Financial Translation Blog: English

Showing posts with label English. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Pinterest Uses Employees’ Moms for Spanish Translations

Only two weeks have passed since the official death of the social media bubble, when Facebook’s IPO floated on the wide open market seas and proceeded to sink like a nylon bag filled with a late Mafia informant and a bunch of rocks. However, its ethos of deprofessionalizing translation lives on. The latest shooting star in the social media space, Pinterest, recently unveiled the exciting announcement that, following in the heels of Facebook and Twitter, it also wanted free low quality translations from its user base. In an attempt to be coherent, it decided to announce it with a poorly written blog entry in Macaronic Spanish. This a print screen of the original version:

That prompted a lot of grumbling by Spanish translators on Twitter. For example, aside from the faulty punctuation, a phrase like “Llamando a los favoritos bloggers hispanohablantes!” is just awful.

Seeing the growing outcry, I tweeted (in English) that Pinterest has apparently “done a LinkedIn” (this is a reference to the firestorm occasioned when LinkedIn called for translator members to translate the site for free, a curious request for a social media site that is supposedly designed for establishing professional connections.) As occurs quite frequently on Twitter, my 140-character message prompted a query from a stranger who turned out to be the very Pinterest employee who either wrote or was responsible for the blog post. The ensuing exchange, in all its endearing innocence, is copied in extenso:

At this point, the flustered woman told me that her mom had helped her translate it. However, when she saw my incredulous response, she decided to erase this tweet in which she indicated she had hired a relative for a defective translation (which I think is more than just a little dishonest):

Yep, you read right. The Pinterest employee told me that the translations should be fine, since they were done in collaboration with her mom, who is from Argentina (whew! I was worried there for a minute!). Anyway, a few hours later the blog entry had been improved after some input from several colleagues who contributed their time for free (personally I would not donate my time pro bono to a company that is going to crowdsource its translation work and also plans to float for a bilion dollars; investment banks are in low esteem right now, but at least they pay their outsourced suppliers):

This reminds me of the case of Smartling, a start-up that provides crowdsourced post-editing of websites. The problem is that its home page couldn’t decide whether it was in Spanish or English. After a few snarky Twitter messages, the company corrected the mistake. Pinterest’s case is only slightly less depressing, since after all its core mission is not translation. Just another vignette of the 300-car pile-up that is the translated social Interspace.

Anyway, I sure hope that Sarah's mom was compensated for her work, regardless of what I may think about its quality. But somehow, I doubt it.

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.

Monday, May 14, 2012

The Language Barrier, Knowledge Exchange, and the Googlevi Twins

Can we honestly go to some scientist and say

the reason you haven’t found a cure for cancer

is you don’t have access to information about cancer research? No!

—Malcolm Gladwell

Is the language barrier an obstacle to knowledge? People with technologically oriented minds would immediately respond in the affirmative. They are frustrated by the language barrier. They feel it is irrational. They equate immediate access to every single bit of information as liberating.

I’m not saying that the language barrier is a good thing or a bad thing. All I would caution is that the belief that it is the cause of ignorance or underdevelopment is perhaps accepted uncritically by supporters of what one might euphemistically call “language technology.”

A late chapter in The Shallows analyzes the attitude of Google’s founders toward information. Brin and Page are, famously, computer engineers. In Ken Auletta’s phrase, “Google's leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers.” Of course, the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley in 2012 consists in invoking lofty goals for very non-lofty business models. For instance, universal access to information is invoked as the end, and the means is the sale of (slightly tawdry) online text ads. The cure for cancer is invoked as the ultimate goal for selling mp3s, etc., etc. Which prompts the question, if the ultimate goal is to cure cancer: why not, uhm, devote your life to cancer research? Inquiring minds might want to know. But you’ll never get a response.

Google’s goal is, as former CEO Eric Schmidt famously wrote, to “gather together all of the information in the world in a single place.” The current dispersal of information is an obstacle to knowledge, and that is true, to some extent The key linkage between the Googlevi’s engineering backgrounds and the ambition of digitizing every single bit of information boils down to efficiency of access and distribution.

