Games agencies play, Part 1: "basic information" for Google searches

The other day a fellow freelancer called me up, irate to learn that a translation agency owner in her country had appropriated one of her ideas and literally taken her words from an online interview to represent his services as something they probably are not.

This started quite a discussion about some of the tactics we and others have observed in the trench warfare being waged for business in some segments of the market. It's not often I see egregious cases of plagiarism like the one I was shown two days ago, but there are plenty of sneaky moves and not-so-sneaky ones employed to try to get those little prospect fish in a world wide net online.

So I've decided to offer a little "series" featuring a few of these tactics and how freelancers might respond appropriately to them to promote their own business and support the real interests of translation consumers in an ethical way. And maybe we'll find a few candidates for the Hall of Shame on our tour.

In Twitspace and in my YouTube content research, I have encountered quite a number of pages, video clips and other material describing basic concepts of translation technology or translation processes, such as translation memory, terminology mining and management, etc. Rarely these are quite good presentations of academic value, which are prepared by knowledgeable colleagues or university instructors, and which are so clearly presented that I am pleased to share them with my clients and others when they are needed. More often these are superficial overviews stuffed with keywords, which communicate too little of the real information needed to assess a technology and its relevance to certain types of problems. Some of the self-serving crap I've seen on YouTube by agency representatives pushing their services is so bad that I'm sure their competitors must smile. What are they trying to accomplish?

Quite a number of different things most likely. Being noticed first by potential prospects searching for information is certainly high on the list for some. Influencing the discussion of certain technologies and approaches to translation is probably another goal of the more clever content presenters and one which freelance service providers should consider.

I am not going to give links to any of these pages I've found. Today's gem - "Guide to Translation Memory (TM)" - found on a US agency site, is fairly typical. It's superficial, but not particularly toxic, but it really makes no useful contribution to helping clients understand the advantages and limits of translation memories. The description of fuzzy matching is actually wrong in some contexts and by no means describes what a fuzzy match might be in some major translation environment tools.

But as more translators discuss their tools and working methods (which may or may not interest translation buyers and consumers), a lot of jargon gets used without adequate definition or appropriate references to consult for more information. And important concepts related to the limitations and risks of these technologies or their most appropriate uses are also very often missing.

A good response to this on our own freelance business web pages would be to present such information on secondary pages of our own sites or provide links to balanced, reputable information sources that can help our clients deal confidently with the concepts if they have an interest in them and avoid some of the traps. Linking good information pages on association web sites, university information pages or even Wikipedia may also help to raise the ranking of these pages and bury the SEO spammers in agencies or propaganda organizations like TAUS or the CSA in the far-back pages of a search where they belong. If an agency like Lionbridge, TransPerfect, thepigturd and others offers such "infopages", for God's sake don't be stupid enough to link them or tweet them; there are more ethical alternatives to be found for sharing such information.

I'm not calling for a boycott of any page associated with a translation agency. There are plenty of good ones out there with highly knowledgeable people who should be the first stop to find information on some topics. There was a guide to preparing source documents for optimal translation prepared by a small agency in Australia years ago; its original link is dead now unfortunately, but I would add the new one to a page of mine without hesitation, and if the author draws in a little extra business for that, I consider it a well-earned reward for sharing his hard-won expertise. But pages like the Guide cited above offer no real expertise; they are just more spam in a too-polluted online world.

Spamalot: desperate translation agencies

Soon after I started this blog in 2008 I found it necessary to take various measures to protect against spam comments. In the early days, the spam was a lot of the same that somehow makes its way to my e-mail inbox, usually real estate scams, offers of wondrous herbal mixtures to supersize various anatomical parts or God-knows-what in Chinese. Spam filters have become sophisticated enough to catch most of that now, so that the trash encountered most of the time now appears to have a bit more human intelligence behind it. That is, if you associate bottom-feeding translation agencies with human intelligence in some misguided way.

I have a definite impression that the competition in the race to the bottom for low prices and garbage quality has led some of these agencies to think they can improve their position in the global dog race by getting backlinks on popular translation blogs. This is done in comments on blog posts, sometimes as a link embedded in the rather vacuous text (as Rosetta once did to a New York agency rival's blog below) or in the link associated with the poster's name (as "Cassy" - surely not its real name - tried above on behalf of "LanguageTran"). What started out as the practice of a few sleazy Pakistani agencies years ago seems to have become routine for a number of UK and US bottom-feeders.

I've seen this happen on almost every translation blog I read. There are so many attempts made on my blog that I make it a point to check the name link on every comment that seems a bit "vacant", and a very large number get flushed to where they belong.

I'm not against comments from agency owners or personnel - quite the contrary. These people are a legitimate part of our business and have a lot to contribute to discussions - and many do. I love it when they or others have something interesting to say in a post discussion, particularly if they can point out an error on my part or add some useful point. But if the point of the visit is simply to post drivel in the hopes of getting a link to drive traffic to your agency's site or improve its search engine ranking, y'all can save yourselves the trouble because you will most likely not be getting through.

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.