The Financial Translator’s Bookshelf: "All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis," by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera

 

All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis

Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera

This is not the sexiest book on the financial meltdown, but it probably is the most detailed, sober analysis of the lead-up to the crisis to come out so far. For a play-by-play of CEOs running around on Lehman weekend and dodging each other’s calls (and not a single insight into why it all happened), go to Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail. For indigestible (and largely irrelevant) inside baseball about Bear Stearns, see William Cohan’s House of Cards. For some of the outlandish characters in Hedge Fund Land who saw it all coming and made a killing, go to Michael Lewis’s The Big Short (still the best read on the crisis). For a detailed and informed road map to how we got here, read this book. McLean and Nocera carefully reverse engineer the current mess we are in and show us how the gigantic landfill of toxic assets was excavated over the course of three decades and progressively filled with some of the worst investments in the history of the modern world.

Each chapter provides a new domino. The first is mortgage securitization, the second is the appearance of non-bank mortgage originators and the subprime mortgage industry, the third is J.P. Morgan’s invention of the collateralized debt obligation, the fourth was the anti-regulatory bias of the Greenspan Fed, the fourth is the Clinton administration’s quashing of the CFTC’s attempt to regulate derivatives, and so on and so on. Each step on the road to the Hell of the New Normal is chronicled with an objectivity that only toward the very end veers off toward condemnation (and there is plenty to go around).

Some of the material is familiar, some of it isn’t. Although based on the mountain of work by many other journalists, it manages to unearth a lot of new information. Mostly, however, it provides a cathartic synthesis of the entire mess. If you sat through the financial crisis from 2007 to the present like the protagonist in A Clockwork Orange —tied to a chair and forced to open your eyelids to see all of it— then this is the book for you. Some of it will be familiar from early coverage of the initial glimmers of rampant excess in the subprime mortgage industry. Other facts are less familiar. I did not know, for example, that the bulk of subprime lending was actually refinancing. What that means is that many people on boring and safe thirty-year mortgages were enticed (or even scammed) into shifting to the toxic ARMs and other WMDs spewing out of the financial meth labs. Now that is scandalous.

Perhaps the one thing that surprised me most was the authors’ impassioned plea that financial innovation actually does not serve any useful purpose. This runs counter to Robert Shiller’s The Subprime Solution. It is not up to the layman to decide, but I must say there are powerful arguments in here for curtailing the more audacious creations of the Wall Street Edisons.

Not the last word on the subject and maybe not definitive, but a great addition to the 2008 disaster genre. Talking and reading about it helps.

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.

Lower Translation Rates: *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion and the Idiocy of Averages

"...averages and extreme values (as abstractions and unrepresentative instances respectively) often provide only partial, if not downright misleading, views of a totality's behavior."

Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin

There seems to be a meme whereby any discussion of lower rates in the translation industry is immediately, or at least eventually, appended by the coda that, “of course, this is partly due to the increased usage of machine translation (MT).” The curious thing is that this is also accompanied by the meme that “the volume of material that needs to be translated has mushroomed exponentially.” Allegedly, we are facing a case in which demand for a service has expanded fantastically but the price per unit of that service has dropped. Surely, there can’t be any parallel for such a trend anywhere else in the history of the world economy since the first caveman traded a pelt for a sharp-edged stone with another caveman.

It is truly stupefying to note how even intelligent discussions of machine translation sooner or later crash into the lower rate/greater demand conundrum and come limping out of it with the “machine translation” crutch.

At first blush, this appears absurd. Supply and demand dictates that greater demand and stable supply breeds higher prices. If demand for translation services is rising but the price of translation a single word is going down, something odd must be happening. Our fuzzy thinker jumps to the conclusion that somehow an advance in productivity is making it cheaper to translate the average word despite the demand rise. Baboom! Machine translation comes to mind. And thus is born the questionable thesis that “greater adoption of machine translation is driving down the price per unit of a translated word.”

