What evil lurks in the results from your language service provider?

Let me start by disclosing that although I have a registered limited company through which I provide translation, training and technical consulting services for translation processes, I am essentially a sole trader who is not unreasonably, though not correctly, referred to as a freelancer much of the time. I have a long history of friendship and consulting support with the honorable owners of quite a few small and medium language service companies and of a few large ones. I vigorously dispute any foolish claims that there is no such need for such companies, and I see a natural alliance and many shared interests between the best of them and the best of independent professionals in the same sector.

But as Sturgeon's Law states so well, "ninety percent of everything is crap", and that would apply in equal measure to translation brokers and translators I suspect, though of course this is influenced by context. But what context can justify this translation of a data privacy statement from German to English? Only the section headers are shown here to protect against sensory overload and blown mental circuits:

The rest of the text is actually worse. This is the kind of thing some unscrupulous agencies take money for these days.

Why, pray tell, was the section numbering translated so variously into English? Well, if you know anything about the mix-and-match statistical crapshoot that is SMpT (statistical machine pseudotranslation) and its not-as-good-as-you-think wannabe alternatives, it's easy to guess the frequency of certain correlations in English with German numbers followed by a period.

And clearly, the agency could not even be bothered to make corrections, and the robotic webmaster put the text up, noticing nothing, where it remained for about a year to embarrass a rather good company which I hold in high esteem.

What's the moral of this story? Take your pick from the many reasonable options. "Reasonable" does not include doing business with the liars and thieves who will try to sell you on the "value proposition" of machine translation to cut costs.

A skilled translator knowledgeable in the subject matter and trained in dictation techniques paired with a good speech recognition solution or transcriptionist can beat any human post-edited machine translation process for both volume and quality. And a skilled summarizer reading source texts and dictating summaries in another language can blow them both away as a "value proposition".

One thing that is too often forgotten in the fool's gold rush to cheap language (dis)service solutions is - as noted by Bevan et alia - exposure to machine-translated output over any significant period of time has unfortunate effects one the language skills (reading, writing and comprehension) of the victims working with it. This has been confirmed time and again by translation company owners, slavelancers and other word workers. Serious occupational health measures are called for, but to date little or nothing has been done in this regard.

And when human intelligence is taken out of play or impaired by an automated linguistic lobotomy, the results inevitable gall in the lower quartile of the aforementioned 90%. Really crappy crap.

As another of my favorite fiction authors used to comment: TANSTAAFL. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. And trust is always good, but these days you need to verify that your service providers really give you what you have paid for and don't pass off crap like you see in the example above.

Virtual symposium on AI, MpT and language processing March 26-29, 2018

The worlds of artificial intelligence and machine pseudo-translation are largely ones of delusion, wishful thinking, deceit and professional manipulation, but once in a while one encounters a few people in these fields who are worth the time to listen and discuss. Dion "Donny the Wig" Wiggins of Omniscien, formerly Asia Online, is one of these: a researcher at heart, it seems to me, and someone with a good appreciation of processes, even those having little to do with the technology he represents in his day job. Although an established godfather of the MT Mafia, his approaches to application have a large dose of common sense largely absent from the ignorant masses who place their faith in technologies they do not actually understand in detail. More than once he has shared workflow "revelations" that back up old research and testing of mine, but with more and better data to show how great productivity gains can be achieved by simple reorganization of common tasks. So when he told me about his company's upcoming symposium, I knew that it probably wouldn't be the usual bullshit-tinted fluff drifting through the professional atmosphere of translation these days.

Click the graphic above to see the symposium program - attendance is free. You'll see some familiar names and perhaps conclude that there might in fact be a bit of BS in the air, but there is likely to be a good bit of substance to consider and to apply even in areas not covered by the program.

One of the biggest problems I have with machine pseudo-translation technologies is the utter ignorance and dishonesty of many of its promoters and the massive social engineering which takes place to persuade and intimidate people to become its willing victims in areas where it offers little or no real value. The continued disregard for documented occupational health issues and language skills distortion in post-editing processes, and the vile corruption of academic programs to produce a new generation of linguistic dullards who cannot distinguish algorithmic spew from real human language are all matters of significant concern. But if we are to engage the Forces of Evil and know our Enemies and keep them within their wholly legitimate domain, this event might be a place to start :-) See you there.

Machine translation, subversion and cyberwarfare

From time to time one reads reports about politically sensitive mistranslations from Google Translate or other popular machine pseudotranslation (MpT) services. At least some of these may result from deliberately targeted "corrections" from pranksters. And recent hype about in-ear real-time translation earphones and such make me wonder how often such things - or even the routine severe errors of MpT services - will result in some poor sap getting the crap beaten out of him due to such occurrences.

Although I happily engage in a bit of "corrective monkeywrenching" myself from time to time, I had not considered the wider implications of all this and the possibilities for more interesting trouble. However, in the light of recent events and the ongoing revelations of Russian cyber-interference in the US electoral process, we should think a little about the trends in the lower echelons of the business translation sector and what potential difficulties might arise from deliberate "interference".

The Unprofessional Translation blog recently posted an article about such things, which got me to thinking about how easy it would in fact be to mess with the data stores for machine translation systems in use at corporations, government agencies, healthcare facilities, etc., subtly altering records to produce results at odds with the purposes of their users.

Can't happen? Yea, yea. Not to the voter registration servers in the US either, much less the electronic voting booths in use there. If such things were possible, which of course they are not, then one might wonder where this cost-cutting lemming rush to use machine pseudo-translation for so many things might take the foolish users if their political or market adversaries had an interest in modifying the intended messages. Imagine the implications of tampering with a system used for criminal interrogations or judicial proceedings. Already, some fools are using machine-based processes for translation and interpreting in such scenarios.

