Counterintuitive Twenty-First Century Hipster Luddism

I love vinyl. I'm an Edison man. Everything

after 'Mary had a little lamb' was kind of derivative.

—Stephen Colbert

Last week, two articles on highly successful musicians provided contrasting glimpses into the technology behind music production in our times. First up was an interesting piece from The New Yorker on what we might call the new Brill Building or the new Tinpan Alley: the dozen or so teams of song producers and writers that are responsible for the vast majority of the hits that dominate the American pop music scene. Fifty years ago, popular musicians didn’t write their own stuff. Their managers simply had them sing songs that professional songwriters churned out like sausages in places like the Brill in New York. Look at the first Beatles and Rolling Stones albums: not a single original composition. That is the world that Bob Dylan blew away. Carole King is the sole survivor of that bygone era. She began as a gun for hire with her husband and later successfully made the transition into the singer-songwriter era of the sixties and seventies who sang her own material.

Now, in the era of the Content Tsunami, "the times they are a-changin' back." A tiny group of twenty or so professional songwriters is once again churning out the Top 40 hits that account for the bulk of music sales. They use very simple formulas:

...today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah.

The songs are written according to a template that relies heavily on so-called “hooks,” the repetitive parts that captivate the listener—who apparently has the attention span of a fruit fly. As if older pop music was not repetitive or catchy enough. (Seriously, how much more catchy will pop have to get in the future? I imagine a couple of hands reaching out from a smartphone screen, grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you while a voice shouts: “Dance, bitch!”):

The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song.

In this age of alleged media diversification, a handful of individuals are responsible for the listening pleasures of millions. In fact, so tiny and influential is this elite that one song written for Beyoncé, “Halo,” ended up being used by Kelly Clarkson (“Already Gone”) before the duplication was noticed… and both became hits!

The process of writing cookie-cutter songs, unsurprisingly, relies heavily on high technology:

Eriksen worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

For a contrast, last week also saw the publication of a New York Times feature on Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, a major figure in the rock’n’roll that was displaced by this resurgence of the Top 40s hit machine.

White sounds like a post-industrial romantic who is knee-deep into the resurgence of vinyl. His record company’s slogan is that “Your Turntable’s not Dead”:

“It’s a really beautiful process,” White said. At the labeling station, an employee handed him a pressing of an old Robert Johnson LP that was being rereleased, and he weighed it in his hand. “That’s killer,” he said. “It’s not as heavy as mine, though. I’ve got the real one.” White calls LPs “the pinnacle of musical expression.” “I was talking to Robert Altman before he died,” he said, “and I asked him about an interview where he said that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He said: ‘I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With videotape or digital, I have no idea what’s going on.’ That’s how I feel about vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel, and you’re just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced. I think there’s a romance to that.”

Later on, the author of the piece describes White’s radically retro style of song production:

White thinks of computer programs like Pro Tools as “cheating.” He records only in analog, never digital, and edits his tape with a razor blade. “It’s sort of like I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,” he said. “The funny thing is, even musicians and producers, my peers, don’t care. Like, ‘Wow, that’s great, Jack.’ Big deal.”It’s easy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso — possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His best songs, like “Seven Nation Army,” are firmly rooted in the American folk vernacular, yet catchy and durable enough to be chanted in sports arenas worldwide. That he does it with such self-imposed constraints — for instance, his favorite guitar in the White Stripes was made of plastic and came from Montgomery Ward — makes it all the more impressive.

I will not attempt to drive a ten-ton truck through this stylistic difference or to construct some facile analogy about highbrow hipster retro and mass-market, tech-driven commercialism. I am perhaps a snob, but not at least in musical terms. My tastes are pretty Catholic insofar as pop is concerned. A peek at my iPod reveals a catalogue that ranges from the artsiness of a Tom Waits to the morose dirges of an Iron & Wine to the sugar-coated superficiality of an Abba. Obviously, someone like White, who says his three spiritual dads are “his biological father, God and Bob Dylan” will be closer to my heart. But I downloaded several of the songs mentioned in the New Yorker piece by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. While not my cup of tea, I can see the attraction. These artists are obviously the direct descendants of the Motown sound that was organized under very similar lines, with manufactured pop groups who didn’t write their own music. This artificial and commercial system nonetheless produced gems such as "You Can't Hurry Love," "Tracks of My Tears," and “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.”

