Financial Translation Blog

The Power of Anchoring and Rate Negotiation

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 23 May 2012 11:38:00 +0000

Quick. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

Come on, come on.

Hurry up, answer.

Was your answer that the ball costs $0.10? That answer is wrong. If the ball cost $0.10 and the bat cost $1.00 more (i.e. $1.10), then together they would cost $1.20. For the bat and the ball to cost $1.10 together, the ball has to cost $0.05. (Did that just blow your mind?)

Don’t worry, I didn’t get it right either. Even years after I first heard this test, every time I hear it I still have to stop and work out mentally why this is. Getting it wrong doesn’t reflect badly on your intelligence, just on your condition as a hairless ape. Faced with a similar problem, Stephen Jay Gould wrote that even after knowing the correct answer, “a little homunculus in my head continues to jump up and down, shouting at me” the wrong answer. It is just that deceptively simple arithmetical exercises like this are done by the intuitive, quick-thinking part of your brain. If the problem used less round or larger numbers, you would be less likely to go wrong. Because then you would mobilize the more sophisticated—but lazier—part of your brain that makes more complex mathematical calculations.

The preceding brain teaser is an ingenious demonstration of cognitive biases (or malfunctions) that are built into our brains. The slower, lazier System 2 that lumbers along slowly to make calculations is a very recent product of evolution. Most of the time, our System 1 is in charge, which we share with other animals. It is quick, unreflective and superficial, because its main job is to flee predators and find food.

I’m reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, an introduction by the Nobel-winning psychologist into the study of the systematic mental biases that dominate a significant part of our interaction with the world. Together with fellow Israeli psychologist Amos Tversky, Kahneman revolutionized the field of economics five decades ago by turning the idea of rational choice on its head.

One of the main quirks of the brain that these academics discovered is the phenomenon of anchoring. In experiments, it has been demonstrated that people who have been shown arbitrary numbers are influenced to use these numbers in making subsequent calculations that have absolutely nothing to do with the original number.

One example: a group of people see a wheel of fortune with numbers being spun. It always lands on 65. Then they are asked what percentage of the countries in the UN is African. On average, they respond 45%. A different group that is shown a wheel that always lands on 15 respond on average 25% to the same question. This means that even numbers which people know are random have an impact on their subsequent mental calculations. This anchoring effect has been demonstrated over and over in many different contexts. Some are funny: MBA students are told to recite their college ID number and it has an effect on different estimates they are asked to make. Others are more chilling: Judges are told to roll two dice and then sentence people for a misdemeanor. Systematically, the judges who rolled low numbers sentenced people to a couple of months, while higher rolls corresponded to sentences of seven months or more.

Leaving aside the disturbing aspects of our irrationality, it makes sense to exploit the phenomenon of anchoring when negotiating rates. Regardless of whether your initial rate is accepted or not, your opening proposal will act as an anchor on a negotiation. Moreover, regardless of where you start the negotiation, your counterpart will be keen on achieving a reduction. Conclusion: never start with the minimum at which you would do the project. Start at a high rate, because the client may ask for a reduction (and perhaps even need it psychologically). Give yourself leeway to reduce the rate a little in case you have to drop it a little to give the other person the illusion that he or she is a savvy negotiator. The use of anchoring is win-win. If you have to lower your original high bid, you still get to work at a rate that is acceptable to you, and the other party feels satisfied after having obtained a “discount.” If your original high offer is accepted, you get to work at a rate that is more than satisfactory for you.

The Language Barrier, Knowledge Exchange, and the Googlevi Twins

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Mon, 14 May 2012 10:03:00 +0000

Can we honestly go to some scientist and say

the reason you haven’t found a cure for cancer

is you don’t have access to information about cancer research? No!

—Malcolm Gladwell

Is the language barrier an obstacle to knowledge? People with technologically oriented minds would immediately respond in the affirmative. They are frustrated by the language barrier. They feel it is irrational. They equate immediate access to every single bit of information as liberating.

I’m not saying that the language barrier is a good thing or a bad thing. All I would caution is that the belief that it is the cause of ignorance or underdevelopment is perhaps accepted uncritically by supporters of what one might euphemistically call “language technology.”

A late chapter in The Shallows analyzes the attitude of Google’s founders toward information. Brin and Page are, famously, computer engineers. In Ken Auletta’s phrase, “Google's leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers.” Of course, the dominant ideology of Silicon Valley in 2012 consists in invoking lofty goals for very non-lofty business models. For instance, universal access to information is invoked as the end, and the means is the sale of (slightly tawdry) online text ads. The cure for cancer is invoked as the ultimate goal for selling mp3s, etc., etc. Which prompts the question, if the ultimate goal is to cure cancer: why not, uhm, devote your life to cancer research? Inquiring minds might want to know. But you’ll never get a response.

Google’s goal is, as former CEO Eric Schmidt famously wrote, to “gather together all of the information in the world in a single place.” The current dispersal of information is an obstacle to knowledge, and that is true, to some extent The key linkage between the Googlevi’s engineering backgrounds and the ambition of digitizing every single bit of information boils down to efficiency of access and distribution.

Now, I would like to make a heretical assumption: perhaps the language barrier is not as much of a barrier to science as one would imagine. For almost a millennium after the fall of Rome, Latin was the lingua franca of learning in the Western world. The fragmentation of the Tower of Babel only entered the ivory tower of science until well after the Scientific Revolution was underway, probably due to the influence of the ever-increasing power of nationalism and the Reformation, but also because of the growing importance of science itself and the desire to get out from under the constraints of Thomism, the heavy legacy of the Middle Ages, and its exclusive use of Latin. Perhaps if Latin had remained as the lingua franca of letters and science, we would be further along the path of progress today, but I doubt it. The movement away from a single pan-European language of knowledge that knitted together scholars from Toledo to Warsaw was in part due to factors such as the Reformation and the rise of nationalism. But it was also due to the fact that the gentleman-scientist of the seventeenth century need not have attended the major learning centres of his time. The exclusive use of the common Latin language for learning might have actually shut out these individuals from the pursuit of scientific truth. Or it may have loaded up a scholar with a lot of prejudices about language and thought that were inconvenient.

In our day, English is the lingua franca of science. I find it hard to believe that the language barrier is a problem when a pre-requisite for being a scientist is to be fluent in English. And, let’s face it, the only type of knowledge that is crucial for the advancement of humanity is scientific. Helping sailors maintain email correspondence with the cutie they met at the last port may help humanity somewhat, but not as much as a cure for malaria. (Would it be churlish to ask to which of the two Cheap Localization has contributed more over the past decade, I wonder?)

If English as a lingua franca for science leaves you unconvinced, listen to this argument about how connectedness inhibits inventiveness. This more sophisticated counterargument comes from novelist Neal Stephenson. It is a parable of how interconnectedness depresses innovation:

Most people who work in corporations or academia have witnessed something like the following: A number of engineers are sitting together in a room, bouncing ideas off each other. Out of the discussion emerges a new concept that seems promising. Then some laptop-wielding person in the corner, having performed a quick Google search, announces that this “new” idea is, in fact, an old one—or at least vaguely similar—and has already been tried. Either it failed, or it succeeded. If it failed, then no manager who wants to keep his or her job will approve spending money trying to revive it. If it succeeded, then it’s patented and entry to the market is presumed to be unattainable, since the first people who thought of it will have “first-mover advantage” and will have created “barriers to entry.” The number of seemingly promising ideas that have been crushed in this way must number in the millions.

So is efficient information exchange a pure good? Not necessarily. Sometimes, the walled garden and the solipsistic bubble are crucial for creation and innovation. Think about Descartes in his man-sized oven. Or Proust in his sound-proof bedroom. The absence of space for unmolested invention may be part of the reason for our current Great Stagnation, pace naïve connectivists such as Mark Zuckerberg and his legion of wannabes.

The amount of information flow does not produce qualitative jumps in our knowledge or social wealth. Our current period is marked by the fastest transmission of the largest amount of information ever amassed in the history of mankind, and yet its is also marked by the slowest economic growth in many decades. The Scientific Revolution came after the invention of the press, but it was not caused by the printing press, as is wrongly believed by a lot of people who know exactly diddlysquat about history. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy, but, as Roland Barthes wrote, it is the foundational premise of narrative.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

My Dinner with Renato

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Tue, 08 May 2012 13:52:00 +0000

Is that all there is? Is that all there is?

—Peggy Lee, “Is That All There Is”

Esto es lo que hay. Esto es lo que hay.

—Los amigos invisibles, “Esto es lo que hay”

(It wasn’t actually dinner with Renato but rather lunch with Renato, but you know I can’t resist a meta-reference.) Readers of this blog are aware I have a low opinion of Renato Beninatto’s take on a lot of issues. The problem is that the world is a small place and eventually even he read these snarky posts and started contacting me on Twitter and via this blog. I basically pretended not to notice, because some of the stuff he says is so outrageous that it provides easy fodder for a lot of blog posts. But he insisted. He proposed a grand debate. I humbly begged off. My counter-offer was that he should write a guest post on this blog. He declined, somewhat predictably, excusing himself on the grounds of time constraints and that he does not write that well. It was therefore a stand-off. However, he proposed dinner in Madrid as one way out. I acceded, although as I said, I was very reluctant. I knew that once you see pictures of someone’s kids, you can’t really be as sarcastic as you once were. The problem is that if he did’nt exist, I might have to invent him; he’s just that juicy. Nonetheless, I thought at least I owed him a hearing. I knew that he was going to “sell” me. Sell me what, I was not sure. But if he insisted, I could not in good conscience refuse all personal contact. Nonetheless, I felt less like a berobed Alec Guinness going to meet David Prowse than one of those writers in Po-Mo novels where an uneasy author meets one of his characters.

We met for lunch last Tuesday. He was in Madrid for a localization association’s networking event. The conversation was in Spanish, which he speaks fluently. He is a talker (not a huge shock). He was not there to hear me out so much as to clarify his own views. The main message he wanted to transmit was that he is not a carpetbagger. He is a translator who pivoted by several degrees to the business side of things. He launched into a detailed narration of his professional life, from a business and economics degree, to his first job at a consultancy at which he also did translations, to film subtitler (like me), to independent freelancer (like me), to owner of a budding agency in Brazilian Portuguese and Latin American Spanish, to executive for several large “multi-language vendors.” His career spans a period in which translation transitioned from being a cottage industry dominated by individuals and small companies to a slightly less fragmented cottage industry in which much larger mid-caps provide outsourced language services to multinational blue chips. I think a lot of his views are tied to his participation in that transition.

