Check out those fake agencies and translators

Last weekend I checked my mail and was surprised to see a message I thought was from an agency owner in Germany with whom I occasionally correspond but with whom I've never actually done business. It seemed that she wanted a short translation of the copyright page from a book. "One line," she said, though I counted more like 24 standard lines.

"The fee will be a minimum charge," I replied, and shortly thereafter I was asked to proceed. There was a funny smell in the air, which I could not yet identify.

Monday morning I prepared to do the little job, but first I decided to enter the company's data into my workflow system so that the delivery would go out with the invoice. Then the penny dropped. "Lopez"... not "Lopes" for the Portuguese German contact I knew. And further down... "Abu Dhabi". WTF? I had some correspondence with a company based there some years ago, but that was a different person. That smell got stronger.

Then my mouse passed over the e-mail address, sandra@multi-ling.com and a small pop-up advertised a different "mailto" target. Fish, I thought. A bit rotten, too.

Then I noticed that the e-mail address  was one of those free accounts so popular with scammers. And wonder of wonders, the domain multi-ling.com doesn't actually exist!

It was then I finally turned to the Translator Scammers Directory. A quick free text search soon turned up the culprit:

Further details on the scam were included in notes. Another bunch of sleazy ripoff artists. There are a lot of them out there impersonating translators, project managers and agencies, sometimes using stolen credentials, sometimes with ones that are purely fantasy.

A very large portion of the spam mails I get are from sleazebags like this. And the statistics on phony translators offering their "services" to agencies might be more believable if reported as a fraction of what they really are.

What can legitimate agencies, translation buyers and translators do to protect themselves from such criminals. Be vigilant. If it smells like week-old fish, there probably is something rotten. And use the free facilities at http://www.translator-scammers.com/ as part of your research to protect yourself!

The New England Translators Association stands tall against attacks

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

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

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

January 26, 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Translators Without Borders: cui bono?

For years I have felt growing unease at the calls for translators to donate their services to "good" causes like Translators Without Borders. It's not that I'm opposed to pro bono work; I have engaged in it often enough myself over the years in translation and other professions. But with the exception of sustainable projects like the development of sustainable translation capacities for the Maa language in Kenya, with technology support provided by Kilgray and instruction time donated by colleague Marel Pawelec, I have not found the appeals particularly convincing.

It was at the IAPTI 2014 conference in Athens that I heard the concerns I had been able to articulate presented in another's convincing words, with many more ethical issues to consider. About halfway through Attila Piroth's talk, the slide above summarized the greatest of my misgivings in a rather humorous way. My first reaction to the "new Board" for "Report Without Borders" was rib-breaking laughter and no f-ing way! But really, does the composition of those calling the shots at Translators Without Borders look much better?

Not really. We have the Silvio Berlusconi of translation and a host of others representing companies with significant interests in the commoditization and sometimes hampsterization of the translation profession and markets encouraging their service providers to work for free instead of for the usual bag of peanuts. As the presenter expressed it, large buyers of bulk market translation, some of the largest translation companies, agenda-setters for the bulk market and providers of related services. What's wrong with that?

Climate change affects not only our planet but the character of charity in its landscapes. In the territory of traditional charities, material profit motives are considered not to be part of the works and the charitable acts typically involve either in-the-moment services or goods to address immediate needs or fixed-long term assets usually managed under strict guidelines and localized in communities. Examples of the former are food, medicines and medical care, the latter might be hospitals, schools, clean wells or power facilities. Transparency in many cases serves to encourage donors with the expectation that the gifts will be used for good, non-profit purposes.

With translation, the picture is a little different. The work donated to TwB not only covers short-term needs and frees up funds to pay for administration, information technology services and other more professional, compensation-worthy needs, it comprises long-term intangible (language) assets which are not localized to the charity recipients but which can be stored, replicated and perhaps transferred to commercial applications by its curators, those who control the organization. There is no special legal regime to regulate the use of such assets; translation work which is given today in good faith for disaster relief might tomorrow find its way into the resources for paid pharmaceutical projects ordered from one of the large companies represented on the TwB boards.

In a series of posts to follow, I'll examine some of the issues and ethical questions raised this year in Athens with regard to Translators Without Borders, so you can decide for yourselves cui bono?

*******

The second post in this series is here.

The third post in the series, with details of the ACCEPT project, is here.

