Skeptic Alert: Did Dylan Self-Censor in China? (Off-Topic Weekend Post)

I don't even know why we come. Goin' back where we come from.

 “Oxford Town”

We live in a world of abundant information. I am highly suspicious of the belief that quantity is even faintly correlated with quality. My skepticism is often proven to be well placed. I don’t know how it happens that some stories travel around the world at the speed of light, but somehow they just become omnipresent, especially during slow news cycles. One instance was last week’s insistent reporting that Bob Dylan had his first gig in China and that he played a censored set. “A little disappointing,” was my first reaction as a well-informed fan, “but not surprising.” The relations between Dylan and political commitments are highly complex. This was probably another episode of a great artist’s five-decade long escape from easy categorization.

But then I recalled Dylan’s steady drift away from the left in the 1960s. One thing I always found unsettling about the reaction by folkie purists to his initial dalliances with rock’n’roll was the piousness of the complaints that he was betraying some sort of commitment he had made to become the voice of civil rights or the liberal left or whatever. He was barely twenty-two, with just two albums behind him and already critics had decided what sort of music he had to play. That is why, in my view, the turn to the electric guitar and the move away from folk was not only logical but a way to escape from a creepy-folkie-lefty religious cult.

Was this same piety rearing its ugly head half a century later as everyone tut-tutted the “censored” setlist? The doubt lingered as I went about my daily business. But then I stumbled upon some of the news articles about the event. The most “significant” absence from the setlist that most reporters noted was “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” cited as practically the only evidence of self-censorship:

New York Times:
Though he stayed away from songs with obvious protest messages, like “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Mr. Dylan played “All Along the Watchtower”…
L.A. Times:
His performance doesn't include 'The Times They Are A-Changin' or 'Blowin' in the Wind.'
Reuters:
Famous for his songs against injustice and for civil liberties and pacifism, Dylan struck a cautious line in Beijing and did not sing anything that might have overtly offended China's Communist rulers, like "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

And then my niggling doubt turned into a raging whirlwind of skepticism. First of all, Dylan’s corpus is huge. We are talking about hundreds of songs. Dylan himself has bragged that he has left out of his albums more material than most artists record in a lifetime, and the nine volumes (and counting) of “bootlegs” bears this out with a vengeance (his website lists 458 songs that have been “released,” but that figure includes several lyrics not written by him). So picking out the absence of one or two songs out of a twelve or fourteen song setlist and extrapolating conclusions from that is hazardous, at best.

That led me to poke around the Internet a little and I must confess that I was amazed by the sheer mountain of information that spilled out after a little absent-minded googling. Dylan’s own website has a wealth of information, including (amazingly) the exact dates and number of times that he has played every single one of his songs in every single concert. Perfect. If the exclusion of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” is meaningful (i.e., due to censorship), it would make sense that it is a part of his regular repertoire.

However, reality fits the censorship narrative less easily than one might expect. The data on bobdylan.com indicates that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (unambiguously a protest song) has been off and on a part of his repertoire throughout the decades (637 plays), well ahead of other civil-rights protest songs. For instance, “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (one of my favorites) has only received 272 plays in live gigs over five decades. To take another example, a song that features prominently in the Dylan legend, “Only a Pawn in Their Game” (about the white supremacist who killed NAACP organizer Medgar Evers) has only been played eight times (the last time was way back in October 10, 1964). Even more surprisingly, Dylan only played “The Death of Emmet Till” in public once, a whopping forty-nine years ago in Montreal, on July 2, 1962.

OK, so far so good for the censorship narrative. The problem is that “The Times They Are A-Changin’” abruptly fell off the recurring setlist almost two years ago. The last time Dylan and his band played it publicly was two years ago, in Fresno, California, on August 14, 2009. Ergo, its absence can hardly be attributed to Chinese censors. 

The hacks would have been on firmer footing if they had focused on “Blowin’ in the Wind.” First of all, it is also unambiguously a protest song, a “get up and do something now” call to political action (albeit more wistful and allusive). Secondly, it is only one of a handful of Dylan songs that have featured more than 1,000 times in the live repertoire (1,027 times). Thirdly, it has been played by Dylan and his band much more recently. It showed up consistently in live concerts as recently as 2010.

