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.

What's your addiction?

Bet you didn't know this use for an iPhone! Free app available in the Apple Store....

Yesterday was not a great day. In fact, it's been a bad past week. The downward slide started with an unrecognized synonym when talking to a receptionist at a medical clinic where I had gone to get my foot x-rayed. Out of nowhere, a panic attack. I began to hyperventilate and stepped quickly into a nearby courtyard outside and around a corner to face a wall and calm myself. But they found me. Would not go away. Then it got worse. Thinking I was having a heart attack, they called paramedics. How do you tell someone to fuck off and go away when you just need some quiet to get centered and you cannot remember the words in a new language?

Yesterday, again. I went to the post office to pick up a package. Took a ticket, waited for my number to come up. It did. At the counter the clerk looked at my ticket, made a face and began to berate me in somewhat harsh tones, almost as if she had learned her manners in Oranienburg, near where I used to live in Germany. As the rush of incomprehension took my ears, I left quickly, sat in the car nearby, hyperventilating. Coffee, I thought, and headed to my cantinho for a galão. Still feeling the alienation and panic I remembered an unpaid vet bill, so I went by the clinic and settled it, though the tightening of muscles amplified the pain in my feet and caused me to move in a way that added half a century to my chronological age. Afterward, I sat in the car, hearing the rush of traffic behind me, fearing I could not pull out of the parking space and drive home safely. Back then to the cantinho for another dinner seasoned with solitude and muito vinho tinto.

In the two years I have lived in my new home, I have acquired an ever greater appreciation for what involuntary migrants, aka refugees, might experience in their dislocation. It's not the country. It's not the language, which is usually a musical massage to my ears and spirit even when I cannot yet discern all of its meaning. And it is certainly not the people or their culture. In fact, I say truthfully to my friends and others here that the worst of my days in the Alentejo are better than most days for me in a place like North-Rhine Westphalia or Brandenburg.

I have spent a lot of time meditating on what it was that I sensed in my first days in Évora more than two years ago which makes this place feel more like a home or a potential home than any I have experienced in decades. My stress reactions are minor and normal for anyone in a new environment where the networked roots of existence and social life are barely sprung from the seed. But the soil here is fertile, and those roots do grow, albeit sometimes not quickly enough to support the plant, windblown and wondering and alone in its field of dreams.

The answer to that question and many others came in an article referenced by a faraway friend this morning. The essential message for me was nothing new; in fact, I have been stating it quite plainly in other words for most of the past week. But the article did solve a few other mysteries, like how it was that I kicked a pain pill addiction last autumn and realized only weeks afterward that I had done so after simply forgetting to medicate my arthritic foot because I was busy.

About the time that I moved to Europe 15 years ago, Portugal had the worst drug problem on the Continent. Then the natural, good sense I appreciate so much in this culture took over, and the society surrendered in the War on Drugs and embarked on a very different path to peace than the usual one taken. Not only was drug use completely decriminalized, but steps were taken for the social integration of addicts. No big deal I suppose, not here where respect for human dignity is so deeply ingrained in the culture that so many of the Portuguese do not realize the extent of their true wealth.

But look at the results: drug use has plummeted. Addiction rates are half of what they were. And the prisons are not full. Alas, there is not much future in a career as a prison guard in Portugal unless you feel like watching over corrupt politicians.

The article shared by my friend and colleague is one of a number I have seen lately about drug use and treatment and the "astonishing" success of Portugal where every other country I can think of has lost the war. Portugal's surrender is a victory in fact, one which we can all share. But it's not about decriminalization. It's not about drugs. It's really about human connection.

The article referenced talks all about the "chemical hooks" we all know that drugs have for us. But what about gambling? Or porn addiction? Or any of the many other addictions commonly spoken of today. Power? Money? Smart phones? Software solutions to human problems? Machine pseudo-translation, anyone?

We talk about "addictive personalities". You know, that common flaw of that weak and worthless human refuse found in our dirtiest, most dangerous alleys. Or corporate board rooms.

Are these personalities truly more prone to addiction? Controlled studies do seem to indicate this. But the gifted scientists who were my teachers, Frank Lambert in particular, often warned me about drawing such conclusions without looking carefully at the design of the system and my assumptions and whether I was dealing with a closed or open system. And that, my friends, is the real problem.

As we translators like to say, context is everything.

As Johann Hari wrote in the article:

".., in the 1970s, a professor of Psychology in Vancouver called Bruce Alexander noticed something odd about this experiment. The rat is put in the cage all alone. It has nothing to do but take the drugs. What would happen, he wondered, if we tried this differently?
So Professor Alexander built Rat Park. It is a lush cage where the rats would have colored balls and the best rat-food and tunnels to scamper down and plenty of friends: everything a rat about town could want. What, Alexander wanted to know, will happen then?
In Rat Park, all the rats obviously tried both water bottles, because they didn’t know what was in them. But what happened next was startling.
The rats with good lives didn’t like the drugged water. They mostly shunned it, consuming less than a quarter of the drugs the isolated rats used. None of them died." ...
"... addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you. It’s your cage." ...
"After the first phase of Rat Park, Professor Alexander then took this test further. He reran the early experiments, where the rats were left alone, and became compulsive users of the drug. He let them use for 57 days—if anything can hook you, it’s that.
Then he took them out of isolation, and placed them in Rat Park. He wanted to know, if you fall into that state of addiction, is your brain hijacked, so you can’t recover? Do the drugs take you over? What happened is—again—striking. The rats seemed to have a few twitches of withdrawal, but they soon stopped their heavy use, and went back to having a normal life. The good cage saved them." ...
"Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It’s how we get our satisfaction. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find—the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe [or a smartphone]. He says we should stop talking about ‘addiction’ altogether, and instead call it ‘bonding.’ A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn’t bond as fully with anything else."