This way of (wrongheaded) thinking is so seductive that it is hard to disentangle the sleight of hand that our 21^st century way of thinking plays upon our own poor reptilian cortex.

Step back for a moment and think about this situation critically. Imagine for a moment a world in which all translation was done by post-editors. They charge a fraction of a penny for every word they edit or they charge by the hour. The crucial point is that the entirety of all the translation work carried out in this hypothetical world is first done by a computer and then processed by a human being who does post-editing.

In this hypothetical word, any improvement in the technology naturally feeds higher productivity. Any profit increase from this productivity improvement is swallowed by the creator or owner of the technology, albeit with perhaps a slight lag. A period of adjustment ensues, after which the post-editor drops her rate slightly to accommodate the greater productivity. Crucially, she still makes the same amount of money every day. But society benefits because a greater amount of work is done for the same amount of money. The same amount of money buys a greater amount of output. In this scenario, the average rate per word has dropped.

Return for a minute to the basic components of this model:

A.    Demand for translation/machine translation technology/population of post-editors/stable output of translation/x cost per unit

Let us tweak it slightly, by improving the quality of the technology:

B.    Demand for translation/BETTER MT technology/post-editors/GREATER output of translation/x cost per translated word DROPS

Let us tweak that slightly again by hypothesizing a concurrent increase in overall demand for translation in this world:

C.    HIGHER demand for translation/BETTER MT technology/post-editors/GREATER output/unit cost per word of translation STILL DROPS (if, and only if, the productivity boost outstrips demand growth, which is not necessarily the case)


In cases B and C, it is perfectly reasonable for the average price per word to drop. And also for the post-editor to charge less per word. Otherwise, there would be no incentive for the investor in the technology to fund the research necessary for improvement. If the post-editors brake a trend toward lower per word rates under conditions of higher productivity (say, through a worldwide union of some sort), society in general is harmed. While higher productivity is ensured, the incentive for better technology is hijacked by a hypothetically all-powerful Brotherhood of Teamsters and Post-Editors and no further improvements are likely to occur.

This is unconsciously the model we are thinking of when we say price per unit is going down because of machine translation.

The problem is we still live in a hybrid world of both post-editors and translators, or, to put it another way, translators who process MT output and translators who don’t. As we proceed, let us take as a given the premise that the price per unit of non-post-editing (i.e., human translation) is going down.

I hope that by now it should be clear to the careful reader that a massive cognitive conflation is occurring here. Leaving aside borderline cases and grey areas, post-editing and translation still remain two distinct activities. To say that lower cost of post-editing (since that is the proper name for the activity, not machine translation) is driving down the cost of translation is tantamount to claiming that the invention and massive adoption of frozen dinners in the United States of the 1960s drove down the average salaries of chefs in Paris during the same decade.

We’re not talking apples and oranges here. We’re talking apples and moon pebbles.

What machine translation might be doing is driving down the average cost of a word that is translated (or, perhaps more accurately, machine translated).

But “translated” here has to be rendered here with an asterisk. Perhaps also a skull and crossbones, but my word processor doesn’t have that emoticon… yet! (as machine translation enthusiasts like to exclaim so mischievously).

So let me restate the thesis thusly:

Machine translation might be driving down the average cost of a word that is *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ed.

Wherein “*ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion” refers to the activity of creating sequences of words in one language that are conceptually and stylistically equivalent to other sequences of words in another language. This is done either through the processing by so-called post-editors of linguistic output produced by a computer or via the more traditional process of “translation” (now often referred to as "human translation"). While the two methods of *ϗԇḨἭᾎ‡₩ion bear some distant family resemblance, they in fact belong to two widely divergent genera.

