The Invisible Hand of Social Media

 

We've probably all been there by now. The evolution of social media platforms has seen the "rise of the machines", with artificial (non-)intelligence programmed by unintelligent humans monitoring and managing our actions, sometimes with little or no possibilities of pushback on our part or processes that waste inordinate amounts of time to obtain correction. We see this on Facebook, LinkedIn and other media which are too often also a major venue for business communication and technical support for professional tools we use. In the case involved with the screenshots above, my "wicked" comment was made with regard to an economic theory promulgated by the long-dead white Englishman, Adam Smith, and I was given the opportunity to protest to an external board after the fourth-world budget help confirmed that I was indeed a bad person promoting terrorism. I wrote:

There was a discussion about the abuses of capitalism and the flawed thinking of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", which he thought guided markets to do the right thing without control. As we all know, it is necessary for societies to exercise some control to protect health and safety, the environment etc. Blind belief in the invisible hand too often leads to tragedy -- in a sense, this invisible hand concept points the middle finger at us humans too often. So I suggested a metaphorical amputation of a metaphorical middle finger on a metaphorical invisible hand, meaning that we need legislation, etc. to protect against abuses in an unrestricted market. No real violence against any living beings whatsoever was suggested. The AI used by Facebook is functionally idiotic.

Consider also that if the hand is invisible the metaphorical blood must be too, so amputation should shock nobody, as any gore will also be invisible ;-)

Now all that is just a bit of amusement over coffee in the morning. But other cases are more serious, like the automated banning of a Ukrainian software developer for two months on LinkedIn because Putinist trolls objected to him trying to describe the reality of serving his customers while coffee breaks are accompanied by missile strikes and business-as-usual genocide. It seems that a certain volume of complaints can trigger a ban even when no specific violation can be identified. Artificial intelligence indeed.

Entirely too much trust is granted to automation, almost a reflex, even when it obviously contradicts logic and common sense. In the translation sector, I encounter time and again the idea that language services work should be cheaper if it involves text pre-proccessed by machine translation such as DeepL, even when it can be demonstrated that achieving the desired level of quality takes longer than if the text were translated by human effort only. So time isn't money for these people, I guess. The real issue is slavelancing.

Some postulate that most people need to believe in a Higher Power of some sort and take from it the direction and meaning of their lives. I used to dispute that, but seeing now how so many educated people in the business world have replaced Nin-girsu, Shiva, Allah, Nossa Senhora da Fatima and Mighty Cthulu with the new God of MTness, I suspect I may have been wrong.

As with most religions, it's our people and their welfare who are the true victims of this automation religion, while the priests argue that the real problem is that we haven't sacrificed enough to that invisible middle finger the technologists wave in our faces.

But I ask, what's the harm of paying a few more cents if you must if it leads at last to a lot more sense and better understanding for us all?

The Kindness of Strangers and Friends

This day was one of tired celebration. I'm in Lisbon, exhausted and relieved at getting my Portuguese visa renewed after months of over-the-top stress about the difficulties of scheduling a renewal interview in a system badly cracked under strains from international politics of recent years. I used to walk in to an office of Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras (SEF) and there would be almost nobody there, and business was settled quickly. Now, even when I tried to book an appointment (walking in is no longer allowed) six weeks in advance, I was given a date for a renewal interview that was three and a half months after my visa would expire. Only by great good luck did I get an earlier date when somebody canceled and my lady called the immigration offices at just the right moment.

I went out to a local restaurant near our Benfica apartment to celebrate alone; the dinner of monkfish and shrimp rice was perfect with a vinho verde tinto.

As I ate, I read various articles on my ever-present iPhone; one - "Helping Others Become Bilingual" in Psychology Today - spoke in particular to my present experience of life and things that have moved me so often in the past six years as I learned a new language and sometimes struggled more than a little to find my way in a new culture I may never understand entirely. The article is basically about kindness.