This is the sort of thing which bothers me deeply about the profession of translation in its current state. It's not about machine translation. It's not about technology of any kind, nor about "linguistic sausage". But it is very much about Linguistic Sausage Producers and processes, very much about technology as The Golden Calf and very much about the sausage into which we grind and extrude people when we put the tools and methods above them.

I was told once by a friend that "the world needs the machines made in small German villages to run". No we fucking don't. That statement upset me so much that I gave away most of what I owned some weeks later and simply got in the car, drove 2800 kilometers and started a new life. A good life, even when the inevitable isolation at the start of it makes some days hard.

I saw some of this last week in a professional context when I had lunch with Joaquim Alves, owner of JABA Translations in Porto, who is now starting a new venture, the JABA Academy. He told me the reasons for starting this new company and his goals to promote better professional skills in the translating communities His translation company does not rely on massive databases of virtual slavelancers. His slaves are right there on the plantation, in-house.Making a decent wage for Portugal, with health benefits and paid holidays. And educational oportunities, paid by the employer, like mine were in the US decades ago before neo-Regeanite madness and Randian cults took over.

Is JABA an evil sausage shop like thepigturd and others? I don't think so. The Devil is in the details, but so are the angels not yet fallen. What I see there is an environment, perhaps not one for which I am personally suited, but in which professional language workers are part of a supported community of work, with integrated training and support. I imagine they are less likely to go shoot heroin, talk to their smartphones instead of their girlfriends or neighbors, less likely to live their "lives" on Facebook.

ISIS has ambitions to take over the world, with vegans in hot competition. Both will inevitably fail, above all for their lack of respect for other people. My money is on Portugal to conquer, at least by example. The addict in me certainly hopes so.

Uptalk in training?

Like a number of other translators I know, for a number of years, I've followed the progress and publications of a young blogger in California, Pat Flynn, who engages in a wide range of transparent efforts involving online marketing and passive income. He has had many useful things to say about the technical aspects of e-books, podcast production and other subjects of interest to me. He also interviews various people involved in online businesses, and some of these interviews cover subjects I care about.

One recent interview was with a fellow who creates e-learning courses. As readers of my blog are probably aware, this is a subject which has had my attention for about two years now, and after reading some of Pat's interview transcript, I decided to download the MP3 recording and listen to the full interview. I didn't make it far.

The interviewee had a lot of interesting things to say, but I found it extremely difficult to concentrate on his content, because he, like, kept using a rising inflection at the end of every sentence? This is what is referred to as uptalk, upspeak, high rising terminal speech or other expressions. For me, I think the phrase "terminated communication" describes it best. Particularly for older Americans, uptalk can be very difficult to hear.


I've also noticed uptalk creeping into some of the training videos for the language professions. When I raised this issue with one person involved in the production of such materials, the response seemed to indicate that the private communication was deeply offensive and that I was "attacking" the person using that difficult inflection in the recording. On the contrary; I know the presenter is a competent professional with useful things to say, and I simply wanted a good person and a good company to benefit from communication less likely to pose challenges for a key "constituency" in the US and UK. On average, translators tend to be somewhat older, perhaps even more conservative in their language habits, and for now I just can't see uptalk as any possible advantage unless you are doing a guest workshop for students at a community college in the San Fernando Valley of California or some other hellish backwater.

I can't say to what extent uptalk may cause problems in other English-speaking cultures, but where I come from there are definitely issues in a professional setting, as this person rather "offensively" points out:


I prefer the more humorous take from this fellow:


His comments on courtrooms 15 years from now were amusing and are probably frighteningly predictive. How would courtroom judges react to an interpreter speaking that way today?

Have you encountered uptalk in professional settings? Is your experience with it positive or negative, and do you see it as useful in some contexts of training or public speaking? Am I just showing my Jurassic disposition to complain of such things?

And, like, when you comment, like, please, like, let us know if you are, like, a native speaker of, like, some kind of, like, English and like how old you are?

Walled gardens

Ashgrove walled garden, roadside view. Kilwinning, North Ayrshire, Scotland (from Roger Griffith)

In the beginning, online networks and platforms were largely separate, walled off from one another. In the California state university computing system that I remember from my youth in the 1970s, it was a big deal that the diverse campuses were linked and that certain operations were possible between the systems - truly useful stuff like directory searches for new versions of text-based Star Trek programs. When the first chat application was introduced and became popular, it was banned at the Los Angeles campus because it used too much bandwidth.

Later platforms like CompuServe, AOL and others I have long since forgotten - as well as many old corporate systems - had their own walled-off e-mail systems. Connections to the Internet eventually killed off most of these.

Today's business networking platforms such as LinkedIn and XING and social media such as Facebook also have private messaging systems that do not co-exist well with the wider world of Internet communication. Even with notifications set, forwarded messages are often difficult to recognize as important in the flood of spam these platforms typically generate. As a result, over the years a number of potentially interesting business prospects have slipped by because I didn't notice the private request for a quotation on XING. Or some colleague or other person feels insulted because months go by without a response to mail on the platform or to a "connection request" of some sort.

I don't worry about the lost business; my usual contact information is easy to find, and it is typically on those sites as well. Not everyone camps out on LinkedIn or Facebook 24/7; many have other commitments and ongoing business that make it impractical to "check in" with great frequency. I do see value in these platforms and use them to communicate with some friends and former coworkers, but I never do so expecting a quick response. If I want that I use real e-mail or pick up the phone.

The phone? Yes, indeed. Years ago I recall being attacked on a public portal by some troglodyte translator who was offended by my suggestion that the telephone system still has a role to play in business. But e-mail is not the reliable medium many believe it is, and after some of my old addresses (one in use for nearly 20 years) were used by impersonating spammers, my e-mail messages often landed in spam folders or disappeared into The Void. Despite its reach and apparent openness, the Internet is in many ways just another sort of walled garden, one rather neglected in parts and full of traps and hazards, and to get where we want or need to go, we must often engage with the wider world, the real world.

