Sinking in the bulk market bog of #xl8

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life at the bottom: Manta/Orbe translations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Put on the red light at thebigword!

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Post-slavery bondage and poverty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time-saving tip: the DELETE key!

As one who clings stubbornly to the notion of value in a "personal touch" for business communication, I found this colleague's suggestion that using the name of your target might indeed be important. In this age of HAMPsTr'ized workflows in the Bulk Market Bog inhabited by Luigi & Co., when flexibility for bottom-feeding agencies means suggesting yoga lessons so translators can bend over farther, I do agree that if you ask people to work for peanuts you should at least ask them using their actual names.

I do, however, appreciate very much the consideration shown in many of these inquiries, which ask me to quote my best rate. As a memory aid, I have put the highest rate I have been paid onto a Post-It note on my auxiliary monitor to remind myself that I can certainly do better than that. So each time one of these silly requests comes along now, I up the ante and double down... or just hit DELETE and spend my time instead on the numerous serious business partners in the queue.

Dey wanna be like U!

Dear Mr/Ms,

We are a new, aspiring translation and interpreting office at the Munich Zoo. Please visit our web site to get to know us.

We are contacting you today because we might be able to offer you a large assignment for translation or review. We are taking part in a request for tender from the German Federal Ministry of Monkey Business.

If we are awarded the contract we will receive German text of a general political, legal, economic, engineering or scientific character which is to be translated into Englisch. The project is expected to begin at the end of May or beginning of June and must be delivered no later than July 10th. The order will be about 20,000 pages or 5 million words altogether.

Are you generally interested in being part of this project?

One requirement to participate is the use of a CAT tool, because the client will give us a list of terminology. If you do not have your own CAT tool, we can lay you Across our knee and provide you with access to ours.

We offer you a fee of 7 peanuts per word for translation, 3 peanuts per word for review and, for successful contribution to the project, a bunch of ripe bananas and a written reference confirming your successful participation in this big project. Of course your successful collaboration will be followed by offers of many other translation projects ;-)

If you are interested in this assignment we look forward to your positive response. Please submit the attached non-disclosure agreement, signed, no later than April 28, 2014 along with your CV emphasizing your expertise in the subject and a reference list of your customers from the past three years. 

Thank you very much for your understanding and cooperation.

We look forward to your response and the possibility of working together.

Your lingoking Team

Ima Dyantochukup
Crowdmanager

lingoking GmbH

Alas, I had intended to post this opportunity last week in time for hungry colleagues to take advantage, but such is the way of the profession that ones like it will surely come again. If you hang out near the seedy watering holeZ of wordworkers, you may hear these summons to the feeding trough often enough, CALLING ALL TRANSLATORS!!!

The "crowdmanager" title is real. Seriously. I had to wonder what a corporate or government client must think when seeing such a title in the signature of an e-mail with a service quotation. Most of those I have met would rather not have their texts masticated and regurgitated by a crowd and feel that qualifications generally ought to go beyond a CAT tool and opposable thumbs. But then I try to hang out farther up in the rainforest canopy where the branches usually won't support big, fat snakes and other predators.

The request for the list of clients from the past three years is also real. Quite up front, unlike the attempt of the owner of the now-defunct Language Promotion in Zurich to get a list of my clients and their contact details by using a false name and posing as a medical device company prospect with a €50,000 project. But just as sleazy in its own way. Think about it. If I want to be a lazy sneak about my marketing in an area I target, I could post a "potential" job on a translation workhouse board, specifying the desired subject and qualification profile and demanding any number of specific references for past translation work in that area, and I then have a good list with which to begin approaching the clients of these suckers and selling my own services. It happens. There are also frequent enough instances of CVs submitted to fraudulent service providers who then use that information to impersonate translators that one ought to consider how such information should be restricted and protected and whether it should be provided at all. In some cases I may refer someone to a professional association directory or official list of court-sworn translators in which I am listed, where there has already been some rigorous screening of certain qualifications. The occasional suggestions one sees of "profiles" or marketing-oriented qualification summaries rather than a résumé or CV are also worth listening to and considering. I haven't heard a peep of complaint from anyone receiving one of these. It's perfectly legitimate to want to know a bit about the person with whom one intends to do business, and this often covers that need more than adequately.