Mao's Revenge

That e-mail like that shown above is perhaps offering me some irresistible bargain on an herbal Viagra alternative made of rhino horn or monkey feces. Hard to tell, though, since I don't read Chinese. Nonetheless, the hardy spammers behind The Great Firewall send me such missives daily, a few dozen times a day. The only result so far has been to increase my natural suspicion of doing business in any form with mainland China. Despite my best efforts to view such transactions neutrally, personal reports over the past three decades from those who have visited clothing factories proposing to make wet suits for a Cousteau company and found workers chained to their sewing machines, adhesives specialists describing the utterly irresponsible, uncontrolled use of solvents in production, factory managers shot for production problems in a refrigerator plant and more than my little brain wants to remember make me question the greedy, headlong rush to outsource everything to the Middle Kingdom and then let it buy up our assets at home with the profits.

Although I wish I knew how to block trash mail like this, for me it is also a useful reminder that we need to choose our business partners carefully. The entry of Chinese LSPs into the service market for European languages in combinations not involving languages in China's region has done nobody any good. Not even the Chinese I suspect, because they are guaranteed to get only very mediocre results at best with the rate structures they favor. I do know one very respectable German colleague who would contradict me on this point. I haven't discussed actual euros and cents with him regarding this matter, but I'll concede the argument to him to this extent that his partner in China is an exception, like the Indian service provider who once paid me about 22 euro cents per German source word for a patent translation. A good partner can be found anywhere in the world, but when confronted with masses of data, a tsunami of cooperation proposals and the potential risks and pitfalls of cross-regional transactions, for those in the US and western Europe, it is usually a complete waste of time to talk translation business for major, non-Asian and non-Slavic language combinations with service providers in many parts of the world. That includes China.

So I have a friendly request for the Party censors there. Please take a little time in your day, stop trying to track down bloggers, artists and others to jail and harass for their "subversive" opinions, and do something to improve your country's image by catching its spammers and subjecting them to public trials (with competent simultaneous or consecutive interpreting, broadcast live on the Internet) and subsequent public execution. If you do, maybe I'll even consider doing a free test translation from German to English for you.

Another scam bites the dust?

You know what they say: "If it walks and quacks like a duck..." or in this case smells seriously of fish. A few days ago on ProZ (The Translation Workhouse) there was a series of projects posted for German to English "Wind Power" texts from a certain "Annie Jones". I haven't quoted on projects there for a long time, not so much for the usual reasons I hear mentioned, but simply for lack of time or interest. However, in the past few days there have been a few things of interest to me, so I've played the game, with quite acceptable results (new direct customer, reasonable rate).

In each of my submissions, I quoted no rate but instead requested a copy of the text to examine and use as the basis of a binding quotation. The first request I sent to "Ms. Jones" went unanswered. Nothing fishy there; if someone is too busy to respond to every quotation in the inbox I'm the last to be offended. If I responded to everyone who wants to offer me Bulgarian, Spanish or Arabic translation (of no use to me whatsoever), I would have very little time left for real work or anything better.

The second got a response from a "rocketmail.com" e-mail address. Rocketmail appears to belong to Yahoo; the domain redirects to there. "Her" mail had three files attached and the following text:

Dear Kevin Lossner,

Thanks for applying.  I would like to assign the project to you.

I have attached source files so you can check it.

Looking forward to your reply

Regards
Annie

Whoa! Assign the project to me? Before I even say what I'll charge? Of course I'm worth any price, but still... no contact details here at all. I checked out "her" ProZ profile: pretty, fresh face, reminds me a bit of my daughter. Even fresher membership date: January 2011. Mackerel, anyone? The salutation is also a bit odd for someone whose alleged name suggests a native speaker of English.


At this point I sent a quick support request to ProZ. Since the responsibility for job postings was taken from former moderators like Ralf Lemster and others who tended to screen posters with some rigor, rumor has it that the ProZ staff to whom responsibility have been given are less discerning. That's not necessarily a fair criticism: it's hard to imagine (probably non-translating) employees having the experience, skill and dedication in sniffing out phoneys and frauds as the jobs moderators on ProZ a few years ago. For any system of screening to be effective, there are many factors involved, and experience is required to develop a workable heuristic.


I sent "Miss Jones" a response with a quotation for the 5000 words of highly technical vibrocoring and cable route analysis (not exactly the windmill technology I was originally expecting) together with that statement that acceptance of the project on my part would require verifiable business details, including a VAT number, since this person claimed to be based in another EU country.