Data exchange issues for translators & TAUS

Jost Zetzsche of the International Writer's Group has written an interesting short report on data exchange standards for translation content, how they affect individual translators, why we should care and why freelancers should be involved in the development of these standards. The report can be downloaded from the link here or from the TAUS website where you'll be asked to give contact information that you may or may not want to provide for a mailing list.

Jost's paper is a good overview which explains its points clearly for nontechnical audiences as well. He has a gift for that, which is why his Toolkit newsletter and Toolbox primer for translators are so enormously popular. In some way I find it a shame that this latest information is distributed via TAUS, and organization regarding which I hold no little suspicion, but it is important that we keep an eye on those who pursue their agenda, and some limited collaboration can in fact be a good way to do this.

Why am I suspicious of TAUS? Two things.

First, I find the organization's case for sharing all TMs rather weak. In certain areas like standard error messages for software, I can see the point. Without even considering copyright and privacy issues, I simply find the idea foolish for much of the work I do. I don't care to see most of the trash TMs that LSPs accumulate, fail to maintain properly and try to "leverage" on the backs of their translating teams. Why would I be interested in greater quantities of linguistic sewage? Even my own TM content gets stale after a while and needs an overhaul as language and usage evolve. Those who plan to leverage their 100% matches for the next decade or two should hope that their customers and users like the taste of cardboard and old shoes or they may find themselves with communication and image problems at some point.

The second problem I have with TAUS is the organization's silly, shameless shilling for machine translation. Horsefeather-stuffed essays like "Want to ride the machine translation tidal wave?" or the intimidation set piece "What options do translators really have?" with its Darwinistic principles for how translating monkeys must evolve should give TAUS very little credibility with those in the industry who do not exhibit disturbing characteristics presumed to be part of a lemming's DNA.

This is not to say that I do not support TAUS. I think all my customers' competitors should hang on their every word and pursue the full program of data leveraging and process automation, eliminating as much of the human element from translation as possible. In Germany, I fully support initiatives by the Arbeitsamt, which previously retrained displaced coal miners as occupational therapists, to offer career path alternatives to call centers by certifying the long-term unemployed as MT post-editors (part of the "evolution" touted by TAUS), perhaps even providing their services to industry in the form of the beloved One Euro Jobs in a tradition of slave labor anchored in the middle of the last century.

I am perfectly content to be sidelined by history here, to stand lonely on a high hill, a translation creationist foolishly resistant to the industry's evolution, and miss the thrill of the MT tidal wave as it washes away common sense and quality and leaves consumers and business people picking through the strewn detritus of meaning.

Where will you be? The surf is up!

Mobile monkeys: Vodafone

My new location makes it necessary to rely on high speed mobile communications for Internet and VoIP telephone connections, as there are no broadband options available for land lines. That's just as well; I like the idea that my entire electronic communications infrastructure is "ready for the road". But I do find it irritating that the provider I use (because the other networks' bandwidth is insufficient here) obviously uses monkeys for its translation. Drunken monkeys like in those old Kung Fu films I used to watch with friends in a Monterey Park cinema in Southern California. Except that those had better translations in their subtitles than Vodafone Germany typically has on its English web pages!

The Entrepreneurial Linguist and Online Media

One of my goals for 2011 is to catch up on a backlog of reading that has been accumulating on my shelves and disk drives. One professional resource that was particularly high on my list is the Jenners' book The Entrepreneurial Linguist; I had followed reports of its production with great interest for about a year as well as enjoyed their business tips on the Translation Times blog. I enjoy the perspectives and tips shared by my colleagues in a number of publications, and I have learned something valuable from every one I have read. I particularly value, perhaps more than many would, subtle variations on the same theme, because these help me to discover the context that works best for my business.

But how much is there to be said about the business of freelance translation that is really different or original? More than I realize, as I am reminded time and again. This profession is evolving quickly, though not always in the ways that the prophets of machine translation and others would have us believe.

The Entrepreneurial Linguist starts off with an excellent discussion of the business mindset needed for successful positioning and negotiation and follows with a chapter on organization and accounting that is for the most part good and relevant, but not particularly distinguished compared to similar expositions I've seen. The third chapter, however, on "Social Media and Web 2.0" is gold. As can be expected in a rapidly evolving field, some minor parts are already in need of updating, and I was surprised to see an excellent, extensive discussion of Facebook without a mention of Facebook "pages". But this is the best overview of the various online media options that I have seen yet for language service professionals, covering blogs, professional networks such as XING and LinkedIn, Twitter and more in a very focused, relevant way.

Innumerable times I have listened to friends and colleagues who "just don't see the point" of various social media for business or personal use or who are put off by all the stupid hype. In thirty well-written, balanced pages, Judy and Dagmar Jenner make the case and the limitations very, very clear. That by itself is worth the cover price of the book and a lot more.

Of course there is a lot more useful content as one would expect from freelancers with business degrees who successfully work exclusively with direct clients rather than agencies. What the authors excel at most of all is communication, both in online media and more traditional venues, and this provides the reader with a lot of unique, valuable and highly digestible fare.

Life in the slow lane

There's an arrogance that some develop when spoiled too long by state-of-the-art communications infrastructure. I see this sometimes in discussions with web designers or software developers who refuse to consider the situation of those with little or no access to broadband. I remember as a young man being able to read faster than the 300 to 1200 baud text scrolling down down my CRT, and I was never a speed reader. Download graphics? Sure, if you've got a free afternoon. Movies? In your dreams. Well, dreams do come true, though often they have a darker side. I'm sure that many of my translating colleagues have received some short job to translate with enormous uncompressed graphics that destabilize the file structure and give translation tools fits. The sort of crap that makes many of us spend more energy as technotweakers than as translators. All this is facilitated by widespread firehouse bandwidth, which also raises customer expectations for a rapid return. Please remember, people, that rapids are often full of sharp rocks and other risky elements, and though you may come out fast, you may come out in more pieces than you went in.

