I’m not an entrepreneur and I don’t head a startup

I carry a love/hate relationship with networking events. Among the methods I have come to love is the 2-minute swap networking as carried out during the 2012 ATA Conference in San Diego last October. Dreading the worst —we introverts dislike gatherings with large groups of strangers— I sat in one of the long tables facing another colleague…one more stranger.

When the whistle blew, we acted as instructed: talk with your neighbor in front of you for 2 minutes, then stop and move to the next seat to your right. I didn’t need any prompting: just the thought of introducing myself and asking my colleague facing me what he or she did was enough to keep the ball rolling. Sometimes, 2 minutes were insufficient to wrap up an otherwise interesting conversation. Business cards and smiles were exchanged. The entire affair was over before you knew it.

I attended an annual business meeting/networking event at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History last Thursday (January 17), hosted by COSE (Coalition of Small Enterprises), an organization that connects its members with more than a dozen chambers of commerce. The business meeting highlights: a professionally made video and the awards ceremony. However, the networking that followed was not my cup of tea. I was looking to spend up to 3 hours with strangers. In this and other similar events, I noticed that, regardless of whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, you will find that most people are already engaged in conversation by the time you approach them to strike up a discussion.

A solitary home office

This is the Upper Midwest, after all. People are cordial, courteous and willing to meet you. But the format for this networking activity is all wrong. You can’t possibly network with even a 10% of all of the people there. I did, however, manage to encounter a fellow translator who lives in Vermillion, as well as representatives of a couple of ad agencies, with whom I discussed a bit of typography and graphic design topics briefly.

Another contact I made was a COSE staff member who is involved in the marketing committee. He mentioned that his committee is going to introduce new services in March 2013 for startups and entrepreneurs, all COSE members. After listening to him for a few minutes, I volunteered my thoughts about the words “startup” and “entrepreneur.”

-I think these words are being overused today. I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur or a startup, even though I have my own small corporation.

He considered my words carefully and went on to expand how COSE had thought about using a word other than startup to refer to small businesses, to avoid the former’s negative connotations. He added that COSE had started to use the word “solopreneur” (a cringeworthy term in my book) to replace “entrepreneur.”

First and foremost, marketing people are not etymologists or linguists, nor should they be required to be. But so-called ordinary words, such as business owner or company manager or even sole proprietor carry more proven weight than faddish words such as mompreneur, solopreneur or any other feeble attempt at me-too linguistic pioneering for marketing or sales purposes.

How do other business owners see a startup? An IT outfit? A young company? What about their view on an entrepreneur? In the eyes of a well-established business owner, does the word entrepreneur carry the cachet of motivation, creativity and inspiration…or a can-do attitude? The more we use an otherwise particular or special word, the soon it becomes stale and obsolete, yielding an anemic impact. Which brings us to a topic of import: writing. Say what you want about the printed media or the impending death of newspapers and magazines, but no amount of slick YouTube videos or well-crafted Facebook page likes will ever replace a well-written message. Even if that message is a one-word label that you choose to apply to yourself or your company.

We may think it’s all semantics, but words, the written word, is the second most important invention since the wheel. We live and die by the word.

Translation craftsmanship and the culture of quality

What do the terms quality, accuracy, precision and perfection have in common? They share an almost mathematical trait of exactness, of measuring by numbers. They also point to something concrete, tangible, almost physical. Days can be measured in hours and seconds. Cargo space in cars can be measured in cubic feet. Even unseen things can be measured, as the gravity of an asteroid or planet or the wattage of an electric current.

The above list of terms, which bring to mind a rhythm of their own so grounded in facts and data, reflects more of an industrial or technological domain. Within an industry, sets of instructions can also be measured by quantity, length and even objectiveness. Any technical writer worth his ink will tell you that a technical document containing instructions to install a boiler cannot have personal opinions on the make and model of the device or whether it’s painted in pretty colors. Simply put, those attributes are foreign to the goal of a technical document.