Now, I would like to make a heretical assumption: perhaps the language barrier is not as much of a barrier to science as one would imagine. For almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, Latin was the lingua franca of learning in the Western world. The fragmentation of the Tower of Babel only entered the ivory tower of science until well after the Scientific Revolution was underway, probably due to the influence of the ever-increasing power of nationalism and the Reformation, but also because of the growing importance of science itself and the desire to get out from under the constraints of Thomism, the heavy legacy of the Middle Ages, and its exclusive use of Latin. Perhaps if Latin had remained as the lingua franca of letters and science, we would be further along the path of progress today, but I doubt it. The movement away from a single pan-European language of knowledge that knitted together scholars from Toledo to Warsaw was in part due to factors such as the Reformation and the rise of nationalism. But it was also due to the fact that the gentleman-scientist of the seventeenth century need not have attended the major learning centres of his time. The exclusive use of the common Latin language for learning might have actually shut out these individuals from the pursuit of scientific truth. Or it may have loaded up a scholar with a lot of prejudices about language and thought that were inconvenient.

In our day, English is the lingua franca of science. I find it hard to believe that the language barrier is a problem when a pre-requisite for being a scientist is to be fluent in English. And, let’s face it, the only type of knowledge that is crucial for the advancement of humanity is scientific. Helping sailors maintain email correspondence with the cutie they met at the last port may help humanity somewhat, but not as much as a cure for malaria. (Would it be churlish to ask to which of the two Cheap Localization has contributed more over the past decade, I wonder?)

If English as a lingua franca for science leaves you unconvinced, listen to this argument about how connectedness inhibits inventiveness. This more sophisticated counterargument comes from novelist Neal Stephenson. It is a parable of how interconnectedness depresses innovation:

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

So is efficient information exchange a pure good? Not necessarily. Sometimes, the walled garden and the solipsistic bubble are crucial for creation and innovation. Think about Descartes in his man-sized oven. Or Proust in his sound-proof bedroom. The absence of space for unmolested invention may be part of the reason for our current Great Stagnation, pace naïve connectivists such as Mark Zuckerberg and his legion of wannabes.

The amount of information flow does not produce qualitative jumps in our knowledge or social wealth. Our current period is marked by the fastest transmission of the largest amount of information ever amassed in the history of mankind, and yet its is also marked by the slowest economic growth in many decades. The Scientific Revolution came after the invention of the press, but it was not caused by the printing press, as is wrongly believed by a lot of people who know exactly diddlysquat about history. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy, but, as Roland Barthes wrote, it is the foundational premise of narrative.

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.

Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Translating from Spanish to Castellano, or Bridging the Gap between a Localization PM and a Horse’s Ass

Danny: No, venti is twenty. Large is large. In fact, tall is large and grande is Spanish for large. Venti is the only one that doesn't mean large. It's also the only one that's Italian. Congratulations, you're stupid in three languages.

Barista: A venti is a large coffee.

Danny: Really? Says who? Fellini? Do you accept lira or is it all euros now?

—Role Model (2010)

The State of McLocalization 2012. Exhibit A: I see an Internet job ad entitled: "Spanish translators with Catalan and Castellano dialects are needed ASAP." An ad calling for a Spanish translator who speaks Castellano of course piques my curiosity. Greater delights awaited me. I kid you not, this is what the ad said: "We have text in English and Spanish that should be translated into Catalan and Castellano." Spanish to Castellano. The wonders of the Web 2.0. The person who posted the ad helpfully adds a couple of linguistic notes taken from the Monty Python Book of Flying Dialectology: "Castellano is a kind of Spanish which includes dialects at the central and north part of Spain (the area from Cantabria to Cuenca)." I omit the notes on Catalan because it describes the language as a “dialect” and I don't want the comments setion inundated with people making threatening comments.