So when I moved to the Schloss a few weeks ago and faced a few tricky decisions on how to configure my new infrastructure for communications, I decided to "go slow" for a few weeks and see what life is like. There's no DSL offered here, so blowing off Deutsche Telekom for good, a dream I have had for a decade, has finally been possible. I spent a week on Vodafone's UMTS and found it good for all my data and voice communication needs, then I applied the brakes and used my FONIC stick, which in this area only gives me EDGE service, which is like GPRS. (FONIC is an O2 subsidiary - I'm told they advertise widely and humorously on TV, but since I haven't looked at a working television since my last visit to the US four years ago I wouldn't know). EDGE really sucks in some cases. I remember trying for nearly two hours last July to send a small file (2 MB or so), before giving up in frustration and going up into the third story of the inn, where a weak UMTS signal was available and the file could be transmitted in less than a minute.

But perhaps I'm stricken with a bit of nostalgia for my old farm in Oregon now that I've finally made it back to more livable, rural settings. The bandwidth in county lands outside Scio was very bad for a long time, which was very good for web page design for medical company clients whose physician customers often had 2400 baud modems with which to crawl the World Wide Web. "Optimization" was a very relevant concept with regard to communications. Another reason for the present experiment is that I have encountered difficulties too often with mobile communications while traveling, and I wanted to explore the possible scope of these and prepare solutions before they are needed. The low bandwidth also gave me an opportunity to test my online project management and communications environment, which was never consciously optimized for such situations, but which seems to work well nonetheless. Given that an iPhone and iPad interface is soon to be available (or perhaps already is - I don't use that stuff, so it's only of peripheral interest) I suppose I should not be surprised. Working a lot with a remote memoQ Server under these circumstances is not something I would recommend unless you remember to create an offline version of the databases for synchronization. I did that on my old laptop, but not on the new one, so I was stuck. Fortunately, the job I had to do was only a short page, so I could live with the delays to confirm segments.

Even at 96% signal strength, EDGE is utterly inadequate for viewing video clips of more than a few seconds length. Thus I missed out on Jon Stewart's successful satirical advocacy that brought needed relief to 9/11 responders and various links that friends wanted to share. Professionally, this had little meaning, though I was bummed out that I couldn't listen to the music videos linked on patenttranslator's blog while reading his posts.

Should the need arise, I can activate and use my Vodafone stick in minutes and get high quality UMTS. I discovered recently that there are now solutions available with UMTS and mobile SIM cards, which offer WLAN access and VoIP telephony, much like the little portable WLAN routers that various colleagues have purchased and rave about. So when this old tortoise is ready to stop crawling down the road, he can climb into an affordable hotrod and tear up the asphalt.



The image of the tortoise on the road from Arria Belli is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. That's not really French Guinea, it's a road in Zehdenick in Brandenburg, Germany on Christmas Eve. Thus the promise of blooming landscapes made by Helmut Kohl has been kept thanks to Global Warming.

Sometimes a great customer

I think that sometimes we get so caught up in the often nutso routines of the translation business that we don't recognize a big gold nugget in our own pans. Someone has to take it out and hit us over the head with it first.

Communication is important in most businesses, and translation is about communication really, so I would suppose you could say this applies even more so to translators. But there are many forms of communication and each exchange is unique. Maintaining the alertness to recognize that uniqueness and to respond in the best way to each individual situation is not easy at all, even for some people who are considered "good communicators".

I had an interesting project several months ago that was a bit of a nightmare in several ways. The source document was in MS Word format, but heavy footnoting and commentary as well as a huge number of hefty graphics caused most of my various translation environment tools to choke. After two days of trying to get the project set up, I finally discovered a complex conversion workflow involving several tools that enabled me to translate. Then the real nightmare began. The source text was a disaster. Written by Germans living abroad for many years, some of whom had no access to a German keyboard and showed obvious signs of having forgotten the proper use of their native language, it also showed signed of having been slapped together in a big hurry. Whole paragraphs were repeated, sometimes consecutively. Sentences ended like staircases into the ceiling at the Winchester Mystery House.

The rational thing to do in such circumstances is to have a chat with the customer about the state of things, perhaps suggest a bit of editing if possible before the actual translation begins. But I think more than a few of us have dealt with customers who become irate at the suggestion that a source text could be less than perfect, and too often I've received responses that essentially mean "shut up and translate what's in front of you". In one case there was a mushroom cloud seen over a small city in North Rhine-Westphalia as an end customer responded to ten pages of corrections for bad grammar, typographical errors and mislabeled diagrams in a source text. So gradually I've begun to give less feedback on the problems I see with source texts unless I see them as precursors to inevitable death or lawsuits. Simply looking stupid doesn't always count any more.

Well, as luck would have it, there were complaints about the aforementioned project. The exchange dragged out for more than a month (largely my fault as I tried in vain to get someone else to review the text and identify serious translation errors that were not apparent to me and I simply didn't feel like engaging in a conversation that seemed a bit Kafkaesque in the clarity of its issues). The customer asked repeatedly that I look at the edited text (which had been subjected to extensive, necessary editing of its content, the faults of which were the legacy of the source text) and make a "proposal" (for some sort of discount, obviously). I had told the customer that I was quite willing to reduce the invoice for the tardiness that resulted from the difficulties involved, but that I couldn't see anything in the translation to fault beyond a few typographical errors my proofreader had missed. In fact, the editor engaged by the customer had introduced serious errors into the text while making a few good suggestions for alternative terminology. That answer wasn't satisfactory.

