The Great Firewall of Washington!

Slowly I am beginning to understand the association of the color red with the Republican Party in the United States. Before the 2000 presidential election, red and blue had no fixed association with Democrats or Republicans, and when I thought of the color red at all in the years after that I was usually seeing red because of Republican policies designed to dismantle the country or all the blood, foreign and domestic, which Republican lawmakers and Republican wannabes like "blue dog" Democrats so happily see shed. But slowly the truth is emerging from the fog of the Bush wars: the Chinese connection. Ol' Shrub & Co. happily financed their military adventures with Chinese money, now it seems that Republican lawmakers, following the lead of their Red Chinese masters, want to erect a Great Firewall in Washington to strangle free expression. Beijing disapproves of dangerous ideas like the First Amendment to the US Constitution, so their eager Red Party students in the US House of Representatives and Senate SOPA and PIPA respectively to set things right, based on the hollow premise of preventing copyright violation. President Obama has stated his opposition to the legislation now proposed; let's hope he doesn't roll over and play dead for the Reds as he is wont to do.

As part of the protest against US legislators' attempts to strangle free expression through unconstitutional preemptive restraints and other measures, Wikipedia will be blacking out its English pages worldwide tomorrow. Wikipedia, like any other Internet-based platform exists within and is affected by the framework of laws, and I find it entirely appropriate that this otherwise neutral platform stand up and take a position in this matter. Details regarding the blackout, scheduled to begin at 5:00 am UTC on January 18, 2012 and continue for 24 hours, will be found here.

We as translators depend very often on the public availability of information for our work. Intellectual property should have appropriate protection, but the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate are not the way forward. If you are a US voter, please make this clear to your erected representatives.

Here Today, Gone Today!

I did something today that I don't usually do. I posted a response - no, two of them - to a thread on ProZ. I had pretty much taken the site from my radar, because the level of discourse there continues to drop, and the general environment has a questionable feel after several data theft incidents, the ongoing history of bad moderation and the ever mutating RuleZ for MutantZ. I do drop in occasionally to update my profile or check the payment practices of some agencies, but there doesn't seem to be much going on there lately from which I can derive much professional or personal use. Even the hosting service appears to be unable to resolve long-standing technical issues (mail server problems, lack of space and mysterious space accounting that seems to include temporary files), so that's on the plan to go out later this year.

But a colleague I like had engaged in discussion on the thread and obviously misunderstood the meaning of an English word, so I offered him an explanation. And then because his misunderstanding of the word was basically a correct understanding of the general spirit of the original post (pure trolling, so I don't even take much issue with ProZ for canning it), I vented a bit of sarcasm for fun, although I knew the NNSoEs would take my words quite literally in most cases.

Some hours later I received this:

Dear KSL Berlin,

This message is to inform you that the thread entitled "Tired of being paid peanuts?" has been hidden because the initial post was not in line with site rule http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/3#3

As a consequence your post "Clearinghouses " has been removed from public view together with the rest of the thread, not because it was in disagreement with site rules but because threads are removed completely when the initial post is removed.

Sorry for the inconvenience, and thank you for your understanding.
Regards,
AEJ, ProZ.com moderator extraordinaire.

No comments about the moderation in this case or about the moderator. The thread was no loss really, just another lot of bitching about rates and the usual silly French calls for Translators of the World to Form a More Perfect Union as the French always seem to want to do. (What do French translators' unions do anyway? Block the roads by dumping dictionaries on them?)

But the incident is a useful reminder of something that is very important for a serious professional: the need for some reasonable degree of content control. Some readers may wonder, first of all, why that letter is addressed to "KSL Berlin" and not "Kevin Lossner" when for years I have criticized the use of aliases by serious professionals. That was before I discovered that my name generated nearly 60,000 hits in a Google search, most of those hits being trash like the Tamil page from ProZ with my instructions on how to convert a PDF to editable text. You would think that the Arabic, Malaysian, Urdu and Mayan pages would have been enough to get the same message across. Now, blessedly, the Google hit count is declining steadily. I have almost achieved the degree of privacy I desire; tonight the count is a mere 25,500.

