ALS’s Gavin Wheeldon: A Case Study in Cheap Translation

Bialystock: Step 1: We find the worst play ever written.

Step 2: We hire the worst director in town.

Step 3: We raise two million dollars. ... One for me, one for you.

There's a lot of little old ladies out there!

Step 4: We hire the worst actors in

New York and open on Broadway and before you can say

Step 5: We close on Broadway, take our two million, and go to Rio.

—The Producers (2005)

The tribulations of Applied Language Solutions (ALS) are everywhere in the blogosphere these days. It remains to be seen whether the company will hold on to its monopoly of court interpreting services in England and Wales despite its dismal performance to date (the catastrophe is discussed here at length). 

However, allow me to take a step back, because ALS CEO Gavin Wheeldon’s overexposure to the British media provides a cornucopia of material to conduct a brief case study of cheap translation in flagrante delicto, as it were. Watching Wheeldon’s TV performances on Dragons' Den and The Secret Millionaire, you literally see the yucky pig lips being inserted into the paste processed by the sausage machines. Wheeldon as a businessman (and a moral specimen) is truly riveting, albeit in sort of the same way that Hannibal Lecter is fascinating as a gourmet.

1.- There is no Revenue from Free Translation (!)

The following exchange is from his appearance in the BBC’s Dragons' Den. The format is as follows: five independent and separate private equity investors hear pitches from entrepreneurs and decide in front of the camera whether they will invest in the businesses. The ten-minute clip is a fascinating snapshot of the cheap translation sector in the early twenty-first century. Among many other issues, it is indicative of how machine translation currently has a grip on investors’ minds, as well as the way in which savvy shysters exploit it to the hilt for hype value (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble), despite the absence of any real substance.

Watch how the Wizard of Oz instantly turns into the shabby man behind the curtain (in three, two, one...):

Dragon 1 (Richard Farleigh): You do two things. One on the Web and the other one is actually live translation…
Wheeldon (interrupting): It’s human. The one on the Web, it’s machine translation. It does it instantly. It does it on the fly. The one on the Web, it’s about 70% accurate. It’s just a gimmick. It’s a good tool. People use it. It attracts visitors. But, obviously, that’s just a driver…
Farleigh: Okay. How is your revenue split between these two activities?
Wheeldon: There is no revenue from free translation. It’s all professional translation.
Farleigh: So all your 3.2 [million]…
Wheeldon: It’s all human translation. Professional translation.

Did you catch that? It is so pristine and simple that you almost expect it to come from the mouth of a Zen master. “There is no revenue from free translation.” What!? Listen to that, world: NO REVENUE FROM FREE TRANSLATION!

So there it is: Free translation does not provide revenue. The simplicity of this tautology is so beautiful, so absolutely beautiful, it brings the slightest little tear to the eye, like a twelve-year-old watching the closing scenes of E.T.

Can you imagine that? It’s hard to make money from free stuff! We should frame this phrase and hang it above the desk of every Cheap Translation CEO across the world.

I can imagine Henry Ford going: “You know, we’ve noticed that giving away Model-Ts tends to hurt our bottom line.” Or Warren Buffett writing to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders to say: “Well, it turns out that Project Free Hamburger was not the money machine we hoped.”

2.- There is No Profit from Cheap Translation

Wheeldon cites £3.2 million in revenue. When prompted for a profit figure, he vaguely estimates £400,000 for the year. He adds that his request of £250,000 for 4% of the shares is based on a P/E (price/earnings) ratio of 15. However, the second Dragon, Theo Paphitis, finds some clash between this figure and his own due diligence. He calls Wheeldon on it. The budding l10n entrepreneur replies that the 15 P/E for a £6.25 million valuation is based on “net profit.” Now, I am not an accountant, but net profit could (and usually does) mean almost anything. And, in this case, it means even less than that. After some prompting, it turns out that the slippery Mr. Wheeldon means “profit including [i.e., before] tax,” which, if anything, should actually be called “gross profit.” Listen to the investor schooling the weasely presenter like a stern schoolmaster:

