Getting independence right: as simple as ABC!

There's been a bit of a buzz lately in professional language service circles regarding a recent ruling by California's Supreme Court, which establishes a new, simplified standard to determine independent contractor status. For example, the corporate interest blog Slator reported on the panic among large language brokerage firms sometimes known for predatory and abusive practices with the companies and individuals whom they contact to provide services, while independent interpreter Tony Rosado offered an interesting perspective on how the ruling can have a positive impact on independent professionals in his field and, I dare say, independent translators as well.

The Court's decision established the "ABC" criteria as the new standard for distinguishing employees from independent contractors:

A) The individual must be free from the control and direction by the hiring entity with regard to the performance of the work, under the terms of the contract for the performance of this work and in fact. 

B) The individual must perform work which is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business. 

C) The individual is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as the work performed for the hiring entity.

Failure to meet all three criteria will lead to a finding that the individual is an employee and is therefore not an independent contractor.

Now you might say – correctly – that California is a long way from New York, London, Paris, Berlin and Rome, what has that got to do contractor conditions there? A lot.

Over the past three and a half decades, since the rape and pillage of unions and workers rights in general began by the rapacious disciples of Ronald Reagan, a system of work and service practices has evolved which I think could fairly be called social strip-mining. (After I wrote this term, I wondered if others have used it as well, and found, unsurprisingly, that this obvious analogy has occurred to quite a number of people.) Very few of the present practices by large corporate providers of language services (interpreting, translation, writing and editing) are in fact sustainable.

Like strip mining companies tearing down a mountain and utterly destroying its ecology of flora and fauna, polluting waters underground and on the surface nearby as well as other ecosystems, companies like Lionbridge, thebigword, TransPerfect, RWS/Moravia and others and their downstream companies in the service sewer put the squeeze on individuals at the end of their corporate digestive system to extract maximum resources for minimum benefit in a manner which often cannot sustain the living of the writers, editors, translator, interpreters and other service workers at the butt end of things. These individuals may cling for some time to their desperate situation as an alternative to prostitution or delivering pizzas, but there is very little incentive and few resources provided for them to develop as professionals and acquire greater skills to deliver greater value with time.

Some, like abused children, learn the lesson of what the abusers can get away with and continue the cycle on small and large scales, outsourcing or even founding new companies with similar practices.

In truth, nobody is well-served by these practices on the end customer side – the individuals, companies and government bodies who contract with the intermediaries for services provided by individual interpreters, translators, editors, etc. – nor on the end-provider side – those very interpreters, translators, editors, etc. And in the middle? "Growth" seems to derive largely from acquisition and from refinement of their marketing deceptions (many in the bulk market bog of language services have SEO-tuned web pages designed to capture searches for independent individual service providers), not so much from actual organic growth of internal service and quality offered. Price dumping practices are also common; many small service companies are unable to compete with "loss leader" prices to end customers which are lower than those they pay to real independent service providers of good professional business standing.

None of these abusive practices are new; they have been known in many forms throughout the modern history of labor starting more or less in the early 19th century. These practices ultimately led to the rise of unions and bodies of protective legislation in the past, so it is not surprising that some have called for "unionization" of international service providers. ("Workers of the world, unite!", anyone?) But these well-meaning calls for unions of interpreters and translators are not really practical in most situations. So many say there is nothing to be done.

Wrong. The California Supreme Court decision points the way toward ending the worst of corporate abuses of individuals providing service by creating a situation in which the true costs of these services are emphasized in the relationship with the service provider. There is nothing standing in the way of companies like Lionbridge or much smaller companies from increasing salaried staff to write, translate, interpret, etc. under local statutory conditions for ordinary employment. To the extent they find this impractical, these companies can contract with other companies or with individuals who meet the ABC criteria.

