A pandemic-driven normal

The days before the WHO declared a pandemic, I was, like many others, wishing it didn’t come to that. I wished it went the way other impending epidemics, like SARS and Zika virus, went: regional disasters that wouldn’t touch my world. Once the pandemic was declared, I hoped it would fizzle out in a few weeks, hoping against reality that this was just a flu variety, not a new disease. Denial, denial, denial.

Once local authorities started to impose stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, curtailing even the most inconsequential movement­­­­­­‒such as going to the store for a can of sardines you don’t need­­­­‒felt invasive. Most people started to buy more staples than they needed. Yes, I stocked up on toilet paper, disinfecting towelettes and alcohol gel like the rest of them. I started to feel imprisoned in my own container of life.

When the order came to work from home, my employer had already asked us to do just that a week before. My decades of experience as an independent translator showed me all I needed to do to be prepared. The transition was seamless. It took me 2-3 frantic hours of rummaging through my cubicle to grab what I needed: computer equipment, monitors, architectural books and dictionaries (I work at a CAD software firm), mugs, power cords. I settled into my work at home routine, first at a hotel as I was in the middle of a move, then at my new house. The traditional living room laid out by a spacious kitchen was comandeered as my home office: far more spacious indeed. Having all of my dictionaries and reference books, not just those given me at work, helped matters greatly. I’ll tell you why.

I’m an advocate of profusely reading something, anything, nothing and everything to do with the text to translate. My cubicle shelves were insufficient to hold all that I need to consult while at work. Roaming from the office to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea or heat up my prepared lunch was a welcome break from the task chair. Walking from my chair to a shelf holding a particular book or dictionary felt liberating. I felt indeed at ease; no distracting voices or conversations from some afar cubicle or from a nearby aisle. No bits of jarring conversation about code or sales or trips that stole my attention away from the text on my screen. And no need to put on my earphones to isolate myself into a musical coccoon of my own making, my ears swimming in notes while my eyes rowed through lines of text.

Amid my comfort, I could fully imagine what my life could’ve been had not I secured my current position in late 2018. The consequences were palpable: I would’ve added myself to the throngs of underemployed or underhired independent translators plying their trade against the increasing silence of nonresponsive customers or lost customers, many of whom are small operators or translation agencies whose own clients dwindled in number or simply disappeared. Government help for freelance professionals came right on time for some, too late for others and never for others even. I cannot begin to imagine their desperation at seeing their sources of income disappear or drop to a trickle, not enough to pay for day care, rent, medicines or other necessities. Comparisons, however, are a cruel luxury and don’t solve problems. Yet I felt fortunate enough. A year passed, I was more established in my position, secure under a steady roof, with plenty of food and toilet paper. I knew we were all paying the price of involuntary isolation: no more seeing our coworkers or associates, no more meeting in person for interviews, chats, classes and conferences. We started to climb a steep hill of expectations as vaccine work progressed and we began to see the light at the end of a long, solitary tunnel.

But a year or more of isolation takes its toll psychologically and socially. We are all changing and become changed because of this. That this is a historic moment, living, trudging, wading across our own world pandemic is no trite statement. We are awoken to new realities while deprived of our old ones. We need to talk about both kinds, mourn the permanent and temporal losses and tentatively contemplate our new gains, even if they don’t seem advantageous at first. For those who love to travel, being told not to is painful enough. Being unable to plan to travel is even more painful, I think. The operative word here is to plan.

We are so used to plan for everything, even if we don’t consider ourselves so methodical and asinine about the details. Just going shopping and getting lost in the aisles of our local supermarket was more than going shopping. It meant random encounters, unexpected purchases, welcome sights of colors, faces, frames and shapes. As ordinary and repetitive as these habits of ours may sound and be to ourselves, we needed them. In the best of scenarios, we would encounter a friend or relative and exchange a touch, a handshake, a hug, our eyes could talk even if we had no words to express. In the workplace or in a classroom, we’d think we were there just for the content, the new stuff to learn. How wrong we were! It turns out that zoomified meetings are filtering out all that is human. It’s not enough to see and smile at each other across screen (the glass cage, as Nicholas Carr puts it); we need to aprehend the fact, consciously and unconsciously, that we are in front of each other physically, that we can touch or not touch, see and not see. We are not just faces but embodied individuals who are members of a society and segments of that society: classroom, profession, workplace, picnic, dinner, playground.