Paphitis (Dragon 2): P/Es are calculated after the deduction of tax.
Wheeldon: Okay, well, I’ve learned something…

You have to hand it to Wheeldon. Caught red-handed in a transparent bit of obfuscation, he doesn’t even flinch. At most, he only seems slightly deflated. Paphitis, smelling weakness, presses on: the real P/E for a 4% equity stake costing £250,000 based on profits of £300,000 is not 15, but a whopping 21 to 22 times earnings (which in technical financial terms is “super-duper high” for a company outside the tech sector). Wheeldon accepts the analysis meekly, but offers an explanation for his creative accounting (viz. ignorance):

Paphitis: Do you expect me to feel a little bit uncomfortable?
Wheeldon (smiling): Once again, I’m learning here, Theo. In terms of a…
Paphitis (irritated): This not for learning! This is not a lesson!
Wheeldon (sheepishly): It certainly seems that way…
Paphitis: You come and ask me to invest £250,000?! And you ask me to teach you at the same time?!

The investor’s rebuke is harsh enough that it wipes the smile from Wheeldon’s face. The narrator sums it up: The valuation cited by Wheeldon is based on projected earnings (i.e., not actually in the bag yet) and it included taxes (i.e., money investors will never see).

Now, none of this is outrageous, but note that Wheeldon has been caught in the space of three minutes in several worrisome fabrications. You might argue that the professional investors pictured on Dragons' Den do this for a living, but is it at all possible that Mr. Wheeldon’s creativity with the truth played a role in securing the contract from the Ministry of Justice? I have my own opinion. I leave it to you to draw your own.

To lay this out as simply as possible, imagine that you have £250,000 in the bank. You can either place it in UK government gilts at 5% interest or, alternatively, you can invest it in the budding business of McTranslations Inc. in exchange for a 4% equity stake.

If you invest the quarter-million pounds in the British government bonds (the risk-free rate), within one year, you will have earned 12,500 pounds as interest.

If however, you take that chunk of change and sink it into the H.M.S. McLocalization Titanic Applied Language Solutions, at the end of the year you have a claim on 4% of the profits, which the chief executive officer “estimates” at £300,000.

Do the math. That is £12,000. That is 500 pounds less than the laziest, safest, most unimaginative thing you can do with your money, aside from leaving it to rot in a savings account at a negative real interest rate. The British Government has never defaulted on a loan since it started asking for money centuries ago. How does that compare to a company founded nine years ago in some dude’s bedroom in Manchester? Is it more or less dependable as an investment? Once again, I leave it to you to arrive at the answer.

The thing is that private equity guys such as the Dragons only become interested in businesses that make sexier returns—on the order of at least 10% a year or more.

Translation, sadly, does not fit that bill (at least the way it is done by shady entrepreneurs). Sure, cheap translation is enough for sleazy characters to make some moolah and fund a lavish lifestyle, but at the expense of generating a lot more revenue than you would need to if you provided quality at heftier margins. Wheeldon raises the long-term idea of floating on the stock market within five years for £60 million. Another Dragon shoots this down out of hand and cites again the company’s dismal balance sheet. Cheap low-quality translation has not passed the smell test. “As a risk/reward ratio for me, it doesn’t stack up,” says one.

Nonetheless, Wheeldon does get a tentative offer from Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, of half the money (£125,000) for more than double the equity stake (9%) he sought. Which is one way of saying: “You, sir, are a fine purveyor of bollocks, but reality is far less rosy.”

In conclusion, the Dragons liked him as a salesman, but they were turned off both by the sector and the valuation, so they turned him down. Cheap translation strikes out.

3.- A New Hope: Capita Steps In

Okay, so that is that. The thing is that, only three months ago, the Financial Times reported that a private equity fund called Capita stepped in to buy the whole of ALS for £7.5 million. So the Cheap Translation Theorist might say: “Aha! Six and a quarter million pounds for ALS’s paltry revenue was not so crazy after all! Gavin Wheeldon secured one and a quarter million pounds more than he asked the Dragons for!”