Such a requirement would also give a fair break to those companies who do in fact invest in the socioeconomic maintenance and professional development of their employees providing service to end customers. Under current practices, these good companies are unfairly disadvantaged by laws and regulatory practices which now permit these service strip-miners to operate as they do. Local and national governments would also benefit from and increase of benefit payments from registered employees or from taxes assessed on work transactions which fail the ABC test.

In the environment of expanding globalized trade and sophisticated corporate shell games to avoid tax liabilities, enforcement of necessary and proper good social practice at the "source" – the intermediate provider level or at the end customer level where there is a direct relationship between a company or government body with a presumed independent service provider – is perhaps the most practical way to accomplish some of the reforms needed on a global scale.

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.

Sinking in the bulk market bog of #xl8

Facebook is a veritable cesspit of bulk market stupidity in translation... name changed to protect the... innocent(?)

If anyone questions why I need massive infusions of Egyptian doum palm tea and karkadé to survive the tribulations of translation, they need look no further than social media, particularly Facebook. Some years ago many people assumed that the unprofessional character and abuses one finds on bulk market reverse auction portals like ProZ.com (aka PrAdZ, ProtZ and many other variants) were due to repressive site policies, or some particular, special evil found only in repurposed chambers in a country once known for dropping political opponents of the junta from helicopters into the sea, but in the meantime some have figured out that this is the Human Condition or at least that of translators and their keepers who choose to dwell in common in the bulk market bog of failure and mediocracy. Of course one can find excellence, even beauty and dream-inspiring experiences of the most creative kind there or in many other unexpected places; I once found the most magnificent opium poppy growing in my dung heap on the farm I had in Oregon years ago. So really, it's not the medium... it's the messengers, who shall always be among us. Hooray for the wisdom of hermits!

Siberian shamans have some cool recipes for this beautiful, deadly mushroom so common in dem Vaterland

I have been subject to social media assault for translation rather often (#yessometranslators), which is the nicer term I can think of for being granted involuntary membership in some of the FB groups which sprout like toadstools. Not all groups which are created in that medium of fertilizer are toxic; some in fact could be characterized as rather tasty shitakes or Portabello mushrooms. But almost everywhere in these media, once can see and hear the incessant, self-harming whine about "outrageous rates" and the perpetual lament that "there will always be someone to accept such starvation remuneration" as if this implied that we must all bow to the "inevitable" and sell our bodies in the bulk word brothels of Moreslavia et alia.

This problem is hardly confined to translator circles; since I began a career involved with commercial translation, I have continued to act, as I have for 30 years now, as a consultant and trainer for relevant technologies and strategies of work and business. I have supported translation agencies and direct buyers of translation services of every size to assert themselves effectively and ethically in a market which often presents very difficult and complex challenges. And from this year forward, with a growing team of educational psychology specialists, university instructors, technical specialists, interns and others, I will do so to an even greater extent.

I have observed for some seven years now, with great sadness, how many translation companies who really earned the label Language Service Providers (LSPs) instead of Linguistic Sausage Producers (LSPs) have circled the drain and gone down because they believed the lies of the buyer-driven bulk market of which Smartling's Jack Welde speaks with such rapture. Quite a number of these principals of failed companies were and are friends of mine. But somewhere along the line, they lost sight of some fundamentals and thought that the competitive market is all about price, or even when they knew it was not, they sometimes lacked the insight or resources to resist the race to the bottom of the drain into the cesspit.

Thus it was my pleasure at the recent GALA conference in Seville to share some ideas with many key business people from diverse backgrounds with many languages, so that they might have more options to follow their hearts and heads and enjoy a more sustainable and satisfying business model with which we all win. There were a few toads in the crowd there, but why waste a lot of time on them, The Toxic Ten Percent, when the venue was full of the 90% whose philosophies and business goals are very much in accord with the interests of individual service providers such as freelance translators and editors? When I shared some workflows which might offer effective means of applying speech recognition in languages previously thought not to be supported, a number of translation company owners and operations managers spontaneously declared their happiness that the freelancers they depend on could now earn a better livinng despite low piece rates in their languages. Such "dirty capitalists" are our natural allies and ought to be considered friends in the trenches of the war with those who fail to understand that disruptive innovation is a bottom-up, evolutionary movement of change which can, with the understanding of ordinary human decency and ethics, be a positive thing and fertile ground for a sustainable, professional crop. It is not the destruction rained down on villages like Guernica by the Great Powers of Lionbridge and their like. 