The text itself was interesting: it was in German, but parts had Latvian set as the language. The author name in Word ("Jurgis") was also Lithuanian. I checked out the source of the document and found an extensive list of contacts, no Lithuanians among them. Curious. Not necessarily a big deal, however. I've seen source documents with Swedish, French and other language markers from large, international organizations where they may pass through many hands. Meanwhile, I got a brief, unsigned return note:

Thank you for the quotation, but it is too high for our budget.

I have just received more affordable rate.

Regards

Thank you, Mr. Checkov! Our fresh faced beauty was so appalled at my rates that she was temporarily unable to remember the proper use or articles in English! Perhaps I am a little too expensive....

Still no contact details. Rather unprofessional for an outsourcer I would say. Several hours later I received the following note from ProZ staff:

  Ticket title: "You might want to verify this person"

  Reply title: "Appropriate action has been taken"

  From: Alejandro Cavalitto

  The ticket has been closed.

  See ticket for details (and to reply or give feedback).

Another note also arrived from the big P:

Hello,

I just wanted to let you know that job posting "Technical translation - 5000 words" by a profile named "Annie Jones"

has been removed after doubts were raised about the supplied contact information. If you are considering this job you are encouraged to proceed with caution.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Alejandro Cavalitto

ProZ.com Staff

A quick check revealed that "Ms. Jones" had also disappeared from the site (profile removed). I presume that the investigation by staff failed to turn up any acceptable answers. This was, as I recall from the little "full member" ribbon icon on the profile, a paying ProZ account. But 100 euros or so is small change to invest for a quick return with a fraud that can net you an order of magnitude more in returns. (Please don't try this at home!)

So KudoZ to ProZ staff on this one and better luck at screening the fakes in the future. Perhaps some screening before posting projects might be in order? Before I let someone set up shop in my front yard, I at least want to be sure he's not dealing drugs or kiddie porn.

Postscript: After some consideration, I contacted the author of the report to ask whether he had requested a translation. In fact he had, from a local translation agency, not from an "Annie Jones" with an e-mail address on the Rocketmail domain. So it appears that the agency gave the job to someone who is either to lazy or too unqualified to do the work him- or herself, and that person has tried to get it done in a surreptitious, likely fraudulent way, by a more qualified person. The author is now in possession of the relevant communication and will discuss the matter with his service provider, who is most likely the innocent victim of an unscrupulous "translator".

Ridin' that train....

May 26, 2010

Sitting in the Bordrestaurant of the train from Hanover to Zurich I contemplated the differences between Hungarian and German trains with a grimace. Hungarian trains have good food. German ones have good electrical connections for laptops. I think the two national railroads have agreed not to tread on the other's area of strength. DB cappucino is probably the nastiest drink invented since Folger's coffee. This thought was reinforced as it occurred by the crash of breaking glass in the Zuchtanstalt that passes for a kitchen on board the ICE.

Preparing for the trip was an adventure. After wasting valuable hours online trying to find out more about train pass options, I finally took time I didn't have and headed to Berlin's train station, where a Deutsche Bahn employee kindly misinformed me of my options regarding an Interrail pass. It wasn't until I was on my way home that I discovered it wasn't valid in my country of residence (Germany), but said employee even more kindly recorded the wrong country of residence after looking at my passport. Just to be on the safe side, however, I don't speak German to the train conductors while I'm travelling within German borders. They're used to stupid tourists and rather tolerant of them or at least more so than I would be.

Once home I started to pack and sort the information for the district court in Zurich until I was interrupted by a call from my high school German teacher, Mad Marianne, who explained at length how her return flight schedule for her planned visit in August had been changed to reduce the length of the flight segments. The most significant part of the change for me was the change in departure time: from 7:05 am at Tegel to 6:55 am. Good thing I found out early enough to adjust my plans.

By then I was too tired to pack or do other work, so I decided to get a few hours of sleep before making an early start. Preparations the next morning quickly nixed the possibility of an early start, especially when I remembered the deer I had stuffed in the refrigerator and needed to finish butchering. But eventually with the help of the neighbor who had kindly agreed to feed my menagerie while I'm on the road I made the last train of the four for which I had a printed schedule.

