, is “information” just whatever can be stored on silicon, paper or tape? It is if you’re Cisco or Seagate, who couldn’t care less whether the bytes they’re making provision for are encoding World of Warcraft or home videos of dancing toddlers. (Americans consume more bytes of electronic games in a year than of all other media put together, including movies, TV, print and the Internet.)

But those aren’t the sorts of things we have in mind when we worry about the growing gap between information haves and have-nots or insist that the free exchange of information is essential to a healthy democracy. Information, in the socially important sense — stuff that is storable, transferable and meaningful independent of context — is neither eternal nor ubiquitous. It was a creation of the modern media and the modern state (Walter Benjamin dated its appearance to the mid-19th century). And it accounts for just a small portion of the flood of bits in circulation.

Please allow me to reiterate the point, because it is crucial and reveals the flimsiness of the thinking by l10n gurus devoted to selling redundant MT systems: “Information, in the socially important sense — stuff that is storable, transferable and meaningful independent of context — is neither eternal nor ubiquitous… And it accounts for just a small portion of the flood of bits in circulation.” That means that truly valuable information, the type that cures cancer or leads to innovative inventions, has not grown significantly.

But don’t expect something like the truth to deter a dead-horse-pummeler as consummate as Mr. DePalma. Remember that you can’t convince someone of something if his salary depends on his not being convinced of it. This sort of implores one to ask the question as to how the Common Sense Advisory funds itself. I find it hard to believe that real companies actually pay this think tank for its “expertise” when they can get the same “World According to the Commonplace Advisory” Weltanschauung for free from the other McLocalization gurus.

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.

Transperfect Morphs into Giant Patent Troll

Bialystock (reading adaptation of Kafka’s  

Metamorphosis while looking for worst play ever written):

"Gregor Samsa awoke one morning

to discover that he had been transformed

into a giant cockroach..." (Pauses.) Nah, it's too good.

—The Producers (1968)

Do you want a measure of The Great Stagnation in Localization Land? The mosquito-infested backwater of language technology now has its very own patent troll! Yes! Transperfect’s purchase of WorldLingo has nothing to do with the acquiree’s technology (which is probably commoditized anyway). According to David Grunwald, the bold merger is a tactic by Transperfect to seize WorldLingo’s patents and then use them in ongoing litigation against a competitor in the field of localizing websites for large corporates. In other words, Transperfect is becoming a patent troll.

What is a patent troll, you ask? To phrase it in the style of Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, it is the bloodcurling sound of the technology industry eating its young. The issue was brought to mainstream attention by a recent podcast from the teams of This American Life and Planet Money (When Patents Attack). (By the way, have I recommended This American Life? Did I mention it’s free?) To put it succinctly, a patent troll is a company that buys up reams of patents from other companies and then uses them to sue innovative start-ups. The objective is simply to extort money. There are entire companies in Silicon Valley that do not create anything but simply snap up legacy patents and use them as part of a tech version of racketeering (“that’s a really nice technology company you have there; it’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it…”). And guess who is the largest patent troll in the Valley? None other than Nathan Myhrvold. And who is Nathan Myhrvold? None other than one of the co-founders of Microsoft. Great Stagnation, Exhibit A: “Thy name is Myhrvold.”

What is wrong with that, you ask? Patents, after all, were invented to protect the work of the inventors who make our lives better. Well, the problem is that in the IT sphere the idea of a patent is problematic. One example is the idea of using the Internet to distribute a piece of software via downloading. The software itself, of course, should have a copyright. That is not the issue. The idea of downloading software via the Web in general, well… not so much. And American judges and the U.S. Patent Office until twenty years ago were inclined to this common-sense view of technology: The hurdles to get an IT patent were many and difficult to leap over. That is, until the tide started shifting in the 1990s. And now you basically can’t move a single inch in Silicon Valley without stepping on a the tails of companies holding reams of useless patents, whether for offensive or preemptive purposes. Indeed, one of the causes for Tyler Cowen’s innovation slowdown may well be the peculiarities of patent-trolling and the U.S. legal system.