While it is true that internet-enabled technologies, mobile phones and the like have allowed us to continue to work and resume our connectivity, we are slowly and painfully realizing that no amount of technology can substitute for the absences we have been suffering during this pandemic. We are becoming aware of how sterile and mechanical our conversations and interactions are becoming through the internet ether. We are also realizing that modern life is not just about apps, iPads, podcasts and Excel worksheets: we need to experience museums, street music, live concerts and theater, we need to smell the street odors, the scent of familial and stranger faces and bodies, our feet need to feel the pavement, the hardfloor, the carpet, the grass, the sand, the water underneath, our hands absolutely need to feel the air that circulates around our bodies, whether outside in a park or sidewalk, or inside in a coffeeshop. Our ears need the din of random conversations across the street and across the table. None of those things will come through technology but through our own selves when we step outside and engage others.

This engagement will come soon enough as pandemic conditions begin to improve in our cities and countries, but this return to engagement won’t come evenly or synchronically. I fear that some parts of the world will continue in chronic pandemic mode because they lack a robust health care system or enough vaccines, or because their economies are in tatters and will remain so for years to come. In a way, they’ll be relegated to a dusty and forlorn cubicle of humanity until better days come. But engaged we must all become if we want to live. Sometimes, the best connection is the low-tech type: I feel relieved when I talk to a friend or sibling over the phone, better than on FaceTime or via Zoom. Freed from the screen slavery, I can focus on pauses, voice cues to certain emotions, and the flow of words. Sometimes a sentence comes out more paused because it invites a counterargument or a comment; but sometimes the statement gushes out in a rush because its speaker needs to say his piece and I must discipline myself to listen more intently.

I’ve read sanguine comments about the future of telework from some LinkedIn posters. Zoom and computers forever, we can work from home wherever we call it home; we can still be more productive and innovative and we are better for it, as if digital nomads were our perennial calling. Yet this focus on productivity sounds, as ever, so much like assembly-line work, joyless work, busy work. My country, the United States of America, is noted for its large strides in worker productivity and professional productivity: faster is better, technology has all the answers. If life were that simple. I prefer to focus on meaningful, slower work, going back to the artisanal side of things. After all, how can I hope to reconnect with my fellow human beings if I become robotic and sterile as a PDF document? I’m afraid we translators are turning into a pretty joyless technobunch. Exhibit A: go to most loclunches or professional virtual meetings and the main talk is translation tools or some new technology marvel to work faster or more efficiently. There’s nary a word about the pleasure of finding the right expression or style without resorting to some technological crutch, like an app or website. We tend to regurgitate data, not converse; we declare others’ opinions from some blog as a proven and unassailable truth while eschewing actual debate of ideas. It is as if our half-cooked or parroted opinions have the veneer of authority if we only mention a technology or declare subservience to some technological marvel, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. We don’t want to risk ridicule or unpopularity. We, professional, well educated translators, are sounding more like a convention of dunces, babbling about SEO words like innovation, creativity, productivity, customers, advancement but we keep it safe. That is, superficial. Ergo, superficial talk is safe talk.

To engage with another human being, as limited as we find ourselves under this pandemic to do, is to be able to talk to an actual or potential colleague or friend with all the attaining risks: risk of sounding stupid, risk of having our idea rejected offhand, risk of being unable to steer the conversation the way we want it. You know, talk with all our insecurities in sight, no so-called imposter syndrome or some other psychobabble excuse. I, for one, want to be able to resume such exchanges asking for nothing in return except for a human expression. Nothing more human than eye contact without the aid of screens.

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The inverse way of disrupting translation practice

I recall a sunny colleague calling me a Luddite on the Proz.com platform some years ago. The reason, vaguely recollected now, was that I chose to criticize a technology. It might have been translators using iPads, I don’t know. I confess to feeling jaded after reading numerous headlines about this or that technology increasing a translator’s productivity or how we should embrace AI, MT or some other technoacronym to bring home the bacon.

I also remember a translation agency owner (the agency, Antler Translation Services; Peter Wheeler the speaker) speaking at a New York Circle of Translators meeting in 1991. He spoke about translators pecking at a typewriter and fearing the desktop computer. That statement made a profound impression on me because a) I was a recent graduate with a translation diploma and b) I didn’t yet have a computer. I was enthusiastic, feeling paradoxically both new and at home among these translators who were challenging each other to move forward. Adopt the PC! seemed to be Mr. Wheeler’s proposed mantra.