Both White and the Norwegian producer duo known as “Stargate” belong to elites that produce popular music for the masses. The only difference is that Stargate’s masses are way more massive. But there is also a second difference. White's musical experiments are much less dependent upon the hit machine. Some of his albums can flop and others will do better, but he still has the independence and freedom to fail. The Stargate duo are much more dependent upon the fickle tastes of the mass public. Their flavor of music can fall out of fashion at the drop of a hat. In fact, it already happened to them once, back in the United Kingdom: "In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. 'People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,' Eriksen told me."

The New Yorker feature of the Top 40 wizards ends with a poignant moment when Adele's sweep of the Grammys is discussed:

But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.

The two styles of production inhabit the same moment in time. I would also suggest that White’s last-man-standing posture of cutting physical strands of tape with a knife might not be simply the anachronism of an eccentric weirdo. Think more along the lines of Apple versus Google or locavorism versus molecular gastronomy. A Luddite retro hipster living in Tennessee like White might just be the flip side of the two Norwegians hunched over their seventeen-inch screens in midtown Manhattan. In a post-historicist society, the line between retro and futurist blurs as the past recurs over and over, and our visions of the future age faster than our furniture. They are simply two different ways of inserting yourself into the present and the future.

But, still, I am beginning to wonder whether, in some fields, technological savvy and sophistication might begin to be correlated with replaceability, and perhaps even lower wages and lower profit margins. Instead of a sine qua non for avoiding obsolescence, technological sophistication might be the tax you constantly have to pay to maintain your status as a cog in a mass-production machine. A cog that is progressively paid less and whose output becomes increasingly commoditized.

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. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Translation and the Slowdown in Technological Innovation

Leo: My generation never got the future it was promised... Thirty-five years later, cars, air travel is exactly the same. We don't even have the Concorde anymore. Technology stopped.
Josh: The personal computer...
Leo: A more efficient delivery system for gossip and pornography? Where's my jet pack, my colonies on the Moon?

--The West Wing, “The Warfare of Genghis Khan”

We live in a time of crisis. In periods such as this, long-held beliefs begin to be questioned. I am reading the heartbreaking stories from the “We Are the 99%” tumblr and I see over and over how many young people say that the “American Dream” was a lie. That sort of pessimism among Americans was previously unthinkable. That same corrosive questioning is spreading to a lot of other acritical beliefs that seemed to be ingrained into the collective psyche. To cite a few examples, there used to be the belief that owning a home was absolutely a must (and that it was the best investment an individual could make). A previously unimaginable five-year-long (!) slump in home prices has put paid to that idea. Blogger James Altucher and others are campaigning against the idea that going to college is necessary or even advisable to ensure a better economic outcome. The conviction that the stock market always rises in the long run is slowly being relegated to the same back closet occupied by flat Earthism, epicycles and spontaneous generation. It is a shame that a prolonged period of economic crisis was necessary for people to question acritical dogma, but at least that is one positive side effect of the present troubles.

The Treadmill Desk for the Translator of the Future

The workstation of the future for the multilingual professional. All that is missing is a pellet dispenser. Perhaps some enterprising LSP will hook up these treadmills to generate green energy.

The Singularity is (not) near... (Hat tip to @jordibal.)

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.

Big Data: Another Silicon Valley Fad

George: If it was a regular salad, I wouldn’t have said anything. But you had to have the BIG SALAD!

(Seinfeld)

One of the narratives of the current tech bubble is closely related to the Content Big Bang. This explosion of data (aside: I don’t think text is necessarily “content” and much less data) is at once a challenge and an opportunity. According to this piece of groupthink, although managing the deluge of data and storing it is a problem, harnessing this flood of bits and bytes provides manifold insights for data mining. More powerful computing technology, we are told, will open the doors of this future.

But guess who was also a fan of Big Data? The preeminent military strategist of the past twenty years. No, not David Petraeus. I mean Donald "Unknown Unknowns" Rumsfeld. Tim Harford writes in a recent essay to promote his new book, Adapt, that the early (failed) Pentagon strategies in Iraq focused on routing tons of combat data to central headquarters, which processed it and then spit out tactical recommendations like a real-time version of Risk:

It is also a story about the role of technology in decision-making. The U.S. military placed increasing emphasis on the use of “effects based analysis of operations” – using massive amounts of data and computing power to allow commanders at headquarters to absorb information and react quickly, moving units around like chess pieces. Such techniques are hugely useful in some circumstances – a “shock and awe” campaign – but even then they do not always perform as advertised. We’re now discovering that in many campaigns, it is the decision maker on the ground – a captain or even a regular soldier – who has the information that counts and the ability to use it.

