Think Different/Differently: Is Translation a Commodity?

David Grunwald acknowledges my hat tip to his Ortsbo coverage but reiterates that translation is a commodity. His basic argument is that translation does not involve creativity. I half agree with the premise that translation does not imply creativity in the same sense that artistic creation does, but I also reject the corollary. You can’t conclude from this starting point that translation is a commodity. Please allow me to highlight the fact I remain astonished by the sight of the owner of a translation agency publicly stating that he believes translation is a commodity. First of all, translation is a service. If you provide service as a commodity, how do you distinguish yourself from the competition? There are only two ways: fiercer marketing or lower rates. That is the eternal race to the bottom that leads us to the clowns from Lackuna. 

The problem with the “is translation a commodity?” debate is that no easy argument exists to prove that it isn’t a commodity. As in the case of many cultural objects —such as humor or art— you either see its value or you don’t. A joke that needs to be explained and dissected ceases to be a joke. Perhaps you can fall back on easy stereotypes about engineers. "They just don’t get why a Gauguin might be interesting despite the lack of realism." But that is a lazy straw man. The tech industry is not universally blind to the quality of outward presentation or design. The “Low Quality Translation” people are not totally tone deaf. They simply (and willfully) shut out evidence that falsifies their industry-centric world view.

If translation is a commodity, so is copywriting. But listen to Steve Jobs obsessing over the 1990s slogan that led his company to charge back to the top of the worldwide tech industry. This is an excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s recent review of Walter Isaacson’s biography:

The famous Apple “Think Different” campaign came from Jobs’s advertising team at TBWA\Chiat\Day. But it was Jobs who agonized over the slogan until it was right:

They debated the grammatical issue: If “different” was supposed to modify the verb “think,” it should be an adverb, as in “think differently.” But Jobs insisted that he wanted “different” to be used as a noun, as in “think victory” or “think beauty.” Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in “think big.” Jobs later explained, “We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. ‘Think differently’ wouldn’t hit the meaning for me.”

This type of process is not much different from the daily process of translation. It is the laborious wordcraft that goes into writing and its sister métier of translating. So then, is translation a commodity? That is an interesting debate that is difficult to resolve. But what is certain is that there is a golden rule: Your degree of conviction that translation is a commodity is inversely correlated with your profit margins.


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.

Steve Jobs, Language Technology and Taste

Dear tech geek:

This is why Steve Jobs is a genius and you’re a dinkus.

  The clip is taken from the final minutes of a documentary entitled Triumph of the Nerds, from 1996. This is a transcription with emphasis added by me:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is… I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way: in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. And you say 'why is that important?' Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products.

So I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

When this interview took place, Jobs was the disgraced boy genius who was ignominiously ousted from the company he founded. These words could easily have been taken as sour grapes from the loser in the great PC battles of the 1980s. Now, however, they are not as easy to dismiss after what has been called the “greatest second act” in corporate history, which began the following year and led to the iPod and now the iPad.

So now you have to pay attention. Because the triumph of Apple over Microsoft is not a story of victory through efficiency, but rather a trouncing of corporate competitors through design excellence and conceptual elegance. In a word, taste. Over vulgarity.

Indeed, the Apple story is a ubiquitous counterexample to a lot of faddish Silicon Valley nostrums broadcast by Wired.

While midgets dream of taking cultural processes and hacking them into assembly lines, the real giants of our times are thinking of ways to break the mind-forged manacles of the twentieth century.

Most research and discussion on machine translation comes from relatively uncultured technicians who look at translation and say “hey, that looks pretty simple, a computer could probably do that.” Over half a century later, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land remains bogged down in the outskirts of London. It is not the Crusade itself that raises hackles but the fanaticized or duplicitous leaders who tell us that the spires of Jerusalem are visible from Southwark if you stand on your tippy-toes. It turns out that a message in one language will never be 100% identical to the message in another language. That information is conveyed differently in different languages. That information encoded in language is hard to quantify.

A lot of the evangelicalism about language technology is marred by intellectual laziness. Whether you’re discussing Lady Gaga or red-shifting galaxies, whether you are an engineer or a computer designer or a poet, you should have the basic courtesy of using words with care. Some very aggressive discussions about the future of the translation industry appear to be undertaken by people who have never written a sentence in their life.

And I’m not asking for holographic Vladimir Nabokov to come down from the Cloud and expostulate on the wonders of the future while chasing butterflies. You don’t have to be a wooly trilingual professional who blogs about hemp cloth in his spare time to appreciate language.

In the clip, the founder of Apple is speaking about how early computers had fonts in which every letter was allotted the same amount of space. An “f” and a “t” placed together looked like “f t” instead of our current “ft,” in which the serif of the “t” elbows its way into the space below the swinging upwards loop of the “f” to form a pleasing whole. That sort of minute attention to aesthetic detail can only come from a profound appreciation of early printing and the artisans who produced incunabula. It is an eloquent example of how humanistic culture should inform technology.

That is sadly missing from current discussions about language and technology. The debate is visibly monopolized by people who are not translators and remind you of the Burt Lancaster character in Elmer Gantry. Or when it is former translators, it is people long on salesy pizzazz and not much in the old noggin. Or people who think translation is a commodity. These people probably don’t read a lot of literature and think any sentence is equivalent to any other. Well, they’re not. Different sentences are not equivalent because of a little thing called style. And if you can’t perceive it, you probably never will. And that is what Jobs was talking about.

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.