Kindness is what brought me to Portugal. It is, of course, not a patented property of the country and culture, though I have encountered more of it here than anywhere else, and I believe that there are some cultural factors which cultivate it more than in some other places. The kindness I have experienced in nearly every country, sometimes momentary, sometimes sustained over decades, is the mortar which holds together the foundation of most of what has been good in my life, and some significant part of that has been linguistic kindness in a large part. When I was an exchange student in the Saarland many years ago, I was welcomed into homes of people who spoke a dialect I found baffling, and they kindly tolerated my lack of understanding, never ostracized nor criticized me and patiently translated bits like "Hoscht gess?" into more familiar forms like "Hast du gegessen?". As a consequence, the many dialects of the Saarland and Rhine-Palatinate region of Germany will always have a special place in my heart.

Poland taught me that the language of kindness need not be verbal. I was buying bread one morning while attending a professional conference, and I had tied my young wire-haired vizsla Jambor to a metal chair outside the bakery. The air brakes of a bus frightened him, and he took off running across a busy street. I screamed No!!! and ran after him into the street, falling full length in front of a car which stopped just in time not to kill me. I ran after my dog and he raced down the sidewalk opposite; after several hundred meters some pedestrians managed to stop him before he ran out into a busy intersection, where he might very well have been killed. I held my young dog, shaking and crying, wondering how it was that we were still alive. The voices around me were comforting, but I understood nothing; I just shook until an old man quietly put his arm over my shoulder, and I could breathe again. I returned to the bakery with the bent and broken chair, expecting to be screamed at for the destruction, but the owner of the shop invited me and my dogs (Ajax, my Drahthaar, was also with me and also managed not to get killed as he followed me on the run) inside and gave me tea, telling me not to worry.

The Dutch are known for being brusque and rude, but in that crudest of cultures I have experienced kindnesses I can never describe without tears and memories of clients who have become friends who will never be forgotten wherever they go.

Such stories are everywhere, and I suspect nearly everyone, anywhere, has at least a few. Bilinguals surely have some, more like a lot, of kindnesses shown when they stumbled and fell over new or rusty tongues. Today again I had my share, in the SEF interview where I proudly mangled the Portuguese language with a patient immigration clerk, at dinner tonight as the waiter kindly confirmed my dessert order while teaching me the correct way to pronounce the fruit I wanted and many times in between.

My six years have, I think, given me some insight into what it might be like for some of the many refugees and immigrants in this world as they struggle to come to terms with new languages and cultures, often without the financial and other material resources I have and with backgrounds and skin colors that might inspire less sympathy than mine usually do. When I think life in my wonderful country of choice can be hard at times I feel shame when I remember how much harder some things are for so many others.

I spent time living in a very poor neighborhood of Évora, because I wanted to get away from all the educated Portuguese who would immediately switch to English with me. The Psychology Today article brought back many memories of that time and the extraordinary kindness of the people who, upon being told that I was not returning to the country of my birth, but instead intended to make theirs my home, welcomed me and patiently taught me new words and lavished me with kindnesses of every degree on my many walk with the dogs through their streets. The local grocery workers even took extra time to show me local foods and teach me to pronounce all the things I pointed to buy.

My goodnight graphic

I am not always kind in return, not even with those who are kindest to me, and that is simply wrong. My beautiful doutora spoke the most miserable English when we met, and I was grateful for her patient communication and complete acceptance of my complex and usually difficult self, but now that she has achieved an English fluency that would make her a good international lecturer I unkindly nitpick her word choices and burst with impatience and yet another fucked-up participle that anyone would understand anyway with no trouble. And I fail to give credit most of the time when I steal her original perversions of English and pass them off as my own linguistic creativity with the applause of my professional peers. Yes, I am a plagiarist of sorts, probably, and an ingrate in any case.

Of course, I have professional justifications for being a linguistic asshole; I feel - probably rightly so - that my strict separation of languages I use is necessary to keep my edge as a writer and translator and not fall into the incompetent muck that is the medium of the bulk market translation service bog. I cringe when I see the actual incompetence of some language professionals who are not quite Dunning-Kruger cases but are at least not in the fraction of the top percent that so many of my friends inhabit. But I'm getting that all wrong in most respects. As some others do too.

Michael Moore made the point well in his autobiography when he wrote of his time with writer Kurt Vonnegut in that great man's last year. Kurt said that his son Mark had figured out the meaning of life for him, with all its senselessness and pain. "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." That's about right.