I almost missed that train. The night before, I had reconfigured my memoQ installation, removing several older versions and getting my licenses sorted out, including a quick upgrade to the project manager version and access to Kilgray's test servers again for a little show & tell planned for various clients in the coming weeks. To my horror, about an hour before I planned to leave, I discovered that memoQ crashed shortly after each launch with an error regarding a custom keyboard file I had created for an earlier version. The keyboard map formats differ between versions 4.0 and 4.2, and there are some problems that can arise during an upgrade.

As usual, Kilgray's super support team came to my rescue, this time with the latest white knight at the Hungarian round table, Denis Hay. Kindly ignoring my very bad mood, he quickly instructed me on how to make a remote connection available so he could examine the problem directly on my computer, and in less than ten minutes I was out the door and on my way to the train station. Would that have happened with the competition? Answer that question yourself the next time you need support.

Losing my UMTS stick somewhere on my last trip to Budapest made Internet access during the journey a lost cause. For a while I dared to hope when I discovered WLAN on the ICE, but the German telephone company Telekom makes it impossible for current customers who don't have a recent telephone bill in hand to sign up for the discounted monthly access rate, and I saw no point in paying more than 300% of that amount. So I was rudely reminded of my dependence on online research and confirmation as I translated various texts on cranes and health insurance and made notes in memoQ on terms to check before delivery. A constant loop of Simon & Garfunkel and Grateful Dead travel tunes in my head also offered a bit of unwanted distraction. I assume that regular drug testing and the heavy hand of DB management encourage Casey Jones to watch his speed when running the ICE down the rails. And reminders of the trouble ahead and behind I can do without; I'm dressed in my threads for a proper pig hunt and plan to drop the bore with a single well-placed shot in court tomorrow....

Train travel is fantastic for getting work done, even with screaming kids, gossiping fishwives in the compartment, rotten coffee (note to self: get a thermos for travel) and whatnot. It's been wonderful blasting through projects with relatively little disturbance.

May 28, 2010

On the train to Munich after The Great Pig Hunt in Zurich. (Der Keiler hatte doch keine Waffen, ist vermutlich 'ne Bache, aber 'ne schwache, keine führende. Auf jeden Fall 'ne alte Sau :-) Eight shots of espresso in the youth hostel finally got my sputtering motor started after I inexplicably woke at 5:30 am, even more inexplicably without a headache after celebrating the night before with pear brandy from the silver and leather vest pocket flask I bought in the fine hunting shop yesterday after completing my business with the court and public prosecutor dealing with the frivolous attempts of Mr. Dominic de Neuville to become the arbiter of free speech and payment practices information in the free world. I learned a few interesting things which may be of use to those who are currently frustrated in their attempts to collect monies long overdue. When I get back to Berlin and catch up on my projects I'll explain in the blog. It seems that there may indeed be a possibility of collective action, though perhaps only with regard to criminal matters. I'm quite interested to see how things develop.

Shortly before my departure from Zurich, Mr. Gramlich, the Bergstockpapst, called to inform me that the wire transfer payment for my combination hiking staff, shooting support and boar spear (Saufeder) had been completed and wanted to know if I'd be picking it up when I pass through Bavaria or whether he should ship it. Since I hope to spend a few pleasant hours with a translation colleague and friend in Munich before continuing home to my dog Ajax, I told him to ship it. I could have used the thing yesterday at the Bezirksgericht, but now it'll probably be a week or so before I can think about Saujagd again.

May 29, 2010

After a fine afternoon of sightseeing in Munich with friend and colleague A.S., I boarded the Train to Hell. The engineers failed to load enough brimstone to keep the fires burning, and as we arrived in Nürnberg well behind schedule and I faced the prospect of being stranded in Göttingen (a suburb of Hell) overnight, I boldly switched trains and took a different ICE to Berlin. But the Devil would have his due, and a freight train stalled on the tracks ahead of us cost that train another hour. I arrived in Berlin at about one in the morning to face a drifting crowd of drunken, pierced, technicolor zombies who are sure evidence that Catholic priests also engaged in unnatural relations with mackaws. I finally dragged myself through the door at home at 2:30 am to be greeted by an overjoyed Ajax, who insisted on a late-night cat-hunting expedition. I think he was most disappointed that I didn't give him the opportunity to lift his leg in Zurich and shower due compliments on the learnéd opposition. Despite all the chaos I managed to get about 150 lines of translation out of the way. I love trains.