Now I know why Amazon keeps giving me such crappy recommendations after over a decade of feeding it data.


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.

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.

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.

“It Rubs the Translation Workspace on its Skin…”

“…or else it gets the hose again.”

Ok, we knew that you had to forcibly subscribe to Geoworkz Translation Workspace to freelance for Lionbridge. It is pricey, it is slow, it is outrageous.

Now comes the news, gleaned from ProZ.com’s forums, that there is no free trial of the tool.

Ahhh, but the first 30 days only cost $0.01.

A single cent. The problem is that no reminder is sent that your one-cent joy ride is about to expire. A perfect example of behavioral economics in action. People are innately hard-wired to follow the default. Example: when you buy a product, the option to get an unnecessary add-on or accessory or useless service plan is activated by default. It has been proven that only a minority acts against the default, i.e., deactivate the unwanted option.

By not sending a notice that the subscription is about to transition to the full price, the company insures itself that some unwilling buyers will lose some of their hard-earned money.

OK, Lionbridge, I promise to suspend my snarky blog posts if you make at least one symbolic, empty gesture at minimally acceptable corporate citizenship or basic human decency.

With these subscription policies,you have already fallen beneath the standards of the porn and gambling industries.

Seriously, guys, what’s next? Clubbing baby seals?

Please stop. I beg you. Please, Lionbridge… You are officially the worst company in the world. You did it. Please stop trying so hard.


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.

Machine Translation and the Gigantic Hamster Wheel

Last week I attended a virtual conference for translation agencies. Though I am not an agency (nor was meant to be...), the directory hosting the event opened the virtual doors of the event to so-called Certified Members, of which I am apparently one, after someone notified me of this fact about a year ago (it's kind of like the Nobel Prize, except for the lack of a huge cash prize and worldwide renown). Despite its virtual character, it was close enough to the experience of real conferences to remind me of why I don't go to conferences. The people who are looking for jobs WAY outnumber the number of people hiring (and since I am neither, I always feel as if I'm wasting people's time). And the people who are trying to sell me colored beads WAY surpass my interest in consuming colored beads (which tends to zero).

But I digress. Anyhoo, one presentation grabbed my attention. It was (grosso modo) about "disintermediation," an alleged trend in the industry for translation agencies (middlemen) to be phased out and for power to return to the individual translator. The presenter was sort of an industry guru and CEO of an agency (or should I say LSP, or "language service provider"? Yes, I probably should, since we are well into the realm of managementese, consultantese and corporatese). Ok. I am a translator. Power is why I got into this game (not the sex... not the money...). And when I lost it, I mourned. And now I'm certainly happy that it's coming back.

Now, "disintermediation" is a pretty heavy word. A compound of two Latin words with a further Latinate prefix to boot. They are fairly common in Romance languages and don't raise any eyebrows in the written cultures of Southern Europe. But they can come in quite helpful, as my now-deceased Swiss undergraduate adviser used to say,  "when shoveling sh*t in a Nordic language." But let's not be snarky. The presentation was 20 minutes long, but it can be summed up pretty much on the back of a napkin.

In the old days, the supply chain of localization projects looked something like this:

Content              Internal              MLV         SLV           Translator
Creation             Translation
                           Buyer



(Note: A little translation (!) is in order to help the poor soul who hasn't had the privilege of being burdened with even more mindless jargon than what the world currently throws at us. An MLV is a "multi-language vendor," which is an agency that handles many languages, often "all" languages, as their websites claim. An SLV is either an agency that handles a single language or a shady businessman with a broadband connection and an unpaid subscription to an Internet translation directory. "Content creation" means "writing." Oh, and a translator is a translator.)

The contention is that there is a trend in the industry for the links in this chain to be squished together more and more. So much so that there is even a tendency for some of the links to be excised from the chain altogether, as unnecessary middlemen are mercilessly amputated from the supply chain. Hence, "disintermediation." Now, to be fair to the author, he stresses that it is a "trend" he is seeing. He is a senior executive of a company and he should have an interesting point of view. However, his insights are ultimately disappointing. He is not providing hard facts. Again, to be fair, the translation pond is peopled by millions of tiny little amoeba, the largest of which tout themselves as multinationals and are actually the size of a tiny red and white zit on Google's capital "G." Any figures about the size of the translation, er, localization industry in terms of turnover, profits, ink cartridges, Mickey Mouse hats or any other arbitrary criterion is really a load of hogwash. 