Interview with an Across user

After some recent controversies on social media concerning the experience of bearing... uh, working with Across and the sort of translators who wax enthusiastic about the platform, I thought it an appropriate time to take another look at this premium tool and what it offers to premium translators. So I asked around to see who had experience and was directed to Ima Newbie, CEO of Redlight Translations LEC.

TT: Thank you for joining me this afternoon, Ima. How are things going for you?

IN: Just great! Lotsa runnin' on the wheel, keepin' fit! My coach says I've got a winning attitude and if I drop my rates and maybe my pants some more, soon I'll be too busy to sit down!

TT: Let's talk about translation tools. You use Across, don't you?

IN: Oh yes I do, and it's wonderful! So much work out there, and rates so much better than I deserve! I am truly grateful for the opportunities it gives me.

TT: Really??? That's not what I hear from others.

IN: Oh, well, don't listen to those arrogant ivory tower assholes with their elitist attitudes about work and all their bragging. They just don't understand. It's about freedom. And work. And freedom to work. And work that makes you free!

TT: Yes, don't you love the smell of freedom in the morning? I know I do. So how did you get here?

IN: Same as it ever was, really. I sent out thousands of CVs, translated for free without borders, even did some great stuff for ProZ to help spread the word for Robert Mugabe at One World University in Mozambique, dropped my rates so far I was paying to translate, but nothing helped. All the agencies wanted was linguistic skills and subject matter experience. And then I found my InstaGuru and Enlightenment™ – and the key to unlock my success!

TT: How's that?

IN: Well I met this guy on LinkedIn who told me that CAT tools aren't for dogs and that each species must seek its ecological niche in servitude. That was really profound. He woke me up to smell the cherry blossoms, and I realized where to go!

TT: Where?

IN: To Hell, of course, but not by the highway. Everybody does that. It's the easy way. But you know what they say, "No pain, no gain!" And the pain of bearing Across really nails it for me and ensures that I'll be saved the trouble of competing on the basis of skills and knowledge I don't have.

TT: Sort of salvation through damnation, I suppose?

IN: Exactly! No more elitist bullshit from those who have it easy after decades of perfecting their knowledge and technique and learning to optimize productivity with a fine-tuned balance of appropriate technologies for the task. That's so Victorian. I'm a modern kinda guy, and I'm gonna party like it's 1934!

TT: Uh... I hate to tell you, but it's 2019.

IN: Same thing! Just ask the experts! Donald Trump! Viktor Orban! Jair Bolsonaro! Stalin! Uh, I mean Putin. All this cosmopolitan propaganda has clouded your mind. Real men get really productive and maximize their freedom through work entirely controlled by real or virtual barbed wire fences and helpful guidance from guard towers to watch over us and keep us safe from the corrupting influence of rational thought or software inspired by such thought. Working for my masters with Across, I no longer have to worry about managing all my reference resources and data. I don't have any of that – it's all on massa's server. This gives me the freedom to exercise and stay fit on the work wheel.

TT: What was that? You are mumbling. What's that stuffed in your cheeks? 

IN: Chicken feed. Want some?

TT: No thanks.

IN: How about some peanuts instead?

TT: Uh, no. Let's get back to the topic. Why Across? Why not memoQ? Or OmegaT? Or Wordfast, for example.

IN: Oh, anyone can use that stuff! It doesn't take any patience, and it leaves clients with too many choices.

TT: I don't understand the problem. What's bad about choices? 

IN: Well, you see, working with Across, the job is in the bag, so to speak. Nobody else wants it, and the companies that rely on Across servers for their translation management are grateful to find anyone who will put up with the abuse. So all that elitist nonsense like qualifications doesn't really matter. It's a win-win situation!

TT: I've got a feeling that someone is losing something....

IN: Yeah, all those ivory tower translators spoiled for work because they can take their pick and use tools that enable them to take on nearly any technical challenge in translation and collaborate easily with colleagues when they need to based on the principles of tool interoperability. Those losers always have to think of what to do next. Not me. Across has no interoperability. It's where translation data goes to die, like a virtual Auschwitz. And that's great. I don't have to think about all that complicated stuff, just do what I'm told and enjoy the freedom of my work free from planning and full of gain from pain.    