Moreover, contributions in a forum are quickly buried, so the same questions get asked over and over again. That used to drive me nuts. Since starting my blog, I have more control over messages and their visibility, though I constantly tinker with ways to optimize that (like the keyword word cloud I'm currently using in a haphazard way for post classification). As a result, certain information remains more accessible to others and I don't get asked certain questions as often as happened in the past. Everyone wins. Important too is the ability to call the shots oneself on whether the message stays or goes (if you have second thoughts or it's simply no longer relevant) or gets updated. Usually this particular moderator deep-sixes my messages there because of her own personal quirks and understanding of the RuleZ (which is apparently often greater than her understanding of message texts in English and German). In this case, my message is just "collateral damage" and not even damage I really care about. On the contrary, I appreciate the reminder to stay out of that particular wallow.

In many ways, message control via social media has wrought the greatest transformation on my business since I started doing my own thing about 22 years ago. Experiments with blogs, Twitter, Facebook and other media have yielded some very interesting and often unanticipated results. Not all of them what I want, but many have been pleasant surprises. And I would have missed much of this had I depended on ProZ or similar portals in the way that many continue to do today. Nothing against ProZ intended here: I have said before and will reiterate that i the past I have derived great benefit from my association with the site. I don't think that's a fair expectation anymore give the flood of cheap otherworld zookeepers inundating me with monkey mail every week, using the ProZ Connect system to bypass the filters I set up ages ago or simply pestering me through the mail link on my profile. (Takes time, I know, but time is cheap in some parts of the world.) But when I think about the latest ProZ membership campaign with its slogan "Grow Your Business" I can't help but think that it's really better and more responsible to yourself and your dependents to grow your own!

Loss of Facebook

rom the beginning I was a bit skeptical of some of the more popular new "social media" for business use. Tweeting on twitter seemed a thing for twits with too much time and Facebook.... well, I couldn't see using a platform covered with cow patties from Farmville and splattered with blood from the Mafia wars as a serious place to do business. But after a young online entrepreneur (e-book publisher for architecture exam prep) from San Diego whom I follow launched his Facebook page and explained how such things work, I decided to give it a try and evaluate the technical aspects of Facebook pages as a business platform. These pages are separate from one's private profile, and since increasing numbers of clients and colleagues had been sending me Facebook friend requests, I thought this might be a good alternative, as I'm not really sure I want my business partners reading snide comments from my sister or drunken remarks from a bum I knew in high school.

The Notes feature and the Wall were my primary means of communication. I never really understood the interaction statistics on the page, though I found them interesting. Technically, there were a lot of glitches. When I wrote dictionary reviews, the cover images often wouldn't upload, or the system refused to align the pictures properly. When edited at a later date, I could usually correct matters. But on the whole the environment was a lot buggier and more limited than even a Google-hosted blog, and far worse than my own site for dogs using Wordpress.

But the deal killer came more recently. Facebook censors without notice. Twice I have received notes like this:

Hello,

You have posted one or more status updates on your Page that violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, statuses that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down statuses that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in your account being disabled.

The Facebook Team

No actual indication of what was deleted, just a generic notice and a disappearance of content. I had to browse a bit and rely on my memory to figure out what had been removed. (Even PrAds usually does better than that.) The content in question involved scam warnings in German and English involving the notorious Dominic de Neuville of Zurich, Switzerland, whose company Language Promotion GmbH was recently declared insolvent, leaving many translators and others unable to collect monies still owed. Mr. de Neuville is also known for his tactics of threats and harassment against those who consider going public about his misdeeds. My partner and I have been subjected to considerable abuse, telephone harassment, threats and attempts to sucker us in the form of fake project offers. Some background on this is posted on my blog here as well as on the Zahlungspraxis list and various private forum blogs:

Juggling Snakes

Betrugsversuch aus der Schweiz

The Imaginary Project

Slithering Along

This evening I received the following comment from one of Mr. de Neuville's former victims, a translator in Africa:

... I think your support for other translators is great. Had a lot of correspondence with some of our colleagues regarding outstanding monies owed by D. de Neuville. The general attitude was: "I do not dare to continue and [I will] give up because I am afraid he will take matters further"(threat, blackmail, defamation, lawsuit etc. - his typical working method). My assurances that he has more reasons to be afraid did not help. Now his company is in liquidation and unfortunately there is no chance for them to get their money.