I have already had considerable personal doubts about colleagues and their work when they talk of relying on machine pseudo-translation as a sort of "dictionary" to get vocabulary that they might otherwise have to research in a real dictionary or transparently sourced glossary. MpT results tell nothing of the sources from which vocabulary is derived and usually present no original context for comparison. This proved to be a problem domestically not long ago when my Portuguese partner used Microsoft's online translator to look up the English word for a common kitchen implement and got nonsense as a result. Mixing up pots and pans is no big deal, but medical, commercial, legal and political terms, or the subtleties of ordinary human interactions in difficult situations require accuracy or at least transparency to aid in identifying possible problems and their source.

And in the rough-and-tumble real world of commerce and politics there is now new scope for subversive action by paid and inspired data terrorists acting against those who put their faith in machines rather than the competence of professional translators and interpreters.

Germany needs Porsches! And Microsoft has the Final Solution....

I hear that Germany is suffering from a shortage of Porsches. Odd, given that the cars are made there and should be readily available, but it's true, because my friend who lives there told me. He owns a large, successful LSP (Linguistic Sausage Production) company, and to celebrate its rise in revenues, he decided to get everyone on the sales staff a new Porsche as a company car. The problem is that he can't find any for €5000 euros.

So he was left with no choice but to cut overhead using the latest technologies. Microsoft to the rescue! With Microsoft Dictate, his crew of  intern sausage technologists now speak customer texts into high-quality microphones attached to their Windows 10 service stations, and these are translated instantly into sixty target languages. As part of the company's ISO 9001-certified process, the translated texts are then sent for review to experts who actually speak and perhaps even read the respective languages before the final, perfected result is returned to the customer. This Linguistic Inspection and Accurate Revision process is what distinguishes the value delivered by Globelinguatrans GmbHaha from the TEPid offerings of freelance "translators" who won't get with the program.

But his true process engineering genius is revealed in Stage Two: the Final Acquisition and Revision Technology Solution. There the fallible human element has been eliminated for tighter quality control: texts are extracted automatically from the attached documents in client e-mails or transferred by wireless network from the Automated Scanning Service department, where they are then read aloud by the latest text-to-speech solutions, captured by microphone and then rendered in the desired target language. Where customers require multiple languages, a circle of microphones is placed around the speaker, with each microphone attached to an independent, dedicated processing computer for the target language. Eliminating the error-prone human speakers prevents contamination of the text by ums, ahs and unedited interruptions by mobile phone calls from friends and lovers, so the downstream review processes are no longer needed and the text can be transferred electronically to the payment portal, with customer notification ensuing automatically via data extracted from the original e-mail.

Major buyers at leading corporations have expressed excitement over this innovative, 24/7 solution for globalized business and its potential for cost savings and quality improvements, and there are predictions that further applications of the Goldberg Principle will continue to disrupt and advance critical communications processes worldwide.

Articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and other media extolling the potential and benefits of the LIAR process and FARTS. And the best part? With all that free publicity, my friend no longer needs his sales staff, so they are being laid off and he has upgraded his purchase plans to a Maserati.

What is it with teaching translation at universities?

Many years ago as an exchange student at the Universität des Saarlandes in Saarbrücken I marveled at the competence and breadth of the university's offerings for translation and interpreting and the great competence I found there in its Dolmetscherinstitut. Other programs in linguistics with Max Mangold and Vorderasiatische Archäologie offered complementary enlightenment for analyzing language structures, early writing systems and long-dead languages of the Fertile Crescent. Most of that is gone today.

Reports over the years of the decline of language teaching programs in Saarbrücken felt like watching a slow-motion car crash. So a few weeks ago when a friend in that area informed me of the demise of the translation and interpreting institute and its replacement with some IT-based nonsense emphasizing machine translation, I was not particularly surprised. I have watched other university translation programs wither or at least fail to thrive under current conditions, largely as a result of their failure to adapt to changing times in a responsible way.

Most would agree that adaptation is necessary, but there is less agreement on the actual changes which should occur. There is, of course, no single right answer to this dilemma (except in Germany, where such things are Pflicht), but it is nonetheless disappointing to see the lack of vigor and vision with which the necessary discussions sometimes take place.

A recent article by Ramón Inglada on the European Parliament DG TRAD Terminology Coordination site presents some key issues regarding the use of technology in translation teaching but fails to provide accurate information or useful recommendations. This is surprising given that the author has been a professional translator for some time, and colleagues tell me that he is not unfamiliar with the current state of technology in the the real world of commercial translation. I take particular issue with his mention of possible "disadvantages" to the use of technology in the instructional program:

• Some students might struggle with the technology and this could have a negative impact on their acquisition of translation skills. 
• Some universities might not have enough staff with the required technical skills. 
• The potential costs associated with a technology-based approach (computer labs, software licences).

First of all, in the programs with which I am familiar, students do not struggle especially with technology taught in an appropriate way. The "struggle" is too often instead with teaching faculty unwilling to update their professional knowledge and not-so-quaintly antiquated curricula. One also encounters toxically ignorant professors like one I know at a Portuguese university, who did his best for years to discourage new students in the now-suspended masters program by informing them that translation is all about poetry and literature and that it is impossible to make a living as a translator.

I can understand the fear of some faculty who recognize that things have changed and continue to change but who are baffled by the bullshit barked in the catastrophic carnival of machine pseudotranslators and confusing and sometimes creepy CAT clowns. I take their concerns as a sign of mental health and hope for the future; a healthy dose of skepticism will be needed as some universities transition from pen and paper work, with the odd bit of word processing and Moodle thrown in, to more modern tools for organizing reference information, text sources to translate, and writing tasks.

Most of these skeptics understand some fundamental truths that many crazed advocates of computer-assisted translation have forgotten: without an excellent foundation in source languages, first-class writing skills in the target language and a clear understanding of the relevant subject matter to be translated, technology for translation is more useless than lipstick on a pig. Anyone who tries to tell you that machine translation or massive archives of parallel translated texts or any other gimmicks can replace the actual competent mastery of language and content by qualified translators or subject matter specialists with outstanding linguistic skills is either a liar or a fool or both.