Crucially, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was not heard in Beijing. However, it did show up in the gig that immediately preceded Beijing, which was held in a very significant place. Dylan chose to perform this bona fide protest song about oppression in none other than Taipei, the capital of a free country where presumably censorship was not a factor.

So was the Taipei list the setlist that Dylan would have rocked in Beijing if the censors hadn’t stepped in? Was he sending a sly message to democracy activists, the detained artist Ai Wei Wei or people working for Tibetan independence? Beats me. Trying to come to facile conclusions about what artists try to communicate through their art, or in this case, through meta-musical elements like a setlist, is tricky. And in this episode the evidence is mixed, at best. After all, the Beijing set included one hard-core Christian-themed lyric, “Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking,” which includes these verses:

Jesus said, ‘Be ready

For you know not the hour in which I come’

He said, ‘He who is not for Me is against Me’

Just so you know where He’s coming from.

And all this in a country where, if I understand correctly, religions such as Catholicism and the Falun Gong are actively persecuted.

To which one must add one salient fact that even Rolling Stone overlooked: Bob Dylan is a strange and unpredictable man.

When he was invited to the concerts to fight the Ethiopian famines, he took advantage of the spotlight to call for a set of similar concerts to help out farmers (a noble sentiment, albeit slightly out of place). Then there was his speech while receiving the Tom Paine Award in the sixties, when he insulted the people giving him the award for being old and made cryptic remarks about Lee Harvey Oswald. My favorite anecdote is when the first Traveling Wilburys album was being recorded in his home in the eighties. Instead of being excited about the project, he apparently grumbled continuously about the expense of having to feed “all those people.” And just watch those press conferences where he runs rings around reporters with half-smugness and half-contempt. Let’s face it. Dylan is a weird dude. And he doesn’t like explaining himself. You just have to take him as he is: “But my heart is telling me, I love ya but you’re strange.”

The interesting thing for me is how shaky information gets around at the speed of light. One nugget that would have given this pseudo-story a little more oomph would have been confirmation that the setlist was actually dictated by Chinese censors. To sort of get to the bottom of this, I had to make several hypertext jumps before arriving at a piece from The Irish Times. It is a very well-written article and, I suspect, the source of the censorship hullabaloo, since it is the only one written by a reporter who was actually at the concert. The author reports that:

The ministry of culture reportedly snapped up 2,000 of the 18,000 seats. The set list had been strictly vetted to make sure there were no songs that could be interpreted as a message to Ai or as supportive of the “jasmine revolutions” sweeping the Middle East.

Which I find a little strange. The ministry of culture “reportedly” bought 2,000 seats and also censored the show? Oh, well. Who exactly is the source for the datum that the Orwellian bureaucrats approved the list of songs? The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.

Ultimately, I think the entire story is plausible but rests on shakier foundations than (mostly second-hand) articles reported with bated breath. All in all, the entire episode reveals more about lingering Romantic views of art than about Dylan or China. The idea of the divinely inspired poet-troubadour who unleashes a revolution with his immortal words remains alive and well. That is not to say that art doesn’t matter. And Dylan, at his age and with his standing, surely could afford to make a couple of waves. But has anyone actually claimed that the average Chinese netizen doesn’t have access at the click of a mouse to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and thousands of songs that are perhaps more subversive?

I think the Irish Times correspondent is on firmer ground when he very vividly depicts the social ambience of Dylan’s first Chinese gig:

It was bumper-to-bumper sports-utility vehicles and white BMWs outside the Workers’ Gymnasium as China’s new rich arrived to see the world’s most famous protest singer, Bob Dylan, make his debut in China.

Ah, music is business. It’s only rock’n’roll, after all. The nouveau riche of Beijing came out to listen to a dimly known American legend whose best work was produced while their country was undergoing the hurricane of the Cultural Revolution. Even the English-speaking reporter had trouble understanding the lyrics of the septuagenarian’s "catarrhal death rattle." In a world where the self-immolation of a fruit vendor can topple governments, perhaps the Chinese would have been wise to censor the setlist. But it is a little childish to believe that even the most powerful lyrics would have created more than a ripple before an audience of eighteen thousand in the most populous country in the world. And, believe you me, it’ll take a teensy bit more than “Blowin’ in the Wind” to spring Ai Wei Wei from prison.