So let us pass over the issue of quantification. Take it as granted that the trend actually exists. The question now turns to the issue of why. And here the presentation is on even shakier ground, as the weight of its rather overblown premise sinks slowly into the fluffiness of its argument. El Niño in hydrometeorology is now invoked as an explanation for everything that is poorly understood because El Niño itself is poorly understood. It is a phenomenon that was only recently discovered (discovered, that is, by people other than Peruvian fishermen, who had known about it for centuries and perhaps millennia). So much the same for the buzzwords of today. Web 2.0! Globalization! Machine translation! Collaboration infrastructure! (Whatever that is...) Buzzzz... Buzzzzz... Buzzzzz....

Now: I'm not saying that these phenomena are not real. Or that their impact won't eventually be dramatic. My skepticism stems purely from the suspicion that historical change (even change driven by technological upheaval) is actually a lot slower than our cyber-gurus would have us believe.

As stated above, overall data for the translation and interpretation industry are hard to come by. Therefore, let us rely on the anecdotal, the illuminating empirical instance. The presenter complies. He proceeds to sketch out an example in which his company was pipped by an Indian company in a bidding process. This is where it gets really, really insane. I have to describe and quote this at length because, apparently, this is how the translation industry actually works.

First of all, a slide appears. In the first line, we see the current cost structure of the translation industry. A translator (admittedly very unproductive) translates 2,000 words a day at $0.08 per word (again, admittedly a crappy rate). (Let's not quibble, it's a hypothetical.) In contrast, let us visit Machine Translation Nirvana, where the translator spurts out 10,000 words a day and charges $300 per day. Although his rate per word has gone down from $0.08 per word to $0.03 (-37.5%, the presenter says), his take-home pay has nearly doubled:

2,000 words x  $0.08 = $160.00/day
10,000 words x $0.03 = $300.00/day
(+500%) = (-37.5%) = +187.5%

The first thing I would like to point out to the MBAs who currently tut-tut the translation industry for being managerially unsavvy is that basic math is still important. When something drops from $0.08 to $0.03, the drop is not 37.5% but 62.5%. But, hey, what the hell do I know? I have a doofy liberal arts degree, right?

The presenter, undaunted, goes on. I quote at length:

 "With the use of technologies like I mentioned like machine translation (sic), translators can boost their productivity to much higher levels than they had before. The simple example in this slide illustrates a hypothetical situation where the volume goes up 500%, from 2,000 words to 10,000 words a day [shouldn't that actually be 400%?]. The price goes down by 37.5%. [;o)] And yet the revenue for the project during the same working day, let's say 8 hours, goes up almost 200%. So are you sure that you still want to be complaining and talking about unit price? Consider talking about price per project, or hourly or daily rates. But keep in mind [that] what really matters is productivity: how many words you can do per unit of time. If this productivity is going up because of the technologies that you have, this is an improvement you can make to how much money you can make. Translators should not be, and LSPs should not be, married to unit prices. You have to look at increases in productivity and how that can give you an edge in providing clients with a competitive price. We probably have colleagues listening from India. We recently were faced with a project where we competed with an Indian company for French into English translation. Our price was, I don't know, 18 cents per word and our colleagues in India got the project for seven cents per word. I'm sure... It was a very large project. I'm sure it's not only the cost structure that they have, but also the productivity that they are getting from these projects that allowed them to provide such competitive pricing."

Wait, wait, wait... What? Stop presses. WHAT! This person is the CEO of a company and he is claiming that an Indian competitor beat him in a bidding process... not by two cents a word... not by three cents a word. No, not even five cents. The winning bid was 11 cents a word lower! That means a competitor undercut you by presenting a bid 61% lower than yours. And this wasn't because the competitor is savagely compromising quality and farming it out to non-native English speakers, but because of their "productivity." I'm sorry, but my bulls**t monitor is going haywire.

If this is the reality of the translation industry in 2010, then all of the major companies will be gone by 2012. They will simply be steamrollered by those crafty Indians and their top secret machine translation technology. And, yes, I know about Wipro and Infosys, and the Indian Silicon Valley, but come on... Moreover, if the Indian company can provide quality translation for the pair at $0.07 a word today, then they should own the entire market within two years. I mean, the owners of that company are the new Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Screw working. Sign me up for the IPO.

