Smartling: Crowdsourced Post-Editing at its Finest

Technology is only as good as its designers and its users. How good are the crowdsourced post-editing (CPE) companies scooping up venture capital in Silicon Valley? Well… It appears to be getting easier and easier to capitalize on the social media bubble to score some easy VC cash. A company called Smartling recently raised 10 million cool ones “to ramp up its localization tools.” The investors include “U.S. Venture Partners, Venrock and First Round Capital,” which “have all chipped in for the series B funding round and are joined by IDG Ventures.”

Some (Serious) Observations on the Duolingo Brouhaha

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion."

L. Ron Hubbard

The MT Crowd has reacted very defensively to the derisive reception of the Duolingo concept. I myself published a tongue-in-cheek post. However, any further discussion either for or against is futile in the absence of further information.

No one has pointed out the fact that the TED talk by Duolingo creator Luis von Ahn doesn’t actually explain how the system works.

In that respect, two observations are in order.

First of all, the ReCaptcha concept for digitizing books is old hat. If you’re struck by the “gee whiz” aspect of this system, you don’t really read the paper. Even I knew about it. However, the point I would like to make is that the identification of individual blurred words is a lower-order task than taking grammatically complex sentences of some length and providing an accurate equivalent in another language. That is where machine translation proves useless and that is where Duolingo will either achieve a breakthrough or bog down.

Second of all, if you listen to von Ahn’s presentation closely, you should note that he does not indicate how the system will work, even grosso modo. The closest he gets to a technical explanation is very vague. It comes in the crucial 30 seconds in which he describes how the translation process works:

Of course, we play a trick here to make the quality as good as [that of] professional translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator (circa 14:50). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

Of course, vagueness is his prerogative. He has a "secret sauce" to sell that perhaps could be easily copied, patents notwithstanding. So, basically, the success of Duolingo will boil down to how good the “secret sauce” is that analyzes the target candidates and creates a composite sentence out of the different options provided. That is what no one knows and I suspect no one will know for several months or perhaps years. The thing is that this "combination" is basically what machine translation does with its constituent corpora. Regardless of where the target candidates come from, the proof is not in the crowdsourcing per se. No, the proof is in the pudding that does the combining of the data, whether provided by language learners or bottle-nosed dolphins.

Let me add three observations that I find revealing about the whole episode. 

1.- I wonder whether Google’s interest isn’t due more to the hope of opening some kind of back door into the social media bubble by drawing in people wanting to learn languages for free. My view: this type of crowdsourcing is a case in which the crowd’s wisdom will only be as good as that of the best individual in the crowd.

2.- To proclaim it “crowdsourcing at its best” given the information at hand is typical of the type of quackery put out by our McLocalization pundits.

3.- Furthermore, the immense amount of buzz generated by a solitary 15-minute video clip that contains very little solid information (and the zeal with which it is already upheld by true believers) is typical of the data vacuum (and religious fervor) of speculative bubbles. 

Renato Beninatto may be a hot air system moving through the translation industry, but he is ideal material to diagnose bubble mentality. To quote from his glowing review of a system about which he knows next to nothing:

Let me put it this way: I choose to believe. 


(Scroll down to the comments section to read his profession of Faith.)



Amen, brother. Amen. 


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.

The Social-Media-Crowdsourcing Bubble Takes Another Step Closer to Parallel Universe

[Charlotte tells Carrie about a salesman who gives her free shoes because he is a foot fetishist.]

Charlotte: I don’t think it’s creepy. He makes me feel like Cinderella!

Carrie (shocked): Yes, just like Cinderella… (Thinks to herself): Sick, twisted, parallel-universe Cinderella.

(Sex and the City)

OK, we know MT output remains pretty poor and crowdsourcing only works for websites that are used obsessively for hours and hours.

So how can we leverage the leisure time of the otiose and ignorant to further the dream of bringing the world closer together?

Last year brought us the greatest philanthropic achievement of the McLocalization sector. There is, apparently, a dearth of material in the Thai language, which means that Thai farmers don’t have enough access to information in their own language (never mind the fact that they may not own computers or even have access to the Internet). Well, Thai peasants, you need no longer fear: the MT Crowd gives you… (drum roll)… MACHINE TRANSLATED WIKIPEDIA!

Their standard of living may not have improved much, but at least they’ve got a very detailed discography of Nat King Cole and a smorgasbord of information on the popular American TV show called Hee Haw.

Fresh off this magnum opus, the phalanx has come up with an even better idea: Let’s get people who don’t know foreign languages to translate stuff!

Why didn’t someone think of this before? Our resident Silicon Valley entrepreneur ripostes: “Just because it’s completely moronic doesn’t mean that it’s not a game changer!”

He proceeds:

“Yes, translate as you learn! Back in the olden days, you had to learn a foreign language to translate. Forget that, my brizzle! The world is moving WAY too fast for that antediluvian paradigm. What’s that you say? That we should learn a language before translating? Geez, Grandpa, go get your slippers and jump into your PJs: Matlock starts in half an hour.”

Sound insane? A new venture called Duolingo.com is enginnovating the future at the same time as it boldly goes where no lunatic has ever gone before:

Language differences remain a barrier for the global sharing of knowledge, and computers cannot process human language accurately. The more you learn at Duolingo, the more knowledge you make accessible to the world.

Since you create shared value when you learn, you don’t have to pay for using Duolingo. We believe language education should be 100% free.

Common sense would suggest that a language learner is probably the worst possible candidate to translate a text. (“Well, of course, when you put it that way, it sounds COLOSSALLY stupid…”). But thanks to the magic of crowdsourcing, people who don’t know languages become the ideal workforce for translating texts.

Seriously, guys, what’s next? Are we going to get dogs to translate random stuff on the Internet? Those border collies that know 1,000 words? Better yet: when are we going to crowdsource dolphins? (“We would only use the really, really smart ones. Duh…”)

When historians look back at the Social Media Bubble of the 2010s in search of a peak (i.e., the moment when things got so delirious that even absurd business models began to be taken seriously), I hope they take a look at this venture. Because it’s my candidate.

Of course, anyone pointing out that the Emperor is dancing around in his birthday suit (and, by the by, doesn’t actually know Mandarin Chinese) is a Luddite. Nay, an ignoramus who doesn’t understand that ever-increasing ingenuity is required to achieve this century’s loftiest dream.

No, not curing cancer. Not colonizing Mars, either. Not even realistic breast implants.

No. The Web 2.0 will break down language barriers to achieve the centuries-long dream of selling more online text ads.

Jesus wept.




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.