However, two things have to be taken into account. First of all, the Dragons' Den clip was filmed several years ago, so you have to discount the erosive impact of inflation. Secondly, the private equity fund jumped in only after ALS secured the mega-juicy Ministry of Justice contract that has raised all the Sturm und Drang. This MoJ contract is reportedly worth £300 million over several (undisclosed) years, or £42 million a year, depending upon the source. So the details of how that breaks down revenue- and profit-wise totally skew the assessment of Wheeldon’s pie-in-the-sky valuation. The Capita buyout was a bet that ALS would execute successfully on a recurrent contract with a good government client, pure and simple. Moreover, the MoJ would represent more than 90% of the company’s revenue for many years to come. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course, that was if and when ALS executed efficiently on the contract, which is currently in doubt.

4.- Epilogue: What Is the Deal With the Cheap Translation/Sleazy Salesmanship Correlation?

The alpha and omega of the entire ALS debacle is the man himself, Gavin Wheeldon. His personality comes across forcefully in the Dragons' Den clip: smarmily charming, slightly sleazy, quick on his feet, evasive, and not overly analytical. It is easy to imagine him courting civil servants and cabinet ministers desperate to make budget cuts with ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky promises about 60% efficiencies. Sadly, these exchanges were not filmed. However, a simple Google check might have given the ministry's staff some pause.

Last week I visited Wheeldon’s Wikipedia page. After reading it, I assumed it had been vandalized, given the nationwide firestorm in the UK. But after checking the footnotes and hyperlinks, I realized that, OMG, those were actually things he said to journalists! Those are actual quotes from his mother!

The first pearl is from a Times profile entitled “How I Made It”. Wheeldon tells the newspaper how he secured his first fat contract:

I was ringing up and pretending I was this huge translation company when really it was just me in the back bedroom with a phone and PC. I won the contract and then thought: oh my God, how on earth do I deliver this?

Is there any chance that this is the modus operandi used to secure the mega-million-pound contract from the British government? Who knows? For me, in the mouth of the chief of a tiny company that is awarded responsibility for providing thousands of interpreters to the entire legal system of a large country, this sounds a lot like someone saying: “Mr. Excrement, may I introduce you to Mr. Fan?”

Sound harsh? Listen to his mother’s description of him as a child during an interview for his appearance in The Secret Millionaire: “My nickname for Gavin was our small Arthur Daley, my dad always said if he didn’t end up behind bars he’d end up making a fortune!”

Who was Arthur Daley, you ask? Check Wikipedia. He was a character in a 1970s British TV show who is described as follows:

Arthur Daley, a socially ambitious but highly unscrupulous importer-exporter, wholesaler, used-car salesman, and anything else from which there was money to be made whether inside the law or not.

The entry goes on to note that “the name Arthur Daley has become synonymous with a dishonest salesman or small time crook.”

Jesus Christ…


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. 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.

Cheap Translation Will not Save a Single Starving Somali Child

Have you come here to play Jesus

To the lepers in your head?

--U2, "One"

There is basically just one way of cutting costs in translation. That is because the central cost in any translation process is human labor.

Do I need to spell it out? The only way to cheapen translation is to slash the rates you pay translators with the cruel zest of Ming the Merciless. That’s it. That’s the only game in town. Go downtown. Force your freelancers into urban poverty.

So, basically, if you have ANY sort of business plan that involves making translation cheaper, you are not Henry Ford or Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or the guy who invented Post-Its. You’re just another low-rent hack who wants to profit from the reserve army of the unemployed.

I will say it one more time: Cheap translation will not save a single Somali child from starving. If you want to save Somali children, go to bleeping Somalia with a 50-pound bag of rice. DO NOT fly your fat ass on a jumbo jet to a localization conference 1,500 miles away from home to give the same hacky speech you’ve given in Madrid, Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo, and London. 