I don’t dispute that he is an experienced translator. Point taken. He is not a carpetbagger. Okay. Most of his views that I have found questionable have to do with slightly superficial ideas about the transformative power of technology. Surprisingly, that subject was barely mentioned during a lengthy three-hour-long exchange. His attitude is that technology is an adjunct and not as central an issue as many think, at least from a business perspective (I think that is just a step away from my own suspicion that translation technology is commoditized, but he did not go as far as saying that). Another surprise is that he also expressed considerable skepticism about crowdsourcing. Furthermore, when I asked him if he thought that translation was a commodity, he did explicitly and flatly refute the idea.

Beyond personal biography, the message he sought to sell me was that “we are not so different, you and I.” I concede we are both Latin Americans of almost the same generation who drifted into translation. We are both typical of a certain, recognizable middle-class type of South American who comes from No-Place, raised and educated in several countries, with two or three passports, two or more languages, and with grandparents who hail from all over the globe. But I replied several times that our views are indeed sharply different, and probably determined by our contrasting positions within the industry. He is a born entrepreneur. I am not. He has probably gambled his life savings on a wing and prayer a couple of times. I am by nature risk averse. He feels frustrated that criticism of business as a dirty thing is unfair. His view is that we cannot and should not demonize companies. I agree with him on that, but that does not mean that sleazy businesses or shoddy practices should not come in for criticism.

It is not so much the facts on which we are divided. It is on the interpretation of those facts.

For instance, he is very enamored of the argument that a call for all translators to try to get into the high-rate sector is self-defeating. He drew a Gaussian curve on a napkin and told me that if everyone in the overpopulated, hamsterized portion of the bell curve jumps into the higher part of the curve, the better-paid freelancers would face increasing competition. In my view, that is a very simplistic way of looking at things. It assumes a perfect, undifferentiated market. In such a hypothetical (and unlikely) case, I still don’t think other freelancers would be my competition. Neither is Lionbridge, which is too large to be interested in the tiny companies I serve. My concern is competition from junky small agencies that are pure intermediaries for a so-so database, or perhaps a junky larger agency such as Transperfect, which is very aggressive in competing at every price level and for every single loose dollar drifting along out there (anywhere). No. I would welcome more translators emigrating from the middle of the bell curve, because I think a rising tide could well lift all boats.

Another challenge Renato posed: Do I think all translators should charge homogenous (and high) rates? No, that is certainly not my view either. A market should be stratified and diversified in order to reflect different levels of service, specialization, and experience. I certainly don’t think someone who just graduated should get the same compensation I get. My view, though, is that the current state tends toward a curve that is far more skewed to the left side of the distribution than is warranted. I see a lot of highly qualified specialists struggling to make rent, or people living with roommates well into their thirties. Not a pretty sight. A slight trend toward the right side of the chart would not be a bad thing, in my view.

Another pointed challenge: Do I think there should be an international brotherhood of translation teamsters demanding standard wages? Not really. First of all, I don’t think it’s feasible in the age of the Internet (except perhaps for interpreters), or even desirable. Rent seeking is not a pretty sight. We have to accept the good that globalization brings in with the bad: the former being access to a worldwide market, the latter being Lionbridge and those annoying South Asian agencies who claim to do “native Spanish.” I don’t think homogeneity is something professionals should strive for. (But even if that were to happen, at least homogenous rates would relieve me from the niggling worry [to which I’m sometimes prone] that I’m competing on price. It would allow me to focus on differentiation.)

In response to the undesired homogenization, I challenged him with this question: What is more valuable for a young translator, to toil for years as a cog in a Very Large Translation Agency for pennies a word, or to forego paid work and maybe get into a graduate program, travel, take a course on specialized translation, or learn another language? He saw no problem with spending your apprenticeship years in the commoditized sector. I, on the other hand, don’t think there is much of a future in working for faceless PMs you never meet or agencies who think translation is a commodity. So that is another major difference.

On another issue, I asked him if he sincerely believed that a translator could deliver 10,000 words a day of high-quality, publishable material. He replied in the affirmative, but I was surprised to learn that it turns out technology has little to do with it, in his view. He confided in me that back in the eighties and nineties (when SMT was not even a twinkle in the eye of Phil Ochs and post-editing was a typo), his output was 7,000 words a day (he described his method as dictating into a tape recorder which would then be transcribed by a typist). My interpretation of this is as follows: A few productivity tweaks, whether from MT or TM or whatever, should suffice to push the profession into five-digit daily outputs. In other words, technology is a red herring. Renato countered by asking me what my output was. I answered honestly that 7,000 words a day was a bridge too far for me, but conceded that I had actually pumped out 5,000 words on many days. With the caveat that I couldn’t do it for more than two weeks in a row before being totally burned out. So you see, slight differences of opinion conceal vastly different views of the profession.

Let me provide another example of differing interpretations of the same facts. Renato said he had once been asked at an event what output a translator could achieve in the future. He had replied with typical bullishness that 30,000-35,000 words per day was a feasible number for a translator in the Era of the Jetsons. I gasped (audibly): “That’s absurd! How could you even proofread that output?!” Undaunted, he went on to tell me that the day after he voiced that opinion, he had logged onto his email to find an advertisement from a leading CAT tool designer in which a translator gave a testimonial claiming that the tool had allowed her to translate 32,000 words in a single day. Once again, I blurted out: “That person doesn’t know what she’s talking about! Thirty thousand or twenty-five thousand 100% matches do not count as words you translated!” That person was completely misreading a technology she didn’t understand (and the company was more than a little dishonest in publishing the testimonial). You see what I mean about differing interpretations? For Beninatto, the incident is a harbinger of a happy future marked by greater productivity. For me, it is a perfect example of how translators are completely incapable of interpreting technological change. Night and day. Day and night.

Regarding the “quality is dead” issue, he explained that it is related to his view that quality as mere error detection was the wrong view. He complained that the bandying about of his now infamous title was unfortunate (which made me think to myself that perhaps a less “provocative” title would have been in order; you can’t place a huge target on your back, take a leisurely stroll through the Amazon jungle, and then complain that the natives are aiming poisoned darts at you). I agree insofar as it means that the TEP model in which proofreaders add a myriad of useless tweaks (and often typos) is not efficient. However, my view is that such a model can work well in small groups of professionals who work with each other. But scaling up that model to larger and larger collectives or companies was a recipe for a lot of trouble. And, incidentally, for hamsterization, a term that he criticizes as impolite (I would reply that it is far more uncouth to deprofessionalize people, but there you go).

No, our opinions are completely different. I asked him point blank if he thought a translator should compete on price. He said flatly no, that competing on price is suicidal. But I think where he contradicts himself is that he often voiced the parallel message that not everyone can aspire to the higher echelons of the market (which is self-evident and not insightful) and that the lower-rate competitors will ultimately eat your lunch.

To sum it up, I think his career represents an example of the undeniable triumph of the drive to Cheap and Big. However, I think Cheap as a pricing model might not be as successful over the next two decades as it has been over the past two. Cheap is already running into headwinds as the middle class in China gets larger and larger. Look at Latin American currencies. They are appreciating at breakneck pace while the industrialized world deleverages. Of course, the commodities boom will eventually go bust, that is inherent to cycles. But take a look at Brazil’s or Colombia’s international reserves. Dutch disease is deadly for cheap labor. Asians and Latin Americans learned the painful lessons of the nineties (the Tequila Effect, the Samba Effect, and those little episodes known as the Russian debt default and the Asian financial crisis). They learned them rather well.

To illustrate the point, I mentioned the anecdote about the late Steve Jobs and Obama at a dinner party held last year. Obama asked the Apple CEO how the U.S. can bring back those factory jobs making iPads. Jobs replied bluntly that those jobs are gone forever. Beninatto knew the anecdote. His eyes brightened when I mentioned it, but I’m sure that it’s because he misreads the anecdote. He thinks it confirms the superiority of Cheap. But the founder of Apple wasn’t saying those jobs are gone forever because Chinese salaries are dirt poor. His point was far more subtle. Listen to why those salaries will never come back to the U.S.:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

If the FoxConn jobs are fated to remain in China, it is not because those engineers are cheap. They may earn less than American engineers, but their country’s real advantage is ease of sourcing and abundance. And that means skilled labor. It is a dramatic indication that China is climbing up the value chain, just as Japan, Korea, and Chile did earlier. That is something a member of a hamsterized work force is not doing. The anecdote does, unfortunately, also spell the end of the highly paid American blue collar worker, whose elegy is pictured in Michael Moore’s films. But it also spells the rise of something equally revolutionary: the better-paid blue collar Chinese worker and the well-paid, thrifty, and hyper-educated Chinese middle class. More significantly, it also spells the end of something else: the demise of Cheap as the main pillar of international business models. China’s edge is now both volume-based AND strategic. An alert player should pick up his ears, because the times they are a-changin’. That is the real significance of the Jobs-Obama story.

As I assured him over and over, I do not think he is an evil person, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t find a lot of his opinions completely erroneous, if not downright objectionable. Every time I said that, he assured me with a little twinkle in his eye that, deep down, we actually agree on more than I think. I could see readily that he is a born salesman. Perhaps even too good. The dirty little secret about investment banking is that, at heart, it is just sales. A trader, a VP, a guru-economist, even a nerdy quant is really just a salesperson. But at Goldman Sachs, the capital sin was to be “salesy,” which means being slightly too slick for your own good.

So, does the man have horns and a tail? No. Does he smell of brimstone? No. He is a charming, affable person with a big personality. However, if he gets flak from random bloggers, it is probably due to his lack of awareness about the heterogeneity of the audiences you reach now on the Internet. A message on a blog or a video uploaded to YouTube is pushed out to an audience that is difficult to predict, much less control. That will be the case until the Internet becomes a more textured place broken down into apps or dominated by more regulated spaces unreachable via the flatness of the search engine. I told him that. Once again, he completely brushed off this suggestion. However, I reiterate my belief that if you venture out into the Internet, you have to be prepared to be misunderstood. I write a niche blog read by a tiny audience of 200 people, and the variety of reactions always runs the gamut from utterly fascinating to completely baffling. We have to learn to live with that.