But let us go back to reality. We are in 2010. A sizable amount of the American public believes in intelligent design. We can't time travel. We don't fly to the grocery store in jet packs. Machine translation is still not very good, despite some very tangible advances in recent years. Moreover, unless you're using a free engine such as Google's machine translation service (and I'm afraid that's probably the case in the example above), creating your own MT application is still expensive. From the little I know, it requires building up a major corpus, analyzing it, assuring its quality, feeding it to the computers, buying major hardware moolah, etc. That means capital. If it's capital, why can't a half-decent Western company beat an Indian competitor? Or, Jesus, at the very least come close. Because, frankly, bringing an 18-cent-a-word bid to a 7-cent-per-word world is tantamount to whipping out a butter knife in the O.K. Corral and lunging at Doc Holliday. 

And, ultimately, if the edge isn't capital, the only other possible edge the Indian company has must be access to superior technology it created itself. However, unless its R&D budget is larger than Google's (and I seriously doubt it), then its competitive edge is a mystery.

But there is no mystery. The presenter asks us not to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. Behind the curtain lies allegedly superior technology powered by the megaprocessors of hundreds of servers processing language strings in supercooled storage buildings in Hyderabad. When we push back the curtains, however, we find a huge hamster wheel powered by thousands of underpaid and underqualified translators post-editing stuff the agency downloaded from Google Translate.

But let's go back to the mathematically challenged example above. The paragraph I quoted at length is very apt because it very neatly summarizes the sort of "deal" that freelance translators will be faced with over the next few years. Increasingly, translation agencies (let's call them TAs, since we apparently love acronyms so much) will try to migrate their freelance workforce to a new payment model based on hours and away from the per-word model (and its per-line and per-character brethren). The presenter mentions the possibility of a per-project rate, but my hunch is the per-hour basis will be much easier to introduce for several reasons.

There is nothing wrong per se with a movement toward lower per-word rates or even per-hour fees, albeit with a major caveat: provided that (and that is a big unknown) computerized translation technology delivers the productivity gains that the poor man's Chris Andersons of the translation world are rhapsodizing about (always around the corner, perpetually beyond the reach of our thirsting, tantalized lips).

"With MT, it almost feels as if the wheel is moving by itself!"

The real mystery isn't the killer MT app. It is why a senior executive of a company that is being run into the ground by subpar competitors is so philosophical about this process.

I can hazard a couple of explanations. Technological determinists and free market theologists (this person is probably both) see competition and efficiency as absolute values. Schumpeter and creative destruction, etc. Don't get me wrong, competition and efficiency are important values. However, mindless migration to absolute computerization of the translation process before it is scientifically proven that post-editing is better, both qualitatively and quantitatively, is simply stupid. Frankly, we are not quite there yet. Do it badly or prematurely and it could become a traumatic process in which professionals are forced to become a hamsters on a poorly made wheel that perpetuates human misery.

The other potential explanation is that the author of this presentation is slowly transitioning from senior executive of a failing MLV to freelance cyberevangelist for creative destruction in the language world. And if his competition is undercutting him by 60% and providing the same quality, that is a smart move.

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.

Battle of the Alignment Tools: YouAlign Wins Hands Down

This week I needed to align two files, convert the result into .tmx and import it into SDLX. The problem is the files had *.docx extensions because they were created with Word 2007. I had at my disposal SDL Trados's WinAlign, Wordfast's align function and the free YouAlign online app offered by Terminotix.

Trados WinAlign, the one I'm most familiarized with, failed to process any of the files, even after converting them to .rtf and saving them as Word97-2003.

Wordfast's Aligner was simply unmanageable. It was my first time using it and, despite an interface that superficially looks like WinAlign, I was unable to make heads or tails out of it after several attempts.

I vaguely remembered something about a free alignment tool . A quick Google search brought me to YouAlign. It worked like a charm, on the first attempt and without a single mistake. Amazing. It is offered by the same company that sells Terminotix. Although I don't own their CAT program, the YouAlign experience made me feel fuzzy and warn towards them. Therefore, I highly recommend it next time you get tripped up by your licensed programs.

(Alas, the import into SDLX failed for whatever reason, but such is the way of the CAT tool.)