Those who have the competence to assess translation quality are usually of the considered opinion that more emphasis should be placed on developing language skills, subject expertise and research skills, while the hucksters, the wordblind and those who really don't get the meaning of "fit for use" or who try to sell snake oil with a label stating that "Quality Doesn't Matter" tend to push more monetary transfers to the IT side of things.

One cannot argue responsibly against the first position: the utter train wrecks we see so often in the bulk market bog of translation, with its unsustainable practices of exploitation and frequent disregard of the occupational health and safety of service providers, make it clear that only a few dishonest middlemen are served much of the time by its unusual business as usual.

Good linguists are hard to find and often not so easy to train, so it is important to consider where technology can provide some relief in organization and ergonomics and improve the processes of learning and professional work. There is a lot of scope for technology to streamline current teaching programs at universities and in programs for continuing professional education and free up more time to focus on essential language skills and knowledge acquisition.

As for the concern that there might not be enough staff with the requisite technical skills to include technology in university programs of instruction, I find that suggestion ridiculous and insulting to a lot of competent people. Anyone who is competent enough to teach at university also possesses the wherewithal to evaluate how technology might contribute effectively to the curriculum. Too often, the failures are on the part of technology advocates who have too narrow an understanding of their own "expertise" and do not listen to the teaching experts and understand their needs and objectives. With patience and open discussion, we will all get a lot further.

As for "potential costs", I almost hurt myself laughing about that one. Universities are among the places on this planet most familiar with Open Source software, and there are quite a number of such tools or other free software which can fully meet the requirements of teaching professional concepts for the use of technology in translation. The OmegaT project is just one example, but it is an excellent one. Major commercial tools are also available for teaching and learning at low or no cost: SDL offers many resources to universities at minimal cost, and Kilgray's memoQ - the most flexible environment available for the widest range of translation workflows - is free to instructors and students for educational purposes, with server resources also available for a small support fee. There are quite a number of other tools available for corpus analysis, speech recognition, format management and a myriad of other peripheral needs of translators on similar terms. Money is not the real issue, but a commitment to doing better with the resources available most certainly is.

There are of course points of light in the firmament of academic blight. The Facultad de Derecho at Buenos Aires University is one such. In April 2017 I visited the law school's integrated translation program and spoke to students, some staff and guests about various ways in which technology can help to better organize the work of legal translation.

Students in the Certified Public Translator program at the Buenos Aires University Law School take many of the same courses as those working toward a law degree; some pursue both degrees. This means that the young professionals graduate with the kind of solid subject matter competence one might expect only from those with significant work experience or who have side-stepped to translation from another field.

In today's market situation, where very few translation graduates can look forward to staff positions in an in-house translating team for a law firm, engineering company, hospital or other institutions as they might have in the past, the problem of acquiring real subject matter competence seems difficult. But programs like BAU's Facultad de Derecho offer can serve as good examples of how similar programs might be established with engineering schools, medical schools, science faculties and other such institutions. Interdisciplinary cooperation is inevitably a great source of creativity and useful results, and I think that struggling translation programs at universities have much to offer in collaboration with other departments and much to learn as all reap the good harvest of such cultivated seeds.

Even the miserable state of translation's bulk market bog offers a fruitful source of research topics to investigate the implications on physical and psychological health under current conditions and to propose remedies for problems. This would seem a much more useful thing than yet another boring and useless doctoral thesis on machine pseudotranslation and post-editing underwritten by short-sighted and unscrupulous promoters of human sacrifice for corporate profit today and who knows what destruction tomorrow.

Do universities need to consider a greater role for technology in their teaching programs for translation? In most cases probably. But just as the real value of technology is measured only by its ability to improve our lives, the most difficult challenges ahead are not technical, but human. A program which fully embraces technology but fails to deal with matters of psychological and physical health and which does not reinforce its credibility and open doors with many possible alliances with other departments or outside institutions will sadly not achieve its full and evident potential. But with good will, open eyes and a willingness to commit to learning and partnership we can all get there.

Fluent failure in translation

A recent ripple in the social media pond concerned the demise of London-based Fluently.io, a platform with pretentions of replacing human interaction in translation project management with a glory hole of electronic anonymity into which companies could plug their projects to be serviced by its team of digital sharecroppers. Aside from an understandable lack of enthusiasm on the part of venture capitalists, who have likely had their fill of such "innovation" promising to conquer great linguistic landscapes, things appear to have fallen apart after a year because wordworkers mostly had better things to do. Like washing their hair, for example.

Fluently is another of many examples where the desire for innovative imitation generated sound and perhaps some occasional fury among companies hoping for the satisfaction of a translated quickie, but made no waves, left just a bit more brown scum in the pond. The worldwide internet web has a lot of life in its tides, many niches where life and scum can proliferate, even depths so far from the light that one can look at the Smartling business concept and believe it to be unique and worthy of investment, because the better angelfish of linguistic Nature are swimming with that concept far away in sunnier, more accessible waters with fewer denizens drunk on pressure and nitrogen narcosis.

The War on Common Sense waged by a cabal of greedy, occasionally deluded fools with the help of some who merely have a healthy, but misdirected intellectual curiosity, tells us that machinery physical and virtual can automate away the pain of human interaction and our inevitable disappointment over words and actions which do not follow the algorithms of profit accumulation for a chosen few. If there is a God of Translation Technology, that is surely Janus, but it is often hard to understand which of His faces is toward the future, which toward the past best left behind.

There are prophet pretenders, like Robert "Sketchy" Etches, who preach that the future face is toward machine pseudotranslation and declare those who do not suck the firehose of bulk electronic content for every drop of profit to be had are fools and dinosaurs destined to perish. I suppose that those who choose to linger by a cool, clear spring and savor its content are equally fools for not drinking deeply the salty vastness of the oceans and using their waters to grow food in their gardens.