So what to do about the bogsters, the Linguistic Sausage Purveyors (LSPs) who dare to promote more slavery to us slavelancers and digital sharecroppers in a post-apocalyptic translationscape? Nothing. Ignore them. Or invite them to a hot date in the sand with a goat. But please, people, leave off the incessant public whine about rates, forget about piece rate nonsense and focus on value, effective earnings for the time invested and sustainable business practices. You can tear down any house faster than you can build one, but ya gotta live somewhere.

And, just for fun, you can share some interesting tidbits with colleagues and buyers about how, when one approaches the price break limits of a silly bulkster discount scale such as that in the screenshot above, you can add some unneeded words to the job and get the whole lot of words for less:

The New England Translators Association stands tall against attacks

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
                                                                           — Martin Niemöller

The New England Translators Association (NETA) has published an open letter of support for Aurora Humaran, president of IAPTI, who is faced with lawsuits against her and her organization in brute violation of her personal freedom of opinion and expression and against IAPTI members as a whole, whose freedom of association has been threatened. Here is the text:

To Aurora Humarán, president of the International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI), from Diana Rhudick, president of the New England Translators Association (NETA), on behalf of the Board of Directors and members of NETA

January 26, 2015

Dear Ms. Humarán:
It has recently come to the attention of NETA’s members that you, as IAPTI’s president, are facing lawsuits for allegedly authoring an anonymous blog post that was critical of a translation agency’s practices and for using social media to circulate it. We have further learned of threats made by this agency to publicize the names of IAPTI members who refuse to disavow support for you as its president and to denounce them personally to other clients for whom they work.
As a fellow association of professional translators and interpreters, NETA is deeply concerned about the dangers that these lawsuits and threats pose to the freedom of expression guaranteed to you, as an individual and as president of IAPTI, and to the freedom of association guaranteed to all of IAPTI’s members. We believe that, more broadly, these dangers represent an affront to the rights of all translators and interpreters to express their opinions, to share information through social media or any other channel, and to associate with their colleagues without fear of retaliation. The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights enshrines the freedom of opinion and expression, including the circulation of ideas through any media and across any frontier, as well as the freedom of association. NETA condemns all efforts to suppress such freedoms taken by any person, translation agency, or other entity against any translator, interpreter, or the organizations that represent them.
As president of NETA, I therefore wish to affirm our unequivocal support for IAPTI and for you as its president to exercise your legitimate freedoms of association, opinion, and expression without interference, without threats, and without restrictions placed on the venue or medium through which opinions are expressed or circulated. We strongly hope that the lawsuits against you will be promptly dismissed and the threats against IAPTI members will be fully retracted.
Since this is an open letter, we are publicizing it through NETA channels and we invite IAPTI to publicize it through its own channels as it sees fit.

Diana RhudickPresident, New England Translators Association, on behalf of the Board of Directors and NETA Members

The recent deranged attack by a bulk market bogster is part of a long-standing pattern of attacks by self-interested parties from the low-end translation bog and other exploiters and charlatans seeking to sell their sleazy interests to trusting professionals and turn these against their own. I am long familiar with such things myself, for example with the recent threats received, in public and in private from the I Am That I Am of translation, His Hendzelness, for discussing questions about Translators Without Borders and its sometimes dubious practices (more on that to come), questions which may have influenced the resignation of that organization's head as the evidence mounted, but Mr. Chiosso's illegal and unethical campaign aggainst IAPTI's president and its members raises the ante to a new level.

And the silence so far from certain pundits and some other professional associations is deafening.