We’ve come a long way in these intervening decades. That gentle push to embrace more efficient technologies has long been replaced by a less considerate and forceful thrust to board the fast-moving treadmill of technomarvels: CAT tools, TEnT tools, terminology extraction utilities, notebooks, laptops, mobile phones, file converters, project management and invoicing applications, webinars. They all march to the thrilling and shrilling marketing tune of each brand. And speaking of brand, we are told to imagine and develop our “personal brand” and speed network, smile and email our way into the hearts of new clients.

Your mind is not a cog. Don’t act like one.

But serious minds demand facts to support this whirlwind of tech-enabled innovation, creativity and get-the-rates-you-deserve chorus. No matter, the oft-cited Bureau of Labor figures extolling the double-digit year-on-year growth figures for the translation and interpreting profession will see us through.

Happy to quote these numbers, translation associations boost their MLM-grade conference offerings with promises of “networking that works” and other slick slogans. After all, hundreds and even thousands of members can’t all be wrong, now, can they? Is this the age of technomagic to transport us to a new era for translators? Can we really improve our lot as professional translators and the product of our labors with the flick of a technological wand? Call me a Luddite but I propose an antidigital approach to translation as a profession because I don’t care so much about my projected image as much as what I write in the form of translations.

I work with a team of translators. We use SDL Trados 2015. Our workstations hold 65 GB of RAM. All of our tools and applications reside in an internal cloud. That’s right—our desktop computers don’t have a hard drive to speak of. We enjoy a highly collaborative relationship with a team of workflow managers who take care of the mechanics of importing and exporting files, handling vendors and making sure our translation memories, termbases and other resources are on the right portals, waiting for us.

There are some unsettling trends that I thought were just my imagination, when I was working as an independent translator: not knowing how to use dictionaries, overdependence on Google hits to determine language usage, assessing translation quality by terminology choices, questionable research methods to determine sense and meaning in an original text or paragraph, overuse of bilingual dictionaries. I recognized some of these trends in the workplace, and they’re worrisome to me. These habits work to the detriment of two translation-related activities: reading and writing.

Reading is cheap and exposes us to a variety of genres and media, from advertisements to novels to specialized magazines and journals. Writing is likewise cheap and it can be done with almost anything over almost anything. I prefer the old writing instruments: pen or pencil, and a blank or lined sheet of paper. Before the reader tells me that reading or writing have little to do with advances in translation, productive tools and networking at conferences to get more clients, or raise rates to the level we all think we deserve, ask yourself: when was the last time you read something out loud? When was the last time you wrote a paragraph, a whole sheet describing, narrating or explaining anything?

Alone with your pen and paper, faced with the hum of your thoughts, try to make up a story, or describe an imaginary village or animal. Try rescuing a beloved teenage memory: your first day of driving a car, riding a bicycle, or seeing a sad face while riding the bus or subway. Consider what a dear friend told you about her day and try to put that in writing, just for yourself. Your mind, your hand, your eyes, your remembrances need no batteries. You don’t need to plug anything. Your high-definition screen in the mind helps you connect the dots.

Years ago I embarked on a sort of lone crusade to work more slowly, to give my eyes a little more time to read the originals I was given to translate, to read over the freshly mindbaked sentences I wrote on my CAT tool, to reconsider merging “segments” so that the language would flow more idiomatically and more naturally in written form. That endeavor, which I playfully called Keep calm and translate slowly, cost me dearly: rush-driven clients stopped calling me, tight deadlines deserted me, but I kept enjoying working with a select few clients who trusted me and with whom I developed lasting business relationships. But market forces being what they are don’t favor such unusual approaches and I was forced to go to the corporate world, where I am surrounded by technology. At least I am given enough time to work at my own pace as long as I am efficient.

Although our translation memories, built by other translators with different reading and writing habits, govern the way I review translations, whenever I am given a translation, I flex my mind muscles and put my own habits to work. I am free to apply my own research, reading and writing methods, techniques—not technologies— that bring me closer to the reader. I still harbor the hope that there is at least one reader who cares about language, about how things are written, who expects to savor a sentence, parse a paragraph, sense the syntax cadence that is carefully assembled for her use and decision-making. Because, no matter what technology you choose to translate with, the warm, distilled sense of human communication, whether oral or written, will always endure and transcend your technotoys.

A day in the life of a 21st century translator

I’m not your vanilla-type translator. I’m not a conventional writer. Keen-eyed readers of my blog might have noticed that I never capitalize Every Single Word in my blog headings. I march to the beat of my own drum. However, I didn’t start like that at all. I thought I would be translating articles, business documents or similar media day in and day out for a corporation or organization after I earned my diploma.