What does that mean for the translation industry? This means that Transperfect is probably planning to use a patent that describes in vague terms a system that employs, say, machine translation, translation memory and terminology management over the Web. None of these ideas by themselves is original. You didn’t need a genius to come along and “invent” the idea of using computers to translate text. Or of recycling previous translations. Or of using the Web to harness the power of the hamster mob. But (wham!) Transperfect is going to leverage those dead patents to hit a competitor.

Just more proof of the vibrancy of the translation technology niche.

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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Kumail Nanjiani on the Age of McLocalization

I first heard this comedian on the This American Life podcast. It was a short two-minute bit that closes his show called “Cheese.” It is one of the funniest things around, mainly because of the stress he places on certain words. Go ahead and watch it here.

Another clip taken from his act has Nanjiani discussing a video game called Call of Duty (full disclosure, I also play it). He remarks that previous installments of the game were based on real wars, but subsequent versions of the game have been set in current conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq. He expresses surprise that one level is even based in Karachi, the city in which he grew up. The joke is that he thinks this might give him an edge in playing: “Hey, guys we can hide out there. I used to rent videos there. Mr. Sadiqqi will let us hide out.”

But then he goes on to make a further observation that is symptomatic of the current state of McLocalization and how it combines a very unconscious Anglocentrism with a naïve but clumsy universalism. The game makes a huge investment in creating realistic settings. Except for one small detail, as Nanjiani points out: 

The name of the language you speak in Pakistan is Urdu. That’s the name: Urdu. But all the street signs in Karachi in Call of Duty are in Arabic. Yeah. Totally different language. And I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but this game took three years to make. If you look at it, they get every detail perfect, like the graphics. You can see individual hairs on people’s heads. When they run, they sweat. When they run, their shoelaces bounce. All they had to do was google “Pakistan language.” They were literally like: “What language do they speak in Pakistan?” “Uh… I don’t care. I can’t get this guy’s sideburns right.”

Watch the whole video here:

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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Whenever I Hear Agency Owners Griping About Translators…

I keep hearing agency owners whining about how difficult it is to recruit over the Internet. “People found through ProZ still have to be vetted!” “Linguists with excellent qualifications on paper turn out to be a disappointment!” My reaction usually is: "What? The guy whose mailing address is the same as a provincial prison in Kuala Lumpur turned out to be unreliable? What is the world coming to?" "You can’t rely on people found through the same medium used by Nigerian scammers?" "Cancel that Russian mail-order bride!"

Recently, one of the “innovators” in the field of crowdsourced translation launched a “bad translators” list where you can denounce unreliable linguists (only humans need apply). (I will not link to him because: 1.- I think the dude is more than just a little insane and 2.- I suspect he is provocative on purpose to stir up a hornet’s nest and drive linkjuice.) But the question stands: Are things really that bad out there? (One observation: It is highly indicative that the people who think translation is a commodity are usually the same people who gripe about the unreliability of these translators found on the Internet.)

I think sometimes we over-adapt to new technology. We think it is better than it actually is. And then we get frustrated because it develops slowly or because it doesn’t deliver the perfect world that only exists in our heads. I think that is the problem here. Nobody stops to think that access to thousands of freelancer profiles might be a double-edged sword.

As a rule of thumb, the quality and value of a professional relationship is probably inversely proportional to the degree to which it is formed and nurtured online. For both sides of the equation. If the relation was hatched via the Internet, both the agency and the freelancer probably view each other as much more repleaceable than they would otherwise. That is just the economics of the Internet.

Secondly, the best client relationships I have had were achieved through references from colleagues and word of mouth. That is how good companies recruit. Blogging, tweeting, online networking and all the rest of that is fine and dandy. But who you know in person counts much more. The world is still very, very local. The constant propaganda about how we are instantly linked to the entire world is deceptive on many levels. We may be separated by six degrees from everyone, but those from whom we are separated by one degree still matter much more than Kevin Bacon. Ignore that at your peril.

Furthermore, I don’t know if agencies realize that the very inefficiency of the market is partly what keeps them in business. In a completely disintermediated world, the hassle of vetting translators would disappear. But in that frictionless world, agencies would be as extinct as the Tyrannosaurus. Providers and direct clients would silently drift toward each other without the messy middle man. 

So vetting translators is a hassle? I’m sorry, but if you don’t do that, what is the service that you provide, exactly?