So, in closing, I thank him for the invitation to lunch. He was also gracious enough to invite me to the ELIA networking event free of charge a couple of days later, an invitation I accepted. But differences of opinion remain and don’t necessarily have to be drowned in bonhomie and red wine, since they can be insightful. My two main messages, which I would like to reiterate, is first of all that translation will probably come to be dominated by a barbell, with large agencies on one end of the barbell and cottage providers on the other. The contrasting views and philosophies of the two extremes will become increasingly more divergent, a divergence which will on occasion sound rather bitter. That is unavoidable. Secondly, there is an emerging sleaze problem as some unethical companies scale up.

About both of these opinions he was unsurprisingly dismissive. He cheerfully waved them off, like the eternal optimist he probably is. I accept these as very real, like the over-analytical pessimist I am.

We must, therefore, agree to disagree and hope for the best, because—to answer Peggy Lee’s melancholy question with a refrain from funk-salsameisters Los amigos invisibles—that’s really all there is.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Dispatches from the Content Tsunami

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:32:00 +0000

Last week, TV writer and broadcaster Tom Scharpling tweeted exciting news:

@scharpling
I can now reveal the Big Announcement: Michael Lewis is writing his next book about me. It's gonna be called RADIO MAN. Very exciting!

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190124529006292992

Two hours later, however, the big news had soured slightly:

@scharpling
Bad news. It turns out that the Michael Lewis writing a book about me was a spambot. Beyond disappointed.

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190156016103600129

Yes, it appears that the Low Quality Content Tsunami is slowly seeping into popular consciousness. We are staring into the black abyss of low quality texts, to which translators must add a multilingual layer of Low Quality Translations to complete the Literary Sandwich of the Future.

Picture yourself, for instance, relaxing next to a Caribbean beach while using your smartphone to post-edit a masterpiece by Israeli Nobel-Prize-winning pyscologist Daniel Kahneman, Fast and Slow Thinking. Life is easy. The sun is shining. Solicitous waiters bring you a healthy lunch silently, so as not to disturb you.

Wait, no. Rewind. It turns out that Daniel Kahneman’s best seller is called Thinking, Fast and Slow. What you are post-editing is a deceptively similar tome written by an entity called “Karl Daniels”. See what the scumbag Conent Tsunami-ers did there by choosing a fake name that sounds sneakily like Kahneman’s? Unfortunately, the book is no longer available from Amazon (I could KICK myself! However, Google Books managed to at least salvage some memory of this oeuvre in its vast Babelian library). The non-Nobel book, according to Geoffrey Pullum of the Language Log, is:

a compilation of snippets from Wikipedia articles and the like, dressed up like a book. Edited by robots for you to buy by mistake. It's a spam book, part of the "gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described as bookspam"

Yes, the world has been enriched by this book by about the same degree as it has been by all those Nigerian scam emails.

But wait, ~~Hal~~ Karl Daniels isn’t the only binary brain that has been busily recycling low quality content to add to the giant tidal wave of information that is going to make us all rich and enlightened. Perhaps you can apply your post-editing chops to the little reports produced by a company called ICON Publishing in San Diego founded by a computer science professor called Philip Parker (Is automated publishing the future?):

Parker's production costs are only 23 cents per book because they're made by computers. Algorithms search through incredible amounts of data from published research and government reports. That info is then plugged into a book format. It's kind of like a very high tech form of Mad Libs. Parker came up with the idea in the '90s when he was writing economic reports.

Oh, wait, the book cost 23 cents to make. Not per word. I mean the WHOLE ENTIRE book cost 23 cents to make. It is highly unlikely that anyone will pay even $0.01 per word to translate it, which is close to below subsistence level in most countries on Earth. So scratch that opportunity. On to the next thing.

Heard about the recent spate of flash crashes driven by stock trading algorithms? Well, it seems that the computer programs that feed on news and use them as signals for buying and selling might be taking their cues from other computers. Which is always reassuring when you mention computers and gynormous amounts of money. Ever heard of the phrase feedback loop? This is from a recent article by Evgeny Morozov ("A Robot Stole my Pulitzer"):

Forbes—one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a company called Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about what to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”Don't miss the irony here: Automated platforms are now “writing” news reports about companies that make their money from automated trading. These reports are eventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spot even more lucrative deals. Essentially, this is journalism done by robots and for robots. The only upside here is that humans get to keep all the cash.

Maybe Narrative Science needs a couple of financial translators moonlighting as post-editors? Once again, though, the production cost of the source text is so negligible as to make out-and-out raw MT the likeliest candidate for translation.

If you truly expect binary recursiveness to feed you, perhaps you can write to the company that published Computer Game Bot Turing Test and propose your services as a post-editor into Spanish or French for this instant classic. Computer engineer Carlos Bueno describes the book as follows (I am indebted to Spanish IT translation über-geek @jordibal for this anecdote):

Let me tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one of over 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipedia articles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher, Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
It gets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the Amazon Marketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price wars no one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

But take heart, not all low quality content is attributable to computers. Last week it was reported that China had censored the sex scene in the 3-D version of Titanic. Many online news outlets (Daily Mail, MSNBC, Entertainment Weekly, E Online…) included a statement from the Chinese Ministry justifying the move thusly:

"Considering the vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people's viewing. To avoid potential conflicts between viewers and out of consideration of building a harmonious ethical social environment, we've decided to cut off the nudity scenes."

Too good to be true… and it was. Gawker reports that the quote came from a satirical website:

Tons of English-language news outlets are running with this quote even though, guys, it's obviously not real. The rumor probably originated with this blog post, which fails to mention the joke aspect.

The Chinese state news agency Xinhua reports that "there is no official response to the roll-back of the censorship policy concerning the 3D film."

Also, the Chinese movie-going public are not medieval villagers; they understand how 3D works.

And, in closing, a widely circulated article estimates that a good chunk of the Content Tsunami is actually sex videos:

It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites/2

Humorist Stephen Colbert paraphrased the finding thusly: “Thirty percent of all internet traffic is porn, according to a new report by the New England Journal of Underestimating Everything.”

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Translating from Spanish to Castellano, or Bridging the Gap between a Localization PM and a Horse’s Ass

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 15:22:00 +0000

Danny: No, venti is twenty. Large is large. In fact, tall is large and grande is Spanish for large. Venti is the only one that doesn't mean large. It's also the only one that's Italian. Congratulations, you're stupid in three languages.

Barista: A venti is a large coffee.

Danny: Really? Says who? Fellini? Do you accept lira or is it all euros now?

—Role Model (2010)

The State of McLocalization 2012. Exhibit A: I see an Internet job ad entitled: "Spanish translators with Catalan and Castellano dialects are needed ASAP." An ad calling for a Spanish translator who speaks Castellano of course piques my curiosity. Greater delights awaited me. I kid you not, this is what the ad said: "We have text in English and Spanish that should be translated into Catalan and Castellano." Spanish to Castellano. The wonders of the Web 2.0. The person who posted the ad helpfully adds a couple of linguistic notes taken from the Monty Python Book of Flying Dialectology: "Castellano is a kind of Spanish which includes dialects at the central and north part of Spain (the area from Cantabria to Cuenca)." I omit the notes on Catalan because it describes the language as a “dialect” and I don't want the comments setion inundated with people making threatening comments.

Let me start to unpack this monstrosity by beginning with the familiar term of “Castilian Spanish.” Most people who use “Castilian Spanish” probably think it sounds a little more fancy or scientific than “European Spanish” or “Iberian Spanish” or the clunky “Spanish from Spain.” But steer clear from the jackass who uses this phrase, gentle reader, because an agency that uses it to recruit translators may also have trouble figuring out the complexities of international wire transfers, whether willfully or not. That person/agency/spambot is affecting an erudition that he/she/it does not really possess.

But, wait, “Castilian Spanish” is endorsed by a source as eminent as Wikipedia. Read this page:

Castilian Spanish is a term related to the Spanish language, but its exact meaning can vary even in that language. In English Castilian Spanish usually refers to the variety of European Spanish spoken in north and central Spain or as the language standard for radio and TV speakers.[1][2][3][4] The region where this variety of Spanish is spoken corresponds more or less to the Castilian historical region.

No, no, no, no. Bad Wikipedia! Bad Wikipedia! Naughty, naughty Wikipedia! You went and urinated on the living room rug of knowledge again! The exact meaning of “Castilian Spanish” does NOT “vary even in that language.” No one uses the term “español castellano.” Why? Because he would be branded a jackass. Okay, I’m only going to say this once. Saying “Castilian Spanish” is just an economic way of proclaiming that a grandfather or great-grandfather deflowered a cousin somewhere in the adjacent branches of your family tree. It is the same as using the term “Tuscan Italian” or “Anglican English” or “Gallic French” or “Sino-Chinese” or “Nippon Japanese” or “Teutonic German.” It is a nonsense term used by Scientologists, Pataphysicists, conspiracy theorists, and sundry varieties of idiot who believe in the Singularity. Think of the funny made-up Roman names used in the Life of Brian, such as “Maximus Minimus”.

Castilian is the language spoken in the north-central region of Spain that spread via the Reconquista and the political ascendancy of Castile to the whole of the Iberian Peninsula, thus becoming the primary language of literature and government in what would eventually become Spain (sometimes in an uneasy and fraught cohabitation with other languages [careful: not dialects] such as Basque and Catalan). Later on, it also spread to the Americas and even the Philippines through the, er, free Spanish courses taught by those stabby, trigger-happy language tutors known as conquistadores. Castilian is just an old name for standard Spanish, whether spoken in Buenos Aires or Mexico City or Barcelona (or even Copenhagen, for that matter). The Castilian dialect, on the other hand, refers to the peculiarities of the Spanish spoken in rural areas of Castile, where this entire story started.

Visit these (correct) definitions to get a sense of what I’m talking about:

Definition of CASTILIAN

1: a native or inhabitant of Castile; broadly : Spaniard

2 a : the dialect of Castileb : the official and literary language of Spain based on this dialect

Or this one:

Cas·til·ian [ka-stil-yuhn] noun 1. the dialect of Spanish spoken in Castile. 2. the official standard form of the Spanish language as spoken in Spain, based on this dialect. 3. a native or inhabitant of Castile.

Or this one:

Castilian
1 a native of Castile. 2 the dialect of Spanish spoken in Castile, which is standard Spanish.adjectiveof or relating to Castile, Castilians, or the Castilian form of Spanish.