Finally, after weeks of stress over the matter, I had largely ceased to care at all about the rather large invoice. I decided to put the ball back in the customer's court, accept whatever suggestion was made and if I didn't like it, then I was unavailable for further work. End of story. So in a relaxed state of mind, I called up the customer and we resumed our chat. I asked for a "wish", saying I simply wanted the matter resolved to their satisfaction, and they know better than I do what they might consider "satisfying". I was surprised (though I shouldn't have been) that the requested invoice reduction was less than what I would have considered acceptable. So that point was resolved immediately, and I could feel the muscles in my back loosen a bit. Then the interesting part of the discussion began.

My understanding at the end was that the real issue was not quality of the translation per se, but the quality of communication. The person with whom I had dealt with for years was rightfully upset at not being informed that she had passed on garbage to me for translation. And I was so caught up in various matters that I didn't stop and consider the particular nature of that specific customer relationship and the fact that this was a customer who is open to criticism and wants to see the best result in the end. A customer who understands that things can go wrong when people work under pressure and who tries to make intelligent decisions if the information to do so is available. In other words, for many of us the ideal customer! Gold in my pan, and I was too blind to notice. My other half, who had been very irritated about the whole matter, nearly broke out the champagne to celebrate when she realized how reasonable our customer really is. This is the kind who is really worth extra effort.

I'm sure this won't be the last such mistake in what I hope will be further busy decades of translation. But I hope that the lesson will stick for a while, and I'll ask myself more often if I am really responding to the situation now confronting me or to a completely different one with a different customer last week.

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".

Still a twit

Twitter is now over three years old - an eternity in the Internet Age - and its place in the social media environment is still the subject of great dispute. There are as many opinions about The Great Twit as there are users and abusers of the platform. It's pretty much what you make of it, really.

The latter-day MLM freaks often tout Twitter as the ultimate marketing tool, citing hyperbolic cases, which even if true are of zero interest to me. I know how to make money, and I like how I do it when I have the time to do it, and Twitter just isn't part of my scheme, thank you. I use it for other things and get good value.

My partner is a harsh critic of Twitter. She has never used the tool, probably never will, but she reads about in on the BBC and elsewhere and forms an opinion. While she's at it, she copies a few hundred articles from the news, pastes them into e-mail and sends them to her brother, me (in the next room) and any number of friends, typing the recipients list out each time and wondering whom she forgot. It's interesting stuff, actually - she knows what I like to read and I appreciate the filter - but it wastes a lot of time. Even pasting the URL and writing a long and constantly varying recipient list is a productivity killer. Twitter would be so much better. In my stream of the twenty or so accounts I follow, I am supplied with a number of interesting links and short comments that give me a hint as to whether I want more information. I ignore most of it, but once in a while, something cool about publishing or children's books catches my eye or a colleague shares a hot tip or exciting news. Even the very short personal exchanges (hey Chris - what would you use for this term?) are helpful and faster than e-mail.

The key to managing the stream for me is to do just that: manage it. I love reading The Onion and I've found Guy Kawasaki an interesting fellow since the early days of the Mac, but I just can't deal with their Twitter streams. TMI. Too much information. Ditto some other comments I've seen lately, but I haven't delisted those feeds yet, because there's still a lot of useful stuff. I think some people need to remind themselves of the public nature of their feed. "No work for a week, maybe I should slash my rates" is not a smart thing to announce to the world. Nor are my comments about impending death from overwork, but the I'm used to the role of jester, and if someone thinks me a fool, I'll probably have to agree. The Tudor court & others need someone to play that role.

So how am I actually doing in living up to my own notions of how to tweet without being a twit? Here's the page of my most recent missives:

@bonnjill - I don't see how people can read about Americans banning dictionaries and NOT believe that they are descended from apes    4:42 PM Jan 26th   from Echofon  in reply to bonnjill
 
@germanwords Schlimmstenfalls Du benötigst 50 Seiten "Einarbeitung". Danach fließt eine sehr schöne Geschichte.... 4:40 PM Jan 26th from Echofon in reply to germanwords
    
@germanwords Doch. Follet schreibt für die Masse. Das Buch ist zwar groß, aber nicht komplizierter als z.B. Stein & Flöte. 4:38 PM Jan 26th from Echofon in reply to germanwords

@germanwords Säule der Erde? Auf EN hoffentlich. Gutes Buch im Original. 2:47 PM Jan 26th from Echofon in reply to germanwords

#memoQ version 4: more to it than just good looks :-) 2:17 AM Jan 26th from Echofon

Another high-pressure collaborative project successfully completed with the help of the #memoQ Server for concurrent translation & editing! 1:20 PM Jan 25th from Echofon

I will be sooo glad whe the N key on my laptop gets fixed! 12:42 PM Jan 25th from Echofon

118 comments & over 6500 in the German ProZ forum discussion (i DE & EN!) of unprofessional ads: http://tinyurl.com/ycyukp8 12:34 PM Jan 25th from Echofon

A failed remote server connection again this morning is a good reminder of the risks of online translation technology 9:07 AM Jan 25th from Echofon

RT: @Jeromobot: Heard a great quote this morning: "We won't change when we see the light; we change when we feel the heat." 2:37 AM Jan 25th from Echofon

Swiss legal German/English: http://www.swisslegalenglish.com/dictionary 11:56 PM Jan 24th from Echofon

Changed my ID on ProZ to "KSL Berlin". I cannot have my name associated with ads for rip-off diets and mail order brides. 6:05 PM Jan 24th from Echofon

 RT: @localization: RT @morsmal: Bilingualism:10 Myths. http://bit.ly/7BHdnL #mle #efl #esl #ece #edchat 1:55 PM Jan 24th from Echofon

