‘Reach Down, God, Give Me a High Five’: Low Quality Translation and Low Quality SEO

This guy thought up Death Bed: The Bed That Eats People and f****ng finished it! That means one of two things happened. He either he never had a moment’s doubt. He hit that typewriter every day. "And then the pillow starts to smother… Ohhh! This is awesome! Reach down, God! Give me a high five! Boom!” Here’s what’s worse. What if he had moments of doubt, AND THEN F***ING WORKED THROUGH THEM? That’s so much worse for me. What if he was going: “And then the pillow starts… What the f**k am I writing? I’m putting my name on this piece of… No! I will finish this!” He looked at his poster of the little kitten hanging from the tree saying “Just hang in there, baby.” And he said: “Yes, I will hang in there, kitten.”

—Patton Oswalt, Werewolves and Lollipops

You know one of my bugbears (or perhaps hobby horses) is the Content Tsunami. It is the main pillar of the flimsy business case for Low Quality Translation. It goes a little something like this: “Since the amount of content is exploding, we need low quality translation to translate this flood of (low quality) information.” I want to use this opportunity to highlight one tiny little molecule in the endlessly expanding ocean of the Information Big Bang.

The piece is published in the blog of a Very, Very Large Translation Agency that does a lot of Spanish post-editing at $0.02 per word and constantly badgers qualified professionals to join its ranks of underpaid drones. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “stupid is as stupid does.” The blog post I am discussing here is, perhaps uncharacteristically, not the product of a computerized copywriting program. I can safely say it was actually produced by a human being. But, as Low Quality theorists are fond of reminding us, human authorship is no guarantee of quality:

Financial documents can be produced in a variety of file formats. Keeping this in mind, Trusted Translations is prepared to accept all types of files, and can deliver them as ready-to-publish files if so required by the client.

Thank GOD for Trusted Translations! Where would we be without an unscrupulous, faceless corporation and its semi-anonymous ten-dollar-an-hour blogger reminding us that financial documents come in a variety of file formats? Thank GOD for the Internet! To think that as recently as 1993 you couldn’t drive your PC on the information superhighway and come across this banal piece of drivel.

But, as Jon Stewart says, “Wait, there’s more”:

Finance departments, along with financial institutions themselves, are a key area in managing any type of business. Producing documents that hold very important and specialized information, these departments often require accurate translations of these documents in order to communicate financial information to a business’s own offices in another country, or to other companies. Trusted Translations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range of financial documents and has access to resources such as proprietary financial dictionaries, translations memories and expert industry-specific translators.

"Trusted Translations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range of financial documents..." Can you just imagine the anonymous blogger writing this sentence and crying out to God for a high five? Let’s parse this. Proprietary financial dictionaries. Yeah. If you place the search phrase “financial translation” in Google, your first result is a bilingual glossary that purports to be specialized in finance, courtesy of… you guessed it! Trusted Translations, the finest purveyor of Low Quality Translation. The glossary bears the distinguished title of “English Spanish Dictionary of Financial Terms.” And, obviously, it was crafted by a bevy of “expert industry-specific translators” (?), who, I am guessing, are the ultimate arbiters of the text after it has been processed by Trusted’s machine translators, Roombas, C3-POs, Wall*Es, and sundry translation memories. What do these “expert industry-specific translators” consider worthy of including in a financial glossary? Let’s see. “Go-go fund.” Yes, that comes up very often in financial documents… written in 1965. So, if you are ever swallowed up by a worm hole and deposited in the year when I Dream of Jeannie was number one in the Nielsen ratings and Vietnam was a distant place where a handful of Marines were spending the nastiest summer vacation ever, well, golly, Sarge, Trusted Translations just saved you a lot of time!

TT’s contribution to the Content Tsunami is, of course, nothing more than cheap SEO-gaming without bothering to actually contribute anything of any value to the Internet. My thesis is that this opportunistic online marketing ethos is indicative of its overall business philosophy (cheap, cheap, cheap...). Allow me to provide a sampling of the blog post’s internal hyperlinks. The phrase “financial translation” leads the accidental cyber-tourist to a cluster of articles (of similar quality) on issues as diverse as “financial translation teams”, “financial translation languages”, “financial document translations” (and, let’s face it, who hasn’t googled those Boolean phrases in the wee morning hours of some desperate, lonely Saturday night?) 

