Sunday, December 18, 2011

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.

Monday, December 12, 2011

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.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

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.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

‘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 SpainTo 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.