IAPTI Member Paula Arturo, a translating attorney, has written an post titled "Defamation or Freedomof Expression? Can Translators Share Bad Practices Info Online?". It is worth reading.

I applaud the sound ethical instincts of the New England association, the first to show backbone in standing up beside another organization and its president to prevent cancers like this from spreading. Like the recent action from the ITI in the UK, begun under its former chairman, my esteemed colleague Nick Rosenthal, and which finally resulted in the conviction of a deceiving translation agency operator who defrauded his suppliers - translators - of large sums, this is the sort of thing where we all need to stand against the criminals. Not support and promote such practiceZ as some do.

I took the picture above in a Swiss courtroom a few years ago, where another infamous bogster and defaulter on payments owed to translators sued me for daring to discuss his unethical practices on this blog. The costs awarded to me in that action remain unpaid to this day. But let's hope that the same graphic could be used soon to report the fate of Mr. Chiosso, who most definitely belongs in the dock. And on that day, we shall see who stands for free, honest expression and the rule of law in our societies and who remains... silent.

Life at the bottom: Manta/Orbe translations

Two days ago I received a most curious e-mail from a Mr. Guillermo Chiosso, associated with a bulk market bogster, Manta/Orbe, known for its bottom-tier rates and reported history of complaints from those who have worked with them. In this e-mail, which appears to have been sent to hundreds of translators and interpreters in IAPTI and possibly others, Mr. Chiosso writes of an upcoming defamation suit against the current president of that organization, Aurora Humarán because of an article at

http://translatorleaks.wordpress.com/2013/11/10/orbe-manta-quacks-scam-proz/

which was linked in a "news" page curated by Ms. Humaran using the Scoop.it keyword service. In the rambling, defamatory letter distributed to so many translators and interpreters, Mr. Chiosso claims that Ms. Humarán authored the piece in question, which is clearly not the case. My blog posts and those of others are featured all the time in such collections, where curators are presented with the results of a web search according to criteria of their interest and then choose interesting bits to share. But offering a link to an article is not quite the same as authoring, and if it were, I shudder to think how long some bylines would be.

What is going on here? Lately, I have noticed what seems to be a trend of aggressive escalation by representatives of the bulk market bog of language services, who are constantly innovating in the efforts to drive the sector toward demonetization. The excessive spin-doctoring responses to my recent post on Translators Without Compensation (TransWC) aka TWB and the many public and private threats I personally received in association with that article before the organization's founder and president resigned are further examples of the intimidation tactics which now seem popular among driving forces in the lower strata of Linguistic Sausage Production. The timing of Mr. Chiosso's missive is, of course, coincidental, but it is interest to note how careless he and in particular another individual are about reading the sources subject to their complaints; one can only hope that they are not or no longer involved in content review activities for documents of importance, because I am not sure I would trust the results.

The tactics employed here remind me a bit of the logo and motto of the Sherwin-William's paint company: "Cover the Earth". But unlike the pleasant colors and tones offered by that manufacturer, here the cover is falsehood intended to direct the attention away from unsavory practices such as spamming, exploitative rates and questionable ethical practices. In issuing their threats, both Mr. Chiosso and the blowhard who misdirected his mistaken outrage against me both claim to have consulted counsel, but when the basic facts of the text in question are examined, it is hard not to call the competence of counsel - or the information provided to counsel - into question.

I hope that Mr. Chiosso will issue the apology due soon and that some of us at least can return to what we do best.

Put on the red light at thebigword!

For those of you who thought that "House of the Rising Sun" was an Animals original, think again. It's likely that the song predates the recording of Leadbelly's wife here; the traditions of translation and the often similar business described here go back a long time, and these days, they seem to intersect particularly, particularly if one is "in a relationship" with a large Linguistic Sausage Producers (LSPs) like thebigword, which recently issued one of its periodic demands for translator rate cuts in a year in which record profits were posted and fat bonuses paid (see "Meaty Payday for thebigword Director").