Without this neologism (the “‡” is silent, by the way), the idea that machine translation can have any sort of impact on "human" translation is quite frankly questionable. Although the cost of servicing a mortgage in many countries has gone down drastically and some commodities such as oil have plummeted from their dizzying heights of 2008, the cost of translating texts (essentially equal to feeding and clothing one human translator and his or her family plus a little extra cash on the side for incidentals) is essentially the same as in 2008. Ditto for 2005 and 2000. Perhaps even 1885 after adjusting for inflation.

So are translation costs really plummeting? Is this really what is happening?

Completely unnecessary picture of Sofía Vergara

As Sofia Vergara would say: “I don’t think so, papi.”

Or is it perhaps something else? Something perhaps more complicated… or perhaps simpler?

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.

Shopping for a CAT: You Have to be Insane or Stupid To Use Translation Software

One of the definitions of either stupidity or insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. If such is the case, to use software, you have to be either crazy or stupid. I try to install the SDL Trados Studio 2009 Starter pack. When I try to register the license online, I get the error "Could not contact activation server (Error code 50040)". (I mentioned the hassle of licensing procedures for CAT tools you own in a previous post.) I check again. The license number is correct. I look up the error code online and the uniform reply is to uninstall the program and reinstall. I do exactly that. Same result. Why shouldn't it be? What should make us expect to have a different result by deleting and re-installing a program? Is it that the computer will remember not to skip an important step in the second installation? Are they really that human?

Ok, reinstalling this turkey didn't work. So I take the long way home of actually looking up the error message on the KnowledgeBase. The instructions I get are as follows:

Error Message 50040:
If you are using the activation code on two computers already then please return one of the activation codes first to make it available for use. You will then be able to activate the new computer. Please follow these instructions on returning your activation code:

1. Open License Manager. To do this, go to Start > All Programs > SDL International > SDL Trados 2007 > License Manager > License Manager. The SDL License Manager dialog box is displayed.
2. Click View Activated Licenses. The Installed Licenses dialog box is displayed.
3. Select the permanent license from the list and then click Return License. (Ignore the trial license.)

You should now see a message stating that the activation code has been returned.
You have now returned the activation code back to the SDL license fulfillment servers and are now able to use this activation code to activate SDL Trados on a different computer.

(Note that I am NOT using the license on two machines. So from the very start the help documentation is already off the mark.) This, however, does not work. When I click "View activated licenses" I see a license for a trial that either ended or expired on September 2. When I click on it, the option to return the license does not light up, meaning it isn't available.

Now, mind you, I am beginning this process out of pure inertia. The trial version of SDL Trados is there on my machine now. I don't like the product. But out of pure laziness (and because an upgrade of my old Trados license would be cheaper than most other CAT licenses), I am willing to give it a try. (Note that this is almost how monopolies work: even clients who hate your product are eventually compelled to use it.)

But the proof that our major industry players are completely divorced from any notion of customer satisfaction: do not forget that all this Sturm und Drang is to use a starter version of the program that I was given for free (!). I have to skip through technological hoops ringed with fire while pursued by starving ravenous wolves to install a license for a dinky little piece of software that is free. Pause for a moment and savor the imbecility of that situation. Yes, let it sink in...

So I follow the instructions: but there is no way to return any of my licenses, either old, new, provisional... The process and the troubleshooting guide were designed thinking of a situation that obviously doesn't include me.

After several attempts, it is still impossible to try out SDL Trados Studio because of the licensing issue. This is a measure of how crappy translation software is: the companies' own help documentation isn't capable of predicting the behavior of their own products.

However, after several attempts to get over the license issue (and reading the help documentation and watching the slide presentations about the relicensing process), I have come to the conclusion that my problem is not covered and probably cannot be resolved without the active participation of a technician from the company (good luck!). So I give up. I give up. If installing and licensing the software is this aggravating, can you imagine how infuriating it would actually be to use SDL Trados Studio for something as crucial as your translations, on which you depend to feed and clothe your family? Can you imagine buying a license for the full product, being unable to use the program and then being at the mercy of unresponsive and under-informed customer service representatives? Brrrrrr.