TT: OK, I've got just one more question....

IN: Sorry, I'm out of time. Daylight come and me wanna go home. 

What is it with teaching translation at universities?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fluent failure in translation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Post-slavery bondage and poverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cambridge conference - Getting Language Right!

One of the phrases best known from the Monty Python is "And now for something completely different!" This could be applied well to the conference at Cambridge (UK) next month (March 24th), which one leading conference planner and industry insider noted does not feature the "usual suspects" :-)

The sameness of conferences in the translation profession is wearing. Same topics, same speakers most of the time, perhaps a change of venue. What I find most distressing is that most (or all) of these conferences that I can recall off-hand are insiders talking to insiders. Chris Durban and others wisely advise participation in professional meetings and conferences related to one's specialties, but there are few venues where businessmen and other professionals gather to deal with issues of language that are important to good working translators, and the best opportunities for networking are generally at events where language and translation is definitely not the focus. One walks the trade fair floor for a day, mingles at event happy hours and pans the silt of interactions for the few nuggets that might be found with care.

The conference Communicating in Business – Getting Language Right features speakers involved in domestic, EU and international business, law and diplomacy and some translators working at high levels of public and private service with direct clients, who all share a deep understanding of what goes missing when we waste too much time fussing over technologies and forget that these are merely the form - irreplaceable human knowledge and skill in communication are most often the content that matters, especially so when one deals with the most important services, products, legal, social and political issues.

It's nice to see the rigid, repetitive mold of yet another Are You Ready for the Future of Translation Technology? event replaced by one that offers substance, nourishment and useful interactions for those who do not aspire to the compromised communication practices of the anonymized bulk market but instead concern themselves with carrying messages most effectively to those who want and need them.

I am a strong believer in good technology, properly applied, but private reports of a recent major translation project where all the processes worked perfectly, with translation memory tools, terminology review, planned workflows, etc. delivered an absolutely flawless format, perfect consistency and all of it perfectly unusable because the most important element was left out: the real communication specialists, the expert linguists who know the subject matter to be translated and how best to express it for another culture in the language needed. That's what the Stridonium conference is about - sharing best practice and working together as true partners in communication to stay on top of the top of the game.

Riccardo Schiaffino's About Translation blog has details of the conference, which can also be found on the Stridonium events pages.

In HAMPsTr We Trust?

So many times when I hear the bright and happy predictions of commercial interests spouting nonsense about "translation as a utility" and hoping to feast on the roadkill of communication, who claim the highest of motives and show the basest motivations in their real acts, I hear a saxophone in my mind and a strained voice declaring that some day "they may understand our rage".

Machine pseudo-translation (MpT) and human-assisted machine pseudo-translation (HAMPsTr) are big business for the profiteers offering pseudo-solutions which typically start in the low six figures of investment. "Get on the MT boat or drown!" declared one such profiteer, Asia Online CEO Dion Wiggins at his unfortunate keynote presentation at memoQfest 2012 in Budapest.

It seems that each week a new story line to justify the linguistic lemmings' rush over the cliff appears. Recently I heard for the first time how translators suffer from the "blank page syndrome" (note: as of 25 December 2013 the entire blog with that "blank page" link has disappeared) and need machine generated babble for inspiration. I thought perhaps I was just an odd one, usually struggling with many ways to render a text from German into my native language and trying to choose the best, but experienced colleagues I asked about their fear of blank pages all asked me if I was joking.

This morning another colleague sent me a real screamer:

"Smaller language service providers (LSPs) process fewer words than larger ones... [this] puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to leveraging linguistic assets due to the smaller size of their terminology databases and translation memories (TMs). These less comprehensive language resources limit reuse on subsequent projects or for training statistical machine translation (SMT) software."

The author of that particular bucket of bilge is Don DePalma, head of the Common (Non)sense Advisory, an organization rightly seen as incompetent to interpret even third-grade level mathematics in their discredited report of dramatic rate decreases for translations, which turned out to be an artifact of calculations involving mismatched survey populations. In any case, the idea that small translation agencies or individual translators, who are generally more aware of and concerned with their clients' business are at any disadvantage by not being buried under mountains of monkeyfied mumbo-jumbo from bulk trashlation nearly ruined my keyboard as I spit my coffee laughing. Don deserves an extra Christmas bonus for that transcreation of the truth.