Facebook has supported the requests of this individual to suppress information which is in the public domain and documents his unethical business practices. My partner has even been warned by Facebook for linking to it. Also, the warning I received from Facebook stated that advertising a product or service is not permitted. Thus the whole notion of using the Pages feature of Facebook to promote one's business is rather dodgy. I will continue to leave my page up there and add content from time to time, but given that there is no possibility of recovering deleted content from there, everything will be backed up and posted redundantly on my blogs here and elsewhere.

And given that Facebook has adopted some of the tactics of the political elites of the PRC and Iran, I would not be surprised to find any day now that I am among the "virtual disappeared".

RTFM

It seems even familiar acronyms are now forbidden at PROZ:

Dear Kevin Lossner,

This message is to inform you that your post "RTFM" has been removed from public view because it was not in line with site rule:
http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/4#4

Dear Kevin, I have changed the title of your posting.
Thanks for your contributions in DVX Support forum.
Kind regards,
Selcuk

Thanks in advance for your understanding and future cooperation.

Regards,
Selcuk Akyuz, ProZ.com Moderator

This was in response to my posting a link to the user manual for the DVX Editor version for a user who apparently never thought to look at the program's documentation. At least Selcuk didn't feel obliged to delete the post like Miss Presbyterian Manners might have, but then Turkish manners usually do have better polish than what I see in other places. I suppose my response is

You're welcome and goodbye!

Really. Funnily enough, my use of BOHICA on previous occasions (probably referring to SDL Trados quality and support) never got censored. In any case, with the ProZ Puritan nonsense getting more ridiculous by the week, I am increasingly less inclined to give any help at all to the many clueless beginners there. Recently, a German acquaintance of mine shared his support correspondence after an Indian moderator deleted his post entirely because it linked to a drawing that showed some leg and cleavage. In India I am told that you can be arrested for holding hands in public; many probably remember the scandal over Richard Gere's innocent public kiss. That someone from there is given the ability to impose her backwater standards on the rest of the world I find greatly offensive. Los Angeles is not Calcutta. Shall I return the favor by sending her pictures of cattle being slaughtered? A bit of tolerance, not pandering to the lowest prudish denominator, is called for in international exchanges. Or shall Germany be forbidden to send its new foreign minister Mr. Westerwelle on a mission to Iran because the mullahs there like to hang gays?

I do not consider it professional to pander to the medieval revivalists or those who have never made it past that period culturally. I have seen ProZ job notices looking for translators for adult content. Surely this offends many, and it's not exactly my cup of tea, though I had no problem with translating a text for a gay outcall service that placed a strong emphasis on health and responsibility. I refuse to translate for tobacco companies, and I have a strong personal reaction to the products, which include an allergy and clear memories of the misery of family members dying of lung cancer, but I think it would be overreaching for me to call for such job postings to banned or to curse my colleagues who do that work. And in that spirit, I will repeat my advice to the novice who will probably face many puzzling moments with many software programs - advice which most of us should probably follow more often: read the fucking manual!

Sillier and sillier

Recently, colleague Jeff Whittaker started a discussion thread on ProZ regarding bottom feeders and the suckers who beg to work for them. Some of the "offers" are quite entertaining, really, but they don't have much to do with professional translation. At about the same time, I got one of those frequent unsolicited e-mails from an Indian agency begging for work and promising to be cheap. I commented on this and shared a few excerpts from my correspondence with the agency, because I hadn't found time to blog about it as I would like to eventually.

Later in the thread, I responded to a point about the bottom of the market, relating my own experiences with an agency here in Germany. After a day, the post was censored by moderator Russel Jones for alleged offensive language:

Dear Kevin Lossner,

This message is to inform you that your post "No, the bottom in Germany is below that" has been removed from public view because it was not in line with site rule:
http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/4#4

Thanks in advance for your understanding and future cooperation.