Therefore, if you insist on using the term “Castilian Spanish”, it can only refer to the Spanish spoken in the Castile region, which by the same token will exclude the Spanish spoken in other regions of Spain, which doesn’t make any sense when you are recruiting translators (who localizes only for Castile?). To sum it up, if you stress the “Castilian” in “Castilian Spanish”, you exclude the rest of Spain. And if you stress the “Spanish” in “Castilian Spanish” (to distinguish it from Latin American Spanish), you get to the insane situation whereby Latin Americans speak Castilian and Spanish, but not Castilian Spanish. In any case, the conceptual difficulties you can get into by simply raising the term “Castilian” are thorny. Better to simply avoid using it and stick to safer terms such as “Iberian Spanish” or “European Spanish,” neither of which requires a doctorate in comparative philology. Yeah, I know “Castilian” sounds fancy, but everybody hurts sometime.

Now, the job ad quoted at the beginning takes the “Castilian/Spanish/Castilian Spanish” idiocy one step further and totally dissociates español from castellano and asks for a translator to work a text from one to the other. That is the equivalent of asking someone to translate from Quebecois to Canadian French or from English into “American.” This marks a step further in the divorce between Spanish and Castilian, similar to a fight between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or between Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Which is an extreme, relatively unstudied phase of multiple personality disorder.

The agency posting this is Ukrainian (the ad, sadly, was erased before I managed to save it). An autopsy of the way in which a project from English to Spanish came to be handled by an agency in that region of the world would perhaps provide an interesting radiography of why there are so many poor translations out there.

Rant over. (Whew, it felt good to get that off my chest.)

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as several small brokerages and asset management companies. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Counterintuitive Twenty-First Century Hipster Luddism

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:38:00 +0000

Last week, two articles on highly successful musicians provided contrasting glimpses into the technology behind music production in our times. First up was an interesting piece from The New Yorker on what we might call the new Brill Building or the new Tinpan Alley: the dozen or so teams of song producers and writers that are responsible for the vast majority of the hits that dominate the American pop music scene. Fifty years ago, popular musicians didn’t write their own stuff. Their managers simply had them sing songs that professional songwriters churned out like sausages in places like the Brill in New York. Look at the first Beatles and Rolling Stones albums: not a single original composition. That is the world that Bob Dylan blew away. Carole King is the sole survivor of that bygone era. She began as a gun for hire with her husband and later successfully made the transition into the singer-songwriter era of the sixties and seventies who sang her own material.

Now, in the era of the Content Tsunami, "the times they are a-changin' back." A tiny group of twenty or so professional songwriters is once again churning out the Top 40 hits that account for the bulk of music sales. They use very simple formulas:

...today’s Top Forty is almost always machine-made: lush sonic landscapes of beats, loops, and synths in which all the sounds have square edges and shiny surfaces, the voices are Auto-Tuned for pitch, and there are no mistakes. The music sounds sort of like this: thump thooka whompa whomp pish pish pish thumpaty wompah pah pah pah.

The songs are written according to a template that relies heavily on so-called “hooks,” the repetitive parts that captivate the listener—who apparently has the attention span of a fruit fly. As if older pop music was not repetitive or catchy enough. (Seriously, how much more catchy will pop have to get in the future? I imagine a couple of hands reaching out from a smartphone screen, grabbing you by the lapels and shaking you while a voice shouts: “Dance, bitch!”):

The producers compose the chord progressions, program the beats, and arrange the “synths,” or computer-made instrumental sounds; the top-liners come up with primary melodies, lyrics, and the all-important hooks, the ear-friendly musical phrases that lock you into the song.

In this age of alleged media diversification, a handful of individuals are responsible for the listening pleasures of millions. In fact, so tiny and influential is this elite that one song written for Beyoncé, “Halo,” ended up being used by Kelly Clarkson (“Already Gone”) before the duplication was noticed… and both became hits!

The process of writing cookie-cutter songs, unsurprisingly, relies heavily on high technology:

Eriksen worked “the box”—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

For a contrast, last week also saw the publication of a New York Times feature on Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, a major figure in the rock’n’roll that was displaced by this resurgence of the Top 40s hit machine.

White sounds like a post-industrial romantic who is knee-deep into the resurgence of vinyl. His record company’s slogan is that “Your Turntable’s not Dead”:

“It’s a really beautiful process,” White said. At the labeling station, an employee handed him a pressing of an old Robert Johnson LP that was being rereleased, and he weighed it in his hand. “That’s killer,” he said. “It’s not as heavy as mine, though. I’ve got the real one.” White calls LPs “the pinnacle of musical expression.” “I was talking to Robert Altman before he died,” he said, “and I asked him about an interview where he said that he would never switch to videotape, that he would always stay in film. He said: ‘I know what that is. It has a negative. It has a positive. With videotape or digital, I have no idea what’s going on.’ That’s how I feel about vinyl. The left wall is the left channel, the right wall is the right channel, and you’re just dragging that rock through the groove. Watching it spin, you get a real mechanical sense of music being reproduced. I think there’s a romance to that.”

Later on, the author of the piece describes White’s radically retro style of song production:

White thinks of computer programs like Pro Tools as “cheating.” He records only in analog, never digital, and edits his tape with a razor blade. “It’s sort of like I can’t be proud of it unless I know we overcame some kind of struggle,” he said. “The funny thing is, even musicians and producers, my peers, don’t care. Like, ‘Wow, that’s great, Jack.’ Big deal.”It’s easy to overlook amid the stylistic trappings, but White is a virtuoso — possibly the greatest guitarist of his generation. His best songs, like “Seven Nation Army,” are firmly rooted in the American folk vernacular, yet catchy and durable enough to be chanted in sports arenas worldwide. That he does it with such self-imposed constraints — for instance, his favorite guitar in the White Stripes was made of plastic and came from Montgomery Ward — makes it all the more impressive.

I will not attempt to drive a ten-ton truck through this stylistic difference or to construct some facile analogy about highbrow hipster retro and mass-market, tech-driven commercialism. I am perhaps a snob, but not at least in musical terms. My tastes are pretty Catholic insofar as pop is concerned. A peek at my iPod reveals a catalogue that ranges from the artsiness of a Tom Waits to the morose dirges of an Iron & Wine to the sugar-coated superficiality of an Abba. Obviously, someone like White, who says his three spiritual dads are “his biological father, God and Bob Dylan” will be closer to my heart. But I downloaded several of the songs mentioned in the New Yorker piece by Rihanna and Nicki Minaj. While not my cup of tea, I can see the attraction. These artists are obviously the direct descendants of the Motown sound that was organized under very similar lines, with manufactured pop groups who didn’t write their own music. This artificial and commercial system nonetheless produced gems such as "You Can't Hurry Love," "Tracks of My Tears," and “Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch.”

Both White and the Norwegian producer duo known as “Stargate” belong to elites that produce popular music for the masses. The only difference is that Stargate’s masses are way more massive. But there is also a second difference. White's musical experiments are much less dependent upon the hit machine. Some of his albums can flop and others will do better, but he still has the independence and freedom to fail. The Stargate duo are much more dependent upon the fickle tastes of the mass public. Their flavor of music can fall out of fashion at the drop of a hat. In fact, it already happened to them once, back in the United Kingdom: "In 2004, things suddenly slowed down for Stargate in the U.K. 'People got fed up with Stargate’s sound—things change fast in the music business—and there was no work,' Eriksen told me."

The New Yorker feature of the Top 40 wizards ends with a poignant moment when Adele's sweep of the Grammys is discussed:

But with the mention of Adele the air pressure in the control room seemed to change. Stargate knew well from their experience in London how quickly fads come and go in the pop business; a massive smash such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” with its heartfelt lyrics, accompanied by simple piano arpeggios—no arpeggiator required—could be the beginning of the end of urban pop.

The two styles of production inhabit the same moment in time. I would also suggest that White’s last-man-standing posture of cutting physical strands of tape with a knife might not be simply the anachronism of an eccentric weirdo. Think more along the lines of Apple versus Google or locavorism versus molecular gastronomy. A Luddite retro hipster living in Tennessee like White might just be the flip side of the two Norwegians hunched over their seventeen-inch screens in midtown Manhattan. In a post-historicist society, the line between retro and futurist blurs as the past recurs over and over, and our visions of the future age faster than our furniture. They are simply two different ways of inserting yourself into the present and the future.

But, still, I am beginning to wonder whether, in some fields, technological savvy and sophistication might begin to be correlated with replaceability, and perhaps even lower wages and lower profit margins. Instead of a sine qua non for avoiding obsolescence, technological sophistication might be the tax you constantly have to pay to maintain your status as a cog in a mass-production machine. A cog that is progressively paid less and whose output becomes increasingly commoditized.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Machine-Translated Investment Research and the Spanish Debt Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:47:00 +0000

I am not going to make the case that Spain is or isn’t on the brink. My opinion on investment in Spanish public debt is worth exactly a hill of beans in this crazy world, as well it should be. But as a language specialist, I would like to point out a few ways in which this crisis is based on very bad translations that, in practice, could lead to very flawed investment theses.

Spain might or might not default on its debt, I don’t know. I just know that when markets were saying that Spanish debt was almost as good as German debt they were mispricing it. Now, when they say it is worse than Zimbabwean debt, they might be mispricing it again. Focusing a lot on emotional images of pandemonium of Greeks or Spaniards throwing paving stones around is gripping, emotional, and targeted toward the more primitive parts of our brains that are easily moved by that sort of thing.

Let me provide an example. The general strike in Spain a couple of weeks ago was widely followed. The unions are obviously strong and command a lot of following from even people who are not unionized. But the country is far from close to chaos. The violent incidents in Barcelona were pretty isolated. The strike in Madrid was a very tranquil day, with the streets mostly occupied by German tourists in town to support Hannover against Atlético.

Madrid looks pretty normal and boring, as the weather warms up and springtime is in the air. It is full of tourists doing touristy things and, in the evening, reveling drunks doing drunky things. On Wednesday I was coming back from lunch and I bumped into the vice president of the Spanish government, Soraya Sáenz, chatting with some colleagues outside a restaurant. There was not a bodyguard in sight.

This is hardly the picture of a country on the verge of the largest sovereign debt defaults in history and massive street battles. Of course, my personal observations are purely anecdotal and worthless as investment intelligence. The bottom line is that the bonfires in Plaza de Catalunya are equally devoid of value for a real investor in a rational market.