Let me start to unpack this monstrosity by beginning with the familiar term of “Castilian Spanish.” Most people who use “Castilian Spanish” probably think it sounds a little more fancy or scientific than “European Spanish” or “Iberian Spanish” or the clunky “Spanish from Spain.” But steer clear from the jackass who uses this phrase, gentle reader, because an agency that uses it to recruit translators may also have trouble figuring out the complexities of international wire transfers, whether willfully or not. That person/agency/spambot is affecting an erudition that he/she/it does not really possess.

But, wait, “Castilian Spanish” is endorsed by a source as eminent as Wikipedia. Read this page:

Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers.[1][2][3][4] The region where this variety of Spanish is spoken corresponds more or less to the Castilian historical region.

No, no, no, no. Bad Wikipedia! Bad Wikipedia! Naughty, naughty Wikipedia! You went and urinated on the living room rug of knowledge again! The exact meaning of “Castilian Spanish” does NOT “vary even in that language.” No one uses the term “español castellano.” Why? Because he would be branded a jackass. Okay, I’m only going to say this once. Saying “Castilian Spanish” is just an economic way of proclaiming that a grandfather or great-grandfather deflowered a cousin somewhere in the adjacent branches of your family tree. It is the same as using the term “Tuscan Italian” or “Anglican English” or “Gallic French” or “Sino-Chinese” or “Nippon Japanese” or “Teutonic German.” It is a nonsense term used by Scientologists, Pataphysicists, conspiracy theorists, and sundry varieties of idiot who believe in the Singularity. Think of the funny made-up Roman names used in the Life of Brian, such as “Maximus Minimus”.

Castilian is the language spoken in the north-central region of Spain that spread via the Reconquista and the political ascendancy of Castile to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, thus becoming the primary language of literature and government in what would eventually become Spain (sometimes in an uneasy and fraught cohabitation with other languages [careful: not dialects] such as Basque and Catalan). Later on, it also spread to the Americas and even the Philippines through the, er, free Spanish courses taught by those stabby, trigger-happy language tutors known as conquistadores. Castilian is just an old name for standard Spanish, whether spoken in Buenos Aires or Mexico City or Barcelona (or even Copenhagen, for that matter). The Castilian dialect, on the other hand, refers to the peculiarities of the Spanish spoken in rural areas of Castile, where this entire story started.

Visit these (correct) definitions to get a sense of what I’m talking about:

Definition of CASTILIAN

1: a native or inhabitant of Castile; broadly : Spaniard

2 a : the dialect of Castileb : the official and literary language of Spain based on this dialect

Or this one:

Cas·til·ian [ka-stil-yuhn] noun 1. the dialect of Spanish spoken in Castile. 2. the official standard form of the Spanish language as spoken in Spain, based on this dialect. 3. a native or inhabitant of Castile.

Or this one:

Castilian
1 a native of Castile. 2 the dialect of Spanish spoken in Castile, which is standard Spanish.adjectiveof or relating to Castile, Castilians, or the Castilian form of Spanish.

Therefore, if you insist on using the term “Castilian Spanish”, it can only refer to the Spanish spoken in the Castile region, which by the same token will exclude the Spanish spoken in other regions of Spain, which doesn’t make any sense when you are recruiting translators (who localizes only for Castile?). To sum it up, if you stress the “Castilian” in “Castilian Spanish”, you exclude the rest of Spain. And if you stress the “Spanish” in “Castilian Spanish” (to distinguish it from Latin American Spanish), you get to the insane situation whereby Latin Americans speak Castilian and Spanish, but not Castilian Spanish. In any case, the conceptual difficulties you can get into by simply raising the term “Castilian” are thorny. Better to simply avoid using it and stick to safer terms such as “Iberian Spanish” or “European Spanish,” neither of which requires a doctorate in comparative philology. Yeah, I know “Castilian” sounds fancy, but everybody hurts sometime.

Now, the job ad quoted at the beginning takes the “Castilian/Spanish/Castilian Spanish” idiocy one step further and totally dissociates español from castellano and asks for a translator to work a text from one to the other. That is the equivalent of asking someone to translate from Quebecois to Canadian French or from English into “American.” This marks a step further in the divorce between Spanish and Castilian, similar to a fight between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or between Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Which is an extreme, relatively unstudied phase of multiple personality disorder.