The above call to swinging translators is also typical of the recurring problem of a great number of unscrupulous language sausage providers (LSPs) suckering translators into providing their details for large EU or other government tenders. These companies often bait and switch, using the records of highly experienced, qualified professionals to get the contract, but with most or all the actual work being done by cheaper and off much less qualified persons willing to accept a handful of shells for their work, the peanuts inside taken to feed the more deserving zookeepers. I'm not saying one should never support a business partner in an RFP, not at all. But be sure that you are really dealing with a partner, and perhaps consider a few terms of your own. Next time I have occasion to chat with a qualified attorney for contract law, I would be curious to see what that individual might think of a binding, signed letter of agreement from an authorized representative guaranteeing a certain volume of business upon the condition of a successful submission for the tender.

Many of these tenders are, I am told, open to individuals or at least smaller organizations, and it might be worth considering submissions with a favored small agency or a team of trusted colleagues rather than support a sausage producer with business goals which may be at odds with values you hold. Information on European public procurement can be found here: http://ted.europa.eu/TED/misc/chooseLanguage.do. Others which may be of interest:

• Directorate General for Translation - Free-lance translators 
• EU DG - Tendering for contracts
• EIB procurement
• Translation services - calls for tenders

(Thank you to colleague Christine Schmit for providing those links!)

New Frontiers in Electroconvulsive Translation

Linguistic Sausage Providers and corporate commodity traders have struggled for years to come to grips with the shocking persistence of translator resistance to advanced technologies such as Human Assisted Machine Synthesis of Translation and Editing of Rubbish (HAMSTER) and Clownsourced Rendering of All Price Sensitive Translations for Utterly Fantastic Text (CRAPSTUFT). Attempts to incentivize wordworkers with faith-based rate reports from the Common Nonsense Advisory, bonus bags of peanutZ, letters of encouragement and even working vacations in Across re-education camps have failed to increase cooperation of "professional" translators to target levels.

There is good news at last, however. As a result of close collaboration and exchange with key LSPs and government agencies in Russia, North Korea and the United States with an advanced understanding of motivational techniques, new electrical feedback methods have been developed to bring even expert translators into line with the expectations and requirements of our Brave New Information Age. Thus it was with pleasure that I learned of funding by the EU's Ministry of Information Access (MIA) for a new research initiative and summer Ph.D. indoctrination program at universities across Europe. Already, major LSPs such as Liarsbridge, thepigturd and Moreslavia have agreed to divert postediting resources from the Soylent Rainbow project in the Russian Republic to feed the new initiative.

Contributions from German and Chinese translation research in the solar industry will also ensure that the new motivational technologies are totally green, like optimally motivated translators. Improvements in speech recognition technology have facilitated the use of green geothermal blanketing methods, in which translators are buried up to the neck in warm sand near anthills and their heads smeared with honey as they are taught to dictate text quickly and accurately to cope with the explosion of demand for affordable corporate wordwork. Combined with the latest solar-powered convulsive motivators keyed to throughput rates and edit distance, considerable advances in cost savings and human resource recycling are expected.

SDL has also announced its contribution to the new productivity initiative: an OpenExchange extension modeled on Kilgray's memoQ Zen feature. As is always the case when it follows the leader, the Maidenhead-based company has introduced a clever twist developed by Securitate-trained programmers at its new development center in Cluj, Romania. Instead of the trippy hippie space music used by the Hungarian company to produce an unproductive, trance-like state of Translation Enlightenment, the improved SDL plug-in will electrify translators with exciting buzzer sounds and a USB-powered surge of motivation to optimize acceptance of machine-translated content. This can be delivered anywhere, but it is expected that most will find their muse with the wired underpants included with delivery, which bear the inspirational message "I ❤ Sodrat".

The pilot launch of the program is planned as part of this summer's Translation Data Analytics program in Copenhagen. Volunteer applications will be accepted by the organizers until the end of May, after which the required numbers will be made up by lottery from the membership of ProZ.com and Translators Cafe.

Games agencies play, part 2: "word counts"

Last week a colleague called me up, very worried because her count of a rather tricky and somewhat long chemical text differed from the translation agency's count by more than 10%. I had only recently introduced her to that company and was vastly relieved to have competent backup for a recent flood of chemical manufacturing procedures, so the thought this might escalate into a serious misunderstanding put a sick feeling in my gut.