Conclusion: after building up a nearly complete domination of the CAT tool market, Trados's licensing procedures are so inane that they are letting get away even a nearly-captive customer like me.

So, without too much regret, goodbye to all that!

Quantifying the Success of the SDL Trados Certification Program

Anybody remember this? Starting a few years ago, if you were a Trados license holder, you would regularly get spammed with invitations to become a certified user of Trados. This would allow you to prove to potential customers your expertise with the tool. You took a test and, depending upon the results, you had to take paid training courses to improve your level (even if you had been using the program for a zillion years).

Was it successful? Using ProZ.com's directory of freelancers, it appears that repetitive carpet bombing via e-mail only gets you so far.

ProZ.com, of which I am member, has 2,263 members who pay the subscription fee and describe themselves as English to Spanish translators. Out of that universe, 1,602 report owning some version of SDL Trados. This is a relatively high number (71%) that confirms the program as the industry leader. However, when you probe the directory to see how many are certified, only 28 have proven their bona fies as beginners for the 2006 version and a piddling 26 have done so in the beginner level for Trados Studio 2009 (totals are difficult to come by because the directory forces you to break down results among the different levels and among the different versions). The highest total is 57 for the beginnner level of SDL Trados 2007, a whopping 2.5% of the overall universe of paid members (3.5% of license holders).

Predictably, in my opinion, the program has fallen far short of becoming a must-have for the freelance linguist. So I guess all that spamming was unnecessary. The ATA's certification program has to be a much better investment of time and money. Now Lionbridge has come out with its GeoWorkz Translation Workspace. (What is the "z" for? How can it be trendier to change an "s" for a "z" unless you're a gangsta? Is Lionbridge the baddest homey in the translation 'hood?) Anyway, this attempt to reap marginal rents by leveraging in-house assets seems about as well-thought-out as SDL's certification program. Maybe Trados should have labeled its effort the "Zertification Program." Peace out, yo!

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.

La postergación del trabajo, Freedom, la lentitud de las herramientas CAT y Young Frankenstein

La edición de este mes del New Yorker, además de la pieza de Malcolm Gladwell que comenté hace dos días, contiene una reseña de James Surowiecki de una recopilación de artículos académicos sobre la postergación de tareas desagradables (procrastination). El artículo enumera diversos métodos que utiliza la gente para vencer ese obstáculo. Se trata de técnicas denominadas self-binding, que se podría traducir como "obligarse a uno mismo" o "autocompromiso". Consisten en hacer arreglos para negarte forzosamente a ti mismo la capacidad para cometer un error o transgresión en el futuro. Un ejemplo son los ludópatas que firman contratos con casinos para que éstos les nieguen la entrada en el futuro.

Surowiecki menciona también el ejemplo de un software llamado Freedom, que cierra el acceso a Internet y, teóricamente, obliga al usuario del ordenador a centrarse en la tarea que tiene ante sí. Confieso que los paseos intermitentes por Internet (y sin ninguna relación con el proyecto de turno) son uno de los principales motivos por los que sufre mi productividad. Probablemente podría trabajar con mucha mayor rapidez si la tentación de usar imdb.com para averiguar en cuántas películas han figurado canciones de Creedence Clearwater Revival o consultar Wikipedia para verificar en qué LP apareció "Jokerman" por primera vez no estuviese a la corta distancia de la ventana de búsqueda de Google.

Confieso que no he probado la herramienta en cuestión, aunque la idea me parezca ingeniosa. El problema es que me parece demasiado radical, como una lobotomía para curar un dolor de cabeza. Una vez visité a un primo en su oficina y cuando quise hacer una consulta en su máquina, descubrí que el acceso a cualquier cosa que no estuviese relacionada con la empresa estaba bloqueado. Me pareció digno de un régimen autoritario fundamentalista.