But the best was yet to come:

This inspiring graphic accompanied an article on how to motivate those involved in post-editing MpT in the HAMPsTr process promoted by Asia Online and others. There has been some vigorous and interesting speculation on where that arrow is pointing :-)  The colleague who sent the link to me commented:

An interesting read from a humanitarian perspective. If they need to go to these lengths to "motivate" people, even those who are otherwise happy to swim in the muddy, toxic pond that these LSPs (your definition of the term) have created, one would have thought that they will understand that there is something wrong with their concept and goals. But why let the facts get in the way, I guess.

Indeed, those swimming in the pond do seem to have some real issues, even in cases frequently quoted as a HAMPsTr success. I long ago lost count of how many MpT advocates have told me of the wonderful words at Microsoft and Symantec, nicely extruded from controlled language sources and lovingly shaped into their final sausage form by happy hamsters. But this TAUS presentation by a Symantec insider tells another story:


And further indications that we are all getting mooned by the MpT Emperor can be heard in the excerpts of this recent GALA presentation in Berlin:


Unlike some of my colleagues, I have no fear of being replaced by Mr. Gurgle or any of his online Asian cousins however well-trained. What provokes some rage in me and more than a little concern is the callous dishonesty of the MpT profiteers and their transparent contempt for truth, the true interests of modern business and the health of those involved in language processes.

I have no little sympathy for the many businesses and individuals struggling to cope with the challenging changes in international business communication in the past 20 years. Nor do I feel that MpT has no role to play in communication processes; colleagues such as Steve Vitek have presented clear cases of value for screening of bulk information in legal discovery to identify documents which may need timely human translation and other applications. Kirti Vashee of Asia Online has commented honestly on numerous occasions on his blog and elsewhere about the functional train wreck of most "automated translation" processes one encounters, but still cannot take proper distance from the distortion and scaremongering practiced by the head of his team and others.

I am particularly concerned by the continued avoidance of the very real psychological dangers of post-editing MpT, which were discussed by Bevan and others in the decades before the lust for quick profits silenced discussions and research into appropriate occupational health measures. If Asia Online and others are truly concerned with developing sustainable HAMPsTr processes, then let them fund graduate research in psychology to understand how to protect the language skills and mental function of those routinely exposed to toxic machine language.

All this disregard for true value and truth reminds me so much of my days as an insider in the Y2K programmers' profit orgy: we all knew it was bullshit, but all the old COBOL programmers wanted to take their last chance to score big before they were swept into the dustbin of history. Some 60 years or so after it began, is machine translation ready to assume its place in that bin? The True Believers and profiteers will loudly say no, but at some point the dust will settle, the damage will be assessed, and we will find that the place of MpT is not at all what many imagine it to be today.

Gratefulness and respect

I have to thank my Romanian colleague Laurentiu Constantin for sharing a link to a TED lecture by the Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast. I lost my taste for the TED material for the most part some time ago; most of it is rather lightweight cardboard wisdom or even crappy pseudoscience, and some may consider this old man's insights and his suggestion that it is not the happy who are grateful but rather the grateful who are happy to belong in the former category.

But as I walked my dogs back tonight from their evening routine in the park, I thought about the puzzle of some people I have known in my life who have such wonderful gifts and opportunities... and how much misery some of them create for themselves, their families and their wider circles. Misery is a popular subject with some in our circles of translation, and it's easy enough to identify persons, companies or technologies to stand in the roles of greater or lesser Satans, and the facts and arguments behind some of the finger pointing are sometimes clear and well-grounded.

If we stand firm-stanced and triumphant in the field, our dragons slain and scattered in pieces at our feet, will we be happy, and for how long? Are we grateful for a new opportunity or insight or are we more concerned with missed opportunities past, the prospect of failure or the cost of late understanding?

There was a passing comment from the old monk somewhere after the 12-minute mark in which he made an interesting contrast between equality and equality of respect. The former is difficult, sometimes impossible and probably even often undesirable to achieve. But the latter, I believe, is very much in the grasp of all, and it might go a long way toward the bad conditions for which we often call for some sort of "equality" as a remedy.