Fortunately, I had noticed some similar issues recently and had a conversation with the project manager involved about the unusual issues for her customer's texts and some of the technical challenges we face in overcoming legacy trash (format trash in this case, not content thank God) and making fair and accurate estimates of the work involved not only for fair compensation but also to plan some increasingly stressful schedules.

I discovered in the chat that the PMs at the agency were "in transition" with their working tools, and although they had SDL Trados Studio around for years, it was only being used about half the time for analysis and costing; the other half of the time the now-discontinued SDL Trados 2007 was used.

I spit my coffee in surprise. Well, I shouldn't have been surprised.

The old Trados tool generally gives much lower word counts, especially for the kinds of scientific texts I often do, with a good portion of dates and numbers to be dealt with. In addition to that, there are considerable differences in "leverage" (presumed matches from a translation memory, which is the case of the customer mentioned above are often useless and incorrect because of bad segmentation issues and massive crap in the TM from 10 years of failure to define appropriate segmentation exceptions). And then there are the tags, which are another matter as well: I love three or four words embedded in 20 or so tags in a segment. Whoever thinks something like that should be charged at a word rate with a count of 3 or 4 is a fool or a fiend or both.

But mostly these are just matters of ignorance and/or reluctance to understand the problem and consider it in costing and compensation.

Paul Filkin of SDL has an excellent presentation which I saw last year at TM Europe in Warsaw in which he showed systematic differences in text counts between tools. I suspect that information is available in some form somewhere, because it's also important for individuals and companies using Trados or other tools to understand just how pointless and arbitrary this focus on word counts actually is. (So far I've avoided bringing up the problem of graphics and embedded objects so frequently found in certain document types and how few of the tools in common use are able to count the text in these, much less the effort to access, translate and re-integrate that text. I've talked about that enough on other occasions, so not now.)

So what's the agency game here? Well, in the case of my friend's concern, no more than an unconsidered resort to the wrong tool by a project manager under pressure and in a hurry, and once they talked about it, it became clear that matters would get sorted out to nobody's disadvantage most likely. Word counts, and the tools chosen to make those counts, can have a huge impact on translator compensation. This can be exploited systematically by unscrupulous agencies to screw their service providers thoroughly, and I suppose there are a few out there beside Pam the Evil PM in the Mox comics who plot such moves carefully.

However, I think it's usually a matter of ignorance, where a bit of education is all that is needed. Sometimes it's fear: I have heard some silly skirts tell me that they are aware of the problem but that quoting with accurate methods would inflate job costs to a level their price-sensitive customer cannot accept. Usually, though, this means that this person or those in her organization responsible for sales lack the communication skills to deal maturely with clients and help them understand what is reasonable and sustainable for a good business relationship. I seldom argue with such people. I note them on the list of Linguistic Sausage Producers and cross them off the list of viable partners for work, and when I hear later how they are circling ever nearer to that drain to the sewers I might offer a sad smile of understanding, but I have nothing more to give.

An agency that offers piece-rate quotation but does not even try to estimate the "pieces" and their relationship to time required very likely does not have a sustainable business model. But that is probably no more unsustainable than all the panting bilge one sees from all those acolytes in the MT temple who don't realize they are brought into the rituals to be relieved of their cash and goods by a greedy IT priesthood eager for another great scam to live off like the old Y2K scare.

What do word counts matter when words will be free or nearly so, given to us by Machines of Ever Loving Grace in LQA-blessed near-perfection, requiring just a bit of post-editing time to be fit for purpose?

Ah, time. That's really the crux of the problem, isn't it? How much time will something take? Proper project management in which the inputs are measured and assessed correctly is critical to understand this regardless of whatever piece rates may or may not be applied. An agency owner recently mentioned a job he had to "translate" date formats into something like 14 different local flavors. He pointed out, quite correctly, that any word count, even an accurate one, was meaningless there. (And he revealed himself as a user of the old Trados by saying that the word count was "zero" anyway, which brings us back to the stupid logic of SDL Trados which began this discourse.)

I'm not an advocate of billing strictly by time. Yes, attorneys do that, but it's not really a viable model all the time anyway for all services, and one could a library with volumes of true tales on the abuse of the billable hour by law firms. Sometimes hourly rates make sense, sometimes the value, an intangible requiring some judgment and risk to estimate, matters more.