Sin embargo, creo que mi facilidad para distraerme no es sólo una flaqueza propia de mi carácter. Estoy convencido de que parte de la culpa radica en las herramientas de traducción. Para decirlo brevemente, son demasiado lentas. Wordfast Pro se demora una eternidad mientras pasa al siguiente segmento y decide si hay alguna coincidencia en la memoria. Mal que bien (aunque en menor grado), Trados y SDLX adolecen del mismo problema. Dos o tres segundos suena como poco, pero mutiplicado por 1.000 segmentos, es una eternidad en la que siento cómo se mueren mis células grises. Ese dolor lo mitigo a veces yendo al New York Times o revisando mi cuenta de Twitter por enésima vez.

En todo caso, al menos soy consciente de mi problema. Antes que soluciones radicales como Freedom, prefiero esperar a que alguien invente una CAT que se ejecute con más rapidez y reduzca mis devaneos. La idea de Freedom me recuerda a la escena de Young Frankenstein en la que Gene Wilder decide entrar a la celda a domesticar al monstruo. Les dice a sus asistentes con gran solemnidad que no abran la puerta por ningún motivo, incluso aunque les ruegue o amenace. Es un buen ejemplo de una técnica de obligación de uno mismo para hacer una tarea desagradable.

La revolución no será transmitida por Twitter, según Malcolm Gladwell

El viernes pasado estaba viendo el Colbert Report y el invitado era Aaron Sorkin, guionista/creador de mi programa de televisión preferido (quizás de todos los tiempos), The West Wing. Estaba promocionando su más reciente peli, The Social Network, sobre la creación de Facebook. Huelga decir que es tan brillante que se le deslizan perlas similares a las de sus personajes (y con el mismo desparpajo). La siguiente fue tan lapidaria que se escucharon exclamaciones de asombro (audibles) en el público: "Los medios sociales como Facebook y Twitter son a la socialización lo que los reality shows son a la realidad". (Ver clip aquí.) Cuando alguien así expresa escepticismo sobre el evangelio de esta década, hay que sentarse a pensar. Y ahora se ha sumado otra voz digna de escuchar que nos invita a dudar, aunque sea un poco.

Malcolm Gladwell es una de las estrellas del non-fiction en inglés (categoría de escritura para la que no existe ningún equivalente en castellano, al menos que yo sepa). Para mí, es el mejor escritor de misterios de la actualidad --con la diferencia que sus misterios son sacados del mundo real. Suele abordar un problema cognitivo, analizar con elegancia por qué las respuestas tradicionales fracasan y rematar sus piezas con descubrimientos científicos recientes que sugieren nuevos horizontes.

En la edición de este mes del New Yorker, Gladwell enfoca sus poderosas baterías analíticas sobre el mundo de las redes sociales online. El título, "Small Change", es un doble sentido: en el primer nivel, significa "menudo, sencillo, las monedas que uno lleva en el bolsillo" y, en otro, significa "cambio pequeño", referido a lo impotentes que son las redes sociales para efectuar cambios políticos genuinos. Su primer paso consiste en analizar la sabiduría convencional. Todos conocemos el Zeitgeist: Twitter permitió que la disidencia iraní se organizara para protestar las elecciones presidenciales fraudulentas en las que Ahmadineyad salió reelegido. Tanto así que el Departamento de Estado solicitó a Twitter que suspendiese el mantenimiento programado durante la crisis para impedir que el movimiento verde quedase incomunicado. Contacto con la realidad: la mayoría de los microblogueros que tuiteaban sobre los eventos en Irán y escribían en inglés estaban transmitiendo desde el exterior. La sensación de inmediatez pasaba por alto un dato evidente: ¿no es extraño que los organizadores de las protestas en Irán escribiesen en inglés y no farsi? Efectivamente, la mayoría eran exiliados que transmitían el mensaje de sus compatriotas a un público internacional. Es posible que las esperanzas milenaristas de los "maoístas digitales" (derecho de autor: Jaron Lanier) sean, por lo menos, exageradas. Para reforzar este punto,  Gladwell procede a citar a mi historiador preferido, Robert Darnton:

Las maravillas de la tecnología comunicacional en el presente han generado una falsa conciencia sobre el pasado, incluso la sensación de que las comunicaciones no tienen ninguna historia.