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.

Economic Theory Set to Rap

Who'd a thought a cracker named Maynard could lay down such sick rhymes?

The partnership of John Papola, a television producer, and Russ Roberts, an economics professor, has produced another rap video in which the two giants of modern economics, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, spar about the way out of the current crisis: massive government stimulus or laissez faire. It isn’t a parody. The unlikely duo really is dramatizing a theoretical debate that has raged throughout the past hundred years without any definitive resolution:

Papola and Roberts fall squarely on the side of Hayek, but the representation of Keynesianism is not unfair. And the production quality is off the charts!

And here is the original Hayek vs. Keynes smackdown:

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.

Most Localization “Consulting” Is Sloppy Fluff

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make their meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set together by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.”

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”

“Go West, young man” was the recommendation in the nineteenth century for the ambitious twentysomething in the overcrowded cities of the East coast. “Just one word… plastics” was the disheartening tip given by a half-drunk grown-up to the kidult Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. “Become a localization consultant” is the mantra now for the freelance translator worried about being washed away by the alleged tidal wave of language technology.

The problem is it’s far harder to actually gain some real honest-to-goodness knowledge about relatively difficult topics like macroeconomics and international business than to spout a few buzzwords and sound like the CEO of the Kwik-e-Mart, who lives on the summit of a mountain and answers only three questions per visit.

What does it take to become a “localization” guru? Not much, apparently. To become a big thinker in the translation l10n industry, take two completely unrelated statistics, pad them with a few vacuous platitudes and then close with a meaningless generalization.

Take, for instance, this blog entry by a “globalization specialist” called Renato Beninatto. He drops the statistic that “three-quarters of sales for 28 of the 30 companies [in the DAX] come from outside Germany.” Now, let’s parse this for a second. First of all, what do you mean exactly when you say that a “sale” comes from outside of Germany? How can a sale go or come anywhere? Do you mean the good that was sold? The place where the sale was made? The place where the good was made? Right from the start, we are in a world of dimly understood terms and poorly managed concepts.

Beninatto proceeds to connect this datum to (emphasis added) “last year's S&P 500 analysis of 250 American companies in which 46.6% of all sales in 2009 were produced and sold outside of the United States.” First of all, the S&P 500 doesn’t analyze one single solitary thing. The S&P 500 is an index of the 500 largest companies in the United States ranked according to market cap. Our business expert is probably referring to Standard & Poor’s, a ratings agency that among other things publishes the S&P 500.

But let’s leave this factual sloppiness to one side for a moment and let’s sink our hands further in the mushy conceptual sloppiness of this brief text. According to the blog post, “46.6% of all sales in 2009 were produced and sold outside of the United States.” What does this phrase mean, exactly? How can “sales” be “produced and sold”? How can you sell a sale, for Chrissake? Much less produce it…

When someone says he is struggling to find the right words to express a thought, that person is mistaken. If he doesn’t have the right words, then his thinking process is faulty. Words aren’t transparent vessels that convey thoughts. They are the utensils with which we think. Muddled expression is muddled thinking.

In this specific case, apples and oranges are being compared and the comparison is passed off as some sort of profound insight about the world economy. However, the German and American economies are two completely different animals. Whereas the United States outsourced the bulk of its manufacturing processes overseas (both low-wage, labor-intensive tasks and medium-wage, specialized factory jobs), Germany followed a different route, outsourcing all low-skilled processes and retaining at home as much high-end, high-value-added manufacturing as possible. Therefore, when 28 out of 30 DAX companies report that their sales abroad amounted to so-and-so percentage, they mean the dollar or euro value of finished products actually made in Germany and exported to European neighbors and the rest of the world. By contrast, when American companies report sales abroad, what they really mean is goods produced in Vietnam and China and sold by, say, Coca-Cola France in France.

That is, of course, a much more nuanced analysis than our self-styled “visionary” and “agent provocateur” has in mind. After all, what the blog post really boils down to is bland statements along the lines of “there is a lot of foreign trade” and “a lot of foreign trade requires a lot of translation” (ka-ching!), both of which have actually been truisms since the mid-seventeenth century, when the first Dutch and British schooners started kidnapping people off the coast of West Africa. But one must not forget that a shibboleth is designed to have no meaning. Its real meaning is its meta-meaning.