One of the greatest problems I see in current controversies in translation which involve crowdsourcing, machine pseudo-translation (MpT) and machine pseudo-translation post-editing, the creeping deprofessionalization and demonetization promoted by Translators Without Borders or similar programs and their well-paid corporate advocates et cetera is the lack of respect shown for individuals, their personal interests and health and their very necessary capacity for useful, sustainable contribution.

But equally troubling sometimes is how easy it is to forget the importance of respect and dehumanize those with whom we disagree. Stephen Fry explored the use of language as an enabler of otherwise unimaginable awfulness, and I think the historical record largely supports his analysis. So I think that those who would stigmatize persons with legitimate reservations about the viability and desirability of machine pseudo-translation in many of the fields where some would apply it by calling them "haters and naysayers" or comparing them to Tea Party political fanatics should take some more care with their choice of words in the service of their paymasters.


I think it is also good to remember that even some of the most damaging influences in our field are not devils, even if there does seem to be a lot of brimstone in their choice of deodorant sometimes. And if their devilish intents require appropriate actions in response, we should not deny ourselves the opportunity to look for some common ground to temper our actions or at least our pride in a successful action.

And if it all goes to shit, I hope that I can still find the quiet to appreciate and be grateful for a warm paw in my hand, the ache in the joint of my index finger which reminds me that I have a hand to grasp a cup, the light acid bite of juice passing over my tongue, the heat of my fire on a cold December night and a well-chosen word from my head or that of a friend.

Just for fun: 8 MT engines for DE>EN compared

When technology guru Jost Zetzsche (Twitter: @jermobot) recently reminded the world of the relative new memoQ plug-in for itranslate4.eu, I thought I would test and blog it for fun if not profit. Alas! The key validation for the free demo (10,000 characters) I "purchased" isn't working for me, so I decided to have fun another way until that gets sorted out. I plugged two sentences into their engine offering translations from six commercial MT tools, then I put the same two sentences in Google and Microsoft's MT engines. One of these sentences is fairly simple in structure, the other less so. I won't comment the results much; I leave judgment to experts and fools to make as they choose.

The results layouts for Google & Bing were modified for better viewing. I think there are plug-ins for all these engines in a number of tools if anyone is daft enough to really want to use them productively (thus unprofessionally ignoring many confidentiality requirements for clients quite aside from other possible issues).

PROMT actually got it right and idiomatic. Should I be impressed? Repeats with other simple sentences showed that accuracy is a real crapshoot for all six engines, though True Believers in MT can serve the machine by suggesting improvements. I did my part by submitting improvements for sentences related to the ongoing Vatican scandals about abuse by priests.

Go Google! Nice to know there are so many ProZ translators depending on this great engine :-)

Full points to Big Bill & Co. this time. Two out of eight got it right. Hmmmmmmmm.

Now for something a wee bit more, taken from the Wikipedia entry on photovoltaics...

Our friendZ at Google say:

Now Big BillZ BoyZ get their chance:

O what a Brave New World, that has such technology in it :-) I think I'll stick to my specialties and use the Dragon if I feel the need for speed. I can dictate fresh faster than I can analyze and fix even the simplest "close calls" for correctness.

Of course, sentence-by-sentence, results will differ in reliability with every engine. But isn't it simply better to use the most reliable engine of all: BAT* with a good translator?

A recent LinkedIn discussion went on at length about quality metrics and other bla bla for MT. And there are various discussions of "best practice". Given enough beer or other intoxicating substances, I'm not averse to engaging in such discussions, and the ten-year-old in me who still likes to fiddle with things IT does take an academic interest in the subject of MT and productivity, but if I want real work and real quality (and yes, Renato, Kirtee, et alia there is such a thing, though its definition will vary by domain and be ever disputed... try telling a customer trying to understand a user manual that it doesn't exist or watch the faces in an audience as a translated speech is delivered in various versions, or send your marketing brochure for the UK to Bangladesh or Russia because rates are lower) I will find it with methods that stay far away from MT. Let the competition do otherwise. PLEASE.

* "brain-assisted translation", a concept once common in the days before the IT devoloution of the profession and still favored by a few high-earning dinosaurs