This guy thought up Death
Bed: The Bed That Eats People
and f****ng finished it! That means one of two things happened. He either he
never had a moment’s doubt. He hit that typewriter every day. "And then
the pillow starts to smother… Ohhh! This is awesome! Reach down, God! Give me a
high five! Boom!” Here’s what’s worse. What if he had moments of doubt, AND
THEN F***ING WORKED THROUGH THEM? That’s so much worse for me. What if he was
going: “And then the pillow starts… What the f**k am I writing? I’m putting my
name on this piece of… No! I will finish this!” He looked at his poster of the
little kitten hanging from the tree saying “Just hang in there, baby.” And he
said: “Yes, I will hang in there, kitten.”
—Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops
You know one of my bugbears (or perhaps
hobby horses) is the Content Tsunami. It is the main pillar of the flimsy
business case for Low Quality Translation. It goes a little something like
this: “Since the amount of content is exploding, we need low quality
translation to translate this flood of (low quality) information.” I want to
use this opportunity to highlight one tiny little molecule in
the endlessly expanding ocean of the Information Big Bang.
The piece is published in the blog of a
Very, Very Large Translation Agency that does a lot of Spanish post-editing at
$0.02 per word and constantly badgers qualified professionals to join its ranks
of underpaid drones. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “stupid is as
stupid does.” The blog post I am discussing here is, perhaps
uncharacteristically, not the product
of a computerized copywriting program. I can safely say it was actually
produced by a human being. But, as Low Quality theorists are fond of reminding
us, human authorship is no guarantee of quality:
Financial documents can be produced in a variety of file formats. Keeping this in mind, Trusted Translations is prepared to accept all types of files, and can deliver them as ready-to-publish files if so required by the client.
Thank GOD for Trusted Translations! Where
would we be without an unscrupulous, faceless corporation and its
semi-anonymous ten-dollar-an-hour blogger reminding us that financial documents
come in a variety of file formats? Thank GOD for the Internet! To think that as
recently as 1993 you couldn’t drive your PC on the information superhighway and
come across this banal piece of drivel.
But, as Jon Stewart says, “Wait, there’s
more”:
Finance departments, along with financial institutions themselves, are a key area in managing any type of business. Producing documents that hold very important and specialized information, these departments often require accurate translations of these documents in order to communicate financial information to a business’s own offices in another country, or to other companies. Trusted Translations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range of financial documents and has access to resources such as proprietary financial dictionaries, translations memories and expert industry-specific translators.
"Trusted Translations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range of financial documents..." Can you just imagine the anonymous blogger writing this sentence and crying out to God for a high five? Let’s parse this. Proprietary financial
dictionaries. Yeah. If you place the search phrase “financial translation” in
Google, your first result is a bilingual glossary that purports to be
specialized in finance, courtesy of… you guessed it! Trusted Translations, the
finest purveyor of Low Quality Translation. The glossary bears the
distinguished title of “English Spanish Dictionary of Financial Terms.” And,
obviously, it was crafted by a bevy of “expert industry-specific translators” (?),
who, I am guessing, are the ultimate arbiters of the text after it has been
processed by Trusted’s machine translators, Roombas, C3-POs, Wall*Es, and
sundry translation memories. What do these “expert industry-specific
translators” consider worthy of including in a financial glossary? Let’s see.
“Go-go fund.” Yes, that comes up very often in financial documents… written in 1965. So, if you are ever
swallowed up by a worm hole and deposited in the year when I Dream of Jeannie was number one in the Nielsen ratings and
Vietnam was a distant place where a handful of Marines were spending the
nastiest summer vacation ever, well, golly, Sarge, Trusted Translations just
saved you a lot of time!
TT’s contribution to the Content Tsunami
is, of course, nothing more than cheap SEO-gaming without bothering to actually
contribute anything of any value to the Internet. My thesis is that this opportunistic online marketing ethos is indicative of its overall business philosophy (cheap, cheap, cheap...). Allow me to provide a sampling
of the blog post’s internal hyperlinks. The phrase “financial translation”
leads the accidental cyber-tourist to a cluster of articles (of similar quality)
on issues as diverse as “financial translation teams”, “financial translation
languages”, “financial document translations” (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t
googled those Boolean phrases in the wee morning hours of some desperate,
lonely Saturday night?)
And so on and so on. The thing that gets me is that TT positively
RULES the search rankings. Not only does it broadcast its low quality content
in every single localization conference, it also dominates the online search
world with the same iron fist with which Ivan the Terrible ruled early modern
Russia.
“Stupid is as stupid does.” If your
translation provider uses Low Quality search engine optimization, what are the
odds that it doesn’t use Low Quality
Translation? And passes it off as the work of “expert industry-specific
translators”? Hmmmm…
Trusted Translation’s SEO strategy is just
the same adolescent hacker ethos that underlies Low Quality Translation, made
even more grotesque by the fact that it is espoused not by teenage computer
nerds who don’t know any better but middle-aged gurus who should. Which leads
to an interesting observation. When they talk to translators, lower quality
translation providers preach the necessity of low quality translation (and,
implicitly, correspondingly low rates). But when they talk to clients, these
same companies masquerade as high quality translation providers. They mumble in
their clumsy corporate prose about “expert industry-specific translators.” They
bloviate about their knowledgeable post-editors. Meanwhile, these selfsame
post-editors are in a nearby supermarket check-out line trying to pay for baby
formula with food stamps, praying to Yahweh and Harry Reid that the Republican
Congress will extend welfare benefits for another six months.
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 his profile or you can follow him on Twitter.
"TT positively RULES the search rankings. Not only does it broadcast its low quality content in every single localization conference, it also dominates the online search world with the same iron fist with which Ivan the Terrible ruled early modern Russia."
ReplyDeletePues da que pensar, sí señor...
Kudos to you for writing the only blog post in which I have come across the word "bloviate" :)
ReplyDelete"...and its semi-anonymous ten-dollar-an-hour blogger...". Not even that much.
ReplyDeleteBloggers don't get paid AT ALL for their articles!
Dear Anonymous:
ReplyDeleteActually, most of the crappier elements of the blogosphere are the output of paid typing monkeys. You see, to get really, really low quality on blogs, you have to pay for it. Trusted Translations probably pays something to "Julia S," although it is probably not enough to keep her above the poverty line.
Great post, Miguel!
ReplyDeleteTrusted Translations is one of the lousiest payers in Argentina.
They pay a monthly salary of approx. 200 USD (1.200 ARS). (Are those in-house translators to be blamed? Of course they are!, but we are now talking about TT, their freelancers and staff translators can be stuff for a future post of yours).
Interesting information about TT: "Blowing the whistle - translation and federal contracting"
http://globaltolocallanguagesolutions.com/2011/06/27/blowing-the-whistle-on-trusted-translations-please-retweet/
Have a great week!
Au
Wow, that's pretty shocking, Aurora. It coincides with most other reports I have heard about this company. Cheap translation and aggressive cost controls are one thing. But paying below minimum wages in a country that already features low wages is quite another thing.
ReplyDeleteCould you explain this Miguel?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.google.com/search?q=traductor+financiero
>You see, to get really, really low quality on blogs, you have to pay for it.<
ReplyDeleteThat's a great mantra, Miguel. Makes my day.