Although it is still healthy to point out from time to time that the Emperor is prancing around in the nude.


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.

Unsuck It: The Jargon-Killing Terminology Translation Tool

Jargon is everywhere. A couple of years ago The Wall Street Journal published a 1,500-word piece on the use of “bucket” and to this day I swear I have no idea as to what the word’s usefulness is. As an undergraduate, I was taught linguistics by non-prescriptivist lexicographers, so I don’t actually believe that there is any wrong or right in language use, only degrees of adequacy to certain situations. I confess, though, that my last remnants of prescriptivism are aggravated not by teenage language or texting or all of those things that scandalize purists, but rather business jargon. Perhaps because jargon is Moriarty to the perplexed bilingual Watsons who wish they were accompanied by a jargon-busting Holmes in their daily labor.

Well, the solution to some of this perplexity has arrived courtesy of a new website called Unsuck It. It allows you to type in the “crapeme” of your choice and inquire as to its meaning. An equivalent in plain English is automatically produced. When you have a little business phrase that is giving you trouble, you type it in. You then get two choices, a la Google: “Unsuck It” and “I’m Feeling Douchey.” The logo says it all: it features a little man with his pants pulled down who is making a photocopy of his butt. If you introduce a query such as “bucketize”, you get a neat little definition (“Categorize”) and an instance of how to use the word (“We can’t boil the ocean, so let’s start by bucketizing the deliverables and picking the low-hanging fruit”).

Then you have the option of either tweeting the meaning of your new-found word or (I love this) you can “send an email to the douchebag who used it.” When you click this option, the page activates your email program and a message pops up with the subject line: “Hey, douchebag! Stop torturing the English language!” while the message contains the offending word and a plain language equivalent.

All in all, a must-have in the terminological arsenal of the modern translator.

So the question is: “Are you feeling douchey, punk?” And if you are, try to unsuck it before your colleagues do it for you.


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 Master and Margarita, Or Why Businesses Don’t Have To Translate Everything

I’m a big fan of Matthew Inman’s The Oatmeal. It isn’t often that a cartoon makes me laugh out loud. The thing is that although Inman is a visual artist, his humor is less visual than one would expect and much more dependent on his writing, which is hilarious.

One example: a strip entitled “If you do this in an email, I hate you,” treats a situation that will be familiar to many translators. Jim Jimmers sends an email to four people and the subject line reads “Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Mission Statement edit” (the attachment is the entirely plausible “missionstatement3_latest_newer_withJimschanges_2304.doc”). Jimmer’s message to his collaborators is: “Okay. I changed all instances of ‘very’ to ‘AMAZINGLY’ and added a clause about how incredible we are at pretty much everything.”

Inman’s translation below reads: “Welcome to our nightmare ‘File… save as’ BWAHAHAHA HORHORHORR. You will cry tears of blood from our collaborative editing clusterf--k.”

It appears that Inman recently translated some of his stuff into Japanese. That prompted one irate Spanish-speaking reader called Margarita to write the following (the entire exchange is reproduced in an ongoing series that is appropriately entitled Retarded Emails):

Nice, you translate your comics in Japanese but not in Spanish. You’re a douche. Maybe you don’t get many Spanish viewers, but that’s ‘cause THEY DON’T SPEAK ENGLISH! Don’t you realize your fellow Latin-Americans like this type of humor?? Maybe not. Do your research.

I seriously think you should translate this shit in Spanish.

Now, there are many things one could say about this type of message, and Inman proceeds to throw a few choice words back at his reader. What I would like to highlight as indicative of current attitudes toward translation is twofold: 1) the assumption that the selection of one language over another is exclusionist and 2) the uncritical belief that translation of a cultural artifact into every single language is feasible or even economical (after all, Inman is pretty much just a very successful freelancer, as far as I can gather).

Suffice it to say that in the mind of uninformed people such as Margarita, the river of relativistic political correctness has clashed head on with the stream of (superficial, millennialist, dangerously naïve…) assumptions that scarcity (which forces us to make choices in the allocation of resources) is a thing of the past. The result is an onrushing flood of idiocy of which she is only a tiny molecule.