Twenty five years ago, with a bachelor’s degree in English and Translation Studies in hand, I did not have one or two specializations in mind. Although I had studied the basics of Law for four semesters as part of the translation studies’ curriculum, I only knew I didn’t want to be a sworn translator nor a bilingual officer of the court (called perito bilingüe in Argentina at the time) nor did I want to specialize in legal translation (as in law-related translations).

The two main forces that shaped my professional decisions over those 25 years were not creativity, inspiration, following a particular leader or influencer or discovering the holy grail of selling professional services. No, sir. The two factors that drove me to where I am today as a diplomate translator were a) market demands on my services and b) my own intellectual interests.

There you have it then: I’m not a translator who just writes translations day in and day out. Today, Thursday, May 5th, 2016, is representative of what I do:

• Write and deliver a rush 400-word corporate translation by 11:30 a.m.
• Finish a medical transcription in Spanish and then translate it into English for delivery by noon
• Insert newly translated paragraph in two InDesign documents, prepare deliverables (PDF files for printing) and deliver them before 7:30 p.m.
• Review the typesetting of a corporate slogan I had translated into Spanish weeks ago and send the annotated PDF file back to the customer, with pertinents recommendations to their desktop publisher for improving copy of the same corporate slogan in RTL (right-to-left) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Translation courses and BA/MA programs for the 21st century emphasize the use of software tools to manage projects, terminology lists and translation memories. These courses also include practical instructions on project management (a related career choice for translators), software localization (another related career) and business aspects of the profession, such as marketing tips. All these components are important and have a place in a translator’s career, but they should not be taught nor emphasized at the expense of a thorough, critical and lively discussion of the craft of translation. After all, a translator is a craftsman. It’s the writing, not the tools, that make a translator, whether in this century or in the millenia to come.

A critique of Massimo Ghislandi’s optimism

Today I learned on Twitter about Massimo Ghislandi’s statements about 2014 and the translation industry, comments which fellow colleagues Jost Zetzsche and Riccardo Schiaffino qualified as interesting. Well, after reading Mr. Ghislandi’s posting, I decided that his words were more than just interesting in a way.

Mr. Ghislandi is VP of Translation Productivity for SDL Language Solutions, a large MLSP with main offices in Great Britain. Some of the news he shared in his posting are very good news indeed, like the removal of Java from MultiTerm. As a SDL Trados Freelancer user, I’m pleased with this development, as well as other minor improvements in the tool. I took issue with some of Mr. Ghislandi’s sunny assertions, particularly those regarding the role of terminology to increase the speed of the translation process and the manufactured need for a faster translation process. The following is my posted reply to Mr. Ghislandi:

After seeing cautiously complimentary Twitter comments on this article, I had to drop by and see for myself. Here are my opinions:

Adjectives in lieu of hard data smell of marketing language, not empirical observation: “huge amounts of content being created.; “it has also been an eventful year for SDL Translation Productivity and the translation industry overall.”

Unsupported statements based on subjective impressions: “The number of full time translators is also not growing at the content’s pace.  I have the impression that the number of full time translators might be growing at 5-10%, while content is growing at double or triple digit rates.”

An artificial urgency to make translation faster based on a fallacy: “The gap between source content and translated content is just widening …I think we do need to find ways to translate faster so that we can try and close the gap between created content and translated content.”

Who is to say that all source content should be translated in its entirety? One rule of thumb to follow is to translate just what the customer needs, no more, not less, and not what some localization manager or sales or marketing manager ‘thinks’ the customer needs. I think that’s the more important gap.

As a professional translator myself, I am persuaded that we need to find ways to translate more slowly so that the translated content is useful, readable and actionable. It doesn’t matter what software tools we translators use, as long as we remember to take the requisite time to think before writing, which is an ability in very short supply.

About your statements on terminology: “Or is terminology seen as way to improve the speed of the overall translation process (cutting down on those review cycles!)? I am not sure.” While terminology management software is useful to keep a level of consistency, terminology by itself it not nearly enough to increase the so-called translation quality. I have seen many poorly written translations that include the right industry terminology, for example. I cannot agree with your take that terminology may be a way to speed up the translation process. We need to let go of the need for speed in translation.

Many visible people in the translation field feel the temptation to play prophet and tell us what’s in store in the future: “I guess I do need to look forward! I wish I could tell you what is going to happen next year in the translation world. Predictions are tougher to make in this agile and perhaps more volatile world.”