Except we know people aren’t rational and markets aren’t always efficient. And right now there are a lot of people fueling the fires of instability to profit on credit default swap bets. And even some of the less emotional gasoline being poured on the fire--which masquerades as cold, analytical number-crunching--is based on appallingly poor translations. Take the example of a PowerPoint presentation that has circulated heavily through the Internet over the past week. It was drawn up by an investment company called Carmel Asset Management.

The .ppt document was loudly endorsed by ZeroHedge, a very popular “investment” blog that has a distinctly nihilistic attitude very typical of the trader mentality: the world is insane; politicians always lie; markets are rigged by Goldman Sachs; there is a huge conspiracy against the little investor; Armageddon is just around the corner; the same guys who killed Kennedy control Apple stock; you have to have a bomb shelter in your backyard; and you basically have to be a paranoid sociopath to make an honest buck in the markets. The main author’s handle is “Tyler Durden,” the co-protagonist of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. Look at his Twitter account. It features a picture of Brad Pitt with a bare midriff playing Durden. The odds are, of course, that the author is a pale, overweight bald dude called Louie who trades stocks from his living room in “Joysie”. The thing is that, in addition to very analytical blurbs on the problems facing the Spanish economy, ZeroHedge also loves to show images of rioting (viz. “The Spanish RiotCam Has Arrived”). And also of making the parallels between any sort of mayhem in the streets of Madrid or Barcelona with the scenes at Syntagma Square in Athens.

The .ppt makes the bear case for Spain, the absolute worst-case scenario in which the country simply defaults on its debt. It points out factors that are undeniable: high unemployment (23%); unfinished housing crash (perhaps only half over); spendthrift regional governments; and shaky cajas overexposed to the housing bubble.

One of the key claims in the presentation is that Spanish debt is actually much higher than many realize. The consensus is that Spanish debt is equivalent to 60% of GDP, which is manageable (sixty percent is actually lower than the debt-to-GDP ratio of “serious” countries like Germany [83%], the U.S. [100%], France [87%], the United Kingdom [81%], and Japan [233%]).

“Aha,” reply the ZeroHedgers and Carmels, “but that 60% is deceptive, because it does not include the debt owed by the comunidades autónomas, the regional governments.” The PPT tells us that: “Spain’s national debt is 50% greater than the headline numbers. Spain’s debt-to-GDP balloons from 60% to 90% of GDP with regional and other debts (Slide 2).” When you factor that in, the figure, they claim, is 90%, which is a lot scarier.

Well, it turns out that this is not actually true. The lower consensus 60% figure is accurate, because it includes both the money owed by the central government and all the goodies on which regional authorities splurged throughout the boom of the past decade. Listen to Luis Garicano, a leading Spanish economist, responding in comments on his blog from a reader who is freaking out after visiting ZeroHedge:

Zero HEdge se hace un pequeno lio. La deuda de las CCAA esta incluida YA en el total de la deuda publica. Otra cosa es la deuda bancaria con aval del estado y la “otra deuda avalada”

Which I translate as follows:

ZeroHedge is tying himself into knots. The debt owed by the autonomous regions is ALREADY included in the public debt total. Banking debt guaranteed by the government and “other guaranteed debt” is another issue.

So, who you gonna call? The economics professor who does this for a living (and, incidentally, is not a Spain bull), or the anonymous blogger who masquerades as the Nietzschean, psychopathic alter-ego of an alienated insomniac suffering from multiple personality disorder? I have my answer, but then again I’m an elitist, as some sock puppets mutter under their breath when they read this blog.

And then you start to probe the detail of the .ppt document, and the picture shifts a little more. A Wall Street Journal blog carried a very useful portrait of Carmel, the company making the bearish Spain call. First of all, Carmel manages $50 million. That makes it a very, very tiny player. Second of all, Jonathan Carmel, the head of the asset manager, reveals that he writes his own investment research and that his Spanish is very poor:

While Mr. Carmel has yet to visit Spain for his research, he says he has spent much of the past year combing through as many numbers as he can dig up, speaking with as many people as he can find and reading as much as he can with what he calls “my pretty bad Spanish.” “I’ve been using a lot of Google Translate,” he confesses.

So, basically, we have a manager from a tiny boutique firm who has never visited Spain and who supplements mediocre language skills with Google Translate. And this is the research that moves the gigantic bond market that decides the rates that govern the lives of millions of people. I am not saying that any of this is evil. After all, Carmel’s PowerPoint very transparently reveals his firm’s interest in the matter:

We began buying Spain CDS in Q4 2011 because the country has significant structural problems within its economy, a debt load that is higher than the headline number, and a banking system with unrealized losses (Slide no. 10)

This means he is betting on a Spanish default (probably using massive leverage). Spain doesn’t have to actually go broke for him to make money. The CDSs only have to go up and his bet will pay off (if he cashes out in time):

Should the Spanish crisis flare up in 2012 as we expect, we can generate a 300% return on the annual premium (Slide no. 10)

Simply put, some of the financial mayhem is being fed by second-rate research based on machine translation. Markets are increasingly fueled by this ever-greater mass of information that is easily available. According to the data worshippers, this will only end up being to our benefit. And language automation will only make the world an even better place by providing approximate translations of this data. But that is a stupid illusion. Seeing grown men spout that silliness is the equivalent of watching those creepy middle-aged men at comic book conventions who still play with Star Wars figures. Because in investment, "close-enough" translation is actually "wrong" translation.

In financial markets, it is increasingly evident that greater information is not providing more rational markets that are better fed with accurate information. On the contrary, what we have is more noise. Noise like the one currently being generated by ZeroHedge and Carmel for their own selfish ends using low quality translations (anonymous blogs don’t have to disclose their positions in the markets, by the way). The Google translations used by Carmel are not capable of providing the fine points of financial data that can be better conveyed by a human translation.

As such, the reams of Spanish-language data translated into mediocre English and consumed by Carmel’s analysts are the equivalent of the stock-trading algorithms that are producing more and more frequent flash crashes.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

The Prosperous Post-Editor: Interesting Testimony on PE Rates

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 11:18:00 +0000

If you grew up with holes in ya zapatos

You'd be celebrating the minute you was havin' dough

The following message was posted this week to an old item from a few months back on the ProZ-TAUS debate, in which the Holy Trinity of L10N Automation was convened to recite the by now stale message that translators will not be replaced by computers (only degraded). It is an interesting testimony because it is a counter to my thesis that post-editing will be accompanied by lower absolute rates (i.e., both per word and per day, month, and year). Check it:

Hi guys,

I realize this comment is really late, but speaking of PE payment, I just finished a 2 year PE project that actually put some decent bucks in my coffers and was so incredibly easy for someone with my experience and education in translation. (10 yrs. experience, MA translation).

At the volume I could do on it (paid at discounted word rate), I earned about 100 bucks per hour. However, I agreed to it only because of the major concession on quality. This stuff was all internal and would not be published, so they didn't care about the quality. They asked for "understandable" and "good enough" quality.

"Good enough" and "understandable" are subjective. I often found many of the garbled, yet decipherable, sentences simply "good enough." ;-)

No complaints from them.

However, I have had agencies approach me with projects that need to be publishing quality--and they want a discount for MT--my response is usually to look at the MT version, find it unusable and needing of complete re-translation and offer them 2 options:

1) inflated word rate by 50% if they insist on use of the MT.

2) regular rate if they want it translated from scratch.

Needless to say, I don't normally get chosen for these kinds of ridiculous proposals. ;-)

MT can be used well on the type of project I described, which I just finished doing. It all depends on the content and the purpose of the target text.

I personally think that MT has no place in publishing quality work--not yet at least. No matter how many strides they make in MT, they are a loooooooooooong way off from replacing humans.

Whether PE becomes a viable market strategy will be up to us translators. I did it for a bunch of easy, repetitive internal garbage that is of interest only to the C suits of a particular company--and made very decent dough. (I also did not lose my style--I can still translate at proper quality too.)

If it becomes the standard for publishing quality work, well, I'll be looking for another profession.

Sorry for the anonymous post, I don't want this client to make a guess at who I am if they happen to stumble on this.

Great blog!

I don’t doubt this testimony is genuine. However, I doubt that $100-per-hour of post-editing is in the cards for many individual translators in the future. Two observations are in order:

1.- The market for translations is very inefficient. I won’t go into the theoretical meaning of economic inefficiency, but I will only point out a symptom of that inefficiency. Any translator can confirm this: Rates offered vary insanely from one job offer to another, by factors of 100% or more. Not even websites such as ProZ have managed to constrain the spectrum of translation prices. I already hear some ninny raising his hand to say: “Of course rates vary. That is true of any market. Rates will vary according to language pair, experience, difficulty, specialization, volume, regularity, etc., etc.” As usual, this is a truism that papers over the fact that a variation of one or two orders of magnitude is way too large for a rational market.

2.- In an inefficient market, there will be huge outliers. Our anonymous poster is just such an outlier. My bet is that, in the future, competition among cheap translation providers will tend to reduce the occurrence of such outliers. This $100-per-hour rate is an inefficiency that will be gradually scraped away as one or two or three low quality players become slightly more dominant in their niche. (Incidentally, the fact that the author of the message maintains his contribution anonymous confirms this. His suspicion is that if his clients discovered that the same tweaking of MT output can be obtained at a much, much lower price, they would turn to another provider… because the service is a commodity.)

I agree with the anonymous author that there is not a place for MT in material for publication… yet. There would be, perhaps, if the MT people got serious about quality metrics. That way, when I came into the office in the morning, with my Starbucks venti and munching on a croissant, and read 57% accuracy, I would simply eject the refuse into hyperspace and greedily keep the 95% matches. But since some MT specialists have claimed on this very blog that any Google Translate match is equivalent to a 95% Trados match, you will forgive me if I remain a skeptic.

I wish I were wrong. If I am, and I end up as a post-editor making $100 an hour, I’ll be right there with you, oh anonymous contributor, filling up jacuzzis with Cristal, raising the roof, and lighting Cuban cigars with one-hundred-euro bills while Jay-Z’s “99 Problems” blares in the background. I will gladly sell my soul, sans sales tax, if any such there is to sell.