And so on and so on. The thing that gets me is that TT positively RULES the search rankings. Not only does it broadcast its low quality content in every single localization conference, it also dominates the online search world with the same iron fist with which Ivan the Terrible ruled early modern Russia.

“Stupid is as stupid does.” If your translation provider uses Low Quality search engine optimization, what are the odds that it doesn’t use Low Quality Translation? And passes it off as the work of “expert industry-specific translators”? Hmmmm…

Trusted Translation’s SEO strategy is just the same adolescent hacker ethos that underlies Low Quality Translation, made even more grotesque by the fact that it is espoused not by teenage computer nerds who don’t know any better but middle-aged gurus who should. Which leads to an interesting observation. When they talk to translators, lower quality translation providers preach the necessity of low quality translation (and, implicitly, correspondingly low rates). But when they talk to clients, these same companies masquerade as high quality translation providers. They mumble in their clumsy corporate prose about “expert industry-specific translators.” They bloviate about their knowledgeable post-editors. Meanwhile, these selfsame post-editors are in a nearby supermarket check-out line trying to pay for baby formula with food stamps, praying to Yahweh and Harry Reid that the Republican Congress will extend welfare benefits for another six months. 

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 his profile or you can follow him on Twitter.

Dispatches from the Content Tsunami

Last week, TV writer and broadcaster Tom Scharpling tweeted exciting news:

@scharpling
I can now reveal the Big Announcement: Michael Lewis is writing his next book about me. It's gonna be called RADIO MAN. Very exciting!

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190124529006292992

Two hours later, however, the big news had soured slightly:

@scharpling
Bad news. It turns out that the Michael Lewis writing a book about me was a spambot. Beyond disappointed. 

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190156016103600129

Yes, it appears that the Low Quality Content Tsunami is slowly seeping into popular consciousness. We are staring into the black abyss of low quality texts, to which translators must add a multilingual layer of Low Quality Translations to complete the Literary Sandwich of the Future.

Picture yourself, for instance, relaxing next to a Caribbean beach while using your smartphone to post-edit a masterpiece by Israeli Nobel-Prize-winning pyscologist Daniel Kahneman, Fast and Slow Thinking. Life is easy. The sun is shining. Solicitous waiters bring you a healthy lunch silently, so as not to disturb you.

Wait, no. Rewind. It turns out that Daniel Kahneman’s best seller is called Thinking, Fast and Slow. What you are post-editing is a deceptively similar tome written by an entity called “Karl Daniels”. See what the scumbag Conent Tsunami-ers did there by choosing a fake name that sounds sneakily like Kahneman’s? Unfortunately, the book is no longer available from Amazon (I could KICK myself! However, Google Books managed to at least salvage some memory of this oeuvre in its vast Babelian library). The non-Nobel book, according to Geoffrey Pullum of the Language Log, is:

a compilation of snippets from Wikipedia articles and the like, dressed up like a book. Edited by robots for you to buy by mistake. It's a spam book, part of the "gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described as bookspam"

Yes, the world has been enriched by this book by about the same degree as it has been by all those Nigerian scam emails.

But wait, Hal Karl Daniels isn’t the only binary brain that has been busily recycling low quality content to add to the giant tidal wave of information that is going to make us all rich and enlightened. Perhaps you can apply your post-editing chops to the little reports produced by a company called ICON Publishing in San Diego founded by a computer science professor called Philip Parker (Is automated publishing the future?):

Parker's production costs are only 23 cents per book because they're made by computers. Algorithms search through incredible amounts of data from published research and government reports. That info is then plugged into a book format. It's kind of like a very high tech form of Mad Libs. Parker came up with the idea in the '90s when he was writing economic reports.

Oh, wait, the book cost 23 cents to make. Not per word. I mean the WHOLE ENTIRE book cost 23 cents to make. It is highly unlikely that anyone will pay even $0.01 per word to translate it, which is close to below subsistence level in most countries on Earth. So scratch that opportunity. On to the next thing.

Heard about the recent spate of flash crashes driven by stock trading algorithms? Well, it seems that the computer programs that feed on news and use them as signals for buying and selling might be taking their cues from other computers. Which is always reassuring when you mention computers and gynormous amounts of money. Ever heard of the phrase feedback loop? This is from a recent article by Evgeny Morozov ("A Robot Stole my Pulitzer"):

Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about what to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”Don't miss the irony here: Automated platforms are now “writing” news reports about companies that make their money from automated trading. These reports are eventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spot even more lucrative deals. Essentially, this is journalism done by robots and for robots. The only upside here is that humans get to keep all the cash.