Of course, Inman’s reply is much more colorful:

I also didn’t translate my comics into French, German, Portuguese, Swahili, Ethiopian, or into that grunting / dry-heaving language that orangutans at my local zoo speak to each other. Do I have to translate into all these languages to be a non-douche? Please advise. The orangutans are waiting.

kabir via everystockphoto.

In a world dominated by instant gratification, I guess it's normal to view any text in a single language as what Lacanians call a “lack.” Worse yet, superficial political correctness will tend to view the selection of one language over another as exclusionist. Moore’s Law and baby steps in automatic translation away from the half century of RbMT stumbles have fed the illusion that instant translation into every language is an arm’s length away.

Margaritas abound, unfortunately. But if you’re going to “localize,” either do it well or don’t do it at all. Above all, don’t settle for a middle-of-the-road compromise such as McLocalization. And if you get some heat from the Margaritas of this world, I suggest that you print out The Oatmeal’s answer and frame it for future reference.

Remember, the orangutans will always be waiting.

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.

Demà és Sant Jordi: Saint George's Day in Catalonia

Tomorrow is Saint George’s Day, or the Diada de Sant Jordi, and it’s a big deal in Catalonia. For F.C. Barcelona fans like me, the crushing disappointment of Wednesday’s Copa del Rey defeat at the hands of Real Madrid is slowly starting to wear off and I expect that the Catalans will be very ready for the festivity. Now, I knew Saint George was the patron saint of Catalonia and from there the nationalist relevance of what was originally a religious feast. The cult of the dragon-slaying saint was widespread throughout medieval Europe. The cross of Saint George pretty much is the English flag and the red on white design figures in the heraldry of places as diverse as Catalonia and the Ukraine. But in recent years, especially across Latin America, the custom of vigorously promoting books on the 23^rd of April and accompanying each book sale with a rose has become widespread. The explanation was that it is a custom adopted from Catalonia. So basically you have a medieval warrior-knight cult mixed with books and roses? What, I wondered, was the connection? Whoa. Time to visit Wikipedia.

What I was able to glean was that it has been customary in Catalonia since the Middle Ages for men to bequeath a rose to their lovers on the day. OK, that accounts for the rose. Now for the book. It turns out that in the 1970s UNESCO declared it World Book Day. The 23^rd of April was chosen because it is the day in 1616 when both Cervantes and Shakespeare died. Except that they didn’t, because the one-armed creator of the Spanish language died on the 22^nd of April and wasn’t buried until the next day, whereas the two-armed creator of the English tongue actually died in May or thereabouts. However, because Protestant England resisted the Popish innovation of the Gregorian calendar and held on to the pagan Julian calendar until the eighteenth century, the (near) coincidence of the demise of the two legendary scribblers passed unremarked for many decades.

Are you with me so far? Sant Jordi, then, is a feast with four layers that have collided thanks to centuries of complex coincidences, near-coincidences and not-very-real- coincidences. The religious meaning has probably long since been lost beneath layers of medieval myth-making. The nationalist relevance is that Sant Jordi is the patron saint of Catalonia. The romantic significance is that on this feast day, gallants gave their ladies a rose. And the bibliophilic meaning was conferred upon the date by some imaginative U.N. bureaucrat with a degree in Romance languages. This initiative has now been bolstered by some sly Catalan book entrepreneur as a good excuse to move some paper and the idea has caught on in the Spanish-speaking world.

These wikipedic excursions were motivated by the fact this year’s celebrations of Sant Jordi include a series of conferences in the locality of Vilafranca del Penedés devoted to my grandfather’s work. Vilafranca, about an hour by train from Barcelona, is where my paternal grandfather and grandmother were born. Several local historians have invested a lot of effort in preserving the city’s heritage, which includes, I am proud to say, my grandfather’s oeuvre (mainly three books: La ben nascuda, Com han estat i com som els Catalans, and Servidumbre y grandeza de la filosofía). He wrote mostly in Catalan and his lifelong passion and only subject was his homeland, which is somewhat poignant given that he lived as an exile from 1939, when he was not yet 30, until his death in Caracas in 1985 (here is a detailed biographical sketch). That loss, of course, marked the common experience of the Republican diaspora that fled Spain at the end of the Civil War. Fortunately, though, he did live long enough to see off the end of the Fascist dictatorship, the return of democracy and the restitution of Catalan regional autonomy.