But I truly, truly doubt that this will happen. The impetus behind cheap translation is precisely to lower quality expectations and make the entire process as cheap as possible. You might think that this is irrational, but the business model simply depends on volume, which is why these companies are trying to convince Fortune 500 corporations to translate Facebook status updates.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Anonymous Sock Puppet Steps Up to Defend ALS: The Ethics of Cheap Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 12:47:00 +0000

I’m not a big fan of anonymity in general. I take it for granted that you are not really putting yourself in any danger by expressing your opinions about something as wimpy as translation. And if you feel that expressing an opinion might endanger your career, you should simply abstain from expressing that opinion. You shouldn’t have it both ways, because the quality of someone’s opinion is related to the degree to which you are willing to stand by it with your real name. Moreover, I feel that, unless you are the employee of a company that might retaliate against you, you are being cowardly. There is clearly a link between anonymity and troll-like behavior, a major problem in current Internet culture.

Allow me to provide an example. I received the following anonymous comment this week to a post on Gavin Wheeldon, the chief executive officer of Applied Language Solutions, a company currently embroiled in controversy because of its inept provision of judicial interpreters to the courts in England and Wales (the grammar and spelling have not been corrected):

As with everyone else, I'm equally appalled by the way in which this contract has been handled to ALS - who are clearly incapable of managing it and who are trying to pay peanuts to qualified staff.

I disagree however with the vindictive way in which Gavin has been portrayed. The issue is with the MOJ who have awarded this contract to a company incapable of managing. MOJ have clearly sanctioned a huge drop in payments to our interpreters who do a fantastic job - assuming they had done their research (which maybe they hadn't) then their cost analysis would clearly dictate the drop that the interpreters would need to take in order for the arrangement to be viable. Why is there such an attack on the small guy? He's running a business - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whom however work fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won a lucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling off such an important service.

You will get no where personnally attacking Gary Wheeldon - you need to aim your criticisms at those who count and make the decisions.

There are several things to observe about this message right off the bat, but I would like to highlight a key sentence. The author of the message (remember: cowering behind a wall of anonymity) says that no animus should be directed at ALS boss Gavin Wheeldon because he is just one more entrepreneur that was lucky enough to snag a nice little contract for his company:

He's running a business - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whom however work fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won a lucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling off such an important service.

In a nutshell, that is the problem with the Cheap Translation model. Nowadays, an agency is often just a sales team (of monolingual English speakers) and a stable of project managers (usually located in Eastern Europe). The sales people hook the bait (at any price), reel in the customer, and then turn the whole project over to the PMs, who look up a random name on the database and then try to arm wrestle the lowest possible rate from the bumbling “vendor.”

The ALS debacle is the same dubious model multiplied by a factor of 3,000. The author of the anonymous message seems to imply that, even though ALS didn’t actually have a parallel database of qualified interpreters, it was fully entitled to go out and snag the mega-contract from the Ministry of Justice. Here is where I differ from the contributor's complacent view of McLocalization.

An ethical businessperson would have told the MoJ that undertaking a responsibility as large as providing thousands of interpreters would take years. Moreover, to cut people’s wages in half overnight was not realistic. The system should have been phased in over a period of at least five years, if not more.

The decision to jump at the MoJ contract at any cost and under any circumstance clearly was a case of a tiny, ravenous amoeba trying to bite off more than it could possibly chew in a million years (in this case, a morsel of food approximately the size of a killer whale).

My point is that this was both bad business and bad ethics. However, people like Mr. Wheeldon, who first get the contract and then worry about how to meet the service (by his own admission to the Times), are totally devoid of ethics. E-T-H-I-C-S. Business is not just about closing the deal. It is also about being qualified to provide the best possible service for a reasonable rate. The prevalence of people such as Mr. Wheeldon (and their chummy tolerance by people such as my sock puppet) is symptomatic of what is wrong with the l10n industry: shady businesspeople who think translation is a commodity service that simply consists in matching a project from a faceless online customer to an online translator profile cribbed from ProZ.com. I am guessing the author of the message is the head of such a pirate outfit, perhaps looking to intercept an unsuspecting container ship somewhere close to the Horn of Africa.

True, the MoJ’s flying civil servants do not come in for a drubbing from me, but on the other hand they do not parade around on reality shows to flaunt their raging sociopathic tendencies. Yes, the civil servants should have done more due diligence. Simply auditing ALS’s database of interpreters and doing a dry run of the system in one or two regions would perhaps have alerted them to the feasibility of doing all of this. So, in that sense, they are equally responsible for this mess. Perhaps they did so due to the pressure from their political masters. When I hear the comments from the entity called “Crispin Blunt” about the whole mess, it becomes quite apparent that there was acute pressure from the Cabinet to make a transparently awful decision due to the urgency of making budget cuts.

Yes, Mr. Wheeldon is not the only culprit in this mess, but the moral instincts he reveals in the media are a major factor in this entire tragic catastrophe. And the reigning professional standards among the many “thousands of agencies” cited by the anonymous contributor, who see nothing wrong with Wheeldon’s modus operandi, should be a matter for concern.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Is Any Translation Better than no Translation?

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 12:26:00 +0000

It is if you’re the Russian Mafia, perhaps, and you need to send a scam letter to millions of people in different languages. Or if you market under-the-counter Viagra. Or if you are the widow of an African dictator who was executed by a firing squad and you need someone abroad to set up a wire transfer. However, if your business model is even marginally dependent on brand image, you should think twice about going down the road of cheap translation providers.

The Low Quality Translation movement’s slogan that “any translation is better than no translation” is tantamount to claiming that if you can’t afford house paint, you might as well smear dog poop on your walls.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

Quality is Dead, Except in My Backyard

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 17:12:00 +0000

"Could it be possible?! This old saint in the forest

has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"

A young mommy is reading a book to her little daughter. Children’s books are filled with illustrations and words in big, big fonts. They also use simple, short words. Typos stand out that much more. She comes to a page in which the book depicts a sheep and has the word “sheep” written in big tall letters. Except the word is misspelled: SHEIP. She goes online to a social media site to post a picture of the offending book and, implicitly, comment on how standards have fallen and “what is the world coming to?” etc.

Okay, I’m a forty-year-old man who has no children. At this age, you notice that the lack of children introduces a major wedge between your world view and that of other people who do have children. They have this wary, self-righteous attitude about the world, as if it is full of dangers and bad, bad stuff that is lurking behind every bush to turn their precious little babies’ brains into mush. Moreover, being a first-time mommy for some women becomes such an integral part of their identity that they have to insert the fact in the prologue of every sentence. (By the second or third child, I’ve also noticed, the babies start to begin to be shunted to a spot farther and farther back in their sentences.)

Anyway, the cri de coeur about the mangled sheep led to a discussion about the meaning of typos in general. I said something along the lines of not understanding the fetish about proper spelling and grammar. My view is that, beyond a certain point at which we have to follow its rules, it has a lot to do with a slightly pathetic petit-bourgeois flaunting of cultural capital (I did not actually say it this way, I only implied it tactfully). To me, it sounds like a cheap way of saying: “I went to college, but not to study anything useful like biology or building bridges, but to do angry, post-feminist deconstructions of The Scarlet Letter (conclusion: it is patriarchal) and To the Lighthouse (also patriarchal, albeit in a more indirect way). And after that, I got married and had a gaggle of babies.”

We live in such a relativistic world that there is no way to get a rise out of anyone by saying anything offensive anymore. You can make jokes about the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Sai Baba, or any other religious leader with a funny hat, but not a peep ensues. You can satirize anyone’s political ideology, whether on the left or the right, and no one challenges you.

But beware of the passions you can unleash if you have the temerity--nay, the uncouthness--to express the opinion that proper grammar and spelling are perhaps not the ideal indicators of intelligence!

Snap! Oh, no he didn’t!

This mommy adopted a very “mommy” tone with me (although I am probably ten years older than she is). The tone subliminally meant: “I am a mommy! My job is to make the world safe for my daughter. Irresponsible, childless miscreants like you do not understand this sacred duty.” She suggested that following these rules can be compared to “hygiene” and that they are “the reflection of a beautiful mind.” To which I responded that beauty is more than following rules and that, as far as hygiene goes, there is a difference between washing your hands before supper and compulsively scrubbing your hands 78 times a day every time you think some random crazy thought.

Except I know this woman is also an l10n entrepreneur who is very much in tune with the faddish notions pouring out of Silicon Valley about how Low Quality is the future. Which created a certain cognitive dissonance for me. So I tried to gently steer the conversation in that direction: “I’m curious. What do you think of the theory that quality doesn’t matter and that the ‘TEP model’ in translation is obsolete?”

You could literally see the light bulb going on inside her head: “Ohhhh! Right!” (Facepalm!)

Immediately, her tone changed. In a flash, she went from mommy-ish to very corporate-y and jargony. It was like watching a metamorphosis, from Mommie Dearest ranting about wire hangers to the lady from the friendly folks at Omnitouch. She wrote: “I like it. It is a model conceived to make many expensive copies from an initial model. When that is the case, it is the best.”

Which means… uhhhh? (My brain hurts!) I must have missed that l10n seminar. I was probably dawdling with the croissants and free coffee, or reading a printed book, or doing some other unproductive idiocy.

The thing is that, by this point, I was already mentally writing this blog post. I was all in.

She continued: “However, if you give priority to agility (software, tweets) over other things, you make different conclusions. I’m not dogmatic.”

Boom! Gotcha. So I went in for the kill. I turned the conversation around 360 degrees back to the exact point where it began, with the bloody, mangled sheip-sheep: “But maybe the editor of your daughter’s book isn’t dogmatic either and just has different criteria about which texts require quality control.”

Check and mate.

Again: Boom! Which I’m sort of proud of, because, like George Costanza, the perfect witty riposte usually only comes to me hours after I need it.

I wish I could relate the rest of the conversation, but here it abruptly ended. My interlocutor declined to continue this fascinating philosophical exchange.

So her silence opens the door for me to complete the dialogue in my head. In there, the silence says: “Quality is dead, oh future post-editor, but if you dare show my child a misspelled sheep or a machine-translated children’s book, I will tear out your eyeballs like a lioness defending her cub!”

Which sounds to me a lot like some Tea Party nutcase saying: “Take your government hands off my Medicare! Not in my backyard! NIMBY! NIMBY!”