The agency posting this is Ukrainian (the ad, sadly, was erased before I managed to save it). An autopsy of the way in which a project from English to Spanish came to be handled by an agency in that region of the world would perhaps provide an interesting radiography of why there are so many poor translations out there.

Rant over. (Whew, it felt good to get that off my chest.)

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 several small brokerages and asset management companies. 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, November 7, 2011

Learn English with a Totalitarian Dictator: The Cost of Lower Quality Translation

Kathleen: It happened in Spain. People do

really stupid things in foreign countries.

Frank: Absolutely. They buy leather jackets for much

more than they're worth. But they don't fall in love with fascist dictators!

—You’ve Got Mail

There is an asymmetrical relationship between the passage of a text from English to Spanish compared to the translation from Spanish into English. And this asymmetry is frequently unacknowledged, especially by people whose background is more technical than linguistic. For example, Silicon Valley is a very diverse, multicultural, multiethnic environment, but only superficially so. In reality, it is very homogenous: It is inhabited by engineers from all parts of the world. And it is also fiercely monolingual: English is really the only language used. It is almost inevitable that the sort of translation philosophy that would come out of this inbred environment is the “Lower Quality Translation” movement. And that this philosophy would be deaf to the asymmetry I mentioned above.

The asymmetry is this: An American or a British company might opt for a bad Spanish translation as a decent stand-in for a better text (Americans and Brits rarely have a clue about what it is like to live in a world where a lot of the text consumed on a daily basis is badly translated). In stark contrast, a (self-respecting) Spanish company would never choose that option when translating its material into English because, in Spain and many other parts of the world, Pidgin English is routinely an object of ridicule. It marks you out as a rube, as unsophisticated. (And I am guessing that stigma is far more “universal” than the urge to communicate at the cheapest possible cost.)

For empirical proof, look no further than these YouTube clips of Francisco Franco reading out a proclamation in English.

I think the video comes from the early days of the 1936 military insurrection that triggered the Spanish Civil War. Someone on Franco’s staff must have decided that an English-language speech was just the trick to get the British Government and public to side with the right-wing coup. One of the YouTube clips is entitled “Learn English with the Generalissimo.” Franco read the text phonetically and none of his aides took the trouble of smoothing out the rougher passages. (The subtitled Pidgin English video is even a mini-genre in Spain; this is from a taped message by the head of a major bank communicating with his British employees).

Like Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit, the literal meaning is sharply different according to the audience: perplexity for native English speakers, extreme hilarity for native Spanish speakers. Lower quality translation has a reputational cost that is hard to quantify in a monolingual English-speaking milieu, but which is nonetheless very, very real.

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, October 24, 2011

Lisa and the Hamster: Some Thoughts on Non-Literary Texts and Style

Over at the Intralingo blog, Lisa Carter is very diplomatically sparring with one reader who relentlessly insists that he cranks out 10,000 publication-ready words a day on a regular basis. (“I’ve often translated well in excess of 10,000 words a day, and working overtime (sic) I’ve translated up to 18,000 words (sic!) over a 15 hour period (sick, yo!), and I would rate my quality as high, if not higher, than my contemporaries (contemporaries?).”) Lisa is very tactfully brandishing argument after argument that this is not possible, but our man, undeterred, blithely charges back after every rebuff. Bless her heart, she is soooooo polite. I, on the other hand, (for good or ill) was not bequeathed the gift of suffering fools lightly. Ms. Carter is wasting her time, though. Let’s face it, there simply isn’t a polite way to, you know, tell someone to his face that he is a hack.