Maybe Narrative Science needs a couple of financial translators moonlighting as post-editors? Once again, though, the production cost of the source text is so negligible as to make out-and-out raw MT the likeliest candidate for translation.

If you truly expect binary recursiveness to feed you, perhaps you can write to the company that published Computer Game Bot Turing Test and propose your services as a post-editor into Spanish or French for this instant classic. Computer engineer Carlos Bueno describes the book as follows (I am indebted to Spanish IT translation über-geek @jordibal for this anecdote):

Let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

But take heart, not all low quality content is attributable to computers. Last week it was reported that China had censored the sex scene in the 3-D version of Titanic. Many online news outlets (Daily Mail, MSNBC, Entertainment Weekly, E Online…) included a statement from the Chinese Ministry justifying the move thusly:

"Considering the vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people's viewing. To avoid potential conflicts between viewers and out of consideration of building a harmonious ethical social environment, we've decided to cut off the nudity scenes."

Too good to be true… and it was. Gawker reports that the quote came from a satirical website:

Tons of English-language news outlets are running with this quote even though, guys, it's obviously not real. The rumor probably originated with this blog post, which fails to mention the joke aspect. 

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reports that "there is no official response to the roll-back of the censorship policy concerning the 3D film." 

Also, the Chinese movie-going public are not medieval villagers; they understand how 3D works.

And, in closing, a widely circulated article estimates that a good chunk of the Content Tsunami is actually sex videos:

It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites/2

Humorist Stephen Colbert paraphrased the finding thusly: “Thirty percent of all internet traffic is porn, according to a new report by the New England Journal of Underestimating Everything.”


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.

The Content Tsunami Hits the Shores of the Iberian Peninsula

The amount of content is exploding like the Big Bang, we are told by the intellectual midgets who speak at localization conferences. Really? If the amount of content is expanding exponentially, why are so many people paying peanuts to other people to create more low quality content? Wake up, people. There is no Content Tsunami! There is a Data Deluge, but content is not data. Content is text, which is human-made and meaningful in itself. There is a deluge of economic, astronomical and demographic data, but all of that is meaningless outside of a context. A text, in contrast, is meaningful outside of any context as long as there is another human being left alive to read it. Data. Content. The two things are radically different. The localization guru’s willful ignorance of this distinction is just a dramatic illustration of his lack of intellectual honesty (and his hunger to make a quick buck and get his hands on that trophy third wife).

The need to create mountains of cheap content is real, but it has very little to do with any mythical Content Tsunami. It is more to do with some of the weird and quirky ways in which the Internet is organized. For whatever reason, the Lords of the Cloud (read: “the Googlevi Twins”) have decided that certain arbitrary aspects of a website are indicative of its importance and should therefore be used to determine its position in a Web search. Those features are basically two: amount of textual content and frequency of updating.

And presto, with that simple formula, you have the recipe for a lot of crap content. Moreover, you have an incentive (Milton Friedman, hello!) for creating a lot of crud that—like the aborted demon-spawn of Ragnarok and Sauron—should never have seen the light of day. The Low Quality Translation Movement is simply the localization industry's arm of the Content Tsunami. Its main get-rich-quick scheme is to sell cheap translation as the answer for cheap content and (crucially) trying to suck the entire translation industry into this model of second-quality garbage under the cloak of technological progress. But I preach in vain. I can see Kirti Vashee rolling his eyes and raising his hands in exasperation: "There are even people who deny the existence of a Data Deluge!" Translation: "See!? See!? You see the kind of crap I have to deal with!?"

That is why I am so relentless in going after the l10n hype-meisters who endlessly lecture us about the Content Tsunami. The latest example of this drive to create rivers of meaningless content comes from Spain. A journalist answered an advertisement for creating online content and received an offer you just can’t refuse. It was 0.75 euro cents for writing 800-word pieces. Yes, you read right. Not 0.75 euros per word. No. Less than one euro for 800 words. That is 0.0009375 euro cents per word. Well, in the year that indignados became a worldwide buzzword, the journalist decided to go online to complain about this. Needless to say, the hashtag #gratisnotrabajo (“I don’t work for free”) became a trending topic for a couple of days on Twitter.