My visit to the online encyclopedia then compelled me to visit Vilafranca’s homepage to see whether it has any plans for Sant Jordi. It turns out that it does and the best summary is on this page. The activities scheduled for Saturday include an outdoor sale (all day long) of roses and books at which several authors from the vicinity will be signing books. At the Jaume I Square at 18.00h there will be a children’s play explaining the legend of Sant Jordi. On Monday, April 25, at 19.00 there is a concert by a local children’s choir devoted to Sant Jordi at the Church of Sant Francesc which apparently has an altarpiece representing the saint (I did not visit this church during my visit to Vilafranca).

However, Vilafranca is synonymous with the castells, and the feast day does not disappoint. The Plaça de la Vila, or main square, features a presentation by the Colla Jove Xiquets de Vilafranca. I had the opportunity to see a competition of castells in the Sants quarter of Barcelona on my last visit to Barcelona. And I was also able to see the Castellers de Vilafranca practice their craft at their headquarters. I was even recruited to participate as one of the bottom rungs of the human ladder, when the cap de colla (head of the troupe) called for els més bestiolets, i.e., the bigger dudes (I’m six feet tall and weigh 220 pounds, so there was really no way around it). Anyway, both as a visual spectacle and as a participant, it is an intense, breathtaking and utterly impressive spectacle, so if you get a chance, go and see the castells either on Sant Jordi or any other diada castellera.

Oh, Vilafranca also means wine, so by all means pay a visit to the city’s Wine Museum, or Vinseum, with exhibitions about the region’s wine industry, curated by Joan Cuscó. And if your thing isn’t museums but rather tours of the wine-growing countryside and tasting the thing itself, then visit the website covering wine country tours for the area. It is in English and seems to be pretty detailed. That, of course, has nothing to do with Sant Jordi, but is worthwhile taking into account if you’re already there. And here I leave it for today. Have a happy Diada de Sant Jordi if you happen to be in Catalonia and, even if you aren’t, buy a good book and read it (one of the precepts of Monty Python’s The Meaning of 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.

Geeks Just Don't Get Humor (Even When It's Their Own)

I'm listening to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen being interviewed on the "APM: Marketplace" podcast:

Interviewer: You actually talk a little bit about what you perceive as a culture of mediocrity at Microsoft. And you quote a guy who is a senior manager there saying "Yeah, I'd like to take every fourth person at this company and take them out and shoot them and we'd be much better off."

Paul Allen: Well, he was speaking metaphorically...

Interviewer: Of course...

 Bazzinga!

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.

Highlights From Last Week’s Reading Around the Web

In his regular Bloomberg column, Michael Lewis analyzes the data dump from the Federal Reserve detailing who got emergency funding at the height of the financial crisis. Although central bank orthodoxy dictates that high-quality collateral should be demanded, it seems that the U.S. Fed lowered its standards considerably. It apparently included “a vault in the Fed basement filled with young women, who claimed, in broken but excited English, they had been repo-ed by the Italian government.”

The Wall Street Journal explains some obscure financial lingo. Always useful for the translator looking to get some of the more dense financial terms explained. My favorite: “Broker: What you'll be, if you follow the advice [of market strategists].”

An interesting Reuters piece by Felix Salmon on the economics of the art market. A whopping 17% of modern art auctions involve Warhol pieces.

Under the category of “S*&%t To Make You Feel Hopeless About the Future,” a New York Times piece analyzing why it makes monetary sense for Rutgers to pay Snooki from Jersey Shore to speak on campus as opposed o paying Nobel laureate Toni Morrison for a lecture.

A really nice blog entry from Seth Godin about where real value lies. Short and sweet (less than 500 words), like all his stuff, but applicable to any industry, including the translation beeswax.


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.

My Favorite Firefox Add-On: Read It Later

How many times have you come across something while surfing the Internet that you knew you wanted to read but not at that exact moment? Perhaps the item is worth reading but not sufficiently important to add to your cluttered list of favorites. The free Firefox add-on Read It Later is one solution. Whenever you see an item you want earmarked for later, you simply clip it to your Read It Later list and it remains there until the appropriate time.

