financial translation blog a dose of skepticism to guard against localization hype, courtesy of...

Financial Translation Blog A dose of skepticism to guard against localization hype, courtesy of Miguel Llorens, a Spanish-English financial translator

Quotes from the blog and tweets of Miguel Llorens


You know one of my bugbears (or perhaps hobby horses) is the Content Tsunami. It is the main pillar of the flimsy business case for Low Quality Translation.


The main question archeologists of the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?"


A reader calls me a "conservative when it comes to the translation business" because of criticism of MT and crowdsourcing.

I suppose I am a conservative if innovation means producing shitty work.


I imagine that if you opened the average freelance translator's anxiety closet, you would find a rogue's gallery featuring crowdsourcing, machine translation (MT), pressure on rates from the larger agencies, outsourcing to lower-wage markets, the industry's knock-off cyberevangelists and just plain dismal news about the world economy.


Is English changing faster because of the Internet? In a word, uh, no


Allegedly, we are facing a case in which demand for a service has expanded fantastically but the price per unit of that service has dropped.


Google Books asks me for my location. That's endearing. Oh, don't be coy, Google. You know I know you know where I am 24 hours a day.


Ok. I am a translator. Power is why I got into this game (not the sex... not the money...).


When we push back the curtains, however, we find a huge hamster wheel powered by thousands of underpaid and underqualified translators post-editing stuff the agency downloaded from Google Translate.


"With MT, it almost feels as if the wheel is moving by itself!"


• To say that lower cost of post-editing (since that is the proper name for the activity, not machine translation) is driving down the cost of translation is tantamount to claiming that the invention and massive adoption of frozen dinners in the United States of the 1960s drove down the average salaries of chefs in Paris during the same decade.


• “If we’re designing a machine translation tool, wouldn’t it be hypocritical to use a human editor to translate the output in our Help files spit out by that very MT tool?”

• Well, not if you want your users to actually embrace the tool.


The main question archeologists of the future will have about our civilization: "Why did they have so many goddamned headphones?"


McLocalization: –The Answer to a Question Nobody Asked


Language Technology Isn’t Getting Better, Our Expectations Are Just Getting Lower


My God, all these vacationing bankers returned to work today and they want me to translate the equivalent of the Baghavad Gita in two hours.


How ridiculously easy is it to feed crap data to Google Translate and mess up its output? From the looks of it: pretty easy. Score one for crowdsourcing, I guess.


Alas! Our “Crap Quality” theorist will feel a distinct pang of disappointment. And perhaps an extreme terror, not unlike Jack Nicholson’s wife in The Shining as she inspects her hubby’s literary handiwork. Yes, it is as if the Internet has been maniacally scribbling “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again


Seven Similarities Between the Machine Translation

Crowd and a Religious Sect


1.- Both fervently await a significant event that is in the future, but constantly deferred (the Second Coming, the Rapture, alien invasions, the day when machine translation [MT] is actually useful).


2.- Both gather periodically at ritual events to recite incantatory nonsense (covens, black masses, localization conferences).


3.- Both demand that you renounce all your worldly possessions in favor of a fuzzy afterlife no one has ever seen (Heaven, Paradise and the 72 virgins, well-paid post-editing).


4 - Both seek to alienate you from your loved ones and take all your money.


5.- Both solicit funding on the basis of preposterous premises.


6.- Both demand a significant amount of blind faith.


7.- Both have been denounced as farces by Richard Dawkins.

(I’m not actually sure about this last one).


Ha! Finally did it! I replied to an agency query asking them to "please provide your best rate." #HowYouLikeThemApples?

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