I recently watched how a Western-style mounting saddle is being made on TV: the different rawhide pieces, sheets of tin to provide strength to the seat, the kinds of needles and strings used to sew leather, the warm-water treatment of the main piece of leather to make it pliable and flexible, etc. revealed the work of highly skilled artisans and saddle makers. The kinds of tools a saddle maker uses have their own names and unique purposes. Never mind the specialized terminology. Just the step-by-step portrayal of such an involved and logical process gave the viewer a sense of pleasure and completion, even to someone who doesn’t ride horses, far removed from the realities of saddle making. The craftsmanship is there for all to see and appreciate.

The same could be said about other industrial processes: beer, waffles, bread, the soon-to-be-extinct Twinkies, bricks, cars, boats, etc. For example, we seldom see craftsmanship in the making of a car because most automobile plants are virtually robotized and human workers only assemble parts, install electrical harnesses or push buttons and pull levers. Their function is important and essential, but denotes no particular creativity because everything has already been designed and determined in advance: the length of a certain panel or the number and color of knobs on the dashboard. Putting them together and running  some quality tests afterwards is all they have to do.

But if you see an industrial process involving some secret sauce or combination of ingredients, or some unrevealed temperature at which something is forged, baked or heated (because it’s confidential), you can see a glimpse of craftsmanship. Someone —not a machine— thought about the different proportions of a certain formula or the best temperature at which to subject a certain material for best results, and decided on a formula by trial and error or because it has been handed down from generations past. That’s craftsmanship, the human touch, the unmeasurable attribute.

To use the word “quality” to try to measure such handiwork is almost patronizing. Granted, we speak of good quality whenever we feel a perfectly smooth and polished leather in a pair of boots, or the lack of burrs in a polished skillet, or the soft border of a very good sheet of paper that doesn’t give us a paper cut. We speak of high quality pictures on a TV when we detect no dead pixels, no smudgy black transitions. Can we speak of high quality poetry or fiction writing? When we read a paper on a topic we care about, like job reports, climate change or safety in public places, do we judge them in terms of quality…or whether they address those topics properly? To me, using the word “quality” in any degree to describe the attributes of a piece of writing is akin to using a stainless steel spoon to measure and weigh the love of a child.

I propose we return to basics and leave alone the bad metaphors based on the making of solid objects. I propose we talk about translation craftsmanship. When we view translations written from the viewpoint of a craftsman, we may appreciate their unique character, even their so-called flaws. We begin to focus on how well written a translation is and not on the number of errors we seem to encounter. The actuarial obsession with which some companies seem to focus on an error-free translation, creating splashy graphics and mind-numbing statistical models to explain how each error in grammar, terminology and syntax should be counted, measured and measured again to provide a picture of quality is a slippery slope to numbing criticism of translations.

Have you ever encountered a completely error-free handbook, speech or clinical trial report in English? Talking about translation quality sometimes feels like talking about the natural imperfections of the wood made to build a cabinet or a table. We lose sight of the whole picture as we focus more on errors and how to avoid them. We make less intelligent judgments about what constitutes good writing in translation because we are too busy counting words, lines of text and commas. We end up thinking like a calculator rather than a human being.

When was the last time you wrote something and felt happy with the final copy? When was the last time you sat down to write an email reply that actually had a coherent subject line on top, a proper salutation and not just “Hi,” and addressed all the points requiring an answer? Do you feel qualified to critique someone else’s writing style? Why, or why not? After all, if you can read complex texts, why shouldn’t you be able to write them and weigh how others write them?

Shouldn’t we start with ourselves and cultivate good writing in order to recognize it in others? Craftsmanship means taking pride in your own work and recognizing good work and giving credit to others for it. Craftsmanship means doing purposeful, complete things with your hands and your mind. Translators are writers, wordsmiths, artisans of the written word, not industry drones that slap words together in other languages.

The promise of speed in service

Imagine yourself in the driver’s seat of a Bugatti Veyron, the world’s fastest automobile. The rush, the adrenaline pumping into your temples, the tunnel vision and the blurry sides of the road as you travel at 267 mph. Imagine running your business the way you’d run in this beautifully designed car. Is speed desirable in both scenarios? Maybe not.