Regards,
Russell Jones, ProZ.com Moderator
http://www.proz.com/profile/35845

It seems that pew is getting crowded :-) As usual, here is the original post:

No, the bottom in Germany is below that Oct 12

Posting not yet approved

Laurent KRAULAND wrote:
... as a general trend in France, the Netherlands and Belgium (sometimes even Germany), I can see that agencies tend to pay the translator about 0.07 euros ex VAT per word and to sell the translations at no more than 0.12 euros ex VAT per word.

In Germany I know an agency seen here from time to time that is worse. Back in 2002 or so when I was building my client base, I took on one job with a really interesting topic for 6 cents/word, with the understanding that the usual rate for jobs to follow would be double that. I got a long whining list of excuses about how the budget for this one was exceptionally bad, etc. etc. and I though "what the heck, they don't know me, so it's an intro for us both". Well, these jokers turned out to be time-wasters, because every subsequent inquiry was offered at the same low rate. Seven years later I still get occasional contacts from these losers at the same rate, and I offer to do the work for triple that as a special favor for old time's sake. For some reason we never do business any more

That was the last time I fell for that sh*t. Either a job is serious and properly funded, or they can take it to Bangladesh for all I care.

Terribly, terribly offensive, though not necessarily for the language. And I'm sure that these days, if you are a ProZ moderator, yours doesn't stink ;-)

Addendum:
After I complained about the censorship, I received this kind note from Russel:

Kevin; I'm sure you can edit with an alternative to sh*t. You wouldn't believe how many complaints I get about such language! I don't find it all offensive but I'm afraid we need to recognise that ProZ.com is an international site and not all cultures share the sensible approach of the English speaking community!

Many thanks.

Russell

So the mods are "forced" to carry out actions against content that they do not find offensive? Interesting. Just following orders we wuz. Used to be a tradition of that here in Germany, but fortunately the populace has grown beyond that. Not so elsewhere it seems.

Curiouser and curiouser

The ProZ censors are at it again, and to be quite honest, I can't see what for. Today I received the following message for a post made some time ago, which was purged today:

Dear Kevin Lossner,

This message is to inform you that your post "Really?" has been removed from public view because it was not in line with site rule http://www.proz.com/siterules/general/2#2

Site users are expected to treat each other with courtesy, whether posting publicly or making direct contact.

Thank you in advance for your understanding and future cooperation.

Regards,
Jared ProZ.com moderator.


Since there was no link given I had no idea what the allegedly objectionable content was, so I filed a support request to ask. Jared kindly responded and copied the text out along with the following message:

Text of removed post

Dear Kevin,

I'll copy the text of the post below. Note that, in the case of removed posts, no links are sent since the posts are no longer visible.

Really?

Samuel Murray wrote:
Exactly. That is why the system isn't a quoting system -- it's a bidding system. But someone at ProZ.com thought that "bid" had a bad ring to it, so they called it a quoting system.

Is this firm knowledge or speculation? Doesn't sound bad to me either way. In an RFP, which in a sense is what many of the job posts could be considered, the terms "proposal", "bid" and "quote/"quotation" are really equivalent, and I think my friends on the big island off the coast of France are fond of "tender" as well. (That might come from all the tenderizing that is said to have gone on in the public schools in days presumably past.)

As you know, some people claim that these job posts are like slavery and ought to be banned from ProZ. I vehemently disagree. I think we should encourage slavery in the profession and therefore I herewith propose to Henry and the staff of ProZ that programming resources be dedicated to creating slave auctions. We won't need dental X-rays and beefcake photos of those up for sale - a summary of their qualifications and a commitment for a unit of capacity within a specific timeframe is all that would be needed. (Sorry, this is only part-time slavery... those who want it full time will have to look for a day job.) Outsourcers could then bid - quite publicly - for the advertised capacity for a specific translator. Those on the block could even specify the starting bid level to make it "fair" :-) Whatchy'all think?

Regards,

Jared
Member services and support

The "rule" allegedly violated reads as follows:

Mutual respect, professionalism and fair play are expected. Site users are expected to treat each other with courtesy, whether posting publicly or making direct contact, and are advised to act under the assumption of good faith. Harassment of, or attacks on, individuals or groups, of any form, as well as discouragement of another's use of the site, will not be tolerated. No action aimed at gaining unfair advantage in KudoZ, the directory or elsewhere, whether taken alone or as a group, will be tolerated.