A viable future of health and prosperity for all of us will use technology like a pair of shoes to protect us from the stones and thorns on the road, help to climb over the barriers we face, but it is our human motor capacities that take us on the paths our sound human minds choose. How can a static algorithm adequately serve our often complex, surprising social and commercial needs with our desires for fresh variety and innovation? Is our wardrobe really enriched by an automated straightjacket?

The CEO of the Fluently failed venture, Karin Nielsen said that “Translators are their own worst enemy. They could ditch agencies and earn more money. But they miss the human interaction.” As surely many translation buyers would, particularly those with a real concern for the communicative quality of the texts they pay good money to translate. But translators and translation buyers do have an alternative in which nothing goes amiss: a direct relationship, facilitated perhaps by the modern technologies of communication, but with people and their productive, creative interactions at the hub of the commercial wheel. And sometimes a good agency with a sound understanding of human needs in complex processes is essential, but seldom can satisfaction be had from automation if it confuses the avoidance of responsible and sometimes uncomfortable human participation with real productivity.

Hitting a nerve with MpT and bankruptcy

In less than 45 hours a record number of shares and views on Facebook....

In all the years I have blogged (since 2008) I don't think any of my posts have achieved the reach of one simple link on Facebook, which discussed the fate of a Japanese publishing house that committed seppuku by the abuse of machine pseudo-translation (MpT).

This is indicative, I think, of the raw nerves of those whose professional standing has been under siege by a lot of abusive fools who, in their lust for profit and social destruction, have disregarded common sense and listened instead to the nonsense of the Common Sense Advisory and their ilk, only to find themselves circling the drain to oblivion.

At a conference I attended recently, one person involved with MpT development and sales correctly pointed out that it is wrong and foolish to speak broadly of MpT as if there were only one flavor of it. But the problem is really not about the technology itself, however close or far it may be to that out-of-favor-with-the-sausage-set term "quality".

I am not and never have been opposed to the existence of machine pseudo-translation in this world. What I do oppose is its use as an instrument of abuse as well as one to corrupt and distort the minds of university students struggling to find their way into our language professions. In the same way, I oppose any material or immaterial thing which is a critical component of toxic social relations and occupational abuse.

Nonetheless I do keep an open mind for finding new tools and techniques which may provide something useful in the right context. But MpT is nothing new generally, and much of what is out there in practice smells badly of 60+ year-old fish. Nonetheless, dead fish make fertilizer, so let's bury the outdated and harmful notions of most of the carnival barkers hawking MpT Snake Oil bottles and put our focus where it belongs: on human needs and psychology rather than technology. When we do that, the toxicity of many technologies is abated, because the harmful application of these is abandoned.

We should not avoid discussion of the physio- and psychoergonomic risks of any methods or technologies as the profiteers so vehemently do. Instead, by looking with greater care at these problems, as David Hardisty, Dion Wiggins and some others have done recently, we may discover some surprising opportunities to make "opposing" technologies and methods, such as MpT and speech recognition and task separation, become good allies of each other and of us so that we may win another battle or two in the Forever War on Human Stupidity.

MpT, limericks and innovative disruption in Porto and Seville

A few weeks ago I received a kind invitation to the JABA Partner Summit in Porto, Portugal. It's a unique event hosted by JABA CEO Joaquim Alves, subsidized by various solution providers whose tools he uses in his business, which I think is the largest translation agency in the country. I wasn't really sure what to expect, though with the likes of Across and my old nemesis Dion Wiggins, aka "Donny the Wig", godfather of the MpT Mafia, Mr. Get-On-The-MT-Boat-Or-Drown himself, I knew it would be plenty evil. Sure enough, on the first day DW challenged me to a duel, so at memoQfest this year in Budapest, we will meet on the field of honor in the park across from the Gundel and settle our differences at ten paces.

I encountered a veritable rogues' gallery of linguistic sausage shoppers at the summit days, discussing plans to conquer the world. As GALA board chairman Robert Etches put it, controlling 1% of content translation is not enough, the elite cabal of translation technologists must march boldly forward with an army of cyborg post-editors and their purely electronic betters and take the 99% by storm, as the 1% have taken control of the rest in society at large.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

People like that need watching, so when I heard of the conspirators' bus to Seville for another of those wicked GALA gatherings which yield so many damning and amusing YouTube video clips (see In HampsTr We Trust) I decided to go undercover and ride along. As you might expect with me, Asia Online, Across and a bunch of capitalist translation agency owners on a bus, there would soon be blood on the floor.

Photo courtesy of Stefan Gentz

As the team of emergency paramedics treated my head wound and did their best to save me from the shock and awe of a relentless technology agenda, co-conspirators celebrated by the bus with cigarettes and champagne, toasting The New Word Order.

Thanks to the heroic efforts of Portuguese paramedics I was able to return to the scene of the crime, where I fought to stay awake and alert to survive the journey to the L10n Den that awaited.

Shore 'nuff, there was an orgy of celebration for the Power of Machines. Not only do they do translation that way, but at the 5-star Barceló Sevilla Renacimiento the 1% Masters have even done away with the baristas (is that why the roses bloom so well?) and replaced them with Nespresso machines to make the coffee. I kept myself alert throughout the three days of the meeting with milky triple ristrettos. I considered the evil in store for Third World babies with that technology as the caffeine hit my veins and I buzzed from one point of innovative disruption to another.

The Wonderful World of Disruption in Translation

Paula Barbary Shanno(n), disruptive Pirate Queen and the Right Hand of Darkness for Sales at Lionbridge, shared her ecstatic vision of such disruption in an explosive, multimedia keynote celebrating the slash-and-burn creativity of Big Wordsters who have learned to think and act in small ways, moving ever closer to Mr. Etches' vision of a world in which commodities such as translation are free and profits are reserved for those studs who service the customers so well. I could see the excitement of bulk market CEOs as she spoke eloquently in well-tuned corporatist clichés. I could imagine the disruptive IEDs of innovation catching the proud wordsmiths en route to their value-priced boutique forges and the cyborg armies of post-editors blasting the bounds of mere human translation and meaning to compose new algorithmic hymns to Common Sense and Cost Reduction.