The Bugatti Veyron Super Sport

Noted former Olympian and motivational speaker Vince Poscente wrote that the rules governing the well-known triangle of time, quality and cost have changed in what he charmingly calls The Age of Speed. He maintains that you can get top quality at the right price, and fast because new speedy technologies make this possible. More on this in a jiffy.

Like New York City’s skyscrapers, speed awe us the higher it goes. When I first visited the Big Apple and saw the Brooklyn Bridge and some of Lower Manhattan’s man-made towers of steel and mirror glass, I was amazed and nothing else seemed to beat the size and grandeur of this spectacle, an ongoing show for the masses.

We all like speed in different settings, from the gearhead with his love for fast vehicles to the bungee jumper to the fighter jet pilot. Speed can be measured in time and distance, and time is our main concern here as business owners. Time to get a loan approved, time to hear back from a prospective customer, time to market our new product, etc.

My goal in this article is not to tell you how to do your job faster or better. In the short space of a few paragraph, I hope to persuade you to stop and think about the priorities in your business that call for additional time to accomplish —and you already know they take additional time.

Back to the age of speed, Mr. Poscente is, like most motivational speakers, half right and obvious. Of course some things can be made with a higher level of quality, faster and cheaper. But services or certain products are not things. These things are supported by craftsmen, people who love their job, people who are making this world a better place thanks to the services they provide.

Take your most recent client: how long did it take you to bring him in to use your services or buy your products? Maybe weeks, months or years, correct? Regardless of the medium of contact or communication, from zippy email campaigns to ubiquitous phone calls, some businesses relationships cannot be rushed into being. Consider the following example.

I recently visited the Best Buy store in Avon looking for a netbook. A helpful employee dressed in traditional Best Buy blue garb greeted me and answered my questions in a clear and professional way; then he proceeded to push a thin folder with Geek Squad material into my hand, prompting me to take it. I said I didn’t need it or want it, but he didn’t listen. What happened next?

I’ve been a Best Buy customer for many years, so I won’t let an improperly trained employee steer me away from the shop. Perhaps he was motivated to do or achieve something fast, like how many Geek Squad folders he could deliver to walk-ins.

You may have recently read about the arrival of the iPhone 5 in a few weeks from now. It’s designed to be speedier and take advantage of 4G LTE networks, much faster than the old 3G or 4G networks of yore. But faster is not necessarily a better trait in a technology, and some technologies provide counterproductive results if they perform faster than desired.

Consider the newest A6 core designed for the iPhone 5. A technical analysis, as reported by Ars Technica[1], revealed that the core blocks were put manually, not by using software, which would be the so-called more intuitive way of speeding things up. Notes iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric, as reported in the Ars Technica site:

“It looks like the ARM core blocks were laid out manually—as in, by hand,” iFixit’s Miroslav Djuric said via e-mail. “A manual layout will usually result in faster processing speeds, but it is much more expensive and time-consuming.”

In physics, there’s a concept called terminal velocity. In layman’s terms, an object moving at a certain speed achieves terminal velocity, which is a constant value of speed, when confronted with the opposing force of say, a fluid or the force of gravity. Let’s look at this from a business point of view. Suppose your secretary types at 75 words per minute. You hired her because she’s a fast typist at the computer, knows how to compose business correspondence and makes very few, if any, typos. There are people out there who can type faster than that, and slower than that, like 40 words per minute, which is the acceptable minimum in most workplaces. Suppose now that you need to send out a very important letter to a client in France, in English, within 30 minutes. You met this prospect at a trade show, shared business cards and struck up a positive and enriching conversation. He wanted to receive some samples, but that time was not the right time. Today you received an email requesting said samples.

As an experienced and effective business owner, you can’t possibly just reply with a short email saying “Confirmed receipt of request for samples. Expect them next week. Your signature.” You are dealing with a new client, a promising prospect overseas, and he wants to see samples of your products! A hastily made email won’t do him justice, wouldn’t you agree? A letter, even if it is emailed as an attachment, is your best shot.