Here is my translation of the job ad: “Journalist wanted. Compensation is €0.75 per article, which must contain a minimum of 800 words.”

But wait… there’s more (and this is my favorite part): “Texts will be subject to certain conditions of quality control—spelling, punctuation, semantics and expression.”

I just love that. We are paying less than a ride on the Madrid Metro for 800 words, but your texts will be subject to quality constraints. Seriously, if the objective is to write large amounts of crap content, why don’t we just get computers to do it? Lackuna, maybe there is a fortune in it for you.


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.

Common Sense Advisory Pummels Defunct Equine Mammal (More on the Content Tsunami… Sigh!)

The Common PlaceSense Advisory—which functions as a sort of propaganda arm for the Lower Quality Translation movement—has jumped on the bandwagon of the Content Tsunami lock, stock and two smoking barrels. In a breathtakingly unoriginal shill for cheap, low-quality translation, a press release from the think tank bleats that:

There is far too much content being created and far too few translators or money to translate it all – or even a tiny fraction of it. Independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory contends that translation automation tools such as MT promise to increase the volume and accelerate the pace of words rendered into other languages. “Translation strategies that rely on human output alone have already been overwhelmed by the explosion in content and the imperative to rapidly enter new markets,” says Don DePalma, Chief Strategy Officer at Common Sense Advisory.

About as subtle as a stomp in the face, isn’t it? Well, so much for independent analysis of the translation industry. Every time DePalma opens his mouth, a sales rep at Lionbridge gets sexually aroused. But, hey, peddling this sort of drivel as independent research gives the ideology behind cheap translation a thin coating of respectability.

At the risk of also beating a dead, decomposing horse, let me reiterate as briefly as I can the argument against the Content Tsunami: The amount of text that requires translation has not grown substantially. When we talk about a data deluge transmitted through the Internet, it involves mostly graphics and video, so the total giga and mega and googol figures breathlessly bandied about by L10N gurus are deceptive (often consciously so).

But let me rely on someone else’s words to drive home this point. In a New York Times review of James Gleick’s The Information, Geoffrey Nunberg comments on the conceptual mushiness of the term “information.” It can mean both “data,” which is meaningless, and “text,” which is meaningful (yes, even if it was written by Gertrude Stein). The slippage in and out of these two (radically different) conceptual realms is what allows charlatans to bang on about the dreaded Content Tsunami. To quote Nunberg:

When he [Gleick] describes the information explosion, he reckons the increase in bytes, citing the relentless procession of prefixes (kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta-, exa-, and now zetta-, with yotta- in the wings) that’s mirrored in the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, game consoles and windowless server farms.

 But there’s no road back from bits to meaning. For one thing, the units don’t correspond: the text of “War and Peace” takes up less disk space than a Madonna music video. Even more to the point, is “information” just whatever can be stored on silicon, paper or tape? It is if you’re Cisco or Seagate, who couldn’t care less whether the bytes they’re making provision for are encoding World of Warcraft or home videos of dancing toddlers. (Americans consume more bytes of electronic games in a year than of all other media put together, including movies, TV, print and the Internet.)

But those aren’t the sorts of things we have in mind when we worry about the growing gap between information haves and have-nots or insist that the free exchange of information is essential to a healthy democracy. Information, in the socially important sense — stuff that is storable, transferable and meaningful independent of context — is neither eternal nor ubiquitous. It was a creation of the modern media and the modern state (Walter Benjamin dated its appearance to the mid-19th century). And it accounts for just a small portion of the flood of bits in circulation.

Please allow me to reiterate the point, because it is crucial and reveals the flimsiness of the thinking by l10n gurus devoted to selling redundant MT systems: “Information, in the socially important sense — stuff that is storable, transferable and meaningful independent of context — is neither eternal nor ubiquitous… And it accounts for just a small portion of the flood of bits in circulation.” That means that truly valuable information, the type that cures cancer or leads to innovative inventions, has not grown significantly.

But don’t expect something like the truth to deter a dead-horse-pummeler as consummate as Mr. DePalma. Remember that you can’t convince someone of something if his salary depends on his not being convinced of it. This sort of implores one to ask the question as to how the Common Sense Advisory funds itself. I find it hard to believe that real companies actually pay this think tank for its “expertise” when they can get the same “World According to the Commonplace Advisory” Weltanschauung for free from the other McLocalization gurus.