Today I had to reinstall Firefox because of frequent crashes. The major downside to this most primitive of solutions for software glitches, of course, is that I also have to reinstall all my browser add-ons. Worse yet, that could imply erasing my Read It Later list. But I shouldn’t have worried. You can create an account and save your links online. There is also an option for downloading your reading list to a folder specified by you, either in .html or plain text, and have it available after you reinstall your browser with all its goodies. This option, however, did not work for me when I tried it. It took forever to process the command and I really don't plan on dealing with software glitches on day when Barcelona and Real Madrid clash at the Santiago Bernabéu. Finally, I discovered a note from the developer stating that “Web based offline reading is a more complicated task.” So perhaps we’re looking at more of a work in progress than a finished product. Nonetheless, Read It Later is quickly becoming an app I use on a daily basis and, to be honest, 60% of the material for this blog comes from random stuff I’ve clipped to my reading list. A nifty arrow to have in your translator's quiver.

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 New Alchemy: How To Take the Crap Produced by 1,000 Bilinguals and Turn It into Gold

There seems to be an imperative in the translation industry according to which a description of your business plan needs to be as outrageous and vulgar as possible, perhaps in order to drown out the outrageousness and vulgarity of your competitors. This inevitably leads to an escalation to see who can say the most idiotic thing. Lower standards are the unsurprising outcome. “Quality doesn’t matter!” screams one such guru and proceeds to make basic arithmetical mistakes in his PowerPoint presentation. “It is wrong to think that translators who charge less are not good” bleats another one while proceeding to embarrass herself. This is the level of expert commentary to which the language professional is subjected as he  makes his way through the mist and fog of the early twenty-first century.

And, of course, one is a pedant, or worse, for pointing these things out. However, the race to the bottom that is the Web 2.0 in the language industry has reached a new low.

Then title starts off fairly well. With a bold, provocative statement. “Each time we fire a ‘professional linguist,’ our quality improves.” That’s good stuff. It reminds one of Hermann Göring at his pinnacle: “Every time I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.” Or Khrushchev: “Every time I send an economist to the gulag, our production figures improve.” So our neo-barbarian is in good company, totalitarianism-wise.

However, it is all downhill from there, for in the next sentence we take a brusque detour through the Valley of No Grammar. “Language translation industry is full of controversy.” And in the  blink of an eye we are in those Cold War movies where the bad guys were Scottish actors playing Russians who spoke without using definite articles. You can almost hear some Stakhanovist management consultant saying: “Definite articles inefficient! Bourgeois! Unnecessary! From now on, Soviet people speak without ‘the’.”

Inevitably, it gets worse. To catalog the grammatical innovations in a 1,000-word piece would require several 1,000-word pieces. But, again, don't let my pedantry get the best of me. My old prejudices about writing at a sixth-grade level. Those quaint remnants of the past onto which I mistakenly cling.

Let's analyze the real quid of Mr. Buran’s musings. His thesis is quite simple. He starts out painting a gloomy landscape of the language market that ProZ begat:

Language translation industry is full of controversy. It is unregulated and licenses are not required. Every unemployed individual can create a profile on some of the famous freelance job boards and pretend he/she is a translator. Such people cause harm to the clients whether they are direct employers or translation agencies. These mom and pop self proclaimed individuals promise fast turnarounds, low rates and claim to know all the languages including rare ones.

Which leads me to scream the following question at the top of my lungs: What in blazes is a “mom and pop self-proclaimed individual”? But, no, no, no. Don’t get distracted by the patent absurdity. Dig deeper. Let’s assume this was actually written by a human being and not machine translated by a Reagan-era Atari console. Let’s roll with it.

From there, the author goes on to make an interesting leap:

As a founder of one of the most successful translation agencies in the world: “Translation Services USA” with a headquarters in the heart of New York City, I noticed that it is a very ill [sic] practice to rely on any single, even the most experienced and trustworthy translator. I realized that despite the threat of loosing [sic] language consistency, it is a very risky move to store all your eggs in one basket, especially, when you have absolutely no control over it. You assign the whole project to that single individual and then it’s up to his/her discretion and level of commitment to deliver the result. Many people do deliver, but some of them don’t. When they don’t, you end up in awkward situations when clients complain, curse you, leave negative feedbacks [sic], threaten to sue and so on.