This photo is the only thing that isn't sharp with this perceptive language and training consultant

But a kinder, gentler, revolutionary vision of disruptive innovation was offered by one who actually took the time to read and understand Clayton Christensen's work, rather than simply plagiarize it, Ms. Diana Sanchez of Nova Languages in Barcelona. When she gave her excellent presentation of one of the best-organized classic PEMpT workflows, I was impressed. Not by the idea of such an application, which I consider to be rather toxic in most cases, but by the fact that it was so well-structured, a good reference against which to measure alternatives I think. And the presentation was excellent, one of the few I have seen delivered quietly behind a podium which would not put me to sleep. However, I objected (rather rudely in fact) to the title of her talk, as I considered the process described neither innovative nor disruptive.

Ms. Sanchez mercifully spared me the public execution I deserved for my insistent error and waited until the knowledge-sharing roundtable later that day to explain the unique costing model applied by Nova in serving their cash-poor startup clientele in the Barcelona area (innovative - check!) and then went on to explain patiently that the "disruptive" character of the innovation was that it entered the lower end of the market where there was in fact no choice, for financial reasons, but to accept quality compromises. Usually when I hear such arguments, they come from the mouth of some bulk market bogster which I am tempted to punch, but with Ms. Sanchez and another Nova associate at that table what I heard was a tale of respectful partnership with aspiring new businesses. And a very profitable one at that. Hut ab!

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned at my first GALA event was that, although the lighted stage and multimedia extravaganza might be dominated by the rapacious and somewhat idiotic one-percenters of the corporatist translation world and their acolytes, who comprise perhaps another four to nine percent, the vast majority of translation company CEOs who attend are sincere partners of the language service providers (translators and interpreters) they depend on, and they earn my respect in stride. I asked myself why some of my long-term, struggling agency partners were not represented in the crowd of 370 attendees and thought perhaps that might be why they were struggling. The information shared by so many presenters and by the mingling participants was worth far more than the four-figure cost of registration.

After a quarter century of not speaking the language, I still give a shit about Japanese!

I decided that, as long as I was there to keep an eye on the troublemakers, I might as well add my own value for the deserving majority, so I made it my mission to seek out translation company owners, project managers and localization specialists and destroy their misconception that there is no viable speech recognition available for languages such as Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Slovak, Russian, Arabic, Turkish, Korean, Norwegian et alia. Throughout the three days of the conference I tested my recently researched solution with native speakers of the many "minor languages" that are so important in the global business ecosystem, with excellent results. It even worked without errors for Romanian in the crowded lunch room, so I suppose it could be used in the open plan offices one finds in many translation sweatshops. The recognized text can be transferred easily to translation management systems for alignment, review and quality assurance, allowing me to kick back with my goats now, guzzle sangria and pet the chickens as I knock out high quality translation in the Alentejan sun. One translation agency owner from Cairo estimated that this new method might increase the hourly earnings of his freelance Arabic translators eightfold. My kind of disruption, certainly better than the sort of coke-fueled destruction that some corporate high flyers are addicted to.

The short, easy bus ride back home after the GALA event ended got a little complicated when the border zone resentments of the Spanish against their Portuguese betters were visited upon me in a practical joke that left me stranded for an extra day in Badajoz, where I took a 2 am kick in the ribs from a pugnacious little station minder who was frustrated to learn that I had done the impossible and bought a ticket for the 4:15 am bus that he had told me I was not allowed to board. It was interesting to learn that my Portuguese has improved to the point where the Spanish think I'm a native and as I near the border hate me accordingly. Just as I learned in Germany years ago, sometimes there are advantages to keeping a foreign accent, and, alas, I always end up the loser with any language I learn.

In the final kilometers between Estremoz and Évora, where I faced another two-day gauntlet of memoQ lectures and workshops at the university with my interns, I reflected on the lessons of my nine-day translation business odyssey, the high points such as, in the middle of an excellent presentation of the Open Source application translate5, the brave and honest call by Marc Mittag for Germans to forgive the debts of suffering Med countries as they were forgiven their far greater debts after the horrors of the Second World War, after which they experienced their foreign-financed Wirtschaftswunder, to those moments of bulk market bogster idiocy, calling for us all to drink the shitstream of the worldwide content firehose. Mr. Etches can take his 99% and the consequences thereof; my glass is more than half full :-)

Notes from a silly discussion of the need for greed.

As is often the case, I found poetic inspiration in the lessons learned and penned these limericks in the final kilometers of my return:

Megalomaniac Bob
will MT his way out of a job.
Being a fool,
he forgot the old rule
that the 1% own the whole mob

In Moreslavia's quality check,
the meaning can just go to Heck.
In the LQA game
Renato's the name
of the guy who is stacking the deck!

Let the corporates trumpet success
and disrupt the whole holy mess.
With speech recognition
we'll pay our tuition
and unequal pay then redress.

A dangerous agitator starts a new year of trouble

Another typical day in social media....

For those planning to attend the upcoming university event for SDL technology in Lisbon, be aware that the imams and imamas of the bulk market bog have issued a fatwa against it for the dangerous agitation expected among wordworkers in attendance, who may discover better ways to master a leading translation environment tool and free themselves from the local piecework slavelancing conditions. In particular, revelations that one can collaborate with users and abusers of other translation tools and challenge the divine infrastructure of Linguistic Sausage Producers in orgies of interoperability caused considerable controversy in meetings of Board Members Without Boundaries and Transwordling, who have worked hard to spread the needed money and manure in the field to ensure rich corporate yields for years to come. His Hendzelness the First and Only, pope of the Premium Church of Translation, decried this and other heresies, such as calls for professional translators associations freed of the commercial guidance of their betters at the production of linguistic sausage, in his New Year's sermon to an admiring crowd of underage Czech and Bulgarian colleagues. Those who hope to have a real future should boycott events such as the one planned at Universidade Nova de Lisboa on January 22nd and instead do some real good for the world and volunteer free translation of materials to inform the world that Robert Mugabe is the greatest defender of African dignity against colonialist aggression.