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 HuffPo and the Fake AP Style Book Weigh in on the Content Tsunami

I.                 The Huffington Post as roach motel (they check in, but they don’t check out):

Scene 1: Ad Age columnist Simon Dumenco writes a piece about Steve Jobs and Weinergate. Since it dealt with a popular topic, the post turned out to be a big hit, attracting lots of visits. So much so that the piece was “aggregated” by a blogger at The Huffington Post. What this means is that Dumenco’s article was paraphrased with extensive quotes without adding anything to the original (i.e., another avenue by which the Content Tsunami grows without actually increasing the quality of information):

HuffPo's aggregation, titled "Anthony Weiner vs. Steve Jobs: Who Won On Twitter?," consisted of basically a short but thorough paraphrasing/rewriting of the Ad Age post -- using the same set-up (i.e., pointing out that Apple had the misfortune of presenting its latest round of big announcements on the same day Weiner resigned from Congress) and the bulk of the data presented in the original Ad Age piece. Huffpo closed out its post with "See more stats from Ad Age here" -- a disingenuous link, because Huffpo had already cherrypicked all the essential content. HuffPo clearly wanted readers to stay on its site instead of clicking through to AdAge.com.

More on the Content Tsunami: Digitized Versions of Public-Domain Books

Any work published before 1929 is in the public domain. That means the bulk of pre-twentieth century classics can be downloaded for free from Google Books. However, as historian and librarian Robert Darnton has warned repeatedly from the pages of the New York Review of Books, the Google book digitization project is very different from the process of making a modern scholarly edition of a classic. When you dive into the freebie editions in the public domain of Jane Austen and Tirso de Molina, you are pretty much at the mercy of the quality of the edition from centuries past, before the careful comparison of versions and variants gave birth to the contemporary discipline of textual criticism.

“This is not a Blockade!”: A Reverse Turing Test for the Translated Web

There is a great scene in Thirteen Days in which Kennedy’s Defense Secretary Robert McNamara is in the war room of the Pentagon moving around little pieces on a wall map that represent submarines and cargo vessels involved in the 1962 Cuban blockade. The situation is tense as the world approaches the brink of nuclear war. At one point, McNamara is told huffily by a slightly dim admiral to leave blockades to the Navy because they have been doing it “since the days of John Paul Jones.” The ice-cold McNamara (known as an “IBM computer with legs”) explodes in fiery rage: “John Paul Jones! You don't understand a thing! This is not a blockade! This is language, a new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!”

In the case of most machine translated websites, one might say: “This isn’t language, it is a new type of communication the likes of which the world has never seen. This is Computer One communicating with Computer Two. Both pretend to be human. The objective of this exercise is to raise the SEO ranking of some shady website peddling shark fins to cure cancer.”

Two Notes on the Content Tsunami

Note 1: Check out this blog post from the New York Times: Google’s War on Nonsense.

The Financial Translator's Bookshelf: How 2 Be a Frielance Transalator (Thorugh not a Very Goode Proof-reader)

We live in a world in which the amount of information is expanding exponentially. Or at least that is what our translationl10n pundits tell us. We are also told that this Content Big Bang overwhelms the current capacity of the translation industry. 

I, for one, keep harping on the counterpoint. For one thing, the idea that more content necessarily requires more translation is a non sequitur if ever I saw one. Just because a piece of text exists doesn’t mean it has to be translated into a gazillion languages. Ah, the McLocalization theorists tell us, but think about the benefit to humanity of increased communication. Call me a skeptic (yes, please call me a skeptic), but an increase in the amount of garbage communicated into other languages will benefit humanity how, exactly?

AOL’s Contribution to the Crap Content Tsunami

On Sunday morning I read a fascinating article in the Faster Times by a writer called Oliver Miller, a former employee of AOL who was paid $35,000 a year to pump out blurbs on television episodes for the company’s web portal. The piece provides a fascinating glimpse into one (sadly frequent) approach toward the Internet by some corporates: emphasizing quantity over quality and speed over relevance.

Another Machine Translation Myth Busted: The Content Tsunami Doesn’t Exist

Last month I wrote a post that criticized several highly questionable theses that pop up frequently in the sales pitches of the hucksters trying desperately to inflate the machine translation (MT) bubble. The three main propositions are:

Condition 1: “Translation budgets are being slashed.”
Condition 2: “Heads of translation departments are being pressured to produce more with less.”
Condition 3: “There has been a cosmic explosion in the amount of content.”

As I wrote last month, singly, these observations are questionable, even if marginally plausible. Together, they form a classic example of “bubble rationalization” well known to anyone who sat through the late 90s tech boom and the mid-“noughties” housing fiasco.

Regarding the third condition, which I nicknamed “The Content Big Bang” or the “Content Tsunami,” my skepticism was motivated by the following observations: 1) it is unlikely that the growth of text slated for commercial translation will sharply outstrip the growth of other goods (especially in a period of economic slowdown); and 2) most of the “content” regurgitated by social networks probably isn’t designed to be translated in the first place (given its ephemeral nature).

And yet the existence of the mythical Content Tsunami, as so many other things, continues to be upheld despite the lack of any concrete evidence. The following fragment from one MT paper is typical of the meme (the bold text is added):

The change from a static, one-way narrow street of Web 1.0 allowing only a passive consumption, to Web 2.0 – a dynamic, two-way highway with its architecture of participation promoting active collaboration on all fronts. Add unimaginable storage and processing capabilities of cloud computing with its data-drive approach and you have technology which is having an enormous impact on the content volume. The content requiring translation, according to Common Sense Advisory, is growing at a rate of 50% a year.http://www.translationautomation.com/perspectives/what-options-do-translators-really-have.html

Well, the results are in, folks. It turns out that the Content Tsunami—like the Great Kidnapping Epidemic of the 80s, the 1920s Red Scare, the 1960s Missile Gap, the Eternal Growth in House Prices, the Holy Grail, El Dorado, Dow 36,000, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy—doesn’t exist.

Last Saturday’s “Numbers Guy” column in the Wall Street Journal shoots the following deflationary darts at the MT Bubble hype. The piece summarizes a paper published in the latest issue of Science.

While overall data production has grown at 23% a year since 1986, the growth in the volume of written words (the object of commercial translation) was manageable:

“The amount of data stored in books roughly doubled between 1986 and 2007, a period during which the world population increased by about a third. The increase in newsprint was a relatively manageable 91%.”

More importantly, overall figures for the Content Tsunami are misleading because they aggregate content such as video and photos (which are byte-heavy) with words (much lighter). Indeed, much of the explosive growth in production and storage of data is in visual media (most of which doesn’t require translation):

But the digital avalanche isn't as massive as those numbers suggest. Much of the growth reflects the surge in high-resolution video and photos. In addition, while there is much more information available, each piece is being consumed, on average, by far fewer people than in the past.

This observation has an interesting philosophical corollary. People with a scientific outlook, technological determinists and positivists traditionally have felt that natural language is a clumsy tool for storing and communicating knowledge. Criticism of its redundancy (reiteration of plural or singular forms) and “noise” (genders, for example) underlies a lot of the push behind quaint relics of the twentieth century such as Esperanto and logical positivism. However, the scientists who authored the Science paper point out one advantage of natural language over other media:

"You can get a lot of information out of reading a half-megabyte book, compared to watching a one-gigabyte TV show," says Roger Bohn, director of the Global Information Industry Center at University of California, San Diego. Yet in 2007, the world's capacity to store video was about 6,000 times greater, in terms of bytes, than the storage capacity of paper, according to the Science study. That, says Prof. Bohn, is a "testament to how efficient language is for communicating concisely."

In conclusion, the Content Tsunami isn’t happening, or at least it isn’t happening in the sense that the quote from TAUS above seeks to suggest. Therefore, in the future, when you hear some blow-hard spouting off about the content boom, you should chime in cheerfully: "Oh, you mean the porn: lots and lots of porn!"


Of course, don’t think a little thing like facts is going to deter a bubble blower. These people have products to sell and children to feed. So the beat goes on. “Play it, Sam. Play ‘As Time Goes By’.”

Yes, Sam, play it ad nauseam. (Anyway, it’s not like we can stop you... sigh.)



Related Content:

Why the Machine Translation Crowd Hates Google

The Machine Translation Bubble

Machine Translation and the Gigantic Hamster Wheel

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.