What I’ve Been Reading

Translation:

Kevin Lossner chokes on his cheese roll while reading ProZ.com’s failed attempt at localizing its gift shop (funny).

How much is your translation worth?

A piece on the ubiquity of advertising by some translation companies — Foreign Exchange Translations Blog.

Rachel McRoberts discusses tips on income diversification for translators — McRoberts Translations.

A blog post on word count differences between Trados 2007 and Trados Studio — My Migration to Trados Studio

Lisa Carter on the “Translate in the Catskills” event — Intralingo.

Finance and economics:

A thought-provoking piece from Ezra Klein on Inside Job, the documentary about the financial meltdown (with some Talebian resonances about complexity in the financial system). Klein raises a major question: was it corruption or simple, plain old stupidity? The former makes you angry, the latter makes you scared:

What’s remarkable about the financial crisis isn’t just how many people got it wrong, but how many people who got it wrong had an incentive to get it right. Journalists. Hedge funds. Independent investors. Academics. Regulators. Even traders, many of whom had most of their money tied up in their soon-to-be-worthless firms. (…) And ultimately, that’s what makes the financial crisis so scary. The complexity of the system far exceeded the capacity of the participants, experts and watchdogs. Even after the crisis happened, it was devilishly hard to understand what was going on. Some people managed to connect the right dots, in the right ways and at the right times, but not so many, and not through such reproducible methods, that it’s clear how we can make their success the norm. But it is clear that our key systems are going to continue growing more complex, and we’re not getting any smarter, or any less able to ignore risks that we know we should be preparing for. “Inside Job” may have missed that story, but the rest of us can’t afford to.

The New Yorker has a long (11,000-word long) piece on the Raj Rajaratnam ring of insider trading — The New Yorker.

The NPR Planet Money people carry an interview in a podcast with Mark Zandi who points to several interesting signs of a recovery — Planet Money.

Fickleness, thy name is social media. A great piece on the fall and fall (and fall) of MySpace after the takeover by News Corp. — Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Tim Harford discusses the unknowability of the future and the dubious value of “expert” opinion from an economic perspective — timhardford.com


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