To know where you fall in the necessary/unnecessary spectrum, ask yourself the following questions:

1.- Do you know the marital status of your freelancers?

2.- Do you know if they have kids?

3.- Can you name something about them that isn’t on their CV?

If the answer to any of these three questions is “no,” then you should probably rethink the way you have structured your business.


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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Think Different/Differently: Is Translation a Commodity?

David Grunwald acknowledges my hat tip to his Ortsbo coverage but reiterates that translation is a commodity. His basic argument is that translation does not involve creativity. I half agree with the premise that translation does not imply creativity in the same sense that artistic creation does, but I also reject the corollary. You can’t conclude from this starting point that translation is a commodity. Please allow me to highlight the fact I remain astonished by the sight of the owner of a translation agency publicly stating that he believes translation is a commodity. First of all, translation is a service. If you provide service as a commodity, how do you distinguish yourself from the competition? There are only two ways: fiercer marketing or lower rates. That is the eternal race to the bottom that leads us to the clowns from Lackuna. 

The problem with the “is translation a commodity?” debate is that no easy argument exists to prove that it isn’t a commodity. As in the case of many cultural objects —such as humor or art— you either see its value or you don’t. A joke that needs to be explained and dissected ceases to be a joke. Perhaps you can fall back on easy stereotypes about engineers. "They just don’t get why a Gauguin might be interesting despite the lack of realism." But that is a lazy straw man. The tech industry is not universally blind to the quality of outward presentation or design. The “Low Quality Translation” people are not totally tone deaf. They simply (and willfully) shut out evidence that falsifies their industry-centric world view.

If translation is a commodity, so is copywriting. But listen to Steve Jobs obsessing over the 1990s slogan that led his company to charge back to the top of the worldwide tech industry. This is an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s recent review of Walter Isaacson’s biography:

The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWA\Chiat\Day. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

This type of process is not much different from the daily process of translation. It is the laborious wordcraft that goes into writing and its sister métier of translating. So then, is translation a commodity? That is an interesting debate that is difficult to resolve. But what is certain is that there is a golden rule: Your degree of conviction that translation is a commodity is inversely correlated with your profit margins.


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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Learn English with a Totalitarian Dictator: The Cost of Lower Quality Translation

Kathleen: It happened in Spain. People do

really stupid things in foreign countries.

Frank: Absolutely. They buy leather jackets for much

more than they're worth. But they don't fall in love with fascist dictators!

—You’ve Got Mail

There is an asymmetrical relationship between the passage of a text from English to Spanish compared to the translation from Spanish into English. And this asymmetry is frequently unacknowledged, especially by people whose background is more technical than linguistic. For example, Silicon Valley is a very diverse, multicultural, multiethnic environment, but only superficially so. In reality, it is very homogenous: It is inhabited by engineers from all parts of the world. And it is also fiercely monolingual: English is really the only language used. It is almost inevitable that the sort of translation philosophy that would come out of this inbred environment is the “Lower Quality Translation” movement. And that this philosophy would be deaf to the asymmetry I mentioned above.

The asymmetry is this: An American or a British company might opt for a bad Spanish translation as a decent stand-in for a better text (Americans and Brits rarely have a clue about what it is like to live in a world where a lot of the text consumed on a daily basis is badly translated). In stark contrast, a (self-respecting) Spanish company would never choose that option when translating its material into English because, in Spain and many other parts of the world, Pidgin English is routinely an object of ridicule. It marks you out as a rube, as unsophisticated. (And I am guessing that stigma is far more “universal” than the urge to communicate at the cheapest possible cost.)    

For empirical proof, look no further than these YouTube clips of Francisco Franco reading out a proclamation in English. 

I think the video comes from the early days of the 1936 military insurrection that triggered the Spanish Civil War. Someone on Franco’s staff must have decided that an English-language speech was just the trick to get the British Government and public to side with the right-wing coup. One of the YouTube clips is entitled “Learn English with the Generalissimo.” Franco read the text phonetically and none of his aides took the trouble of smoothing out the rougher passages. (The subtitled Pidgin English video is even a mini-genre in Spain; this is from a taped message by the head of a major bank communicating with his British employees).

Like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, the literal meaning is sharply different according to the audience: perplexity for native English speakers, extreme hilarity for native Spanish speakers. Lower quality translation has a reputational cost that is hard to quantify in a monolingual English-speaking milieu, but which is nonetheless very, very real.

