Economics and Intelligence

One John Yunker marvels about Dekadu, which is running a complicated venture to enable interlinguistic trade, or as he describes it “supports language pairs like Polish <-> Czech and German <-> French.” All those languages can make a guy dizzy! He contrasts the approach with “American companies tend to focus only on language pairs that involve English.” The brilliant insight, that “there are many more language pairs out there that don't involve English. Which is why Dekadu sees a nice business opportunity.”

So far so good, especially for the multi-language professionals among us. However, the monolingual point of view rears up and barks in his guess about the mechanics of this, when Yunker states that If you figure that most content on eBay, for example, are fairly predictable text strings, like "high quality" and "never been used," all you really need to do is translate most of these boilerplate strings and you'll have strings that can be re-used again and again.

And in that one sentence Yunker drops a bombshell, the quality requirements, and most of the world’s trading-partner audience because that’s not the way to do it, is it? Not when the platform is meant to support the sale of actual goods and maybe services.

‘Cause I may be preaching to the choir, here, but last time I checked the grammatical variations, prefixes, postfixes, infixes and just plain textual correctness means that just dumping a pile of strings on the screen with little or no human oversight will lead to the sort of howls of laughter that tend to accompany any widely disseminated exercise in machine translation. In a trade situation, where someone expects a full return for their seven-hundred and fifty rupee (which are about 16.60), automating multi-lingual translation can be seen as a delightful, if somewhat disingenuous, invitation for law-suits. Good luck Dekadu, and do hire lots of humans, beyond the setup stages. Hire translators. And hey, try the ATA first. Think global – shop local, y’guyz!

That’s exactly what the Chinese government seems to be doing. In fact, they're desperate for us! Of course, they’ve got their ideas of supply and demand a bit skewed: One would think that with the international interest in China and in the Chinese language, translators and interpreters would be begging for jobs.

Uh, no... ...the greater the need, the LESS interpreters will be begging for jobs. That’s how it works, see? Global commerce has made our profession into a hot one, that attracts talented people and perforce is becoming professionalized. Will Chinese translation clients get down on their knees and beg for help from their suppliers? Something tells me that a livable rate will do more than any politely phrased plea. Even in China.

The funniest title I saw today was about the plight of simultaneous interpreting clients in Indonesia. Apparently, demand is outstripping supply there, too. This is no surprise, nor is it particularly funny, but The Jakarta Post saw fit to tell us that simultaneous interpretation is harder than it seems. Making this point, Interpreter Edlina Hafmini Eddin gives the reporter some basic pointers on what interpreting actually means, how it differs from translation, and that it’s actually hard to do. That’s ten out of ten for client education, Edlina – we need more of that everywhere in the world!

Over on Cyprus, one of our colleagues (unnamed, to protect the inexcusable), was accused of being party to coercive interrogation. Or, in other words, aiding in torture. Now, this is a practice used by intelligence forces worldwide, but this wasn’t a global intelligence issue, it was a petty crime involving forty bottles of whiskey and some DVDs. Stealing isn’t ok, torture is worse, two wrongs don’t make a right, and we need a slogan, don’t we? Because y’know what? It’s up to us to stop the practice: translators don’t torture! Interpreters interrogate, not intimidate!

I think we need a better slogan... check this space tomorrow for what may come up.