Often when veteran translators gather at conferences, online or even down the road for coffee, the subject of project management quality - or the lack thereof - at companies like thebigword, TransPerfect, Lionbridge et alia comes up. There is a widespread impression that these big agencies hire recent university graduates as staff to recruit, test and manage translators, editors and interpreters for their corporate and government clientele. I cannot count how many times some outraged language service greybeard like me has griped about the stupidity of some PM who is presumed to be not only wet behind the ears but in other ways as well, not having yet graduated from diapers.

I am pleased to report that these assumptions appear to be baseless, at least as far as thebigword is concerned. After a tip from one colleague, I began to research the impressive qualifications of the human interfaces at this LSP using their LinkedIn profiles. Here is some of what I found:

Clearly, the next time I do a translation related to veterinary science or training dogs to track and hunt, I will need to take care, because my work might be reviewed by a volunteer dog handler. And I'm sure that these big sausage shops have the erotica angle covered too.

Reviewing the educational histories of some staff at thebigword who claim to recruit and test translators, I found it interesting to note that university education did not appear to be a job requirement. No matter; I can name two good linguists who never attended university, and I'm sure there must be a third one out there somewhere. With project management skills, of course.

So, dear colleagues and corporate clients, the next time you are frustrated in your dealings with some large translation agency and start to grumble about the qualifications of recent university translation studies graduates, be careful. My initial research shows that you may owe a big apology to some recent grads.



If you are looking for an exit strategy from the bulk market bog, don't let the glass door hit you in the a**e!

Post-slavery bondage and poverty

Following the news recently, I read with some interest a number of stories involving the latest innovations in the modern chattel labor market. Some corporations now control their labor costs with the use of innovative software which optimizes the labor force to meet the ebb and flow of spot demand at retail locations. What that means is that worker's schedules are adjusted, sometimes on as little as an hour's notice, and after working the night shift, getting off for an hour or two or three to sleep and shower before opening the shop early the next day, these desperate low-wage workers may find that they are sent home after just a few hours of work that morning because not enough customers have showed up.

The effect of this on families and relationships or the complications - the impossibility - of serving multiple massahs should one be unfortunate enough to have two such optimized part-time positions to make ends meet.

"Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be broken" a youth pastor in my church used to say many years ago. But that was in an era where such things were unheard of, where the expectation of a job was that one could meet life's expenses with it, not be an underutilized but optimized cog in the profit gears that grind out their soylent bulk feed for the global corporate trough. A body just can't bend enough to meet some of today's unreasonable demands by the merchants of greed.

Some of this may sound very familiar to many translators, especially those stuck in the bulk market bog where tools like Across or GeoWorkZ is used with or without the Babeled output of machines to grind and season wordworkers in linguistic sausage production. "Ah!" – you may protest – "But slavelance translators can do their work at home!" as if the digitally sharecropped fields where one need not even be exposed to sunlight on the way to work all day for the sugar in yer tay were any greener....

Historically in oppressed labor markets, companies and those who supported the interests of exploiters at the expense of social stability and healthy markets made good use of "divide and conquer" tactics to pit one group against another and drive wages into the dust on which the desperate choked in an attempt to eat it when bread was too dear. Living in Portugal and having just left a neighborhood with a degree of social misery through economic disadvantage which I simply cannot describe in public with polite language, I have seen some modern variations on this there with skilled college graduates willing to go to extremes for the typical monthly wage of a bit over €400 (with skilled engineers earning a lordly €1500 a month or so, enabling one I know to pass up the opportunity to work for three years in Germany as an indentured servant of Siemens for €800 a month and share a flat with other chattel). I see the stress cracks in spirits pounded relentlessly by those much-loved laws of "supply and demand" and wonder how it is that most have forgotten history and are now doomed to repeat it.