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. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Ortsbo and the Sleaze Factor

Sorry it had to go down like this, baby, 'cause yo ass is cute. But you got got.

—The Wire

you got got: you've been had; you've been tricked.

Hey man, what about our deal?

Heh! You got got!

—Urban Dictionary

I have been following David Grunwald’s series of posts about a language technology company called Ortsbo with interest for some time now (read the entries here, here, here and here). He has been blogging about it for months. In a nutshell, Ortsbo is a public company that trades on the Canadian stock market and purports to have created a program that allows you to translate instant messages automatically. The company periodically rolls out announcements that it has launched an application of its proprietary technology for some use or other. The problem is, as Grunwald has demonstrated, that it is a total scam. The company does not have its own automatic translation software. It is hooked up to the Google Translate API. It is pretty straightforwardly a rip-off. Just look at the following YouTube presentation by an anonymous user:

In brief, it is a massive scam of the old “pump and dump” type familiar to anyone who has watched Wall Street.

The thing I find baffling (aside from the passivity of Canadian market regulators, especially in the wake of the Sino-Forest scandal) is that, although Grunwald’s blog is widely read, on Twitter you regularly see gurus and pundits retweeting Ortsbo’s press releases or circulating its bogus operational reports. Why is this happening? There are only two possible explanations: ignorance or connivance.

Ignorance? Well, there is plenty of that around in the world (and a healthy percentage of it in Translation Consultancy Land).

But what do I mean by connivance (please note: "connivance" is different from "complicity")? I am guessing that many of the consultants and analysts who fling Ortsbo’s criminal dung at each other like frenzied chimpanzees are probably aware of Grunwald’s exposé. But they don’t care. That’s it. They simply do not care. Which is cold, cold, cold, because real people who invested in that company will lose money. And other people will go to jail. But a lot of the people who contribute to spreading Ortsbo’s garbage are self-righteous, pious souls who think bankers’ bonuses are obscene and feel warm and fuzzy about Occupy Wall Street. Now, of course, no amount of malfeasance in an industry as tiny as translation will ever require a bailout like TARP, but my point is that financial plutocrats do not have a monopoly on the stupidity and compromised morals that led to the multi-tranche synthetic subprime CDO cubed.

The problem is that the people doling out the language tech feelgoods on the streetcorners of the World Wide Web are in the business of hype. As Web 2.0 ideologues like to say, the quality of information doesn’t matter. No, the amount of information is what matters. So they just circulate these press releases to keep the buzz going about the “vibrant” and “innovative” (cough, cough) translation tech sector. Because, without the buzz and the hype, the reality of a stagnant Florida swamp is harder to pass off as prime real estate. So they just keep on bringin’ in da funk and da noise. (Now, does anyone need further proof that there is an MT Bubble?)

Now, I disagree with Mr. Grunwald about most things. His ideas about translation as a commodity are depressing and I wouldn’t work for him unless something with a bit more dignity—such as “circus freak”—weren’t a viable career option (for whatever reason). However, he must be commended for his honesty in denouncing the Ortsbo mess. And if l10n consultants wish to wash off some of the sleaze that is beginning to spatter them, they should help him clean out this Augean stable. 

 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, several small-and-medium-sized brokerages, asset management institutions based in Spain, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network or follow him on Twitter.

McLocalization: The Answer to a Question Nobody Asked

In all of these discussions about information technology,

you come back to the fact that they are

solving problems that are not really problems.

- Malcolm Gladwell

Even in our age of globalization, if you take a poll of all Fortune 500 CEOs, cheap translation would not rank among the top 10 or even 20 items on their wish list. The problem with McLocalization is it’s designed to do things companies would kinda, sorta want done without actually investing any real money in it. It is a technology for doing things companies want done at the margin. Guess what? Great fortunes have come from making things cheaper that are important priorities. Not the stuff you leave as your last priority and assign to the absolute lowest bidder. To quote an economist: “Markets have a strong incentive to find and develop alternatives to relatively expensive inputs (like pricey labour).” Did you hear that? Relatively expensive inputs. For translation, that boat has long since sailed in the Era of the Internet. But even aside from the Internet, the highest earning translator in the world earns less than the average assistant of a chief executive officer (translation is  not scalable, in the sense discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; the heirs of Roberto Bolaño can become millionaires another time over with zero input of labor, while Bolaño's translator gets exactly the same fee whether a translated novel sells ten copies or one hundred thousand copies). Translation-tech companies struggle mightily to climb the Kilimanjaro of cheap translation only to reach the summit and find Lionbridge already there, having a picnic with ProZ.com.