Cheap translation is only an incredibly unimaginative way for some second-rate “entrepreneur” to turn a quick buck while providing bad service. And, as the ALS debacle proves, it is often a recipe for disaster rather than a vehicle for generating value. Dressing it up under the guise of some sort of dubious technological advance does not make it any better. Or you any less culpable.


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.

Kumail Nanjiani on the Age of McLocalization

I first heard this comedian on the This American Life podcast. It was a short two-minute bit that closes his show called “Cheese.” It is one of the funniest things around, mainly because of the stress he places on certain words. Go ahead and watch it here.

Another clip taken from his act has Nanjiani discussing a video game called Call of Duty (full disclosure, I also play it). He remarks that previous installments of the game were based on real wars, but subsequent versions of the game have been set in current conflicts such as Afghanistan and Iraq. He expresses surprise that one level is even based in Karachi, the city in which he grew up. The joke is that he thinks this might give him an edge in playing: “Hey, guys we can hide out there. I used to rent videos there. Mr. Sadiqqi will let us hide out.”

But then he goes on to make a further observation that is symptomatic of the current state of McLocalization and how it combines a very unconscious Anglocentrism with a naïve but clumsy universalism. The game makes a huge investment in creating realistic settings. Except for one small detail, as Nanjiani points out: 

The name of the language you speak in Pakistan is Urdu. That’s the name: Urdu. But all the street signs in Karachi in Call of Duty are in Arabic. Yeah. Totally different language. And I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but this game took three years to make. If you look at it, they get every detail perfect, like the graphics. You can see individual hairs on people’s heads. When they run, they sweat. When they run, their shoelaces bounce. All they had to do was google “Pakistan language.” They were literally like: “What language do they speak in Pakistan?” “Uh… I don’t care. I can’t get this guy’s sideburns right.”

Watch the whole video here:

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.

McLocalization: The Answer to a Question Nobody Asked

In all of these discussions about information technology,

you come back to the fact that they are

solving problems that are not really problems.

- Malcolm Gladwell

Even in our age of globalization, if you take a poll of all Fortune 500 CEOs, cheap translation would not rank among the top 10 or even 20 items on their wish list. The problem with McLocalization is it’s designed to do things companies would kinda, sorta want done without actually investing any real money in it. It is a technology for doing things companies want done at the margin. Guess what? Great fortunes have come from making things cheaper that are important priorities. Not the stuff you leave as your last priority and assign to the absolute lowest bidder. To quote an economist: “Markets have a strong incentive to find and develop alternatives to relatively expensive inputs (like pricey labour).” Did you hear that? Relatively expensive inputs. For translation, that boat has long since sailed in the Era of the Internet. But even aside from the Internet, the highest earning translator in the world earns less than the average assistant of a chief executive officer (translation is  not scalable, in the sense discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb; the heirs of Roberto Bolaño can become millionaires another time over with zero input of labor, while Bolaño's translator gets exactly the same fee whether a translated novel sells ten copies or one hundred thousand copies). Translation-tech companies struggle mightily to climb the Kilimanjaro of cheap translation only to reach the summit and find Lionbridge already there, having a picnic with ProZ.com.

Is it any wonder that the giants of McLocalization are burdened with anorexic profit margins and, defying belief, fail to turn in attractive earnings despite paying dirt-poor rates and having huge corporate clients? Put it another way: How many McLSP billionaires are there out there? When was the last you saw one of those CEOs dining out with Zuck and Steve and Larry and Sergey?

And, remember, every penny sunk into research and development (if any is actually being done outside of Google) is a penny added to the cost of translating a bunch of stuff no one really needed to read in the first place.

This suggests that any business model based exclusively around cheap translation is dubious in the long term.

Moreover, this suggests that, from the point of view of the post-editor, translation automation and low wages are inextricably linked. You ask: Why won’t I be able to charge a premium rate for post-editing these manuals no one ever reads anyway? Why? The answer is kind of in the question, don’t you think? Your boss is struggling to turn a dime for himself and only needs you to apply a little lipstick to the crowdsourced, post-edited pig.