But not all of my comments are critical. Well done for getting rid of Java in MultiTerm.

 

 

 

 

 

“Lowest rates available and high quality”

An old Spanish say goes like this: “Dime con quién andas y te diré quién eres” (English: tell me who you are friends with and I’ll tell you who you are). It means that the people you choose to surround yourself with will determine your image, your public persona, your identity.

A similar saying in English would be Birds of a feather flock together. It’s only human to desire to be with whom we feel a certain affinity. It could also be said that the people whose company we choose to keep might determine our degree of success in life. Our parents saw to it that we picked the right friends, for example. As adults, we face pressure to be with the right crowd and so on.

Whether we are students or professionals, we want to seek the association of those who we see as equal to, or better than, ourselves. Thus, a recent college graduate aspiring to be an interpreter will seek the company of more seasoned interpreters; the translator who decided to set up shop as an agency will procure advice from established agency owners whose experience approaches hers. This natural cycle resembles the medieval model of master and apprentice or, in clunkier prose, of mentor and mentee.

Apprentices follow the narrative that best seems to match their goals. If a translator wants more clients, she will gravitate towards the masters who offer a promising marketing plan. If a translator wants clients who pay more for her services, she will find the current chatter about premium markets quite attractive. In the marketplace of ideas, the ones that sound more promising win the day. And why wouldn’t they? If I’m a medical translator who wants to work for Big Pharma companies, I will naturally feel attracted by the rhetoric of someone who has Big Pharma contacts. That I may gain access to those contacts is obviously another story.

Some of the promising ideas in this marketplace are high quality translations. I have a problem with the use of quality in the realm of translation because, contrary to what standards associations and language service gurus affirm, quality in translation is an oxymoron, it can’t be objectively measured no matter how many error-counting templates are being used. To be clear, quality can only be measured for goods or services that can be predictably and repeatedly manufactured or performed the same way every single time. Manufacturing safety valves, for example, requires such a precision that quality measures have to be taken. Applying automatic weld points by a robot on an automotive chassis has to be a highly controlled process to deliver the same product predictably and accurately. The following excerpt illustrates how a manual welding process, with its innacuracies and variations, compares to a robotic welding process:

A robotic welding process resulted in lower costs, more efficiency and consistency in the NASCAR industry. Source: Lincoln Electric

The previous discussion about NASCAR robot welding can be used to imagine how a translation process would fare under similar circumstances. The areas highlighted in yellow are mine. Please note key terms such as manual welding, variations in weld quality, inconsistent weld pattern, among others. Notice also the result of applying robotic welding: the elimination of variation and the improvement in weld accuracy. Translation providers married to the quality control model offer a similar guarantee.

Another aspect of quality control in this scenario is that it can be independently assessed. That’s why we tend to trust independent quality reviews of cars by organizations such as Consumer Reports because they are performed outside of the factory and outside of the marketing and sales pitch of the automaker. Carmakers use these independent assessments to prop up their advertising to sell more cars because the buying public sees those quality evaluations as authoritative and not part of the sales process.

Therefore, a translation agency or translator who claims to provide translations of such and such quality are expecting you to believe their hype and their sales spiel. They add testimonials with redacted clients’ names on their websites to add the patina of authoritativeness. If you let yourself be convinced by that rhetoric, that means you are maintaining a relative position on quality. In other words, to you, quality is subjective and part of the word of mouth.

Another fallacy in the translation quality discussion is budgeting for words, regardless of their multiplicity of meanings and different contexts. A customer may state that she understands that words have varying connotations and a legal document is not the same as a videogame script. However, for the translation quality metaphor to work —however inadequate is in reality— the customer has to see each word as a separate unit of a whole. In this view, words are assembled into strings of text, like so many pickle jars or oil cans are lined up in a factory, and translators are just assembly workers checking items for errors and discarding the words that don’t fit a set of parameters like spelling, punctuation or their proper place in the correct word order.

The lower rates become an issue secondary to this quality control problem. If you see words on a page like screws in a blister box or a pile of laser printer boxes, then it is easy to see why you would request the lowest price I can offer as a translator. But words are not products, items or fabricated things. They are living things created by thought.