Perhaps I'm merely getting old and senile, but I fail to see the connection here. But as Barney Frank would say, trying to have a conversation with some people is like trying to talk to a dining room table. Jared is a nice fellow, but I think he's off in the Twilight Zone here with his RuleZ.

I was actually serious with the slave auction proposal in any case. I think it would be fun, and it would be revealing in a lot of ways. I remember years ago too that this used to be a popular fund-raising method for churches and youth clubs in the California town where I grew up. The other good thing about this proposal is that the bidding structure would move prices up and reveal to some of the bottom feeders what others are willing to pay. Instead we have the usual system where hungry translators in some language pairs compete to see who can work for the fewest calories per day. Better to be open about that slavery thing, because real slave labor has more value than what many ProZ outsourcers are willing to pay.

Bound and gagged again!

As mentioned in a recent post, ProZ.com has now begun to act as an online translation agency. The Turnkey Translations project - referred to by others as Turncoat Translations or Turn-off Translations - matches what is presumably the "cream of the crop" at ProZ - those bearing the Scarlet P - with clients needing a quick turnaround of short texts at third-world prices. All without invoices and tax-reporting because, after all, such things don't matter in web development when you are just trying stuff out to see where it goeZ. To some of you this may sound a bit half-baked, but that is essentially the position taken by the founder of ProZ, Henry Dotterer:

As usual, it is optional
Hi all,
Thanks for the additional posts. To reiterate my position, in the event this feature begins to amount to anything, I believe it will be appropriate to get into the details raised here. In the meantime, there seems to me to be some potential here for a service of some value to some members -- and some members are agreeing -- but the fact is that it remains to be seen, and this feature could just as easily disappear as remain.
If you are not among those who has any interest in this, your position is respected. ProZ.com's mission is to provide tools and opportunities for you, but it will always be up to you which of them, if any, you use.
If you are among those who have expressed grave concerns about an experiment of this nature even being undertaken, I can understand your fears, but really, I think you can relax a bit. 15 to 20 euros of work per day -- with one translator meeting one new translation customer in the process -- is not going to bring down the industry or your livelihood any time soon. (And don't rule out the possibility that turnkey may be a useful thing even for you. Would it be the end of the world to be invited to consider completing a short job, with the potential to meet a new client in the process?)
Jason may post (or may not), but that is all I have to say for now.

And a short time later:

But how did it work for you, PRen? Would you ever consider a turnkey job?

PRen wrote:
...you've managed to "bring down" the industry quite a few notches in the last few years. This should take it down a few more.

Clearly you don't like this idea, PRen. But why are your criticisms still so general at this point? I was being serious, you are now the leading customer of turnkey translations. So if you are going to trash the idea, won't you give some specific details from your experience with it?
I mean, was the work ok? Would you consider working directly with the translator(s) who did your jobs in the future?
Putting yourself in the position of the translator, as you have seen the system work, are you saying you would never like to be notified of turnkey translation opportunities? If not, why not?
As a more general point, PRen and others, if you have specific issues with the way an idea is being pursued, it is more helpful when you express those concerns in such a way that Jason, or whoever is working on a given project, can act on them. Statements like the one above, well, they just don't get anyone anywhere.

And then:

Yes, ScottishWildCat, it could turn into that. Or not.

ScottishWildCat wrote:
As I now derive it from Henry's posts about the subject, the positive side of TK jobs would be to bring P-certified ProZians in touch with potential clients, at conditions which are not ideal but are better than doing so-called translation tests for free.

I think that is one way of looking at it, one thing that this idea could lead to. Or not. Or maybe it will lead to something else completely, or nothing at all. We really don't know right now, we have to see where the people who use it take it.
If that sort of uncertainty is unsettling to anyone, accustomed as you may be to delivering work only when it is completely done, I am sorry. I wish we had all the answers in advance, but we don't! (Maybe there are more capable sites out there who do.)
As ProZ.com staff members, we do, however, do our best to watch, listen and adapt. And we are working for you all the time -- I promise.
Thanks again, everyone! I would say you can expect to hear more back in a few weeks, either more details, or a simple "there was not enough interest." In the meantime I am closing the thread. Anyone who wants to be involved in the project is invited to contact Jason.