Time, value or meaningless commodity units (word, lines, pages or pounds of sausage): these will surely still be sources of consideration and dispute in the translation profession long after we are all dead. Until then, it really does pay to become more aware of current practice and its implication and remain alert so that it does not work to your disadvantage, even if the other parties are not deliberately playing a game.

The "WordPerfect Computer"

A recent discussion on a closed CAT tool forum on Facebook reminded me of an encounter with a school secretary some 23 years ago. At the time I was an Apple Education Sales Consultant and systems engineer for a couple of computer dealers in the Los Angeles area, advising educators on what to do about all the technology that was beginning to accumulate at their institutions.

One of the incidents I'll never forget from that time is an encounter with a school secretary who was getting a new computer for her duties. Actually, I have forgotten most of the incident.

What I will never forget is how she mourned the loss of her "WordPerfect computer". At first I was utterly baffled by what she meant, and then when I understood that she meant her old, dead IBM PC which had WordPerfect installed on it, I thought, "What a stupid person" and patiently tried to explain how the hardware was from IBM and WordPerfect was merely one of a number of applications installed on it. All in vain. For the entire length of my visit, she continues to speak of her WordPerfect computer. And how great it had been.

I was the stupid one, of course. I was a technically savvy 20-something, utterly deaf to the fact that she was giving me an important lesson in brand experience. For her, the experience of working with WordPerfect was so significant that all those other programs - Lotus 1-2-3 (an old spreadsheet application), Harvard Graphics (the pterodactyl to the bird PowerPoint) and so on - were merely other, less important things to be found on that WordPerfect computer.

As translation management servers from Kilgray, SDL, Across and others have spread among language service resellers and corporations wanting to manage their own large-scale translation resources, I am seeing some things that remind me of the secretary so many years ago.

The first encounter that many users have with a particular CAT tool is now very often in an online project. An online project with a host of problems. Very often the companies operating the server are inexperienced and haven't a clue how to operate their new platforms properly. The translators time is wasted and their work is compromised as resources are mismanaged, connections are difficult and the value proposition remains totally opaque to those doing the work. "Linguistic Sausage Producer" is probably one of the nicer thoughts entertained about an LSP at such times, as translators feel themselves chopped up virtually like bits of meat and extruded into some oozy gray mass of words in which a few specks of color and globs of fat can be dimly identified.

When a translator has had such a first experience with memoQ or SDL Trados Studio, for example, and engages in discussions with colleagues about the tool, there is often very little real communication. the victims were usually thrown at the tool like bits of meat stuffed in a grinder, trained for little, if anything other than the most basic mechanics of how to be part of the sausage (if that), and when I read their words in forum posts I see a lot of confusion, frustration and occasional rage. Except for cases like an obviously worthless tool like Across, that's really a shame. A lost opportunity in so many ways.

Who is to blame? Everyone can probably take some share of the blame, and certainly everyone suffers the consequences to some extent sooner or later. The providers of the translation environment tools should be more aware of and concerned about the experience of translators with their online tool and do more to ensure that these first experiences will be good ones. Train the language sausage producers, language service providers and corporations who buy their technology better and encourage best practices, which have an equal part of human concerns and psychology with the technology. Very often these translation servers are bought based on word-of-mouth from translators talking about their good and bad experiences.

My good experiences with memoQ as a desktop application led rather directly to a number of significant server software sales although I hadn't a clue about that environment. And I have experienced some well-managed online projects with companies that understood their memoQ Server well and used it appropriately. But I have had other server experiences that would have burned a very ugly mark on the Kilgray brand if I had not had good experience before and elsewhere. I haven't been terribly impressed by what I have seen from SDL server users, but I am trying to keep an open mind about where the problems lie. Across? (Well, the evidence is clear for Across, and we can just write it off as a lost cause.)

There are so many issues tangled up here with so many parties that there will not be an easy, packaged solution to all of it. Not even in TIPP format ;-) But most of the problems can be resolved well enough in ordinary learning processes if we make a conscious effort to be patient, to treat our business partners, clients and suppliers as reasonable people should, and if we commit ourselves consistently to better communication and education. Companies selling technology could be more aware that even after the deal is closed and the price is paid, the payables and receivables for karmic interest can continue quite a long time. The best thing SDL could hope for would be that some day some happy translators might innocently refer to their "Trados Studio" computers.