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 Future of Crowdsourced Post-Editing is Here

Wolowitz: Raj, did you ever tell your sister about the time Sheldon got punched by Bill Gates?

Priya: Oh, God! You're kidding?

Raj: Nope. Gates gave a speech at the university. Sheldon went up to him afterward and said, "Maybe if you weren't so distracted by sick children in Africa, you could've put a little more thought into Windows Vista."

Leonard: Bam! Right in the nose. Made me proud to own a PC.

--The Big Bang Theory

On a blog, one of the theorists of the “Low Quality Translation” movement enumerates several successful crowdsourcing projects that, in his view, point toward the future. They are all touted as good examples of how unpaid crowds of non-professionals can undertake “community” translation (the euphemism du jour for crowdsourcing). One thing immediately jumps to my attention after perusing the list. The projects can be clearly divided into three distinct categories.

The first category is made up of non-profit or not-directly-for-profit projects that probably do not have the budget to fund a large translation effort. This category includes Yeeyan, Asia Online’s CPE (crowdsourced post-editing) of Wikipedia and the TED Conference subtitlers. The other characteristic of this first group is the ability to garner sufficient enthusiasm from their community of users to get them to contribute their work for free. Millions watch the TED conferences and probably feel sufficiently identified with the project to invest the time needed to subtitle these videos for free. The Asia Online experiment attempts to leverage the crowd in order to generate more raw material for an underserved language such as Thai and probably appeals to nationalism at some level. Yeeyan appeals to Chinese web surfers who are interested in gaining access to more content that is free from censorship and who also contribute their time in order to let other fellow non-English-speaking Chinese citizens to read this material. You can safely say that this category is more akin to phenomena such as fansubbing.

The second category is made up of large corporations (Adobe and Microsoft) who are clearly wading into the crowdsourcing waters as a way to cut down on costs and gain greater efficiency while making a half-hearted attempt (in my biased opinion) at expanding their meager customer support to their hapless victims in other languages.

Facebook and Twitter occupy a third category that is a hybrid in between the first two subsets. They are rich companies that can afford to pay for large-scale translation efforts from one or another outsourcer but choose not to. However, Facebook and Twitter generate sufficient enthusiasm from users so that they can coax them into doing the work of translating the site and still not see it as work (it is, after all, just another way to spend leisure time in a depressed economy). My hunch is these companies do not use crowdsourcing to save money but because that is just the way these companies do things. It is part of the Silicon Valley ideology, that mix of idealistic libertarianism, fanatical devotion to core competencies and trust in the depersonalized hive mind that Jaron Lanier describes as “digital Maoism.” Despite its cultural omnipresence, Facebook famously employs only 2,500 people. The localization of Facebook and Twitter are clear examples of projects which could have gone to engross the revenue of a large translation agency like Lionbridge or SDL (the non-existence of such projects may be a clue to their dismal stock market performance). What happened, on the contrary, was that Twitter and Facebook leveraged their own obsessive users and saved a bucketload of money. As such, their localization projects using CPE are a textbook example of Tyler Cowen’s Great Stagnation, which posits that the rate of technological progress is slowing down and that the few advances being made create less and less wealth.

But what I wanted to discuss was the second category, i.e., large companies such as Microsoft and Adobe without fanatical users who could pay for professional translation projects but choose not to do so. Clearly, the incentives are what draw the crowd in to work for free. The problem is that getting users to work for free can be quite a challenge for large corporations whose products simply do not generate that much loyalty or excitement.

So what can Adobe and Microsoft do? They are well-known megacorporations with products used by millions, albeit without much enthusiasm or affection (in some cases, the users are openly hostile). [Two side notes: 1.- It is very telling that the set of companies dabbling in CPE does not include Apple. We all know Apple is a cult. You may be a part of it, you may not. But it is highly indicative that Steve Jobs’s company chooses not to go down the path of crowdsourcing despite the ease with which it could mobilize its fanboys and fangirls to do so. Just think about the values we generally associate with Apple and mull that over for a few seconds… My guess is that the company has concluded that crowdsourcing clashes with its walled-garden, high-end image. 2.- If you are not a techie, the proposition that “Microsoft is a leader in innovation” in any field whatsoever may not sound that preposterous. But if you are a techie, the very idea makes you break out in spams of bitter, derisive laughter.]