It's been two years and two days since my first arrival at The End of the Earth, prodigal Portugal, immersed in the agony of grief over its lost colonies, where the people still stubbornly refuse to understand how worthless an Agrarland is and that the world needs the machines made in small German villages to run at the tempo dictated by the Bundesbank, Siemens et alia, and flawed human hearts still beat in defiance of the better-engineered alternatives implanted in Merkel and her cronies. Since my transplantation to this Unworthy Place of sun, sangria and sex, I have conspired with other unworthies to continue producing the propaganda of futile resistance to the Borg juggernaut of machine pseudo-translation and the undeniable value it offers as evidenced by the breathless exclamation of leading translation technologits that some translators are actually using it.

In the spirit of that tradition, in 2015 Translation Tribulations hopes to expand its range of heresies to include cartoons honoring the Prophet Mohammed, thepigturd, Mantis/Orbe, Lyingbridge and other Great Leaders who show us how life can be if only we would submit. To that end, the office at Quinta Branca is working to acquire two young goats to provide the necessary therapy for those who dispute the power of the pen as opposed to Le Pen.

Comfort for a frustrated artist forbidden to draw people, about to embark on a new career as a wannabe terrorist

Confessions of an American MpT User at #iapti2014

A specter is haunting language service professions – the specter of machine translation! Or as I prefer to call it, machine pseudo-translation, because translation is a cognitive process requiring human intelligence.

As interesting as algorithm-based simulation of language translation may be, it is not translation in the real sense as we understand it: it is not fault-tolerant, able to cope with the frequent shortcomings of human language use and overcome these. Little things like a spelling mistake or confusion of words, which we might recognize and correct easily, quickly reveal that we are not dealing with truly intelligent processes!

As with any tool or process, we need to take a careful look at its potential benefits and its disadvantages. An honest look. And we need to ask ourselves who benefits?

Today, I would like to come clean. To make a confession. Or perhaps several confessions…

But as we translators like to say… context is everything.

In a recent project, I shocked a German colleague with whom I was preparing a quotation when I remarked that the job was a perfect candidate for machine pseudo-translation. It was

• highly structured catalog text with many errors and
• pattern-based rule sets were needed to identify the errors and cope with the mind-numbing work. I used memoQ auto-translatables to cope with the challenge, but a customized MpT process would have been even better.

I am blessed with a diverse lot of friends, from many countries and language backgrounds. And I sometimes use MpT technology to understand the gist or subject matter of their commentaries in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish – or even Russian, which I used to read reasonably well. If I have any interest in pursuing the conversation, I do so in a language with which we are both competent.

Similar use of MpT can have many positive professional applications, such as screening large volumes of content in legal discovery to identify the most important documents for which human translation is needed.

I also used MpT technology throughout the day for months recently in a relationship with someone whose language I was only beginning to learn, someone with no knowledge of languages I know well. MpT, even when it failed, greatly facilitated the human communication and helped me to go from being unable to form more than a few simple sentences to conversing in my new language all day… and night… long. In less than a week.

Here, too, the shortcomings of MpT were very clear:

• The inability of my conversation partner to spell often compromised the machine results… but in this case, the final result was greater attention to the human communication, because both sides were committed to understanding.
• Without a good background in several languages, the essentially monolingual person was unable to cope or even recognize many of the machine translation errors. This reminded me of the dangerous absurdity of monolingual post-editing.

So how is it that I have acquired a reputation for opposing something as wonderful as machine pseudo-translation, with all the benefits it provides to me?

And isn't it rather hypocritical of me to speak out against something I use, often daily?

Context is everything.

What is it then that I oppose? What is it that you should oppose?

I confess that I'm opposed to all these things. 

And I hope that you can make this same confession from your heart.

For me, these confessions have certain, specific implications and require specific actions from me:

• Opposition to post-editing processes with the potential of unmitigated mental damage and deterioration of one's communication skills
• Opposition to compensation models which require more work for less pay which discourage professional and personal development of sustainable nature
• Opposition to individuals and organizations whose true objective is the disempowerment of professionals and the hamsterization of communication processes

Doesn't this apply to more than just machine pseudo-translation? Of course it does.

This might apply to the dismantling of corporate translation departments, which once served as the breeding grounds for some of our best specialist translators. 

This might apply to abusive, so-called non-disclosure agreements, monstrosities of many thousands of words designed to intimidate and impose often illegal – and certainly immoral – conditions of work.

This might apply to attempts by corporate privateers to impose on an ergonomic working tools, such as web-based translation environments or environment tools such as Across, which cut productivity drastically and compromise quality and hourly earnings.

And the list goes on… All this can be summarized in one word:

Ah, but haven't we all got those? I doubt that, unfortunately.

We have professional associations of translators and interpreters which clearly give priority to the interests of corporates over individuals. Their publications and events are often dominated by unconsidered or ill-considered promotion of harmful practices involving technology or professional activities.

I would also question the ethics of abusive practices like calling nonprofessionals to donate services en masse to organizations like Translators Without Borders. At the least, points like these should be considered and discussed much more.

We even have professional organizations and many individuals of standing in the profession willing to overlook such minor indiscretions as long histories of physical and psychological abuse, with these organizations and honored colleagues continuing to support abusive individuals with such suspect histories in the organization of events.

There is a lot of scope for organizations like IAPTI and for individuals who take a stand to engage in issues – technical or otherwise – which affect us, and where we should feel some ethical or moral imperative to demand something different. And in doing this, we should maintain a respectful dialogue with those who oppose us and make the same commitment to respect in personal and professional exchanges. We will make mistakes as we do this, but we have no other good choices.