Appreciation for language is hard to teach if your student simply doesn’t have it. It is a sense. Just like you cannot explain to a blind person what makes one of Monet’s water lilies special, Lisa cannot raise her voice sufficiently and explain to our 18,000-word-per-day Wunderkind that his output is most assuredly a stomach-churning bucket of bat guano. Even tone-deaf people who talk about translation but have never translated a single word in their lives are smart enough to sidestep the “literary” argument quickly. So they just, Sheldon-Cooper-like, bracket literature in a special mental category (“stuff that other people care a lot about—for some unfathomable reason—but I don’t”) and blissfully go about their business because literature isn’t applicable to commercial translation. “Ah, but that is literature,” the McLocalization theorist ruminates with a knowing smile, “I have heard of it, hmmm, yes… Wikipedia tells me it is something from back in the Age of the Codex. But I am here to discuss repetitive technical texts…”

The literary/non-literary dichotomy is not that ancient. As is the case of a lot of stupid stuff (nationalism, Mesmerism, Gothic novels), it only dates back to the Romantics. It is slowly being placed into question by the genre-disrupting culture of the present. Think about Ali G and reality TV, and then try to retain the old comforting distinctions of fact and fiction snugly in your head. The idea that we bring a set of conventions (the phrase “suspension of disbelief” was coined by Wordsworth) to one set of texts and another—completely different—set of decoding tools to non-fiction simply does not resist serious critical scrutiny. Does that mean that Ben Bernanke’s press conferences should be rendered by the financial translator with the same appreciation for the mot juste that Lisa Carter lavishes on her novels? Well, yes and no. “Yes” in the sense that you should weigh every word carefully (because every central banker does and their words can cause a lot of devastation) and “no” in the sense that you shouldn’t waste too much time waiting for the right adverb to strike you like the Pacific struck Keats’s “stout Cortez.” Because, aside from being slightly foolish, it will get you fired in the end.

Of course, the idea that a “translator is a writer” sounds hyper-pretentious if you think capital “W” Writer: a Luther-throwing-the-inkpot-at-the-Devil Writer, or a Flaubert-spending-eighteen-years-working-on-Madame-Bovary Writer. But small caps “w” writer in the sense that you write. And you should try to do it as well as you can in the service of the original author, who may or may not be a capital “W” Writer, but nonetheless deserves a hearing (or at least is paying for it).

I was reminded of that recently while reading Bruce Catton’s trilogy on the Army of the Potomac ( translators should be keen readers). While Catton’s books are not really works of academic history, they do provide a lot of technical details on military affairs, from the movement of armies during campaigns to minutiae such as the types of weapons used and just what the heck hardtack actually was. But his works are also quite opaque as texts. The influence of William Faulkner is felt on every page, even though it is a very Northern book—an attempt to write Yankee history. The jumps forward and backward in time are also unimaginable without the precedent of literary Modernism. One small example. When Catton is describing the sequence of the Second Battle of Manassas/Bull Run, the 12^th Massachusetts regiment is left facing a colossal flanking movement from the Confederates. The author abruptly breaks off for one entire page, in the middle of the battle, to tell the story of the regiment. Its members were responsible for writing the marching song John Brown’s Body, dedicated to the abolitionist guerrilla whose raid on Harper’s Ferry partly triggered the Civil War ( “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave/ And we go matching on!”). This song was the source for Julia Ward Howe’s Battle Hymn of the Republic, which is still a staple of American military marching bands (and tactfully suppresses references to rotting corpses). That takes Catton a page and a half. After such as lengthy digression, Catton equally abruptly returns to the two tiny brigades facing a Rebel onslaught:

But the dandy 12^th was a long way from the ladies of Boston now, and Colonel Webster was killed, and the 12^th was finally forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts’s men and the Germans. (p.40)

You see what the author did there? Try rewriting that sentence according to the rules of “proper” grammar (leaving aside the fact that he started a paragraph with a negative conjunction, a huge no-no according to the provincial school marms who teach “proper” English):

However, the dandy 12^th was a long way from the ladies of Boston. Colonel Webster was (had been?) killed. The regiment (Note: the reiteration of the name probably wouldn't pass muster with most proofreaders) was finally forced back, along with the rest of Ricketts’s men and the Germans.

Blink and you miss it. Try to translate this sentence without trying to recreate the confusion and terror of the Massachusetts soldiers and you might as well translate 18,000 words a day.