We are told that Adobe is using CPE to provide information for the Chinese users of Adobe products. Microsoft, for its part, is a "trailblazer" (sic) in the field.

And here is where I start to get skeptical about how bright (or even feasible) a future dominated by CPE will be. The thing is I am one of the hapless victims who are subjected on a regular basis to Microsoft’s crowdsourced “knowledge base.” By virtue of the language settings in my operating system, I routinely have to take a walk on the wild side of  translated support documents, frantically clicking with mounting irritation through page after page of low-quality translations trying to get to the English original (which nine times out of ten turns out to be completely useless anyway). Yes, the managers of the hamster crowd in their infinite wisdom and absolute reluctance to provide decent customer support regularly make me sweat blood in order to fix the latest glitch from their products.  And it stokes my contempt just that little bit more.

The future, of course, is unknowable. But I’m just here to tell you the future of CPE is already here. And it pretty much sucks. If tech monopolies are opting for it, to me it sounds like: 1) just another way to squeeze more productivity out of their overworked personnel and external providers, who are worried about hanging onto their jobs in a desperately dark economy, and 2) just one more avenue to screw over their long-suffering users.

So what does the future look like? Remember this little guy? Yes, just imagine Clippy the Paper Clip annoying you in mangled Spanish, Urdu, Mandarin…

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=microsoft+clippy&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=firefox-a&sa=N&rls=org.mozilla:es-ES:official&biw=1200&bih=486&tbm=isch&tbnid=BmEZ_tqaE5DXlM:&imgrefurl=http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/microsoft/7614408/Microsofts-10-worst-products.html&docid=el2ZWkMqoTEAHM&w=460&h=288&ei=1v-ITtaLAuHs0gHzwc3UDw&zoom=1

http://acadamnit.blogspot.com/2010/07/grammnit.html

http://blog.radvision.com/codeofcontact/2010/04/14/if-you-were-a-fly-on-the-wall-at-these-great-companies/

http://www.worsttech.com/products/worst-tech-inventions-of-all-time-part-1-1103680.html

http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=46479&page=4

http://blog.studentexperts.com/photos/student-experts-gallery/evil-microsoft-clippy/4640

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.

David Mitchell on the Age of McLocalization

I am a big fan of David Mitchell, a British comedian who, along with Robert Webb, is the brains behind the TV sketch-comedy series That Mitchell and Webb Look. His comedy style is both slightly bookish (bordering on the pedantic) and heavily infused with pop culture. A typical sketch involves Admiral Karl Dönitz finding out that he has just been named Führer in the wake of Hitler's suicide. After some initial euphoria in which he cries he has "great plans for Germany" and calls his wife to tell her the big news, Dönitz is crushed to discover that his totalitarian reign will be rather short-lived because his only task as Leader is to surrender to the Allies ("you wouldn't mind just giving me a quick 'Heil Dönitz?'").

Web 2.0 Dogma: Is Any Translation Better Than No Translation?

One of the unspoken dogmas of the crowdsourced post-editing (CPE) model is that if you can’t afford to translate a website or document, the next best thing is to McLocalize it. In other words, use the CPE model at pennies a word. Privately, the vendor will tell you that “of course, the translation is lower quality, but at least you have access to some approximation of the original.” The recurrent mantra is that “bad translation is better than no translation.”

The Future of Translation is Selling Less Translation

Less will be more in the translation world. To really serve your clients, you will have to convince them that translation to 100 languages is not a good idea. In fact, it’s a very, very bad idea. You will have to prove to them that post-editing your copy is tacky. That crowdsourcing content makes you look shady. That it proclaims that your company stands for lower quality.

Lionbridge Circles the Drain: Are Cheap Translations a Road to Riches?

This sucker could go down.

