Smartling vs. Easyling: the court has spoken!

See:

https://slator.com/press-releases/easyling-wins-trial-as-jury-rejects-trademark-and-trade-dress-claims/

The first time I heard of "Smartling" was when Miguel Llorens wrote an exposé of the new company's rather dubious Spanish website quality. That was 2012, bad timing for a company in the first stages of acquiring many millions of venture capital financing. Certainly not the time one wants to see negative publicity like Miguel wrote. But all that didn't interest me; he and I were scheduled to debate machine pseudo-translation advocates at a conference in Warsaw that September. Yet another funky little startup without much to offer beyond the usual hype for idiots was really not enough to get on anyone's radar given the broader trend of deprofessionalization and war on independent service providers.

But Miguel never made it to that debate. Shortly before the conference he went silent, and when I finally got news through mutual friends, it was that his mother had already returned to Venezuela with his ashes. The circumstances of his death were never really resolved as far as I know; it was hot in Madrid at the time, a real heat wave, and the body wasn't found for some time.

Fast forward a couple of years. A well-financed Smartling is engaged in a full-court press on the market, but not yet of the judicial variety. Despite denials from some company employees, there was still incomprehensible, low-quality machine-translated content to be found on the site - for Dutch and German at least when I checked. But CEO Stormin' Jack and his sidekick VP of something-or-other Nataly Kelly (she of CSA fame with those bogus estimates of rate drops in translatiom that were used as a cudgel against independent service providers) were busy networking, making contacts among "influencers" and seemingly buying whomever was for sale. They tried it on with me, certainly, and I found it fascinating to study their methods. I had not seen some of those sophisticated moves since my days of footsie with FBI counterintelligence.

And the rounds of VC financing went on and on I'm told. "Shades of Thanatos!" I thought at one point, though really, Jack is no Elizabeth Holmes. There were a few associated with translation service companies who loudly rang the bell for Smartling and all it had to offer; Terena's bell rang a bit hollow to my ear, and sure enough, before long she bailed out on the translation sector to do other, better and presumably more profitable things.

So what does one do when flush with cash but the dog and pony show is just filling the stage with dogshit and horse apples, and your competition does something much like you do, but more transparently and perhaps more functionally? Double down on research & development? That's not The American Way today! Why you sue, you do, sweep those pesky foreign companies from the market in a legal campaign of Shock and Awe.

Except that sometimes common sense and justice prevails in the legal arena, and all your money won't buy you love... or victory. See above.

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....