But perhaps that is a rare case of non-fiction that is suffused with literary technique. After all, the Civil War as a historical subject has always been more the preserve of belles lettres because of Whitman, Sandburg and Faulkner. The lyrical undertone to a lot of writing on the conflict stretches all the way to the present, as anyone who has seen Ken Burns’s documentaries on the conflict will easily perceive.

So how about a less high-falutin’ example? This is an example of something I come across very often (the highlight is mine):

After Papandreou's election win, Mršnik wrote, in a confidential letter to Standard & Poor's customers, that in light of the repeated budgetary lapses of the various Greek governments, it remained to be seen whether the new administration had the will to implement a credible budget strategy. This sounded diplomatic, but it was pure sarcasm. Investors got the message, namely that the decline of Greek bonds from secure investments to casino chips was accelerating.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,790333-2,00.html

In a lot of financial research, what you put down on paper is purposefully bland, because some day you may have to answer to a wider audience (or an angry politician or, gulp, a judge) for anything that is more controversial than a spiceless platitude. That is why you have to be attuned to the sarcasm. Once again, blink and you miss it. Mršnik was trading a “nudge, nudge, wink, wink” moment with his readers. His real opinion was reserved for the very privileged clients who get him on the telephone or the board room, as any good analyst’s opinion should be. That is why inexperienced translators often chuckle and say: “Wait, is he serious?” Duh! Of course not! The unspoken byword here is “ldl,” which is what investment bankers write for “let’s discuss live” (i.e., where no written or taped evidence is left).

Every single sentence contains dozens of tiny little decisions. If you translate 18,000 words a day, that means you make over 100,000 tiny decisions in a single day. But that is no problem because you are working on a non-literary, repetitive text, right? We can just hope that none of your tiny decisions is dangerous. Or the subject of future litigation.

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.

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

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:

Television in the 1920s: Technology and Financial Bubbles Are Joined at the Hip

Television in the 1920s? How come there are no stories about millions of Americans watching Herbert Hoover's inauguration? In these times of technological bubble-blowing by both innocent fanatics and not-so-innocent snake oil salesmen, it is worthwhile dipping into our musty history books. “A new technology comes on the scene and, boom, prices drop to the floor, immediately.” This statement is representative of a naïve view of how technological change happens. But when you read a little bit about the past, you come to realize that this is not how the world works.

Read up on the history of television. John Kenneth Galbraith mentions prospectuses of companies floated on the NYSE in the late 1920s that claimed every home in America would have a TV set by that fall:

Inevitably promoters organized some new companies merely to capitalize on the public interest in industries with a new and wide horizon and provide securities to sell. Radio and aviation stocks were believed to have a particularly satisfactory prospect, and companies were formed which never had more than a prospect. In September 1929 [the crash, you may recall, was in October], an advertisement in the Times called attention to the impending arrival of television and said with considerable prescience that the ‘commercial possibilities of this new art defy imagination.’ The ad opined, somewhat less presciently, that sets would be in use in homes that fall. (p. 46)

Stock prices in 1929 reached ridiculous heights, beyond any reasonable valuation. One of the justifications for the mad prices was that the innovative power of technology and American know-how was driving ever greater efficiencies that justified absurd stock prices without any relation to earnings, which were in some cases non-existent (as was the case during the late nineties Internet boom). Sound familiar?

I am not 40 years old yet and I’ve already seen this story play out twice: first, with the Internet bubble of the 1990s and, later, during the housing bubble of the 2000s. And now I’m seeing the same inane dynamic in translation, a frenzy fed in part by the much larger social media phenomenon.

Of course, TV sets eventually made it into every American home… in the 1960s. But we all know what happened in the interim: stocks cratered, millions lost their job, a decade of depression ensued and a second world war broke out. Instead of watching TV in their homes in 1932, Americans were lining up on bread lines, and in 1942 they still lacked TV but their children were losing their lives in tiny Pacific islands no one had ever heard of. Yes, stocks recovered and eventually regained their 1929 values… in 1954. Adjusted for inflation (i.e., in real terms), they only beat their 1929 levels a couple of years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.

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.

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