There was a lot of concern expressed by ProZ members regarding the information in the FAQs for service providers and for customers which were posted rather belatedly (something like a month after discussions on this topic began. Considering that a good part of my afternoon today was spent digging up data on income received over three years from two customers for years which had already been filed with tax authorities and approved after careful review of the financial data and preparation of the return by a leading tax consultant in Berlin (not good enough apparently), I think that the boyZ at ProZ are being a bit to cavalier in experimenting with what my local tax office in Oranienburg would surely view as an invitation to tax evasion. I have in fact dealt with income received without an invoice issued by me by issuing a "pro forma invoice" detailing all the VAT obligations, etc., and I have not yet gotten in trouble over this (I am very careful to document all income received in all taxable accounts in all countries), but situations differ drastically from country to country or even from county to county, so I think that the shoot-from-the hip, quick and dirty approach of ProZ to do all this without invoices is, though surely without wicked intent, a terrible, immature mistake.

This recalls very clearly a conversation I had months ago with a former ProZ moderator, a man whose business ethics and expertise I respect enormously. He told me that one of the motivations behind the moderator purge was that Henry D was simply tired of hearing about slippery slopes and potential problems and basically wanted everyone to shut up and go along while boyZ play with their IT toyZ. He characterized many of the problems at the site as deriving from a naïvety one finds sometimes among techies without much understanding of the law, business principles or social ethics. Unfortunately, I think some of that can be read clearly in the tone of the messages quoted above.

I appreciate that Henry is interested in feedback on the mechanisms of what could, under other circumstances, be a very interesting experiment. But blithely ignoring the concerns clearly and specifically expressed on issues such as legality, taxation, rates, dispute resolution while at the same time making disingenious complaints that all concerns expressed are unhelpfully general is really not the way to go.

Despite the bad reputation of ProZ in many quarters of the translation world, I have (had) a generally positive view of the company and its platform. I have met quite a few fine colleagues and clients through it, and it has been a significant contributor to the progress of my business over the years, though the days when I actually depend on it to draw clients are probably past. For my language pair (German to English) I do not perceive it as a price dumping ground, and I have found clients paying very reasonable rates actively by responding to posted jobs and passively by being contacted via my profile or information posted there. I'm not particularly concerned with the ridiculous rate paid for ProZ "quickies" through the Turnkey system, as it simply tells me that the feature in its present form is not interesting to me. I don't have to use or benefit from everything on the site; in fact, I ignore 80% of it and get along nicely with the 20% that fits my needs. I get value for my 100 euros annual membership, and that probably won't change much if I continue as a member.

But there are legal and ethical lines that should not be crossed, and sometimes the company dances a bit to carelessly along them. My partner feels very strongly about data protection laws in Europe, and while ProZ may not be in technical violation of these, the company's conduct regarding user data and Google certainly violates their spirit. She was also very concerned about things like ads for prostitutes being displayed on ProZ pages. I hope that latter issue has been sorted out. In any case, where we formerly had two memberships in the office, we now have one. I'll be migrating my domain (currently hosted by ProZ) for the business web site and e-mail as I find time in the coming months, and then we'll see what happens after that.

In the past I have vigorously defended ProZ against criticism in places like private BDÜ forums, because much of this criticism was based on fundamental misunderstandings of how to use the platform effectively to find paying projects. I have done astoundingly well with that over the years, but I cannot be bought. There is another body of criticism having to do with business ethics, censorship and good citizenship, and I can find little ground to stand on if I want to contradict some of these critics. Among them are some of the finest, most ethical translators whom I have been blessed to make the acquaintance of in the past 9 years. I listen carefully to what they have to say, and they give me cause to consider if I am not in danger of becoming a Mitläufer if I remain a paying member of ProZ.

Oh yes... and in the end, the discussion thread quoted above was locked, though the language used was civil and there was nothing in violation of the platform's many RuleZ. Once again, mature discussion on ProZ has been bound and gagged.

(Apologies to all for the bad formatting - Google's Blogger software really sucks in this regard!)