De allí, Gladwell pasa a aplicar su bisturí a un contraejemplo del pasado: el movimiento de los derechos civiles de la población negra en el sur de Estados Unidos. La característica clave de este activismo "tradicional" (es decir, previo a Internet) que resalta Gladwell es la siguiente: fuerte compromiso interpersonal (los participantes en las protestas se conocían entre sí), lo que el sociólogo Doug McAdam denomina un fenómeno strong tie ("vínculo fuerte"). Este tipo de relación es la que permite a los individuos correr los riesgos (prisión, violencia física, incluso asesinato) implícitos en el desafío del sistema de segregación institucional conocido como "Jim Crow".   

Las redes sociales modernas, en contraste, carecen de este tipo de vinculación: "El tipo de activismo asociado con los medios sociales no se parece en nada a esto. Las plataformas de medios sociales se construyeron alrededor de lazos débiles". Lo que no significa que estas redes carezcan de valor. Los vínculos débiles logran fomentar acciones pequeñas que, agregadas, se pueden volver gigantescas. Gladwell cita el ejemplo de un empresario que logró que 25.000 personas se inscribiesen en el registro nacional de EE.UU. de posibles donantes de médula ósea. El esfuerzo requerido para darse de alta es mínimo y el beneficio para la sociedad es inmenso.

Pero esto resulta muy distinto a imaginar que este tipo de activismo puede tumbar gobiernos autoritarios. Los organizadores de movimientos como los derechos civiles en los años 60 y los jóvenes iraníes de la Revolución Verde exigen mucho más a sus seguidores que simplemente tomar una muestra de su ADN y enviarla por correo. Golpizas, tortura, prisión y pérdida de empleos son apenas algunos de los costes de este tipo de activismo. Acota Gladwell:

Los evangelistas de los medios sociales no comprenden esta distinción; al parecer, creen que un amigo de Facebook es lo mismo que un amigo real y que inscribirse en un registro de donantes en Silicon Valley es activismo en el mismo sentido que sentarse en un comedor segregado en el Greensboro [Carolina del Norte, cuna de las protestas contra restaurantes segregados] de 1960.

No contento con esta herejía, Gladwell pasa a explorar un territorio aun más delicado: la posibilidad de que las redes sociales desestructuradas son menos efectivas que organizaciones más jerárquicas. Del lado positivo, las redes carentes de autoridad central son "enormememente resistentes y adaptables en situaciones de bajo riesgo". Pero del lado negativo:

Debido a que las redes no tienen una estructura de liderazgo central y líneas claras de autoridad, experimentan problemas serios a la hora de llegar a consensos y fijar metas. No saben pensar estratégicamente y son susceptibles de forma crónica al conflicto y el error. ¿Cómo puedes tomar decisiones difíciles sobre asuntos tácticos, estratégicos o filosóficos cuando la opinión de todos pesa por igual?

Y, con esto, Gladwell cruza el Rubicón y se instala del otro lado de la ribera, ocupado por apenas dos o tres intelectuales públicos como el chillón Andrew Keen (El culto del aficionado; en la página de Amazon hay una reseña mía, enterrada en algún lado) y el estrafalario pero profundísimo Jaron Lanier, uno de los pioneros de la "realidad virtual" que después de cumplir los 40 comenzó a replantearse algunas de las esperanzas evangélicas de la cultura digital. Su brillante You Are not a Gadget está a punto de aparecer en castellano como No somos ordenadores gracias a Debate. Y es que cuando se combina la crítica de la tecnología mediática con la sugerencia de que la ausencia de jerarquías no necesariamente es algo positivo, la respuesta puede ser explosiva, como lo verifica la recepción de estos dos libros. ¿Será éste el tema del próximo libro de Gladwell? Ciertamente representaría un cambio de rumbo para él, pues hasta ahora sus libros presentan ideas de las ciencias sociales de forma muy atractiva para su fácil deglución por la legión de management consultants y "asesores de estilo de vida". Confieso que estoy prejuiciado a favor de la gente no sólo brillante sino también combativa. Veremos.