Back to the old Spanish saying, I have long associated translators and agencies offering the lowest rates with poor-quality translations. So, I tend to dismiss translators offering low rates out of hand because I’ve conditioned myself to think that they must be providing low quality. I have to pry myself free from that assumption, however, because I really don’t know how good those translators are at what they do. I confess that I started this entry because I read the byline “Lowest rates available and high quality” on the profile of a translator working in Colombia. I realized I couldn’t judge her because I don’t know her particular circumstances beyond that phrase. I certainly don’t know the Colombian marketplace for translations and translators.

I do know the marketplace in the United States, and here translation providers who offer low rates do it because a) they want to increase their market share and b) they have embraced the assembly line quality control model and operate accordingly.

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.

Talking to machines

Ever took a robocall? Pretty annoying, huh? A prerecorded message sounds on the other end of the line after a machine calls your phone number at dinnertime. The next morning, you need to call the DMV because you changed addresses. It is seldom a live human voice who answers the phone. We are all painfully familiar with the stock phrase offering us a language option: “Press 1 for English, press 2 for Spanish…»

AT&T and other companies save a lot of money by using IVRs (interactive voice response systems). A computer, not a human operator, interacts with a caller and responds/routes calls according to the nature of the query. Call centers fully operated by humans are costly to run. One way to reduce this cost is to outsource the customer service (or technical support) to a cheaper call center overseas. You or someone you know have already experienced this in the form of a support call for a company like Dell Computers taken overseas by a India-based call center. The guturally-accented English is noticeable. I have personally met some people at call centers in Córdoba, Argentina. Among their customers are cellphone companies. These employees have studied British English in college, which shows as a slight accent. This can be very annoying to a customer who is already irate about poor service.

In the genial movie Wargames, the term machine is mentioned by various characters in different situations, but the viewer gets the impression that there’s a question mark attached to the seemingly evident advantages given by our wondrous technologies. In the movie, a fully-automated computer system called WOPR (War Operation Plan Response) is in charge of controlling the launching of nuclear missiles, eliminating the need of human intervention. At one point, the WOPR detects (erroneously) that a Russian nuclear missile attack is under way. General Beringer, in charge of NORAD, asks Dr. McKittrick what the WOPR recommends, and the response is “Full-scale retaliatory strike.” Bemused and sarcastic, Gen. Beringer responds “I need some machine to tell me that?”

The WOPR system at NORAD in the movie Wargames

This could point to one of the morals of the story: Do we need a machine to tell us the obvious? Take some feature of your word processor, for example: if the spellchecker says it’s okay, it must be okay, right? And some automated features can become a hindrance to productivity and performance. I had a taste of this last week when I was readying a file to be exported back to Word format for a rush job. Because of some incomplete or corrupt codes, which I couldn’t immediately fix, the program repeatedly and consistently failed to export the file. It took me a few minutes of fiddling with the options until I fixed the problem, running against the clock.

Had I translated the document in plain wordprocessing fashion, with no CAT tool at hand, I would have not faced a corrupt code problem to begin with. But we translators also love technology, and the occasional hiccup is the price we pay for a more streamlined (irony intended) performance.

A few months ago, I ran into a more intractable problem. I was setting a Burmese translation in an InDesign CS3 document. Not knowing Burmese —a beautiful script, with elegant strokes and fanciful characters—, I first struggled with the correct font to display the characters correctly and then with the ligatures so that the words connected properly. Had I worked with a handwritten copy, I would have just erased the offending stroke, line or letter and rewrite. But a complex software like InDesign automates things like ligatures, kerning and other font features. It took me hours to get things right. Despite my technical knowledge, I still had to send a PDF copy in Burmese for approval by a human Burmese translator to make sure the script looked right, prior to final delivery.

You trust your dryer to do a proper job with your clothes but, would you trust a robot to paint your house? Surely you do online banking and do your taxes with the help of software, but, would you depend on artificial intelligence or ask a machine for financial advice? If you are single and looking, would you ask your friends to match you up with someone or would you trust online software in a dating site to match you up with someone? Would you carry on a love conversation with an Internet bot? Would you trust your company’s marketing tagline to a piece of software? Will you let software write up a sports column?

Actually, the latter scenario is already possible, thanks to Narrative Science‘s software. Last month, I spoke with Larry Adams, one of Narrative Science’s representatives, about the main features of their program, which mines data to author a piece of writing that is basically undistinguishable from what a human writer would create.