In a recent Twitter dust-up, a number of colleagues who position themselves in well-compensated parts of the translation markets, where there is a continued demand for the kind of quality and service that Linguistic Sausage Producers are unable to deliver or even really comprehend in most cases (and which, alas, too few are able to deliver, though the Dunning-Kruger effect often leads them to think otherwise), argued with a prominent figure in the language service world known for his role as a consultant to commoditizers, as a co-founder of the Common (Non)sense Advisory and more. I found it interesting and disturbing that a man involved with marketing and market development for a bulk processing word shop would make a divisive statement claiming that his partners in the conversation "despise" those with lower rates. Those receiving the slave wages are very conscious of the difficulties of their lives and are often rightly resentful of the arrogant and dismissive way in which some colleagues do go on about the "price dumpers", but in this particular discussion the point was being made that there is more room in the "premium markets" for those with the skills and the business savvy to work them.

I'm not taking a side in that particular argument, nor will I add my voice to the occasional chorus that condemns Renato, who may well have responded too sharply in this case because of the many unwarranted personal attacks directed against him by people who too often fail to understand his world as he appears to fail in understanding theirs. But I have been fortunate to have a few exchanges with him in person and through various online media, and while I disagree on a number of points (possibly a great number, but I really don't know, because we haven't talked enough), I have found him to be one of the most insightful persons with whom I have discussed marketing in my many careers, and the fact that his focus is on linguistic sausage shops and their bulk word paste and redefined "quality" criteria doesn't detract in the least from the many good lessons I have learned from advice he has generously shared in public and private.

On the other hand, I am taking a side on a number of other matters, because I feel it is necessary for the good and profit of all parties who deserve to continue in productive participation in our societies. I think that we need to resist the temptation to suck the black, infected milk of lies from the "free market" advocates of markets which are far less free than claimed and recognize that all boats will not rise with the wave of prosperity unless we do something about patching the holes in many of them. Rather than waste its time canonizing popers who protected child molesters for decades, perhaps the Catholic Church should think about making Henry Ford a saint. Certainly he qualifies better than some of the disreputable characters in the roll of holies.

Mr. Ford is often noted as an innovator of sorts with assembly lines. He came rather late to the game of automobile manufacture, but it's probably fair to say that the automobile industry as we know it today and the prosperity it helped to create for generations is due to this great man and innovator. But what, in fact, was his greatest innovation. His assembly lines produced cars at a lower cost than ever before! Surely that, and in school I think this is what I was told. But I think that is not it. Mr. Ford had the radical idea that the workers in his factory should be able to buy the cars they produce. And they bought them not because the cars were suddenly cheap enough that a worker in an automobile factory could afford them. They were not. Unless that worker happened to be building cars in Mr. Ford's factory. The rest is history as they say.

Today the largest retailer in the world, Walmart, has many of its (low wage) workers subsidized by public benefits to be able to afford to shop for the cheap goods in their stores. McDonalds I'm told even has a hotline to advise its workers on how to get food stamps and other necessaries to support lives that are not sustainable through their employment. And at Lionbridge, TransPerfect, thebigword, Moravia, Kern and others....

Yes, there is a premium market of which many of the linguistic sausage pundits in the MpT world are often largely unaware, though, as colleague Kevin Hendzel has pointed out for years, it comprises many billions of dollars, euros, zlotys, etc. of business ripe for the taking by those who can meet the market criteria. All the disputes and denials on that subject are either deliberate deceptions on the part of corporate-side exploiters or simple lack of insight or of information by others. But in parallel there is that other universe of "commodity" language service which some are best suited to serve. There is no shame in that, because these words are often needed just as much or more than those in the world of high-end language service, and the waters are indeed rising swiftly with globalization there for all The Big Wave itself might have failed. But those hoping to profit from what the profiteers often refer to as the tsunami of information would do well to remember the example of Henry Ford if they want to escape being left broken on the beach one day when the tide recedes. Fairness pays and bread cast upon the waters is indeed found again, multiplied.

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....