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 Financial Translator as Small Businessman: No Logo? Yes Logo!

As part of my focus on direct clients, I decided to spruce up my website and acquire certain accoutrements (logo, letterhead, business cards) that bespeak professionalism (without actually pretending to be an agency, which a lot of people do and simply looks shady). The new website is almost completely ready and I will roll it out as soon as I iron out a few details. Regarding the visual paraphernalia, I read on Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Workweek that there are websites for small businesses where graphic designers compete to provide precisely that kind of service. (A quick aside: Regarding Ferris's book, I recommend reading it even if you think the concept of "lifestyle coaching" is laughable or if your list of goals does not include working just four hours a week; it is full of tips and observations that are helpful for any professional working by him or herself).

One of the websites mentioned by Ferriss is Crowdspring.com, where small businesses can recruit freelancers to carry out graphic design projects. The concept is simple. The first step is to post a graphic design project. You must provide as much information as you can: what the logo is for, where it will be used, what you want it to transmit, etc. Then you specify the amount of money you will offer for it. The minimum for a logo project is $200 and for a logo and letterhead project it is $300. The project is then posted to the site and designers register to participate. Afterward, they submit their options. I left mine open for nine or ten days and received some fifteen submissions, most of which were of a surprisingly high quality.

This was the design I eventually selected.

I ended up going for a simple logo composed of two arrows pointing toward each other. It is slightly generic, but I thought a design that is as simple as possible was better for posting as a profile photo on professional websites. The closest competitor was a bar chart enclosed in a circle with a fountain pen tip projecting outward. It was worth considering because it was obviously made to suggest financial translation. However, ultimately I went with the frontrunner because of the aforementioned criterion of simplicity.

In summary, I was very pleased with the experience. It ended up costing $474 for my logo (on both black and white backgrounds in addition to an  array of formats for the Web and print uses); a letterhead template in several formats (including Word); a business card design I can upload to online printing services; and an envelope design. Three hundred dollars from the total go directly to the designer and the website's different fees account for the rest ($174).

Other random observations about the website: the winner was ultimately the person who submitted the first proposal, several days before the deadline. Also, it doesn't really pay to set a deadline of more than a week because, in the end, 99% of the submissions were placed on the final day (indeed, the final hours). That means the winner (a designer from Bulgaria) had an edge, because I had already asked her for stationery designs and I had already been given several days to get used to the idea of her design as the look for my new website.

Therefore, all in all, a very satisfying experience. Now, I must also mention in passing that I was ambivalent about using the service. After all, I am a freelance professional and I was using the website to hire freelance professionals. The crux is that the contest format means that the people who submitted the ten or twelve losing designs did not receive anything for their work. I admit that this gave me some pause. You can award second or third prizes for entries that do not win, but when I tried to include a second prize to assuage my guilt (after the project had already been posted), it turns out that any prize has to be equal to the first one, which meant that I would have to pay a further $300 plus assorted fees, bringing the total cost of the project to over $800 (after factoring in the website's fees). This was well beyond what I had budgeted and so, unfortunately, I decided to decline the second-place prize and live with my guilt. I had to tell myself that the cost of mocking up the design was small enough that the risk of losing was outweighed by the frequency with which you win a competition (comparable, perhaps, within the translation sphere, to submitting a small sample when bidding for a project).

So, in any case, that is my first incursion into the brave, new world of crowdsourcing. Despite my qualms about the contest format, I amply recommend the service, because it beat all of my expectations. And now my freelance business has a professional client-facing look that will hopefully send out the right message to prospects.