Agriculture & dairy terminology dictionaries http://bit.ly/5NICF1 12:15 PM Jan 24th from Facebook

Excellent justification of machine translation on the eMpTy Pages: http://tinyurl.com/yjs5z5z 10:47 AM Jan 24th from Echofon

Any experience with #CafeTran out there? 2:25 AM Jan 24th from Echofon
 
Saved by the #memoQ Server: http://simmer-lossner.blogspot.com/2010/01/saved-by-server.html 1:27 PM Jan 23rd from Echofon

Phony projects continue to roll in... http://bit.ly/4z4MMz 12:15 AM Jan 23rd from Echofon

Ave, Maria! http://bit.ly/66GcyF 12:08 AM Jan 23rd from Facebook

The registration form for the professional translators' refuge Stridonium is working again: http://stridonium.com/ 10:35 PM Jan 22nd from Echofon 

Twenty tweets. As can be seen from all the notes about "Ecofon" as the source, I use a browser plug-in which allows me to monitor what's up while I do other things like look up terms or read background information on a topic I'm translation (or the news or whatever). There are two automatic notes from my Facebook page in there too. I'm not thrilled about having no control over what these look like, so I may cut off that publishing link and do it manually. Of the 20 posts, 14 (70%) are somehow directly relevant to my professional activities though tht isn't always obvious from the tweeted text. The three tweets about the Ken Follet book belong on the direct channel perhaps, but I left them public, because I happen to love the book in question (Pillars of the Earth) and thought maybe someone else might get curious ad read it. In the original English preferably. They keyboard comment is irrelevant and off the wall, but in the past few weeks a number of people have wondered what happened to my spelling/typing as my keyboard has failed bit by bit and the replacement keyboard has decided to play the sticky key game too. I'm better of throwing a snowball at the dog to blow off steam, I know. The book banning comment with indirect hints at William Jennings Bryan & Co.? Controversial, surely and destined to offend, but those who need political correctness at all times will quickly realize that I'm probably the wrong guy - the sooner, the better. We translators live by words, and I take strong personal offense at the banning of dictionaries - critical tools of our trade - from schools. So maybe that's 15 relevant posts (75%). Room for improvement, though it could be worse. I could tweet that I'm off to make a grilled cheese sandwich now!

Keep your team or client up to date!

A few minutes ago I received one of the automatic notices from ProZ that I mostly ignore for lack of time. This one turned out not to be a project RFP but rather an update thanking the masses who had responded and expressed interest in the project. What the details of the original job notice are I don't know, nor do they interest me. I thought the courtesy expressed by Mr. Duck of ICON Linguistics, LLC was rather nice and out of the ordinary, but what really caught my attention was his novel approach to keeping the interested parties informed.

The company set up a temporary mail address with an autoresponder. When someone sends an e-mail to this address, an automated mail gets sent back with current details of the product status. What a nice idea!

I have used an autoresponder on one of my business group mail addresses (translation à simmer-lossner.com) for the clients who want confirmation that a message has arrived at our mail server. On rare occasions, that server at our hosting company has swallowed the mail, but in general it's a reliable indication that the communication has succeeded. Many of us also use autoresponders to indicate planned holidays or absence from the workplace. But these messages are all attached to regular mail accounts used for correspondence. Although the idea of an e-mail address used strictly for information is surely not original (similar arrangements have been around for faxes for ages), this is the first time I've encountered it

Some possible applications relevant to my way of working might be

• Project update for a customer or team (seldom)
• Quick advice for particular procedures (like the old fax info centers). For example, my up-to-date advice on converting PDFs for translation work might be sent as an autoresponse via PDF@information-now.com or whatever.
• Availability. It's a nuisance to keep things like my ProZ calendar updated, and we get frequent calls just to find out if we might be available at some particular time. Although I'm generally pleased to talk to the callers, often we're both quite busy, and if a quick e-mail to capacity@supertranslator.com tells them what they want to know and saves everyone time, all the better. In our office we work as a team, and customers often want to know Monique's availability for certain things and mine for others, so for us it would make sense to have information for both of us on that autoresponder.

I'm sure there are other good uses of this idea. Somewhere in my endless folders of information I even have an eBook from some marketing guru that focused entirely on the value of autoresponders for business. I read it a few years ago with some interest, but I don't recall seeing anything like what the outsourcer did here, and I finished the eBook thinking that I was pretty much covered for what I could really use. Now I have a few new ideas, so thank you once again, Mr. Duck :-)

In the echo chamber of social media

Rod said...

I see you're going hog wild in the social media echo chamber ;-> I bet in the end that quietly doing translation work and then enjoying your free time will prove more profitable than chasing after loopy followers.

This comment on my Listening to Jeffrey post by our colleague in Japan reflects the confusion that a lot of people have with regard to so-called "social media" and the role these now play and will play in the future in our business and others. In fact, the latest newsletter from Mr. Gitomer included an interesting article on this very subject. According to Mr. Gitomer's definition of social media and my own understanding of the term, this "echo chamber" is where I and many others make a living. All of it.

Nitpickers will point out that Gitomer's definitions of social media confuse Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 media, but I don't think such distinctions are particularly productive. I think it's important to consider one's online presence as a whole. This will include e-mail, static media, dynamic media and interactive media, and the lines are not always clearly drawn between these areas. In the end what matters is that potential clients and colleagues with shared interests can find you and interact in some useful way, with the ultimate result hopefully being that the electric bill and a few other things get paid.