What if you need an email written in Mongolian translated into English in a rush? Enter Google Translate or any other number of software solutions, powered by machine translation. What drives the translation of large volumes of content, or bulk translation, is speed, not quality. Large companies that can afford the expense of custom-built machine translation software solutions already create multilingual versions of their technical documentation. Companies with a smaller wallet have to content themselves with us, human translators. For the sake of argument, I’ll oversimplify the issue a little bit. There are large translation companies that operate in bulk and outsource language services to the cheapest providers, from India to Argentina. Other companies try to stay competitive by emphasizing quality, then hire a more costly professional workforce in developed countries. The downward push on translation costs continue. After all, translation is usually viewed as a necessary cost of doing business, like buying office supplies or ordering printer ink cartridges.

While American business owners recognize the need and advantage of addressing the translation of documentation for their products or services, it is difficult for them to see the direct connection between higher sales and better-written translations. Hence, the advantages of quality translation are intangible ones, noble concepts in an abstract world. Companies with overseas offices trust their salespeople in the different geographies to check the accuracy of the translated documents. In-country reviews are an established quality control but translation managers often face an uphill battle to perform these reviews according to quality translation standards because the reviews’ completion depends on the time and availability of the reviewers —the people who are in charge of selling and marketing the products. Their main job is to market and sell, not to sit down and review translations, a task that is not a natural part of their role.

In the meantime, companies are offered a variety of technologies to automate most of the translation process: translation memories, terminology databases, automated quality controls, confirmed translations with lock-out of changes (so that future translators or editors cannot modify them once approved), and, of course, machine translation. As machine translation reaches new, more solid performance markers, a question insinuates itself: Will it be possible to completely automate the creative process of translation by sheer data mining and parsing of linguistic patterns in the corpus?

There is an intriguing article on self-driving cars in the latest issue of WIRED magazine. In the near future, it would be possible to let the driving to an advanced vehicle. Software solutions devised by companies like Narrative Science may make the high cost of writing standard sports news and financial articles a thing of the past, once the engine is properly customized. There seems to be a technological answer to our most pressing problems. Will translators be relegated to the mere role of editors, no more creators of original translations?

Machines and software, regardless of their level of automation, still operate in a GIGO fashion (garbage in, garbage out). The machine is no better than the operator that programmed it. Intuition, creativity, the right turn of phrase, the cumulative good judgment that comes from years of writing experience cannot be automated. Your business uses complex software and complex machines to churn out products and project sales. But, who do you turn to for sales, marketing or financial advice vital to your business? A machine? A software bot?

Towards the end of the movie Wargames, General Beringer faces a crisis. The highly sophisticated WOPR system warns of an impending Russian attack in the form of 2100 missiles, which may or may not be a simulation. The general is torn between ordering an attack for real and assuming that it’s a computer game gone awry, while the U.S. president is waiting for a decision on the phone. The creator of WOPR, Stephen Falken, reasons with him in this moment of terror:

-General, you are listening to a machine. Do the world a favor and don’t act like one.

Wise words to live by.

In search of the holy grail of non-human translation

In Slate, Jeremy Kingsley writes about Google Translate. The tagline reads It already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old. How good can it get? (Read the article here).

My answer: not that good. How can a 10-year-old be a good writer, unless he’s a prodigy? More to the point: you may be fluent in German, but that doesn’t mean you can write in German appropriately in a given situation, like an educated native would. Most proponents of machine translation (MT for short) are enamored with having software produce translations after learning foreign languages. Here’s the problem: translation has little to do with learning a foreign language, and a lot to do with the craft of writing, acquired after years and years of practice and error.

I was intrigued, however, by Mr. Kingsley’s article, to which I responded in the following fashion:

Mr. Kingsley is evidently enthusiastic about technology marvels that may or may not replace some activities of the human brain. I don’t blame him, he’s just a writer.

Even though the article brings together different views (Bello and Wittgenstein), it struggles to be neutral…and fails. There are so many aspects that pop up in a well-informed conversation about machine translation that my comments cannot possibly touch on all of them, but here’s my attempt:

a) Orality (the speech part of language) informs but does not shape all forms of written expression in a language.
b) Most languages have a written form, some never had one. Where would Google Translate (or MT) find the copious amounts of data to mine? Nowhere.
c) Human knowledge and activity show themselves in thousands of domains, not just EU documents, not just webpages. How many books are NOT in digital form? The Internet’s corpus is minuscule by comparison.
d) Different domains (law, financial prospects, discovery documents, material safety data sheets, voting instructions, and so on) have different registers, different formulas for expression. Some languages handle similar situations in different ways, with a different tone in writing form.