OK, first of all… “Translation Services USA”? Really? To paraphrase Matthew Perry: Could you be more generic? You’re honestly telling me that you’re not a KGB front and this is the name you chose? Who in their right mind would assign their documents to an agency called “Translation Services USA”? Are you sure this isn't another cunning ruse from Wiley E. Coyote to catch the Road Runner? Can you imagine a parent saying: “I just left my kid over at Babysitting Services USA. With a name like that, you can’t go wrong, right?”

But, once again, the sheer absurdity of the presentation has led me astray. Back to the argument. Remember the premise: Translators who register for freelance portals suck. Now, to go from there to the statement that “Individual translators are unreliable” is a massive non sequitur (look it up). Yes, any individual can be hit by lightning, impeding them from delivering work on time. But surely the sourcing of reliable individuals is part of the added value you provide as an agency. Otherwise, what distinguishes you, “one of the [self-proclaimed?] most successful agencies in the world,” from thousands of fly-by-night outfits traveling under fishy names like “World Translation Services” or “Language Translation Agency” or “American Translation Agency”? (All three of which actually exist, incidentally.)

Recall the paradox in which a Cretan philosopher gets up and says: “All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan. Therefore, everything I say is a lie.” In this case, Buran the Sophist seems to reason: “All translators suck. This guy is a translator (and sucks). Therefore, I will hire 1,000 translators and produce high-quality translations.” In the case of the philosopher, you have a Cretan paradox. In the case of the agency owner, you just have a cretin (not a paradox).

Imagine you run a company whose 100 employees are all drunks and drug addicts. Nothing gets done, or if it gets done it is handed in late and the quality is appalling. But it so happens that you live in a region where everyone is an alcoholic or has addiction problems. So you fire the 100 drunks and re-hire them on a part-time basis along with another 900 homeless druggies. You split up your old tasks into tiny pieces. Voilà: the magic of crowdsourcing explained in two shakes of a tail. My thesis is that in all possible worlds, your delivery time will be faster but your quality will be comparable to considerably worse. Our linguistically challenged entrepreneur claims otherwise:

We fire our translators! Yes, instead of assigning the whole project to a single translator or several, we decided to build a modern system which would allow us to utilize all our available linguists at the same moment. This way, we don’t rely on anyone. There is a huge redundancy built-in and this also results in huge turnaround improvements. If a single linguist can translate at a rate of 2,000 words per day, the new approach lets us to [sic] reach a 10 times faster turnaround. Even the 100 time faster turnaround is feasible for some of the most common languages such as Spanish, Russian or Portuguese. To put it into perspective, that’s roughly 800 pages per day!

I know what you’re thinking. This guy is an imbecile. Devoting a blog entry to this is about as useful as barking at passers-by. And, yes, there is some truth to that view. However, I justify this on the basis that Mr. Buran’s delusion is actually an extreme example of business models that are being posited as the future of the translation industry. Mr. Buran’s only virtue is greater clarity than the one employed by other omnipresent gurus.

And this catastrophe (Mr. Buran, hire a copywriter, or have one of your drug-addled English natives proofread your stuff) helps clarify something that I had never realized previously.

Adam Smith’s simple yet profound analytical insight was the identification of the division of labor as the secret to higher levels of production. The division of labor has indeed been the key to the great multiplication of humanity’s wealth during the past centuries. However, during the 250 years that separate us from Smith, the process of translation never profited from the division of labor. And don’t tell me that the technology wasn’t there. Because, despite the tsunami of corporate agitprop to which we are constantly subjected, translation remains a low-tech endeavor.

What could have kept a clever industrialist in eighteenth-century Britain from taking a heap of bilinguals, shutting them up in a big warehouse and having each of them translate a paragraph from Hume’s Essays? Absolutely nothing. Why, that way you could translate an 800-page brick in a single day!

What indeed would have kept our industrious entrepreneur from doing that?

Oh, I know! Common sense.

What was stupid in 1776 remains just as stupid in 2011.

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.