*******

This is a partial transcript of my keynote speech at the opening day of IAPTI's second international conference, which was held this year in Athens, Greece. In the many excellent presentations that day and the next, I was pleased to hear experienced peers present their competent and reasonable approaches to professional practice and ethics with clarity, insight and solid research which went far beyond my generalizations here. It was an honor to be a guest at one of the best professional events I have attended in my career as a commercial translator.

Photo credit: Danielle Gehrmann

Let them eat cake (in translation)!

Ya really gotta wonder what kind of Kool Aid is guzzled by those social anarchists mistakenly called "conservatives". No outrage is beyond them, no depraved indignity too great in the Pursuit of Capital. We look askance at North Korea, rightly so, but fail to notice that particular interests have long since stepped in to offer their puppet Great Leaders to the sheeple afraid of a freedom which tolerates difference and calls for a minimum of respect.

In the wake of the US Supreme Courts astounding, radical declaration that the "religious rights" of registered businesses trump the rights of the wage slaves they keep, when women who feel they should have a right to use an IUD for birth control and have it covered by the same health insurance that covers Viagra and vasectomies are casually called Nazis and perhaps worse, ya really gotta wonder what latter-day Kesey is running around spiking the juice in the Cuckoo's Nest.

We have our share of those in translation too. More than our share, as a friend in Bairro da Câmara rightly observed. Todos os tradutores são loucos. Not all perhaps. Yet. Give the hamstermeisters in the Big Agencies a little more time to MpT your brains and the day will come. Their acolytes have been ejaculating in prayer for a long time now in service of their algorithmic subcommunicative gods of pseudotranslation and professional degradation. Yoga instructors have even joined their cause to teach wordworkers to bend over just a little farther to receive their labor's rewards.

In her eagerness to show flexibility in her professional standards and squash the "unfounded rumors" that there might have been some quality issues, such as machine-translated content or just general sloppy garbage on the web site of voracious venture capital consumer Smartling, Ms. Bell wrote:

January 16, 2014, German translator Kevin Lossner Tweeted that a business in our space was “toxic waste” and “a load of crap” because he thought the company had machine translated its site (they hadn’t)

Screenshots from Smartling's web site taken on January 16, 2014. Jus' mah 'magination?

Namaste.

What can be done about the rising tide of mediocratizers and profiteering liars who give the many good eggs in translation technology a whiff of rotten odor? Recently in a PuffPo piece, Smartling apologist Nataly Kelly tried to claim how that "so many" translators hate translation technology. Her perspective might be skewed given that many do in fact hate the dysfunctional, browser-based translation interface offered by the aggressive venture capital guzzler Smartling, her employer, but the truth is that as support technologies for translation have improved and early misconceptions based on the primitive functions of old technologies like Trados Workbench and Wordfast Classic are slowly displaced by real knowledge of modern productivity tools, many "technophobes" have casually embraced what might have once seemed a daunting technology. But the same person who brought you the argument that translators will soon go the way of blacksmiths, to be replaced by the technology her owner offers, has a certain pecuniary interest in making us all seem like dippy, frightened housespouses desperate to pick up a little mad money for shoes or to get the kiddies' over-sugared teeth fixed. Really, Jayne Fox said it better and in touch with reality.

The desperation of the MpT interests, the clownsourcers and other linguistic riffraff has been growing visibly in recent months, as their attacks escalate on "haters and naysayers", who oppose the greedy cabal by suggesting that translation quality is still possible by emptying your mind of MpT thoughts. It all so much resembles the desperation of COBOL programmers at the dawn of a new millennium, scamming in those Y2K bucks as fast as they could before their Emperor's knockoff duds were revealed for what they are and the limits of their 2 cm caralhos of competence became all too apparent. MT hasn't gone where it claims it will in more than 50 years and it's not going now where the carnival barkers claim it will if you part with six or seven figures of major Western currency cash. Or as some would have it and go cheap by gargling your confidential translations and following the advice of some "gurus" to throw out considerations of law and ethics.

What can be done? Stop listening to the relentless propaganda of the commercial interests who have neither the interests of language service providers like translators, editors, writers and interpreters at heart nor the interests of the successful clientele whom the good ones serve with pleasure and skill. Most importantly, unplug the noise machines of "professional translator associations" who are too often becoming sellout puppets to commercial interests and are too often merely adding their wheezing voices to the chaos of the translation profiteering echo chamber. In their own separate ways, newer organizations and watering holes for wordwalkers like Stridonium and IAPTI are taking necessary risks to ensure that a place will remain in the future of translation for ethical service of the quality needed to move beyond the bulk market bog.

I'll be talking about a few of these matters in between shots of ouzo and poetry slams at IAPTI's 2nd International Conference in Athens, Greece on September 20th & 21st. Get to know the professionals with backgrounds in engineering, physics, law and other disciplines who get under the skin of the hamstermeisters so much that one recently called them "Shiites". That reminds me of an agency friend who for years has referred to my direct clients (and many of my agencies) as Die Ahnungslosen, because they foolishly pay a mere freelance translator more than that company's clients will usually give to a "full service" agency. There are other places to run with your language business than the HAMPsTr wheel. Come to Athens or come to a Stridonium event and see a much brighter side of translation.

Oh yea, and click around on those pics above for your reading pleasure....

Translation on tap(ioca)

In last autumn's technotwit gathering in Portland, Oregon, TAUS proposed that translation is becoming a utility. In their world I suppose that may be true, perhaps in their world the translation bill will be an addendum to the one for water, electricity or garbage services, because as many of us know, in certain circles, Arbeit macht frei is still common wisdom. For some, that is A Phrase Which Must Not Be Spoken, but I think we all owe it to those who have been involuntarily subject to such freedom in the past to consider its implications in the present. For many of us, translation work can become an obsession, an easy fix for many things which quickly hooks and enslaves us worse than many a coca habit. And the Brave New Future of Translation envisioned by our technocrats is merely a new instance of that opiate religion, used like so many others in the past to win hearts and minds for the habit and exact a terrible tribute from most for the benefit of a few to feed their own ravenous, rapacious habits. There is no honor among thieves. Ye shall reap what ye sow.