Translation is an act of written and visual creation. Before we get all enthused about how technology tools can “translate”, we should ask ourselves “can software write something cogently?” Or, “can software create?” If by creating we mean “doing something from scratch”, we already have robots that can perform such tasks. Obviously, there’s more to it than meets the eye.

To me, a created thing has to bear a meaning given by its creator. No, I am not talking about god or religion here. There’s meaning, intent, focus, tone, a sense of beauty or a tinge of ugliness, contradiction, coolness or fervor, a human imprint.

Of course, there are translation users who can’t be bothered with these disquisitions. As Mr. Kingsley said, their bar is low enough that they can achieve software-enabled translations to meet a need. Here’s a question: Who will bother to ask for input from the reader? Isn’t that the purpose of having a text translated?

There’s more. When you write, you decide what words to use based on a number of circumstances. Some words come to mind more easily than others, some phrases and references pop up more freshly or apt than others. In short, what you write is the sum of your decisions. What you translate is no different.

Translators will always be wanted

I recently answered a poll at the popular site Proz. The question was Would you recommend translation as a career to future generations? There were over a dozen comments by the participants.

Understandably, some translators are concerned about finding direct clients or retaining the ones they got. Others doubt because technologies may replace our craft. Here’s my answer:

Absolutely, a resounding YES

I’ve been a full-time translator, often freelancing, sometimes inhousing, for the last 19+ years in America (oh, sorry, the U.S.A.) –I was born in Argentina.

I am not afraid of new technologies, Google, artificial intelligence or other tools because I don’t confuse excellent writing with so-called productivity. Translators who write very well are hardly in danger of being replaced by technology (how unimaginative!) or low-cost translators in third- and fourth-world countries.

Translation requires passion as do other professions and crafts, but excelling at writing in your own mother tongue is so germane to our occupation that you can’t be a good or successful translator unless you write very, but very well.

Our profession also requires an understanding and command of translation techniques and strategies, something you learn from translation theory. Don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about ivory-tower, only-for-academics theory. But it is required to understand why some texts can be translated in one way and other texts in another.

Finally, excellent translators know how to read and why (this reminds me of a Harold Bloom book I just purchased and that I am impatient to start reading!). My best friends are books (sorry, human best friends!). They’re always there, they help me reflect on what is said and how it is said.

Loving languages or being a polyglot are not enough to become a prosperous translator (I am using ‘prosperous’ here with liberty). You have to love to write, and write well. Anything else is secondary.

The poll and comments can be found here.

We’re in the fourth inning

Let me start today’s post by honoring a revolutionary world inventor, Steve Jobs, on his passing, just a day after the new iPhone 4S was announced by Tim Cook this week. Some bloggers and news outlets were underwhelmed by this new iteration of the famous gizmo. There is one experimental feature, however, that deserves special mention.

Siri is a new feature in the iPhone 4S. According to media reports, it allows the user to speak to the phone not just statements like “Call Stan to go watch Thor” but queries such as “Any Jiffy Lubes in Orlando?” as well. While Siri is in beta mode (in English only, I suppose), I can imagine the use of its artificial intelligence (A.I.) engine to infer meaning from statements in other languages.

According to Fox News Latino, Spanish will be a challenge for voice recognition in Siri. So, we are forced to sit on our hands and wait. If A.I. through Siri could interpret Spanish phrases and commands in a fairly accurate fashion, it won’t be machine translation per se, but a new kind of computerized, on-the-fly foreign language interpretation.

In yesterday’s issue of USA Today’s Money section, Mike Thompson, mobile business head at Nuance Communications, says “We’re in the fourth inning –the rate of change and innovation is faster than ever before in speech. The accuracy and performance [are] getting better. (In the) next five innings, we’ll see greater and greater natural language.” I was happy to find a technical text with a sports metaphor. This can be an excellent exercise in writing to test your Spanish writers and translators.

Spanish translators knowledgeable in baseball understand the meaning of inning, one of nine divisions of play. It’s called entrada or manga in Spanish. Most translation services providers like to talk about high quality, faithful translations. Almost no one says a word about translation strategies or techniques, which are learned through a rigorous study of translation theories applied to practice.

If we use the equivalence strategy, we could search for a sports equivalence in Spanish –soccer or baseball, perhaps? But what about the meaning underneath the sports figure of speech? What does the author say with in the fourth inning? What does he say with in the next five innings? It doesn’t take us long to realize that the fourth inning is very close to half of the baseball game at 9 innings, as if he were saying we’re almost halfway.

How would your Spanish writer or translator express this?