So you write up a draft for your secretary to type up, format in company template with logo, letterhead, the whole bit. You will then have it printed out in laser color, sign it yourself, scan it and send it to your French customer as an enclosure in a return email. The question is, do you want your secretary to hurry up and type it faster than usual?

Rome wasn’t built in a day, goes the saying. Tasks and projects that require attention to detail can seldom fulfill their goal if done faster than it is advisable to do. Big decisions in business require quality time set aside to make them, but only experience, trial and error and focus can help us weed out the inconsequential decisions from the really big ones.

I work with words every day, and I have to choose them carefully for my customers. I can translate some documents very, very fast and produce a highly efficient product. But other documents require more research, more reading, more formatting and more consultations with a client. With an eye set on what my client needs and not what my clock is looking like, I hope to continue to serve my clientele with the same gusto and drive that moved me to write this for you.

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[1] http://arstechnica.com/apple/2012/09/detailed-analysis-of-apple-a6-core-reveals-layout-done-by-hand/ as published on September 25, 2012. Viewed on October 3, 2012.

The promise of speed

I am an avid reader of science for public consumption. I am also an observer of ads in different media. Let’s face it, most of us dislike commercial messages interrupting our favorite TV show, but it’s a love-hate relationship. We want to be entertained more than informed.

One particular area of advertorial entertainment is the slew of auto insurance ads on TV. Shticks abound, such as the Farmers Insurance University with talented J.K. Simmons as their instructor with characteristic dry humor. Then there’s Dennis Haysbert in the Allstate spots, but he’s too serious for my taste. However, Allstate has Dean Winters, the very funny “Mayhem like me” star. Let’s not forget two of my least admirable characters —Flo of the Progressive ads and that irritating reptile in the Geico commercials.

For the State Farm singing skits, I haven’t forgotten them. “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there!” I am sure many people find all of these entertaining and valuable in different degrees. They all promise one thing: comprehensive insurance that is easy on the wallet. And speed in taking care of your insurance claims.

Science shows that serve up facts with a side of personality are big business: Morgan Freeman in Through the Wormhole is one example. His voice lends credence to otherwise dry and dusty facts. I’ve been following Mr. Freeman’s career through several of his memorable and not-so-memorable roles, from The March of the Penguins to the forgettable Wanted. It’s the delivery, the cadence of voice that brings in a spectator, a reader, a buyer.

How do you want to capture your listener’s attention? You speak more slowly, with added emphasis in subtle ways. The opposite is true if you want to scare away listeners or viewers. Consider this: how many times have you understood the speech of the actor reciting the legal disclaimers in those TV commercials? Have you ever bothered to read the legal disclaimers in the same commercials? Why not? The font is too small, even in a big flat screen TV.

What does this say about the speed of delivery? Faster is not always better. In fact, faster may act as a repellent instead of an attractant to your ad, your service, your product, your reputation, your brand. You.

I remember an impromptu meeting of engineers, developers and translators at Intergraph in Huntsville, AL, in mid 1999. The manager in charge of software localization wanted to push the simultaneous release of the next version. In the past, he said, software localized (i.e., translated) in foreign languages waited for about 3 months to be released, which affected sales. The decision was then to shorten the localization time, making it a simultaneous delivery of software releases with all its attendant —and unintended— consequences.

Shortly after leaving the company, I still recalled that episode as an event where speed was more important than excellence. Faster deliveries seem to guarantee faster deals and shorter sales cycles. The cellphone industry is one prime example: Samsung brings to market a new model every 2-3 weeks by my calculation. In contrast, Apple debuts a new cellphone model once a year. Yet the iPhone’s market share is 15%. Not bad for a phone introduced in 2007. Nokia and RIM’s Blackberry, however, have been losing market share over the last few years. Yet the market pressures to come up with new models ever so often are too great to ignore, and the temptation to speed up products is very great.

Along with these faster products, documentation in multiple languages is rushed out the door. Unlike math calculations, that computer can perform increasingly fast, documents can’t be written in infinitely shorter times. Consider a short email of 10 words…you still need at least 30 seconds to write it. Maybe you type fast and can send out a 10-word message in 10 seconds. Good for you. Was that enough time to think about it? Maybe, maybe not. If all you needed to do was to acknowledge receipt of an important piece of information, all you had to do is type “Yes” and hit the Reply button. Nothing to think about. However, we can all agree that some of the most troublesome and dangerous emails contain a few words and were thoughtlessly sent out in the Internet ether. Once sent, you cannot easily undo it. So much for the benefits of speed.

Speaking of emails, I am reminded of a classical Apple ad published in 1985. Back then, modems were just a little faster than walking by today’s standards, but the capability of 1200 bits/second was a blazing speed at the time. Apple promises instant access in the ad published in the June 1985 issue of National Geographic:

Apple promises instant access by using an Apple modem with the Apple II computer.

The concept of speed has become the concept of now. But this is nothing new. A proverb such as The early bird gets the worm accentuates the virtue of speed. But, is this really a virtue? Is it really advantageous to rise early always? I recently closed one of my most “productive” days last Friday by clocking in at 5 a.m. and clocking out at 40 minutes past midnight. I handled at least 4 projects in 4 different platforms, from SDL Trados to Adobe Illustrator. Was I feeling proud of myself? Sure. But nature charged me extra for the privilege by making me sleep in the next day: I woke up at 10:30 a.m.

That is not to say that promising speed does not have its place in business. Four days ago, one of my customers required a quick turnaround inside 21 hours for a 25,000-word project and offered me a portion of it. I ventured to offer up to 9,000 words in that timeframe, which was humanly possible and professionally feasible to me. Did I deliver on time? You bet. But that meant sleeping only 2 hours to meet the deadline without putting my mental abilities at risk.

We all know our strengths and weaknesses. We can be speed demons in some tasks and slow as a snail walkers in others, and that’s good. Our minds and bodies tell us, if we listen, when we can push ourselves to the limit and deliver in a speedy yet responsible fashion without abandoning excellence. Please notice that I haven’t used the word quality, not even once. I prefer excellence.

Today, where speed is king, let’s pause for a moment, smell the roses, take a cup of joe and consider that excellence is best achieved with calculated, measured pace. Suetonius’ invitation, Festina lente (more haste, less speed) could be more relevant today than we think.

Branding vs. Reputation

Brands are as ubiquitous as human beings. But, does a brand have a code of conduct or values? Can it give you its word? Then, how can you trust a brand? A brand is nothing but a disembodied voice, seductive in delivery, aiming to burn value in your retinas.

One of the most important assets a company has is its brand. That brand is not just the typographical or graphical representation of a company’s identity. When a brand is unknown, it’s just another name, another logo, another pretty image. But once known beyond its initial boundaries, a brand has the potential to become an icon. People recognize the brand and ultimately identify with it.

Some brands have accomplished this by becoming omnipresent. Think Target, Sony, AT&T, Staples, Dell. We have become familiar with them by sheer repetition and repeat interaction with them. We develop a level of trust in those brands to the point that our purchasing decisions become fast and reactive.

However, there’s a movement out there that seems designed to confuse entrepreneurs and customers alike. It’s a the conflation of a personal trait with an umbrella symbol. I am referring to reputation. Having a good reputation is a trait of good character, of moral standing in society. But now branding is being touted as a synonym of, and ultimately a replacement for, reputation. We might want to take a step back and look at what’s going on.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Branding is important. It lends identity to a product line. According to marketers, branding is the idea that communicates value to potential customers about your product or service. In our highly competitive marketplace, however, brands point to a company, product or service in a spectrum of reliability with its attendant consequences. If a product is reliable, then you’ll likely buy it or use it again. Hence, a brand is as strong as the virtues of the product or service it represents.

But, can individuals be considered brands themselves? Why? Some celebrities may be considered “brands” in the sense that they are widely known to multiple audiences and that they offer a reliable product —their artistic performance. People like Beyoncé, Pink, Lady GaGa and Madonna can be considered brands because they stand beyond the universe of commodities. Movies, software applications and other objects of consumption can also become brands. For example, a Madonna song is unique; a Beyoncé album is distinct in quality and experience. That’s another concept of modern branding: experience, which I suspect is meant to mimic what we experience in human relationships.

But branding belongs to things, reputation to persons. After all, a product is made by someone, a service is provided by someone. A person is not a thing to be branded because an individual cannot be reduced to just the value his products or services can offer. Doing so exposes the individual to become a commodity, just like any other consumable.

If we go back to the concept of reputation, we may be surprised at the freshness of this old idea. We build relationships with other human beings based on trust and reputation. The old word-of-mouth concept is a good example of relying on a provider’s reputation to do business with them. On the other hand, designating a person as a brand is dehumanizing and reduces the individual to a dollar amount and a material experience.

Consider cell phone brands such as Apple, Samsung, Nokia and Blackberry. Are they good brands? Sure. Right now, however, two of these brands are undergoing radical changes (Nokia and Blackberry). Nokia and RIM, the Blackberry maker, have been losing market share to Android and Apple competitors. Are they still good brands? Sure, but here’s the difference: their brand and reputation are good, but it’s their experience that is undergoing tectonic shifts. Experience is dependent on reputation, not so much as on brand.

Another reason branding as a misnomer for reputation for individuals —especially small businesses or independent professionals— is problematic is this: branding promises to make you ubiquitous and famous. This may be true of performers such as actors, singers, musicians, etc. who succeed in representing the zeitgeist and having their voices heard and enjoyed by millions. But most small businesses will be happy to fetch a slice of their local or regional market. Some of these businesses will want to grow exponentially and organically, but branding alone will not take them there.

For independent contractors and small businesses, the old standard is true: build on word of mouth and a reputation for quality service and excellent product. How you call your business is your own decision, and you will definitely need marketing help to assert yourself as a reputable business with a solid brand, a recognizable name. But let’s not confuse business growth with ego growth.

In an increasingly competitive and sometimes litigious society, going back to the basics —build your reputation by keeping your promises, never go back on your word and keep a code of honor— is not just a nice idea but it makes good business sense. A solid brand may have quantifiable value, but a good reputation is priceless.

Machine translation, the perpetual niche

The frenzied discussion about machine translation (MT) continues unabated, with strong opinions coming from different sides. In a LinkedIn group, the owner of a cloud-based translation portal based on machine translation, boasted 10,000 registered translators and counting. His opening remarks included the snarky “so called [sic] professional linguists” and the closing line “Consider this a disruption.” He soon reworded his posting to a more translator-friendly tone after receiving a gentle reprimand from the group’s moderator.

I was surprised at the initially condescending and adolescent tone of this posting. The “disruption” part reminded me of TechCrunch, the techblog notorious for bombastic and loud pronouncements, with the dubious value of entertaining but distracting occasional infighting among editors. The word disrupt is being used as a badge of rebellious street cred these days by people too enamored of technology, infatuated by angry birds and shiny objects. And so machine translation seems to be one of these glowing gems that take our eyes off more valuable prizes.

In his book The Language Instinct, psychologist Steven Pinker argues that language is a mental faculty we humans are born with and reaffirms Noam Chomsky’s tenets on universal grammar. In a gentle but persuasive introduction, Pinker states:

Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (The Language Instinct, p. 4)

At first, I was taken by surprise by the bold statement that language is an instinct. Further, Pinker claims that language is not a cultural construct (“Language is no more a cultural invention than is upright posture”) but a complex creative system born in our brains. One of my favorite quotes involves spiders:

Web-spinning was not invented by some unsung spider genius and does not depend on having had the right education or on having an aptitude for architecture or the construction trades. Rather, spiders spin spider webs because they have spider brains, which give them the urge to spin and the competence to succeed. (The Language Instinct, p. 5)

I have often said that translation is a creative writing process. By creative I mean started from scratch, not assembled from previously written phrases and sentences, like an IKEA piece of furniture. Regardless of the topic at hand, from instruction manual to marketing slogan to movie subtitles, translation involves a set of complex ideation steps inside the translator’s brain, some of which run parallel to the stages of reading and comprehension of the original text. The productive part of a translator’s task is handled inside his/her brain, not at the keyboard or on some piece of software, no matter how wonderfully sophisticated the latter is.

You’ve probably heard and read the wonders of Google Translate. A short trip to its website (translate.google.com) and a brief test shows the distance one has to go to find a workable solution only involving technology. The web-spinning quote above was handled by Google Translate in Spanish as follows:

Web giro no fue inventado por un genio no reconocido de araña y no haber tenido que cuelga a la derecha oa la Educación en tener una aptitud para la arquitectura o la construcción entregar. Por el contrario, haciendo alarde de telas de araña arañas, ya quetienen el cerebro de araña, les dan la llamada a la que la jactancia y la competencia para tener éxito.

Of course, this is a first try. Let’s remember that Google Translate relies on a vast memory of translated texts, millions and millions of words. But memory is not the same as creativity. There is a place for memory to be used as a template for newer translations, such as last year’s version of your employee manual. If your line of work depends on fresh and engaging content, forget about memory, including translation memory. This reality was brought home by an interesting movie quote from Inception:

COBB
Never recreate places from your memory. Always imagine new places.
ARIADNE
You have to draw from what you know

COBB (tense)
Use pieces —a streetlamp, phone booths, a type of brick— not whole areas.
ARIADNE
Why not?
COBB
Because building dreams out of your own memories is the surest way to lose your grip on what’s real and what’s a dream.
ARIADNE
Did that happen to you?

Away from the din of marketing claims about the wonders of machine translation, the overpromised productivity for translators, I prefer a more grounded conversation about the advantages of this technology. As with any other technology, it’s just a tool to achieve results, to make things happen. To summarize, machine translation, however advanced it becomes now or in the distant future, will always be a niche, not a mainstream application for the following reasons:

1. MT cannot mimic the human instinct of language
2. MT is unable to create, only emulate based on memorized texts
3. MT is unable to determine on its own what texts should be translated and for whom
4. As indicated in a previous posting, MT requires a costly implementation and training
5. MT post editing (editing of machine-translated text done by translators or editors) is very labor intensive (that is, costly for you)

Translation has to have a purpose and a return for a business. Just because a text can be translated does not mean it should. A businessman brings purpose to a translation, and that purpose should be coupled with the value a translator brings to the table. Machine translation offers neither.

See spots run

All languages are equal, but some languages are more equal than others.

Paraphrasing the (in)famous quote from H.G. Well’s Animal Farm, «All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others,” I find myself thinking of a soup of random but oddly connected ideas: pigs, languages, words, and spots. Why spots? British painter Damien Hirst’s endless artwork collection of spots, carefully arranged color dots named after pharmaceuticals.

In my list of random ideas, there’s an undercurrent: commodification. According to Merriam-Webster’s, it means turning something that is not supposed to be a tradable object into a commodity. Look around in your house or office. Are there any objects that are uniquely wrought and made? Maybe that purple sweater knitted by grandma? Or perhaps that loaf of homemade bread you made two days ago? Did you make the bread from scratch? Of course. Where did you bake it? In an oven, a bread maker?

My mother used to bake homemade round breads and pastries for sale, fresh out of a brick-and-mortar hemispheric oven. My father built it for her in our backyard when I was a preteen. That oven was very useful to my mother for several months. I only cared for the pastries. Even though my father was no skilled bricklayer, his oven was similar to thousands of other mud ovens. Whatever we do with our hands remains unique, not line-assembled like a plastic toy or an SUV. Working things with our hands has many benefits but, how many people bake their own bread these days?

A mud oven

Take another commodity: books. A Gutenberg-printed bible in 1455 cost “the equivalent of three years’ pay for the average clerk” (from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html). Nowadays, you can get a nicely bound bible for 5 bucks or less. Thanks to industrialization, many handcrafted items became commodities and arrived in our homes. In mine, for example, most items are commodities: books, computers, kitchenware, clothes, pieces of furniture, CDs, DVDs, consumer electronics, foodstuff, rugs, office supplies, lighting fixtures, even the paint on my walls. But it’s not just objects that have been commoditized. Services such as electricity, water, cable Internet and phone service are all commodities.