It is rumored that the Unholy Alliance of the Common Nonsense Advisory, TAUS, the corporates who control the ATA and ensure that its Code of Ethics does not offend the offenders, thepigturd, and other usual suspects have a secret join venture to develop a revolutionary new line of juicers based on HAMPsTr processes and their proven ability to squeeze more blood from stones.

There is some controversy involving the ganz besonderer Saft which the bleeders of the translation crave from their hamsters. Juice itself is often controversial without MpT promises of drudging survival, and we must, for the sake of our health, take care with our levels of its consumption. As a rule, fruit is a better alternative to the juices made from it; the fiber and other elements lost when the squeeze is applied can help maintain our health in times of tribulation. 

I prefer my fruit with pudding, sweet and smooth, but please, without sugar. Being the Anti-Vegan of Translation, I also try to keep bees enslaved and buzzing for my benefit, so after those amazing, negative calorie Alentejan feasts, I replenish my energies with something good like this perfect tapioca preparation:

1/3 cup small tapioca 
3 cups milk
2 egg yolks
1/2 cup honey
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon lemon zest
Fresh fruit as garnish (strawberries, raspberries, kiwi, whatever)

1. Let tapioca soak overnight in 1 cup milk and the lemon zest in a medium pot in the fridge
2. Then next day, whisk in the rest of the milk, egg yolk, salt, vanilla and honey, and salt. 
3. Bring the pot slowly to a boil on low to medium, stir to avoid scorching.
4. When it boils, put heat on low and simmer for 15 minutes with frequent stirring.
5. Remove from heat, cool for at least 10+ minutes, add fruit garnish and serve hot or chilled.

Coming clean on dirty machine translation

Click the tweet shot to decode his babble

Well, well. I started to dream in Portuguese two nights ago, and it happened again tonight in a dream where I discussed the sentimental value of some old items on their way to another life or recycling. One of these was the first color computer I bought and why; no idea why I should be telling my daughter all these things in Portuguese. I'm supposed to write a letter in English to minha noiva and have it translated into Portuguese by a friend to be sure that no meaning is lost, because I'm too far from mastering all but the most primitive grammar. I think maybe instead I had better just do it in the language in which it will be received, and message will come through as well or better than any translation, though certainly it will be checked. Maybe not. We'll see.

I responded to the incessant, poisonous spew of Luigi Muzii (@ilbarbaro) on Twitter last night, because the little puffed toad obnoxiously insists on croaking nonsense in debates (mostly with himself) which the dim bulb of his mind can never illuminate, and he does so in a tortured, incomprehensible and of course incorrect English which leaves readers I know unimpressed and utterly baffled, which has made him a frequent poster child for nonsense examples at conference presentations and which has convinced some that the man knows no English at all and merely machine translates his disordered thoughts from Italian.

Communication is seldom about the correctness of language or the degree of its mastery. Certainly it can be useful for some of us to command the subtleties of grammar, and I'm one of the guilty who enjoy that fine edge to carve patterns which will sometimes be appreciated by almost none. But sometimes the most eloquent expression can be in the most broken speech, supplemented by tone and gesture and scribbles on paper, signs in the air. And the howls of a dog. I realized this last night as I sat at a table with my Portuguese tutor and one of her many nephews, telling and understanding jokes and completely at ease in their language and culture in our negotiated register, where two weeks before I could do little more than say my dog doesn't bite, order 200 or 300 grams of anything at a butcher's counter (pointing at the item) or perhaps get half a dozen eggs, coffee and some pastry. I remember the eloquence of a Greek mechanic who shared tea with me on the floor of his shop years ago and told wonderful, funny stories I understood and laughed at though I knew about five words of his language.

The desire to communicate and to understand in ordinary situations of interaction is often a more effective facilitator than technical skill. Sometimes a friend and/or colleague will call my attention with some outrage to a web page or a message with "horrible" errors and I look and see none, only fluid expressions of thought and meaning or at least a fit-for-purpose text. A computer program has no motivation, no matter how great the motivation of its creator. It can have adaptive, event-based routines, but these are seldom adaptive in the way we know for the least of human minds. The messaging of machine pseudo-translation profiteers and their snake oil sidekicks pushing a fix of crowdsourcing, rightsourcing and workflow is quite adaptive to hide the static concepts and rotten nature of the repackaged Gammelfleisch they sell in pretty packages to hungry cost-cutters.

The MpT talking heads, Friend Muzii among them, have turned up the volume of their megaphone marketing lately, offering HAMPsTr'd hope to translation buyers that the lapis philosophorum sold by language carnival barkers can transform merda to gold with just the right six- or seven-figure engineering investment and straightjacketed expression we call controlled language. They babble and bark of so-called professionals who are "scared" but it is those unprofessional and MpT charlatans who are running scared at the thought that, like with the naked emperor in the story, their glorious equipment will be revealed to all and found to be of more limited use and interest than most might imagine.

I use machine pseudo-translation (MpT) every day, effectively, to aid in many critical tasks, and I see great value for it in its proper place. But what is that? Certainly not what the greedy HAMPsTr'izers say it is as they seek fresh mental sacrifices for their unholy altar. I believe there are a number of excellent, honest and profitable applications for MpT processes, and I know some translation agency principals and others who profit clearly and honestly from them, and I can find few points of disagreement with these people. But they are also not the more prominent Jungle Book characters on the international scene singing sweetly "Trust in me...."

Come to the IAPTI conference in Athens this September and hear my confession of how MpT technology has worked for me. Or better yet, go to Athens, skip the conference, get drunk on ouzo and tell the natives how much better their lives will be thanks to the transformative powers of MpT.

Please note: no underage girls were anesthetized and abused in the making of this blog post about the technologies and advocates of the bulk market bog (BMB)!