Is it any wonder that the giants of McLocalization are burdened with anorexic profit margins and, defying belief, fail to turn in attractive earnings despite paying dirt-poor rates and having huge corporate clients? Put it another way: How many McLSP billionaires are there out there? When was the last you saw one of those CEOs dining out with Zuck and Steve and Larry and Sergey?

And, remember, every penny sunk into research and development (if any is actually being done outside of Google) is a penny added to the cost of translating a bunch of stuff no one really needed to read in the first place.

This suggests that any business model based exclusively around cheap translation is dubious in the long term.

Moreover, this suggests that, from the point of view of the post-editor, translation automation and low wages are inextricably linked. You ask: Why won’t I be able to charge a premium rate for post-editing these manuals no one ever reads anyway? Why? The answer is kind of in the question, don’t you think? Your boss is struggling to turn a dime for himself and only needs you to apply a little lipstick to the crowdsourced, post-edited pig.

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, several small-and-medium-sized brokerages, asset management institutions based in Spain, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network or follow him on Twitter.

Lisa and the Hamster: Some Thoughts on Non-Literary Texts and Style

Over at the Intralingo blog, Lisa Carter is very diplomatically sparring with one reader who relentlessly insists that he cranks out 10,000 publication-ready words a day on a regular basis. (“I’ve often translated well in excess of 10,000 words a day, and working overtime (sic) I’ve translated up to 18,000 words (sic!) over a 15 hour period (sick, yo!), and I would rate my quality as high, if not higher, than my contemporaries (contemporaries?).”) Lisa is very tactfully brandishing argument after argument that this is not possible, but our man, undeterred, blithely charges back after every rebuff. Bless her heart, she is soooooo polite. I, on the other hand, (for good or ill) was not bequeathed the gift of suffering fools lightly. Ms. Carter is wasting her time, though. Let’s face it, there simply isn’t a polite way to, you know, tell someone to his face that he is a hack.

Appreciation for language is hard to teach if your student simply doesn’t have it. It is a sense. Just like you cannot explain to a blind person what makes one of Monet’s water lilies special, Lisa cannot raise her voice sufficiently and explain to our 18,000-word-per-day Wunderkind that his output is most assuredly a stomach-churning bucket of bat guano. Even tone-deaf people who talk about translation but have never translated a single word in their lives are smart enough to sidestep the “literary” argument quickly. So they just, Sheldon-Cooper-like, bracket literature in a special mental category (“stuff that other people care a lot about—for some unfathomable reason—but I don’t”) and blissfully go about their business because literature isn’t applicable to commercial translation. “Ah, but that is literature,” the McLocalization theorist ruminates with a knowing smile, “I have heard of it, hmmm, yes… Wikipedia tells me it is something from back in the Age of the Codex. But I am here to discuss repetitive technical texts…”

The literary/non-literary dichotomy is not that ancient. As is the case of a lot of stupid stuff (nationalism, Mesmerism, Gothic novels), it only dates back to the Romantics. It is slowly being placed into question by the genre-disrupting culture of the present. Think about Ali G and reality TV, and then try to retain the old comforting distinctions of fact and fiction snugly in your head. The idea that we bring a set of conventions (the phrase “suspension of disbelief” was coined by Wordsworth) to one set of texts and another—completely different—set of decoding tools to non-fiction simply does not resist serious critical scrutiny. Does that mean that Ben Bernanke’s press conferences should be rendered by the financial translator with the same appreciation for the mot juste that Lisa Carter lavishes on her novels? Well, yes and no. “Yes” in the sense that you should weigh every word carefully (because every central banker does and their words can cause a lot of devastation) and “no” in the sense that you shouldn’t waste too much time waiting for the right adverb to strike you like the Pacific struck Keats’s “stout Cortez.” Because, aside from being slightly foolish, it will get you fired in the end.

