Where Do Translators Think Language Rules Come From?

I am watching my West Wing DVDs again and reliving the wonder of experiencing just how good the show was. Its charm, of course, was its absolute lack of realism. People just don’t talk that way. Nobody can slip a crushing one-liner or witty epigram into every sentence. But it is just pleasant to watch a show that proves even Hollywood never bets absolutely on the lowest common denominator. On the second episode of the first season, Chief of Staff Leo McGarry calls the New York Times to complain that they misspelled the name of former (yes!) Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on that morning's crossword puzzle:

The Treadmill Desk for the Translator of the Future

The workstation of the future for the multilingual professional. All that is missing is a pellet dispenser. Perhaps some enterprising LSP will hook up these treadmills to generate green energy.

The Singularity is (not) near... (Hat tip to @jordibal.)

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.

Language Technology Isn’t Getting Better, Our Expectations Are Just Getting Lower

Diane McCartney just published a report on Kevin Lossner’s blog about a localization conference she attended (by the way, read the whole thing, since it discusses a lot of very current issues). Among the events, she describes a seminar by Jaap van der Meer, a language technology specialist who has made the (highly revealing) observation that:

Whenever You Hear Someone Redefining Quality...

...what they really mean is lower quality. You can just bracket the complex rhetorical pyrotechnics and write "less than good" beneath. And that is okay. Complex, globalized markets require different levels of service. But the tortuous redefinition of simple concepts belies a will to obfuscate.

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.

The ProZ-TAUS ‘Great Translation Debate’: Not So Great and, Actually, Not Really a Debate

Irmy: I slept with someone for it. Does that make me a whore?

Kleinmann: [Referring to the money he's holding] This?

Irmy: Just one person. Does that make me a whore?

Kleinmann: Well, no, only by the dictionary definition.

---Shadows and Fog

I’m looking at the program for the “Great Translation Debate,” a virtual conference organized by ProZ.com and TAUS. One session will dicuss the proposition that “Translation automation is good for the industry.” That is orthodox debate structure: You float a proposition and two teams argue, one of them for and the other against. That is the ritual structure set up in Oxford debating societies and practiced in universities throughout the world. However, in this case, we have a very curious twist on that venerable model. In the immortal words of Sideshow Bob: “Oh, Cousin Merle, really…”

What You Won’t Hear in the ‘Great’ ProZ-TAUS Debate

(Robot arm places soy sauce on Penny’s palm)

Penny: Oh ha-ha. That’s amazing!

Sheldon: I wouldn’t say amazing. At best,

it’s a modest leap forward from the basic technology that gave us Country Bear Jamboree.

—The Big Bang Theory (2010)

I see that ProZ.com and TAUS are organizing a virtual conference about technology. For those who don’t know what TAUS is, it is an organization set up by several large translation sellers and buyers to enhance the sharing of translation memories, either for use as TMs or as raw material for training machine translation software.  It is billed as “The Great Translation Debate” about technology and localization. Which I find utterly endearing for its absolute lack of self-awareness. Hello? The irony warehouse called (they’re kind of running out). It is sort of like the Schutzstaffel and the Sturmabteilung getting together in 1930s Berlin to organize a conference on “The Future of Judaism in Europe.”

The IAPTI Published One of my Pieces

The International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters, led by the indefatigable Aurora Humarán, published a short piece I wrote a while back. Here is the link. The short article is also accompanied by a very funny illustration courtesy of the very talented Juan Manuel Tavella.

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.

Machine Translation Companies and the Closed Kimono

We saw at the time of the Iraq war what it means to be in the know and the games people play when they say they’re in the know. So in the lobby of the House of Commons before the Iraq-invasion vote you had whips saying to the MPs, ‘If you’d seen what I’ve seen, you’d know how to vote!’

--John le Carré

Open the Kimono [def.]: Share information. Reveal.

[syn.] Disclose your sexual organ to the wolf.

[usage note] The douchebag who said this probably also said Baxtrapolate.

[Source] Unsuck It: http://unsuck-it.com/open-the-kimono/

The (by now ritualistic) debate surrounding machine translation (MT) at present tends to go a little like this: