Future Schlock: Common Sense, Nonsense, and the Law of Supply and Demand

Things seem so random all of a sudden, and time feels like it’s speeding up.

—Mad Men, Season 5, “Signal 30”

The ideological arm of Lower Quality Translation, also known as the Common Sense Advisory (CSA), has published yet another dubious white paper on the translation market, enticingly entitled “Translation Demand-Supply Mismatch.” Thankfully, the organization charges a lot for its full-length reports, so peasants such as the writer of this humble blog are left to peruse only the public summaries. This allows us to devote the precious few moments left on this Earth to more profitable pursuits, such as the latest slutty exploits of those crazy Kardashians or that never-ending cliff dive known as the Spanish equity market. The CSA does push the low quality envelope a little aggressively, though, but, after all, their audience certainly is not little old yours truly. Their stuff is aimed more at the larger translation agencies that disguise themselves as technology companies and perhaps the odd middling sort of agency that dreams of making it to The Show.

Anyhow, in the fragmented age of the Internet, some of its stuff winds up on my iPad and the ease of blog publishing allows me to kick the tires a little bit. The first surprising takeaway of “Translation Supply-Demand Mismatch” is pretty breathtaking: The law of supply and demand isn’t applicable to the translation industry.

To start off, the author cites three factors that are constraining supply.

The first one is that old chestnut (say it with me) known as the Content Tsunami. I have played enough with this faulty concept to trot it out and flog it again. Let sleeping, defunct horses lie.

The second factor is a shrinking supply of translators. Really? Based on what evidence? Hmmm, “executives at language service providers (LSPs) regularly tell us…” That is called hearsay evidence in a court of law.

Thirdly, “translator productivity has stagnated.” This is a very strange way to put it that reveals an entire underlying agenda:

In the survey we conducted for this report, we found that individual translators averaged just 2,684 words every day. This number hasn’t changed much for decades, if not centuries.

Okay, De Palma has proven that supply is constrained (I guess…). Let’s take that as a given. The expectation would be that translation prices are soaring at a rate that zips past Zimbabwean inflation rates (cha-ching!). But no (crushing disappointment):

With such a classic case of high demand and inadequate supply [please note this elegant example of question begging], prices would rise, much to the delight of LSPs and freelance translators… However, we don’t see widespread rate increases any time soon, given the price sensitivity of the language sector and tight budgets at companies stockpiling cash.

What? The laws of supply and demand don’t apply to the translation sector? Really? That’s fascinating! You could get a Nobel Prize by demonstrating why that happens! Do, please, tell me more!

But Mr. De Palma has other more pressing business to take care of than the teensy weensy little detail that one of the most basic laws of the social sciences just doesn’t have any relevance to the area of the economy he analyzes. Because he is, after all, too busy frying other fish. McFishsticks, to be more precise. Yes, the lack of pertinence of one of the most basic laws that describe economic reality merits less than a passing mention, because now we are into the nitty gritty of where we wanted to go: “Some informed companies and specialists intelligently apply MT and other translation automation to the problem.” A clunky sentence? Perhaps. Completely misguided? Possibly. A ringing endorsement of cheap translation? You bet your ass! This is followed by a reference to a discarded guru from the 1970s who mistakenly thought that by now we would be colonizing Jupiter. All of this crowned with an admonition that the world is changing way too fast and that he who doesn’t adapt risks being left behind by the dizzying rate of innovation at companies such as Trados and Lionbridge:

we expect that many buyers and suppliers will merely react to the changes rather than permanently change their behaviors. If they can step back from their day-to-day issues, though, they will see that the market for language services market has fundamentally changed. Once a cottage industry, language has become a core business process and critical enabler for a range of economic, political, and humanitarian activities – and subject to all the attendant macroeconomic pressures. Some participants will be unnerved by so many changes in such as a short time, leading to the displacement that sociologists labeled “future shock.“ To survive, they will have to adapt to the new realities and economics of language services.

So, please, translators, take a step back. Please. I beg you. Be careful. You might get some of this future schlock on your shoes. Yuck.

Some of you may be familiarized with Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock idea. The latest season of Mad Men plays a lot with the unease that Americans felt in the mid-sixties. The fear was that the world was changing a lot faster than the speed at which an individual could assimilate it. In Mad Men’s case, it is not so much because of technology, admittedly; the vertigo felt by the characters is punctuated mostly by famous crimes, such as the U of T at Austin sniper and the nurse massacre in Chicago. Half a decade after Pete Campbell was having sexy fantasies about the daughter from The Gilmore Girls, Toffler put the finger on that unease, called it future shock, and made a bundle of money explaining this anxiety to the general public. Anyone who is around forty has found that book lying somewhere in the bookshelves of every household he visits. However, what Mad Men is pointing at is social change. As the United States becomes more fragmented socially, racially, generationally and sexually, the world begins to look a lot scarier and less integrated. That is the subject of a lot of pre-post-modernist literature. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. But technological determinists take another, slightly different, view: chiefly, that it is technology that is driving everything. And technological determinism, as I have pointed out often, is our sad, secular religion.

Now, note that to state that the rate of social change is speeding up is not exactly a world-changing perception. We can all pretty much agree on that. However, the prediction that this rate is only set to speed up to a point where we all go insane (i.e., that it is exponential) is quite another thing. As a recent reporter who visited Toffler writes:

Still, the accelerating change doesn't seem to be driving people crazy, as was predicted by Future Shock. Alvin Toffler says it may be that younger generations have simply become more adapted to change, that it is their culture. Academic futurist Stuart Candy says the Tofflers were wrong to predict widespread "future shock," as a form of societal illness or breakdown.

So, let me see… Future 1-Toffler 0. Shocker! (Schlocker?) And yet, forty years on, sub-gurus are still peddling this as a diagnosis for people trudging through the Great Stagnation. (Which prompts one question: Why, if the world is changing so quickly, is a book from four decades ago still relevant? After all, Adam Smith apparently isn’t relevant, since demand and supply is obsolete. Why should Toffler remain pertinent to our madcap era of flying cars and weekend trips to Mars?)

But all of this is deceptive. We have arrived at this point by conceding the premises of Mr. De Palma’s faulty analysis. Let’s go back to some of his more eyebrow-raising observations. Chiefly, that the dynamics of supply and demand don’t apply to translation. If true, that should blow you away like a tornado. But, as noted, the author glides blithely by.

Imagine a naturalist who passes by an elephant with a giraffe neck and says: “Wow! That’s kind of weird! It contradicts everything we know about evolution and the animal kingdom. But, wait, look over there! Is that a new Krispy Kreme? Wow! In the middle of the bush? That’s even more awesome!”

Or imagine your friend giving you a tour of his new five-bedroom house. “And this is the guest room. However, the law of gravity doesn’t apply here, for whatever reason.” You peer inside and see a bed, a dresser and a cocker spaniel floating around in zero gravity. What would you do? Would you follow your friend out to the garden to have cocktails as the furniture and the dog float round and round? Or would you devote your entire life to finding out why the law of gravity doesn’t hold in your friend’s guest bedroom?

I wonder. Is it possible that a lot of the “empirical” observations about supply constraint are not really based on any concrete studies? Maybe. Is it possible that the translation market is incredibly inefficient, as I have often preached from this digital pulpit? Hmmmm, perhaps. Is it possible that the enormous spectrum in which translation prices float is due to massive information gaps? You know, that’s possible. Or is it perhaps also the influence of the commodity thesis that is explicitly or implicitly held by a lot of buyers and sellers of translation? You know what, now that you mention it, that might be part of it. That surely does not mean that supply and demand doesn’t apply. Only that a slightly more informed analysis is needed that employs the tools of very traditional microeconomics. Also, a consultation of slightly less outdated gurus might come in handy. Unfortunately, none of these avenues of inquiry would help Mr. De Palma sell more reports. 


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.

Economic Theory Set to Rap

Who'd a thought a cracker named Maynard could lay down such sick rhymes?

The partnership of John Papola, a television producer, and Russ Roberts, an economics professor, has produced another rap video in which the two giants of modern economics, John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich Hayek, spar about the way out of the current crisis: massive government stimulus or laissez faire. It isn’t a parody. The unlikely duo really is dramatizing a theoretical debate that has raged throughout the past hundred years without any definitive resolution:

Papola and Roberts fall squarely on the side of Hayek, but the representation of Keynesianism is not unfair. And the production quality is off the charts!

And here is the original Hayek vs. Keynes smackdown:

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 New Alchemy: How To Take the Crap Produced by 1,000 Bilinguals and Turn It into Gold

There seems to be an imperative in the translation industry according to which a description of your business plan needs to be as outrageous and vulgar as possible, perhaps in order to drown out the outrageousness and vulgarity of your competitors. This inevitably leads to an escalation to see who can say the most idiotic thing. Lower standards are the unsurprising outcome. “Quality doesn’t matter!” screams one such guru and proceeds to make basic arithmetical mistakes in his PowerPoint presentation. “It is wrong to think that translators who charge less are not good” bleats another one while proceeding to embarrass herself. This is the level of expert commentary to which the language professional is subjected as he  makes his way through the mist and fog of the early twenty-first century.

And, of course, one is a pedant, or worse, for pointing these things out. However, the race to the bottom that is the Web 2.0 in the language industry has reached a new low.

Then title starts off fairly well. With a bold, provocative statement. “Each time we fire a ‘professional linguist,’ our quality improves.” That’s good stuff. It reminds one of Hermann Göring at his pinnacle: “Every time I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.” Or Khrushchev: “Every time I send an economist to the gulag, our production figures improve.” So our neo-barbarian is in good company, totalitarianism-wise.

However, it is all downhill from there, for in the next sentence we take a brusque detour through the Valley of No Grammar. “Language translation industry is full of controversy.” And in the  blink of an eye we are in those Cold War movies where the bad guys were Scottish actors playing Russians who spoke without using definite articles. You can almost hear some Stakhanovist management consultant saying: “Definite articles inefficient! Bourgeois! Unnecessary! From now on, Soviet people speak without ‘the’.”

Inevitably, it gets worse. To catalog the grammatical innovations in a 1,000-word piece would require several 1,000-word pieces. But, again, don't let my pedantry get the best of me. My old prejudices about writing at a sixth-grade level. Those quaint remnants of the past onto which I mistakenly cling.

Let's analyze the real quid of Mr. Buran’s musings. His thesis is quite simple. He starts out painting a gloomy landscape of the language market that ProZ begat:

Language translation industry is full of controversy. It is unregulated and licenses are not required. Every unemployed individual can create a profile on some of the famous freelance job boards and pretend he/she is a translator. Such people cause harm to the clients whether they are direct employers or translation agencies. These mom and pop self proclaimed individuals promise fast turnarounds, low rates and claim to know all the languages including rare ones.

Which leads me to scream the following question at the top of my lungs: What in blazes is a “mom and pop self-proclaimed individual”? But, no, no, no. Don’t get distracted by the patent absurdity. Dig deeper. Let’s assume this was actually written by a human being and not machine translated by a Reagan-era Atari console. Let’s roll with it.

From there, the author goes on to make an interesting leap:

As a founder of one of the most successful translation agencies in the world: “Translation Services USA” with a headquarters in the heart of New York City, I noticed that it is a very ill [sic] practice to rely on any single, even the most experienced and trustworthy translator. I realized that despite the threat of loosing [sic] language consistency, it is a very risky move to store all your eggs in one basket, especially, when you have absolutely no control over it. You assign the whole project to that single individual and then it’s up to his/her discretion and level of commitment to deliver the result. Many people do deliver, but some of them don’t. When they don’t, you end up in awkward situations when clients complain, curse you, leave negative feedbacks [sic], threaten to sue and so on.

OK, first of all… “Translation Services USA”? Really? To paraphrase Matthew Perry: Could you be more generic? You’re honestly telling me that you’re not a KGB front and this is the name you chose? Who in their right mind would assign their documents to an agency called “Translation Services USA”? Are you sure this isn't another cunning ruse from Wiley E. Coyote to catch the Road Runner? Can you imagine a parent saying: “I just left my kid over at Babysitting Services USA. With a name like that, you can’t go wrong, right?”

But, once again, the sheer absurdity of the presentation has led me astray. Back to the argument. Remember the premise: Translators who register for freelance portals suck. Now, to go from there to the statement that “Individual translators are unreliable” is a massive non sequitur (look it up). Yes, any individual can be hit by lightning, impeding them from delivering work on time. But surely the sourcing of reliable individuals is part of the added value you provide as an agency. Otherwise, what distinguishes you, “one of the [self-proclaimed?] most successful agencies in the world,” from thousands of fly-by-night outfits traveling under fishy names like “World Translation Services” or “Language Translation Agency” or “American Translation Agency”? (All three of which actually exist, incidentally.)

Recall the paradox in which a Cretan philosopher gets up and says: “All Cretans are liars. I am a Cretan. Therefore, everything I say is a lie.” In this case, Buran the Sophist seems to reason: “All translators suck. This guy is a translator (and sucks). Therefore, I will hire 1,000 translators and produce high-quality translations.” In the case of the philosopher, you have a Cretan paradox. In the case of the agency owner, you just have a cretin (not a paradox).

Imagine you run a company whose 100 employees are all drunks and drug addicts. Nothing gets done, or if it gets done it is handed in late and the quality is appalling. But it so happens that you live in a region where everyone is an alcoholic or has addiction problems. So you fire the 100 drunks and re-hire them on a part-time basis along with another 900 homeless druggies. You split up your old tasks into tiny pieces. Voilà: the magic of crowdsourcing explained in two shakes of a tail. My thesis is that in all possible worlds, your delivery time will be faster but your quality will be comparable to considerably worse. Our linguistically challenged entrepreneur claims otherwise:

We fire our translators! Yes, instead of assigning the whole project to a single translator or several, we decided to build a modern system which would allow us to utilize all our available linguists at the same moment. This way, we don’t rely on anyone. There is a huge redundancy built-in and this also results in huge turnaround improvements. If a single linguist can translate at a rate of 2,000 words per day, the new approach lets us to [sic] reach a 10 times faster turnaround. Even the 100 time faster turnaround is feasible for some of the most common languages such as Spanish, Russian or Portuguese. To put it into perspective, that’s roughly 800 pages per day!

I know what you’re thinking. This guy is an imbecile. Devoting a blog entry to this is about as useful as barking at passers-by. And, yes, there is some truth to that view. However, I justify this on the basis that Mr. Buran’s delusion is actually an extreme example of business models that are being posited as the future of the translation industry. Mr. Buran’s only virtue is greater clarity than the one employed by other omnipresent gurus.

And this catastrophe (Mr. Buran, hire a copywriter, or have one of your drug-addled English natives proofread your stuff) helps clarify something that I had never realized previously.

Adam Smith’s simple yet profound analytical insight was the identification of the division of labor as the secret to higher levels of production. The division of labor has indeed been the key to the great multiplication of humanity’s wealth during the past centuries. However, during the 250 years that separate us from Smith, the process of translation never profited from the division of labor. And don’t tell me that the technology wasn’t there. Because, despite the tsunami of corporate agitprop to which we are constantly subjected, translation remains a low-tech endeavor.

What could have kept a clever industrialist in eighteenth-century Britain from taking a heap of bilinguals, shutting them up in a big warehouse and having each of them translate a paragraph from Hume’s Essays? Absolutely nothing. Why, that way you could translate an 800-page brick in a single day!

What indeed would have kept our industrious entrepreneur from doing that?

Oh, I know! Common sense.

What was stupid in 1776 remains just as stupid in 2011.

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.