My business uses no local advertising. I have a sign next to the door so temporary postal workers don't walk away with my business mail undelivered, but local directories, yellow pages, etc. are not graced with my business presence in any form. And as much as I agree that it is valuable to attend local business chamber mixers and get involved in other community organizations, time is short, and I usually prefer to spend that limited time exercising the dogs, hunting or studying for a test. The time I spend "advertising" my business - or more correctly making the world aware of the fact that I exist and offer certain services - is generally better leveraged online. The experience of others may differ, of course. And along with the inevitable echo that over 30,000 Google hits brings (one friend recently complained that Google autocompletes my name, but I think that's normal), comes a steady stream of interesting professional contacts and inquiries resulting from the full range of online media I use.

What are these media and how do I use them? Some of this is covered in many earlier posts, but I'll take this opportunity for a recap and overview, because my approach is developing as I learn more, and it might be useful in six months to a year to see what has changed.

Let's start with e-mail. That's not really what one thinks of under the category of social media, but it is the most frequent direct means of communication that many of us use with our clients and colleagues, and it is often a gateway to social media interactions. How is that? In my e-mail signature I list addresses for my business web site, translation blog and translation-related Twitter account (so far, perhaps more to be added). I don't list my Skype account, though many do, and many use that tool to communicate with agency PMs and direct customers. Some of my signatures also include my pompous-sounding, legally protected German professional title as a state-examined, court-sworn translator. As silly as it sounds, it does carry weight with some clients, and it answers the question "Can you certify a patent translation?" without anyone saying or writing a word. There are many opportunities to use an e-mail signature effectively as a tool for improving communication and promoting your business.

There's this blog. Despite the irritating overabundance of comments on translation portal politics and other irrelevancies from time to time (virtual watercooler gossip, not to be confused with Any Bell's excellent Watercooler site), most of the posts reflects my professional interests as a translator in some way, including resources and tools which I think make my work easier. In some cases this provides information to prospects or current customers that make it clear that a particular project might be a good fit. Or tips I provide in the blog or a public forum may head off a private e-mail request or telephone call asking for help on a subject I have already explained a few hundred times. I began to write and publish little "how to" guides in PDF format a few years ago, because colleagues, customers and complete strangers were asking an enormous number of questions which often could be grouped in a few simple categories and handled in a 5 page written guide with a few screenshots. I usually give these away or actively promote them on web sites, public portals, Facebook, etc. This ultimately saves me time that I can spend on other things, and it demonstrates my competence in certain subject areas, which is often good for business.

My business web site is horribly outdated. I think it was last worked on seriously in December 2004, though a few minor changes have been made since then. Its successor has been in the works for over three years, but lack of time and my teenage daughter's opinion of my bad German have caused some delay. (I have been criticized for having a business web site only in English when I live in Germany and have most of my customers in German-speaking countries. However, the glass can hold only so much fine wine, and the tablecloth is ruined from the overflow as it is. I also got a belly laugh that the fellow with the harshest critical comments is a German who has French, German and English listed on his web site's landing page, but only the English link works, leading to pages that are shockingly ungrammatical.) In any case, with all its flaws, our site brings in steady business, even from customers who don't speak much English. Some day I'll do these nice people the favor of introducing myself online in German, but not before I have a full time secretary or project manager in my office to answer the phone and say I'm busy.

Online professional forums. For me these include the closed BDÜ members forum (not viewable by the public) and ProZ. Significant business volume and professional support from colleague has been derived from both platforms. I also have profiles registered with at least half a dozen other portals and forums, but these have not been very productive for me (and I haven't invested much time in them to be honest, so that may be the result), and if I could figure out how to delete some of these profiles (often quite difficult), I would.Depending on your location, qualifications, etc. the ITI, ATA and other organizations may offer other useful alternatives. These forums also contain searchable directories which have resulted in many referrals and excellent new clients over the years.

LinkedIn and Xing are favored platforms for "connecting" with business clients in the opinion of many. I'm present on both, and I find them to be useful tools to keep track of some colleagues past and present as well as clients, but I spend more time reading the Xing hunting forums in German than I do looking for business there. I think there's a lot of potential there, but my presence is and will probably remain largely passive. The structure of these environments doesn't really fit how I prefer to communicate, though I think forming ad hoc groups to discuss issues like crowdsourcing has some value.

If I did training videos as a way of promoting training or other services, I would probably use YouTube. I don't.

Even flawed online content publishing sites like eHow, where I have invested a little time, have brought in interesting business inquiries, though so far nothing of note has come of these. However, the fourteen short articles (11 related to translation) have been viewed over 2700 times in the past 5 months, which might prove beneficial in a business sense at some point if it has not already.

When Rod refers to "echo chambers", I presume he means Twitter and Facebook. I've written enough about the former I think; while I get irritated with one translator who seems to feel the need to let the world know every time she washes her hair, for the most part I have found the Twit Stream useful for communication in both directions. However, I am concerned about the manageability of that data stream, so I follow very few people. I think I've added one (Kilgraymemoq) in the past three months. Twitter has actually become the major mode of communication with a few colleagues who are very high on my professional respect list. Most of our useful exchanges fit well in 140 characters, and I'm sure they're glad not to see my pompous e-mail signature several times a day.

Facebook. Although I've used that platform to keep in touch with old high school friends and college buddies, FB has been a dilemma for business. I have a few friended colleagues there, most of whom I would consider actual friends in the real world or persons whom I would gladly have in that role, but when I get a request from a stranger or business I don't know I am not comfortable with given them access to my personal profile. I really don't think they need to see rude remarks from my sister, the stoned ravings or a high school friend who still hasn't overcome his substance abuse problems after 30 years or the political and military commentaries of my Texan cousin. Recently I read a blog post by Pat Flynn which seems to offer a solution to this problem or at least a plausible approach: Facebook "pages". I looked into this function and discovered that it works almost like a second profile and allows me to collect translation business information in a way that might be useful to my colleagues and clients without annoying the motley crew that constitute my friends and family. For the most part, I've found the setup and maintenance of my Facebook page for translation to be simple, and it lets me organize a few things in a way I cannot currently do with other tools. It feels comfortable. One thing that annoys the heck out of me, however, is the term used to refer to persons who subscribe to the profile stream or request access: fans. Elton John has fans, but until I learn to play piano and sing, I'd prefer a different word. I'm just not sure which one. My Facebook page allows me to organize information I may have published elsewhere in more useful, accessible ways. My "target price defense tool" - a spreadsheet for calculating a word or line price to counteract a Trados scale one disapproves of - has been available for some time on the How To tab of my ProZ profile for over a year and was even mentioned on this blog in its early days, but except possibly for members of a Bavarian BDÜ chapter who may have received the German version on a CD, I don't think many are aware of it. FB provides another channel which allows me to help fellow translators with information like this or agencies and direct clients with other issues.