George W. Bush (Sep. 2008)

De una vieja de Egipto relata Felino que dormia con un crocodilo al lado, imitando

á los pueblos de la America Septentrional, que hazen gargantillas de serpientes, y

á los Vruvayos pinta el Historico sin cabeça; desta suerte de monstruos se me

representan essos accionistas, pues no teniendo cabeça algunos para governarse,

duermen al lado de los crocodilos con descanso, formando galas de los aspides y

adornos de los venenos.

Joseph Penso de la Vega, Confusión de confusiones (1688)

Is cheapo translation a quick path to getting rich? Not for LIOX shareholders, apparently. For these unfortunate souls, owning stock in the largest player in the McLocalization sector has been more akin to jogging along with the Bataan Death March. Their investment plummeted -2.11% in today’s session and shed -6.88% of its value over three months, -32.7% over the past year, and -38% over the past five years. Yuck. Just look at the chart (if there are any children in the room, please send them away; if you are very squeamish, avert your eyes).

Redefining Quality in the “Translation” Industry: A Response to Jost’s Comment

A reader called Jost left the following comment on “The Hamster Who Translated 10,000 Words a Day (and Other Urban Legends)”:

I read your blog post earlier this afternoon and I've been thinking about it since. I think we need to be careful not to be too dismissive of each other's work. Our "industry" is made up of a lot of different kinds of jobs and interests and, I'm going to say it: quality standards. And someone who prepares text for mere usefulness rather than other quality criteria can still have a happy life. Jost

I am thankful that the comment was made because it allows me to write about a subject that had been rattling around in my brain for several months. The thing is that Jost zeroed in on the crux of the problem: “Our ‘industry’ is made up of a lot of different kinds of jobs and interests and, I'm going to say it: quality standards.” The issue, then, is quality and recent attempts to redefine it in order to create a more inclusive concept of the translation business, one that comprises both the hamsters and the non-hamsters.

Is Machine Translation Killing the Internet? Google Plays Peekaboo With its Translate API

El universo (que otros llaman la Biblioteca)…

Jorge Luis Borges, “La biblioteca de Babel”

This weekend, Google made a major flip-flop on its decision to pull the plug on the Translate API. Everyone and his dog in the MT Crowd by now have weighed in on the original bit of news: Google decided to withdraw access to its Translate API: “The Google Translate API has been officially deprecated as of May 26, 2011.” And then on Friday, June 3, the company backtracked after the pack of software developers, who want their content to altruistically reach all of humanity but aren’t really willing to actually pay (!) for it, began to howl like a pack of vampires being sprinkled with holy water:

UPDATE June 3: In the days since we announced the deprecation of the Translate API, we’ve seen the passion and interest expressed by so many of you, through comments here (believe me, we read every one of them) and elsewhere. I’m happy to share that we’re working hard to address your concerns, and will be releasing an updated plan to offer a paid version of the Translate API.

As many blogging heads have pointed out, this does not mean that Google Translate or Google Translator Toolkit are being withdrawn. Google is simply cutting off access to website developers who link up to the Google machine translation (MT) capability for free. Trados Studio, for example, had a plug-in for anyone wishing to use Google’s engine through the Trados interface. SDL now has to decide whether to pay for continuing to provide that feature or look for an alternative.

Google Chokes on McLocalization’s Perpetual Garbage Creation Machine

Last week I wrote a blog post describing a hypothetical experiment in which I created a Word file with one billion words and tried to shove it through Google Translate. I wrote then:

(Of course, there would be a cost to Google for the Biblical amounts of resources I have wasted on my little antisocial effort, but that is irrelevant for this thought experiment. Let us further assume that Google can’t track me down even with those Google Maps cars that go around the world with little cameras on them.)

(I go AWOL with a new identity and end up eating Fritos while watching Sopranos re-runs in some fleabag motel.)

It turns out, apparently, that the McLocalization Brigade was busy doing this exact same thing on an even more massive scale. To the point that they were putting a considerable strain on Google’s infrastructure.