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

The Single Woman Hotness Phone App: Jaron Lanier and Super Sad True Love Story

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 10:38:00 +0000

I have a long review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are not a Gadget in the works. For those not in the know, he is a pioneer of virtual reality who now works as a consultant for Microsoft. The piece should provide a lot of background to some of my crazy rants. In the meantime, Lanier continually makes public appearances that always yield a good quote or two for the tech-savvy Luddite. This is from a talk last week at the SXSW festival, the same event, incidentally, in which homeless people were hired as wireless hotspots. The following quote provides a glimpse into how revolutionary the second wave of social media will be:

One of the problems is that if you say advertising is the only official business plan for open information, you’re inviting everything to turn into bullshit. You know, over time. It’s just a fact. What I’ve noticed with Silicon Valley start-ups is that there is this ideal time after they start when they have good information. At first, they’re just too small. They don’t have enough good information. And then they get flooded with bullshit and then their value goes down. Like, three or four years after something starts, then there’s good information. A year or more later, it’s all crap. That’s just the way it is. I’ve seen that in Google search results. Since I work with Microsoft, I shouldn’t… but in a way, it’s true.

They get gamed. It’s what happens. The thing is, uhm. Uhhh, God! It’s weird with network effects! The validity of the information doesn’t matter so much as lock-in. I’ll give you an example of this. I’m on this committee at UC Berkeley where we evaluate the business plans of graduate students in engineering. Because we want them to be entrepreneurs and show up with their start-up at "South By," right? A couple of years ago, we had these guys show up and they said: “We have this great idea for a start-up! And here’s how it works. We’re going to have a mobile app where a guy is in a bar. He sees all these attractive, unattached women and he’s going to enter all this information for his friends, so that they can come in and find these girls.” And I’m like: “Is there even the slightest chance, EVER, that this thing will have any good data on it? Will anyone ever do this?” And they looked at me and said: “No, of course not! This whole thing is based on hope. We’re just going to sell liquor ads. We don’t expect there to be good data ever. It’s all based on fantasy.” They got an A-plus.

So the thing is these business plans don’t depend on real information. And that’s a problem for society.

One of the advantages of making information be real and grown-up and consequential, which means there’s money behind it and people are making a living and that someone is responsible for it, is that it will become less junky.

The fascinating thing is that the mobile app where you sit and get information about the degree of hotness of the women sitting at the bar evokes Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. In the proximate future imagined by Shteyngart's comic novel, people's mobile phones immediately rank everyone else on the basis of physical attraction, credit rating, and money in savings account. So immediately when you walk into a bar, for example, your smartphone tells you that you are the fifth hottest male with the thirteenth best credit rating and fourteenth insofar as money in the bank is concerned.

Now notice that I am not saying that Lanier's example means "Oh my God! Shteyngart's dystopian future is coming true." Don't be stupid. You're better than that and that's why you read this blog. The reality is worse than the bad future where we are all reduced to vulgar hotness and credit ratings. In Shteyngart's future (circa 2020), the data on which these ratings are based is of a high quality. In our real near future (i.e., the one suggested by Lanier's example), you will have the information that at O'Neill's Pub in central Madrid there is a group of three unaccompanied female sevens and two eights, but this information will have been uploaded by the bar owner, a liquor company or who knows who the hell else. It will be junk information, like the junk we currently get on Facebook and Twitter.

At least in Shteyngart's nightmare, the data we use to discriminate against each other is accurate.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

ALS’s Gavin Wheeldon: A Case Study in Cheap Translation

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 11:55:00 +0000

Bialystock: Step 1: We find the worst play ever written.

Step 2: We hire the worst director in town.

Step 3: We raise two million dollars. ... One for me, one for you.

There's a lot of little old ladies out there!

Step 4: We hire the worst actors in

New York and open on Broadway and before you can say

Step 5: We close on Broadway, take our two million, and go to Rio.

—The Producers (2005)

The tribulations of Applied Language Solutions (ALS) are everywhere in the blogosphere these days. It remains to be seen whether the company will hold on to its monopoly of court interpreting services in England and Wales despite its dismal performance to date (the catastrophe is discussed here at length).

However, allow me to take a step back, because ALS CEO Gavin Wheeldon’s overexposure to the British media provides a cornucopia of material to conduct a brief case study of cheap translation in flagrante delicto, as it were. Watching Wheeldon’s TV performances on Dragons' Den and The Secret Millionaire, you literally see the yucky pig lips being inserted into the paste processed by the sausage machines. Wheeldon as a businessman (and a moral specimen) is truly riveting, albeit in sort of the same way that Hannibal Lecter is fascinating as a gourmet.

1.- There is no Revenue from Free Translation (!)

The following exchange is from his appearance in the BBC’s Dragons' Den. The format is as follows: five independent and separate private equity investors hear pitches from entrepreneurs and decide in front of the camera whether they will invest in the businesses. The ten-minute clip is a fascinating snapshot of the cheap translation sector in the early twenty-first century. Among many other issues, it is indicative of how machine translation currently has a grip on investors’ minds, as well as the way in which savvy shysters exploit it to the hilt for hype value (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble), despite the absence of any real substance.

Watch how the Wizard of Oz instantly turns into the shabby man behind the curtain (in three, two, one...):

Dragon 1 (Richard Farleigh): You do two things. One on the Web and the other one is actually live translation…
Wheeldon (interrupting): It’s human. The one on the Web, it’s machine translation. It does it instantly. It does it on the fly. The one on the Web, it’s about 70% accurate. It’s just a gimmick. It’s a good tool. People use it. It attracts visitors. But, obviously, that’s just a driver…
Farleigh: Okay. How is your revenue split between these two activities?
Wheeldon: There is no revenue from free translation. It’s all professional translation.
Farleigh: So all your 3.2 [million]…
Wheeldon: It’s all human translation. Professional translation.

Did you catch that? It is so pristine and simple that you almost expect it to come from the mouth of a Zen master. “There is no revenue from free translation.” What!? Listen to that, world: NO REVENUE FROM FREE TRANSLATION!

So there it is: Free translation does not provide revenue. The simplicity of this tautology is so beautiful, so absolutely beautiful, it brings the slightest little tear to the eye, like a twelve-year-old watching the closing scenes of E.T.

Can you imagine that? It’s hard to make money from free stuff! We should frame this phrase and hang it above the desk of every Cheap Translation CEO across the world.

I can imagine Henry Ford going: “You know, we’ve noticed that giving away Model-Ts tends to hurt our bottom line.” Or Warren Buffett writing to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders to say: “Well, it turns out that Project Free Hamburger was not the money machine we hoped.”

2.- There is No Profit from Cheap Translation

Wheeldon cites £3.2 million in revenue. When prompted for a profit figure, he vaguely estimates £400,000 for the year. He adds that his request of £250,000 for 4% of the shares is based on a P/E (price/earnings) ratio of 15. However, the second Dragon, Theo Paphitis, finds some clash between this figure and his own due diligence. He calls Wheeldon on it. The budding l10n entrepreneur replies that the 15 P/E for a £6.25 million valuation is based on “net profit.” Now, I am not an accountant, but net profit could (and usually does) mean almost anything. And, in this case, it means even less than that. After some prompting, it turns out that the slippery Mr. Wheeldon means “profit including [i.e., before] tax,” which, if anything, should actually be called “gross profit.” Listen to the investor schooling the weasely presenter like a stern schoolmaster:

Paphitis (Dragon 2): P/Es are calculated after the deduction of tax.
Wheeldon: Okay, well, I’ve learned something…

You have to hand it to Wheeldon. Caught red-handed in a transparent bit of obfuscation, he doesn’t even flinch. At most, he only seems slightly deflated. Paphitis, smelling weakness, presses on: the real P/E for a 4% equity stake costing £250,000 based on profits of £300,000 is not 15, but a whopping 21 to 22 times earnings (which in technical financial terms is “super-duper high” for a company outside the tech sector). Wheeldon accepts the analysis meekly, but offers an explanation for his creative accounting (viz. ignorance):

Paphitis: Do you expect me to feel a little bit uncomfortable?
Wheeldon (smiling): Once again, I’m learning here, Theo. In terms of a…
Paphitis (irritated): This not for learning! This is not a lesson!
Wheeldon (sheepishly): It certainly seems that way…
Paphitis: You come and ask me to invest £250,000?! And you ask me to teach you at the same time?!

The investor’s rebuke is harsh enough that it wipes the smile from Wheeldon’s face. The narrator sums it up: The valuation cited by Wheeldon is based on projected earnings (i.e., not actually in the bag yet) and it included taxes (i.e., money investors will never see).

Now, none of this is outrageous, but note that Wheeldon has been caught in the space of three minutes in several worrisome fabrications. You might argue that the professional investors pictured on Dragons' Den do this for a living, but is it at all possible that Mr. Wheeldon’s creativity with the truth played a role in securing the contract from the Ministry of Justice? I have my own opinion. I leave it to you to draw your own.

To lay this out as simply as possible, imagine that you have £250,000 in the bank. You can either place it in UK government gilts at 5% interest or, alternatively, you can invest it in the budding business of McTranslations Inc. in exchange for a 4% equity stake.

If you invest the quarter-million pounds in the British government bonds (the risk-free rate), within one year, you will have earned 12,500 pounds as interest.

If however, you take that chunk of change and sink it into the H.M.S. ~~McLocalization~~ ~~Titanic~~ Applied Language Solutions, at the end of the year you have a claim on 4% of the profits, which the chief executive officer “estimates” at £300,000.

Do the math. That is £12,000. That is 500 pounds less than the laziest, safest, most unimaginative thing you can do with your money, aside from leaving it to rot in a savings account at a negative real interest rate. The British Government has never defaulted on a loan since it started asking for money centuries ago. How does that compare to a company founded nine years ago in some dude’s bedroom in Manchester? Is it more or less dependable as an investment? Once again, I leave it to you to arrive at the answer.

The thing is that private equity guys such as the Dragons only become interested in businesses that make sexier returns—on the order of at least 10% a year or more.

Translation, sadly, does not fit that bill (at least the way it is done by shady entrepreneurs). Sure, cheap translation is enough for sleazy characters to make some moolah and fund a lavish lifestyle, but at the expense of generating a lot more revenue than you would need to if you provided quality at heftier margins. Wheeldon raises the long-term idea of floating on the stock market within five years for £60 million. Another Dragon shoots this down out of hand and cites again the company’s dismal balance sheet. Cheap low-quality translation has not passed the smell test. “As a risk/reward ratio for me, it doesn’t stack up,” says one.