Of course, the idea that a “translator is a writer” sounds hyper-pretentious if you think capital “W” Writer: a Luther-throwing-the-inkpot-at-the-Devil Writer, or a Flaubert-spending-eighteen-years-working-on-Madame-Bovary Writer. But small caps “w” writer in the sense that you write. And you should try to do it as well as you can in the service of the original author, who may or may not be a capital “W” Writer, but nonetheless deserves a hearing (or at least is paying for it).

I was reminded of that recently while reading Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac ( translators should be keen readers). While Catton’s books are not really works of academic history, they do provide a lot of technical details on military affairs, from the movement of armies during campaigns to minutiae such as the types of weapons used and just what the heck hardtack actually was. But his works are also quite opaque as texts. The influence of William Faulkner is felt on every page, even though it is a very Northern book—an attempt to write Yankee history. The jumps forward and backward in time are also unimaginable without the precedent of literary Modernism. One small example. When Catton is describing the sequence of the Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, the 12^th Massachusetts regiment is left facing a colossal flanking movement from the Confederates. The author abruptly breaks off for one entire page, in the middle of the battle, to tell the story of the regiment. Its members were responsible for writing the marching song John Brown’s Body, dedicated to the abolitionist guerrilla whose raid on Harper’s Ferry partly triggered the Civil War ( “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/ And we go matching on!”). This song was the source for Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is still a staple of American military marching bands (and tactfully suppresses references to rotting corpses). That takes Catton a page and a half. After such as lengthy digression, Catton equally abruptly returns to the two tiny brigades facing a Rebel onslaught:

But the dandy 12^th was a long way from the ladies of Boston now, and Colonel Webster was killed, and the 12^th was finally forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts’s men and the Germans. (p.40)

You see what the author did there? Try rewriting that sentence according to the rules of “proper” grammar (leaving aside the fact that he started a paragraph with a negative conjunction, a huge no-no according to the provincial school marms who teach “proper” English):

However, the dandy 12^th was a long way from the ladies of Boston. Colonel Webster was (had been?) killed. The regiment (Note: the reiteration of the name probably wouldn't pass muster with most proofreaders) was finally forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts’s men and the Germans.

Blink and you miss it. Try to translate this sentence without trying to recreate the confusion and terror of the Massachusetts soldiers and you might as well translate 18,000 words a day.

But perhaps that is a rare case of non-fiction that is suffused with literary technique. After all, the Civil War as a historical subject has always been more the preserve of belles lettres because of Whitman, Sandburg and Faulkner. The lyrical undertone to a lot of writing on the conflict stretches all the way to the present, as anyone who has seen Ken Burns’s documentaries on the conflict will easily perceive.

So how about a less high-falutin’ example? This is an example of something I come across very often (the highlight is mine):

After Papandreou's election win, Mršnik wrote, in a confidential letter to Standard & Poor's customers, that in light of the repeated budgetary lapses of the various Greek governments, it remained to be seen whether the new administration had the will to implement a credible budget strategy. This sounded diplomatic, but it was pure sarcasm. Investors got the message, namely that the decline of Greek bonds from secure investments to casino chips was accelerating.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,790333-2,00.html

In a lot of financial research, what you put down on paper is purposefully bland, because some day you may have to answer to a wider audience (or an angry politician or, gulp, a judge) for anything that is more controversial than a spiceless platitude. That is why you have to be attuned to the sarcasm. Once again, blink and you miss it. Mršnik was trading a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” moment with his readers. His real opinion was reserved for the very privileged clients who get him on the telephone or the board room, as any good analyst’s opinion should be. That is why inexperienced translators often chuckle and say: “Wait, is he serious?” Duh! Of course not! The unspoken byword here is “ldl,” which is what investment bankers write for “let’s discuss live” (i.e., where no written or taped evidence is left).

Every single sentence contains dozens of tiny little decisions. If you translate 18,000 words a day, that means you make over 100,000 tiny decisions in a single day. But that is no problem because you are working on a non-literary, repetitive text, right? We can just hope that none of your tiny decisions is dangerous. Or the subject of future litigation.

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, several small-and-medium-sized brokerages, asset management institutions based in Spain, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network or follow him on Twitter.