The benefits of commoditization are evident: affordability, predictability of cost, ease of manufacturing, standardization of manufacturing processes, performance and delivery, ease of use, easy transfer of goods and services across borders, just to name the most important. For us, consumers, affordability and ease of use stand out.

Globalization made commoditization a truly international phenomenon. Almost overnight, there were no borders, tariffs were lowered, products, services and jobs began their fluid transfer among nations and territories. In America, we live an economic paradox: we have an unprecedented access to affordable goods from all corners of the planet, and we want products with better quality at lower prices. The downside is that we lose jobs to other nations in the process —not just China. If the goods we so prize were made in America, we would be paying several times over for them…and we wouldn’t be a happy lot, would we?

Works of art used to be unique. Paintings, sculptures and installations worth tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars, cover the walls and floors of many a museum in urban centers across the globe. Why are they so costly? Because they are unique. But then, we have another paradox: the commodified painting that is also expensive, intended for the wallets of the one-percenters.

Damien Hirst’s simultaneous exhibits in all 11 of Larry Gagosian’s galleries around the world consist of more than 300 spot paintings. These art objects come in different sizes and color palettes but share two themes: perfectly round color spots and grid distribution. Not all of these paintings were made by Mr. Hirst, however, but by his assistants. I saw some examples in the January 23, 2012 issue of The New York Observer this week. Granted, the paintings are mesmerizing in all their blahish glory. The most anyone paid for a Hirst spot painting, named 3 -(5-chloro-2-hydroxphenylazo)- 4, 5-dihydroxy-2, 7-naphthalenedisulfonic acid, was £1.8m (from http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Seeing-spots/24530). You can see a reproduction here and judge for yourself if this painting is worth more than 2 million dollars.

Damien Hirst's Valium (online reproduction)

But Damien Hirst is a well known painter, a brand in itself. His paintings draw higher-than-premium prices because of who he is and what he’s done, even though his spot paintings make you yell “My daughter could have painted thaaat!” Some art pieces are more equal than others, and so are other products or services.

Consider your product or service, how much it cost you to produce and deliver to market, and how much you price it. Even if it is a commodity, if your product or service is rare or unique enough, and useful enough, it will command a premium sticker price. Imagine your product to be a premium water bottle. Supermarkets stock those for $1.5o -$3.50 apiece. After a bottle is drunk and tossed into the garbage, what is its price? A few cents for recyclable content.

Consider now your product or service and the messages surrounding them that help to sell them or use them, such as ad copy, marketing collaterals, documentation, handbooks and instructions. How much value do they add to your product or service? Are they recyclable or transferable? In case you sell overseas, do the translations of said accompanying messages add value to your product or service?

Your product may look like millions of other products. Your service may sound like thousands of similar offerings. At a distance, all of them look the same, just like Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. Will Heinrich, The New York Observer’s resident art columnist, has this to say:

“…the medical-white canvases are decorated with perfectly round, appealingly candy-color spots…The colors, although sticking to a narrow, consistent palette, do not strictly repeat in any one painting, and they’re so precisely applied that the spots look like stickers…Even the white backgrounds stop perfectly short at the edges.”

Hirst’s formula to make his spot paintings unique was the unrepeatability of the color dots, which brings uniqueness to his commoditized art. Likewise, the texts that promote and sell your products and instruct on their use may as well share this distinctive trait of unrepeatability: your company style and tone permeates the texts to create the look and feel your customers have come to expect from your offerings. So should your translated materials. Your message —in English or in foreign languages— does not have to be a commodity just because it is printed on commoditized paper, html or pdf.

A skilled word artisan can make this possible by spotting the inherent and vibrant patterns in your writing, and then casting fresh servings of texts in foreign-language flavors that are pleasing to the eye of the discerning consumer. Whether it is an MSDS, a help file, a tool’s instruction manual or a brochure for your new service, don’t relegate them to your customer’s blind spot. Make them visible. Make them valuable.