As for chasing loopy followers, if henna gaijin applies, it's your issue, not mine or anyone else's ;-) Doing business involves letting people know what you do in a variety of ways, and I don't generally find it useful to put a money meter on every activity. Really understanding the changing world of online media means hands-on involvement, not eternal grumbling over a sake flask. Moreover, teaching and communication are important to me, and I will offer information in any channel which I think is of potential use to those who may benefit. Sometimes this may involve looking beyond the edge of my plate as the Germans are fond of saying. The world continues to change, and the long term viability of a business may very well be tied to taking steps today to explore communication media which may be important tomorrow and which are not obviously related to my main professional activities. If in five years most translation buyers and translators hang out on Third Life, I'll probably be there somewhere.

There are some things I plan to publish on my business page on Facebook which I really don't know where I should put elsewhere. I have a huge number of links to online dictionaries and other resources which follow various topics I translate frequently. I suppose I could do a "Links" page on my business web site, but I would really rather not for various reasons. It seems to me that the Facebook "Notes" function might be a more useful way to organize links related to hunting terminology, sustainability and corporate responsibility, materials science, etc. If desirable I suppose I could even use the Facebook pages or groups functions to organize information on specific translation topics. I might have to look into that someday.

And the next time I am accused of robbery, I'm sure that my participation in Facebook will prove useful :-)

Four months of Twitter

Last May I finally decided to become a tweeter on Twitter (or a twit some might contend). Four months on, my use and perceptions of that medium have changed little. I follow few and am overwhelmed by those feeds , so I simply can't imagine how anyone following hundreds can pan the gold out of all the mud. Major filtering tools I suppose. However, I am finding it an interesting channel of communication, particularly with colleagues and strangers who go light on the self-promotion and details of when they take showers and point me to interesting resources. I also appreciate the pointers to news I might otherwise miss.

It's a medium that is clearly abused by some. I killed one feed, because the woman writing it seemed to be intent on retyping an entire book of crappy aphorisms. Multilingual feeds in languages that I don't understand are occasionally frustrating (and I'm sure some reading my feed feel that way about my German tweets), but it's also fun to puzzle out the odd tidbit of Portuguese or Italian with no pressure. Lately I've been getting spammed by "nice" girls offering themselves for sale, and I wish I knew a way to block nonsense like that and not restrict others with reasonable intentions.

On the whole I think that Twitter has been a worthwhile addition to my communication toolset. I'm not sure where else I could get a bunch of good, fresh tips on children's book reviews and publishing like Carsten Peters (calutateo) provides or follow the tasteful reading lists of others. Since I'm not selling anything at this point (plans for a technical book have been delayed indefinitely due to surprise developments in the technology in the past year), I can't confirm or refute any of the claims of Twitter's importance for marketing, and I really don't care about that point. I'd rather trade work philosophy one-liners with colleagues, point to useful sources for self-education and have a bit of fun.

Tweet, tweet, chirp chirp

When I logged in for my daily dose of Doonesbury today, I found Roland Hedley tweeting away with important messages for his follower base about the impending dismissal of his houseboy and whatnot. A few months ago I wouldn't have understood the joke; now I'm part of it. In February, my colleagues the Jenner sisters (Twin Translations) put a post on their blog about having joined Stephen Fry and other celebrities on Twitter. I was rather skeptical about the whole thing, being inclined to agree that this Web 2.0 "phenomenon" was blogging for those with ADHD. Recent endorsements by The Petshop Boys haven't done a lot to persuade me otherwise.

So why am I now GermanENTrans on Twitter? Rather often I've had short bits of news that I wanted to post to my blog, where there was neither good reason, nor sufficient information, nor time to make a "normal" post. A bunch of one-liners for stuff that might be valid for a limited time only would look really silly in the main text. Other thoughts also played a role, like being able to communicate availability or the lack thereof without logging in to and updating a dozen agency calendars (I'm asked to do this, but I ignore it, because it's an unreasonable waste of time I don't have).

Currently I'm only "following" a few people on Twitter, and I'm quite overwhelmed trying to keep track of that limited data feed. I don't send it to my mobile phone or any such thing, because the constant interruptions would be as bad as telephones that never stop ringing I think. I just log into my page once a day or so and scan for interesting tidbits. As you can see from looking on the left column of this blog, I feed my twitter posts to my translation blog, thus achieving exactly what I wanted in the first place: passing on short bits of information on (mostly) translation-related topics in an efficient, timely manner. Since I expect to have a lot of short messages regarding dog stuff in the future, I'll probably do a separate Twitter ID for that. I don't think there are a lot of translators out there interested in laying blood trails through the woods or dummy training.

At the ProZ powwow in Berlin recently, I met quite a number of other translators who have made Twitter part of their personal and professional communication toolset, including a number of old fogeys like myself. That's where I heard about hash tags and a number of other "insider tips" for the first time.

So is Twitter the crest of the wave of the future? I don't know and I don't care. It's accomplishing the limited result I want from it now with no bother, and that's good enough for me.