Language Promotion GmbH: still twitching

When I was a kid I used to hike the hills above the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California collecting rattlesnakes. These usually ended up as food for my king snake or as tasty barbecued snacks and soups. Even as an eight-year old, I was responsible for killing and cleaning my own snakes, and one of the things that fascinated me about those rattlesnakes is how they kept on twitching even after the heads were cut off. Watching a snake dance across a barbecue grill is a strange sight.

Just as strange to me is how some businesses continue to twitch even after they are killed legally. Take Language Promotion GmbH in Zurich, for example. I've reported a number of times in this blog what the modus operandi of that company's owner, Dominic de Neuville is, and a quick look at any of the payments practices lists for translators online soon makes it clear that there are a lot of people out there waiting for a lot of money. In vain it would appear, since Language Promotion GmbH was declared insolvent. This occurred some months ago. But here's the strange part: when I look this evening at the ex-company's web site at http://www.language-promotion.com/CHCOM/index2.php?content=content_ueber_uns, for example, I see that the pages are alive and well, advertising services for a company that no longer exists.

But stranger still: the means of contact still work! And the addresses and telephone numbers for all the forwarding services posing as business offices in Switzerland and Austria are the same as those for a shadowy business calling itself Transit: http://www.transitweb.ch/index2.php?content=content_kontakt. I am told by my contacts in Zurich that this business is not in the commercial register and under Swiss law should bear the name of its operator, once again Mr. Dominic de Neuville. Twitch, twitch.

What does all this mean and why is it important? I'm not sure. It does, however, raise some interesting questions about business succession and possible personal liability of the owner for matters having to do with the now-insolvent GmbH. If the web pages of the dead company Language Promotion GmbH continue to feed potential business to this "Transit", is the new business in some way liable for at least part of the debt for the defunct company? Do the translators left out in the cold with no compensation for their work have a chance of collecting after all?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I am told that when it was raised at a judicial proceeding in another matter last week that the judge, a former collections official, implied that this might be the case. It's a matter worth investigating for those who have a significant amount to collect, and if the Swiss laws allow, it might even be interesting to see some sort of collective action, perhaps by assignment of invoices to a factor or something similar.

Translation agencies that do not treat their freelance translators well (and I think it's fair to say that nonpayers fall in this category) typically have to rely on continual transfusions of talent as they suck the blood out of one service provider (i.e. freelancer) after another. But there are always naive persons willing to take the bait and accept a project for which they have little hope of payment. Read the ProZ forums: there you'll find plenty of threads started by newbies who don't even think to agree on a price before taking a project, doing the translation and delivering a job. How many of these will practice due diligence? Not many I suspect. So take heart, thieves: there will always be a good living to be made unless someone realizes that the hunting season for pigs is year-round in most countries. And as I noted with the example in my essay on juggling snakes, even with "payment in advance" there are possibilities to be bitten.

So translators, look out for your own interests. If you work with agencies, stick to the many thousands of honest ones out there and avoid the rot at the bottom of the barrel. And if despite all due diligence you still get caught out or you are just having a "stupid day" when you unwisely take a project from a nonpayer, remember that you retain the copyright until you are paid and this can be the lever you need to pry the cash loose.

Loss of Facebook

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

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

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

Hello,

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

The Facebook Team

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

Juggling Snakes

Betrugsversuch aus der Schweiz

The Imaginary Project

Slithering Along

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

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

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

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

Dirty Data Deeds

In recent days, yet another ProZ.com-related scandal has become public. As one upset site user wrote in the thread about identity theft:

I've also just found my details on Outsourcingroom.com

...including personal information I'd hidden on Proz.com. So much for Proz.com's guarantees about privacy and data protection.

I could understand it if my public data had been mined, but not the hidden data. Proz.com claims to know things about Internet security, so they should be on their guard against data mining.

I don't care if it's the weekend (I happen to be working) but I (and obviously a lot of another folk) want an answer from the Proz.com staff NOW.

I also expect Proz.com to take whatever action is necessary to remove our details from this intruder site - we individually did not cause the security breach and it's not up to us to sort it out.

Whatever you're doing, Henry, it's not as important as this is. Get off your butt and sort it out.

And yes, my data (some of them at least) are there too. I wrote a nasty note to the scamsters running the site, demanding that my name be removed; we'll see what happens. I tend to take a very extreme view of identity theft like this (this is not the first time it has happened either), and off-hand I can't think of any measures I would not consider applying to the perpetrators of such things in the fullness of time. There were a lot of things to be learned in early issues of Liebigs Annalen der Chemie before such information began to be restricted.