Nonetheless, Wheeldon does get a tentative offer from Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, of half the money (£125,000) for more than double the equity stake (9%) he sought. Which is one way of saying: “You, sir, are a fine purveyor of bollocks, but reality is far less rosy.”

In conclusion, the Dragons liked him as a salesman, but they were turned off both by the sector and the valuation, so they turned him down. Cheap translation strikes out.

3.- A New Hope: Capita Steps In

Okay, so that is that. The thing is that, only three months ago, the Financial Times reported that a private equity fund called Capita stepped in to buy the whole of ALS for £7.5 million. So the Cheap Translation Theorist might say: “Aha! Six and a quarter million pounds for ALS’s paltry revenue was not so crazy after all! Gavin Wheeldon secured one and a quarter million pounds more than he asked the Dragons for!”

However, two things have to be taken into account. First of all, the Dragons' Den clip was filmed several years ago, so you have to discount the erosive impact of inflation. Secondly, the private equity fund jumped in only after ALS secured the mega-juicy Ministry of Justice contract that has raised all the Sturm und Drang. This MoJ contract is reportedly worth £300 million over several (undisclosed) years, or £42 million a year, depending upon the source. So the details of how that breaks down revenue- and profit-wise totally skew the assessment of Wheeldon’s pie-in-the-sky valuation. The Capita buyout was a bet that ALS would execute successfully on a recurrent contract with a good government client, pure and simple. Moreover, the MoJ would represent more than 90% of the company’s revenue for many years to come. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. Of course, that was if and when ALS executed efficiently on the contract, which is currently in doubt.

4.- Epilogue: What Is the Deal With the Cheap Translation/Sleazy Salesmanship Correlation?

The alpha and omega of the entire ALS debacle is the man himself, Gavin Wheeldon. His personality comes across forcefully in the Dragons' Den clip: smarmily charming, slightly sleazy, quick on his feet, evasive, and not overly analytical. It is easy to imagine him courting civil servants and cabinet ministers desperate to make budget cuts with ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky promises about 60% efficiencies. Sadly, these exchanges were not filmed. However, a simple Google check might have given the ministry's staff some pause.

Last week I visited Wheeldon’s Wikipedia page. After reading it, I assumed it had been vandalized, given the nationwide firestorm in the UK. But after checking the footnotes and hyperlinks, I realized that, OMG, those were actually things he said to journalists! Those are actual quotes from his mother!

The first pearl is from a Times profile entitled “How I Made It”. Wheeldon tells the newspaper how he secured his first fat contract:

I was ringing up and pretending I was this huge translation company when really it was just me in the back bedroom with a phone and PC. I won the contract and then thought: oh my God, how on earth do I deliver this?

Is there any chance that this is the modus operandi used to secure the mega-million-pound contract from the British government? Who knows? For me, in the mouth of the chief of a tiny company that is awarded responsibility for providing thousands of interpreters to the entire legal system of a large country, this sounds a lot like someone saying: “Mr. Excrement, may I introduce you to Mr. Fan?”

Sound harsh? Listen to his mother’s description of him as a child during an interview for his appearance in The Secret Millionaire: “My nickname for Gavin was our small Arthur Daley, my dad always said if he didn’t end up behind bars he’d end up making a fortune!”

Who was Arthur Daley, you ask? Check Wikipedia. He was a character in a 1970s British TV show who is described as follows:

Arthur Daley, a socially ambitious but highly unscrupulous importer-exporter, wholesaler, used-car salesman, and anything else from which there was money to be made whether inside the law or not.

The entry goes on to note that “the name Arthur Daley has become synonymous with a dishonest salesman or small time crook.”

Jesus Christ…

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Ray Kurzweil Was Right! Humans and Machines Are Merging!

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Fri, 16 Mar 2012 15:02:00 +0000

This is the future predicted by our tech visionaries! The Singularity is just around the corner!

Company Turns Homeless People into Wi-Fi Hotspots in Texas

(Substitute "translator" for "homeless person" and "post-editor" for "wireless hotspot" and you have the dream dreamed by the Common Sense Advisory.)

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International.

CVs, Translation Databases, and Online Privacy

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:08:00 +0000

A very hard-working and experienced colleague discovered today that her very lengthy and distinguished CV had been copied lock, stock, and barrel by one of the little worms that populate the glorious online localization world. She took it pretty hard. She is very upset. I understand how she feels. It is like a violation of your privacy. Of your professional identity.

I had a similar experience a few years back. Out of the blue, I received this haughty message from some paper pusher in the European Central Bank telling me they were sorry to report that they would not consider me for something or other. I was a little peeved to be rejected for a position I didn’t even apply for. Which is a little weird and irrational, I know. Why should I give a flying flip that I was rejected for a position I didn’t even need or apply for?

The thing is, at those points, your lizard brain kicks in. After all, there is enough rejection in the world: social, sexual, professional, artistic… Who the heck needs unsolicited rejection? I mean really! Every single struggling actor says the same thing. “The hard part is the rejection.” Even successful actors get rejected more often than they are hired.

So I took it out on the snooty central bank drone (the attitude of some in-house financial translators, especially in northern Europe, is enough to raise your blood pressure…). I’m ashamed to say that I made insinuations about legal action just to get mine back. The thing is that I scared that poor, stupid woman into checking with the bank’s legal department to see whether there was a basis for action (of course, I had no intention of suing anybody). A few days later, a lawyer from the ECB got in touch with me to say that I had no basis for action because I had posted my CV on an online database. By then, the irritation I felt toward the original drone had subsided. But now the cause for embarrassment was double: the first was that I had scared the willies out of the original woman; the second one was that the lawyer was right. How can I complain if I uploaded my professional identity online? I basically gave CV thieves every single iota of information they needed to invade my privacy.

So, yes, there are all sorts of scumbags on the Internet. But what steps have you taken to protect not just your identity but the essentials of your personal biography? A few practical suggestions (believe me, I realize there is precious little of that in this blog):

1.- Consider password-protected pdfs for your online CVs.

2.- Do not publish personal information such as birth dates and addresses on your online profiles that are also used for verification of bank accounts (for people from Spanish-speaking countries, be very stingy with the use of your mother’s maiden name, which is used in other parts of the world for ID verification; a double-barreled last name is an easy way to impress people who don’t speak Spanish, but dangerous).

3.- Publish only a summarized CV. Maybe you can add a note that you will send a more detailed CV upon request.

4.- Give serious thought to Kevin Lossner’s frequent advice to shy away from ProZ.com. More successful translators have a modest online presence. There is a reason for that (and not just generational).

5.- Rethink in general your attitude toward an online presence. Become more sophisticated in the way you let it all hang out online.

6.- Do not swallow the current dogma about social media. It is neither as game-changing nor as indispensable for freelance professionals or businesses as the current wave of propaganda claims. Social media is basically cheap entertainment. Tweeting is not marketing, just as “Angry Birds” is not mental exercise.

7.- My personal little (infantile) rebellion against the algorithm: systematically lie on online databases and surveys that ask you for your information for free.

8.- Experiment with privacy and social media abstinence.

I have personally decided to heed Kevin’s frequent admonitions and not renew my ProZ membership this year when renewal time comes around. I will also erase my data from the site (although I suspect that ProZ’s terms of service are now like those of Facebook and they have a right to greedily hoard my personal information until the Sun collapses upon itself). ProZ.com is now for all intents and purposes mainly a price comparison tool that reduces thousands of people to a single per-word rate. And, secondly, it is also a comparison database for information thieves. As in so many online social websites, YOU are the product. On ProZ.com, you are fishing, gutting, icing, packaging, shipping, and exhibiting yourself on a fishmonger’s counter so that the mass of shady online middlemen and agencies can peruse you more easily. With the amazing downside that ProZ isn’t even free.

Once again, as occurs in almost every one of my blog posts, we have to return to Jaron Lanier and You Are not a Gadget. We have to abandon the childish, naïve notion that we can live our lives publicly and online in the same way that we live our non-digital lives. Access to a database of thousands of freelancers is a double-edged sword, as I wrote in Whenever I Hear Agency Owners Griping About Translators…

We have to grow up and become more sophisticated in the way we use the Internet (and the way in which we let the Internet use us). We must rethink the way in which we take our personalities and upload them to a database for the easier consumption of sleazy advertisers and crappy agencies. We must think twice before we jump into ProZ.com and make it easier for Low Quality Translation companies to reduce us all to the lowest common denominator.

We have to grow up, period. The dogmas about online connectivity bringing forth a new world are nothing more than the post-modern incarnation of simplistic, medieval beliefs about the end of the world.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

“Another Fine Mess”: The Applied Language Solutions Debacle

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:00:00 +0000

The whole Applied Language Solutions (ALS) catastrophe reminds me of a Simpsons episode in which Homer is put in charge of handling the response to a nuclear meltdown. Inevitably, everything goes south immediately. While scrambling desperately for a solution, Homer grabs the manual, suddenly realizes he doesn’t understand the first thing about nuclear physics, and slowly begins to grasp how desperate his situation is. He finally exclaims in exasperation: “Who would have thought a nuclear reactor could be so complicated?” You can sort of imagine ALS CEO Gavin Wheeldon crying in his office while he wonders where he went wrong.

In a nutshell, the British Ministry of Justice (MoJ) decided to assign responsibility for finding interpreters for all courts in England and Wales to this single company. Previously, every individual court sourced its own linguists via a national register of vetted interpreters.

The problem is that the company that won the contract, Applied Language Solutions, was totally unprepared for the changeover. The new deal imposed by the ministry included a sharp reduction in the per hour rate earned by interpreters, from £30 to a sliding rate of £22-£16. Furthermore, compensation for the time spent traveling and other costs incurred were severely slashed. All in all, an already difficult task which was woefully underpaid was made completely unattractive with one stroke of a bureaucratic pen.

The thing is that the system collapsed almost immediately. Many interpreters simply decided to boycott the new system in protest against the pay cut. Hearings were suspended because ALS failed to fill many slots. Lawyers and judges complained about missed deadlines and the level of qualification of the people supplied by ALS. The overall perception is one of generalized chaos up and down the green and pleasant land.

These are some of the lessons to be drawn from the affair:

A massive contract was dumped on a tiny, inexperienced company incapable of providing the service. It is quite evident that, in this case the need to make hasty cuts to the ministry's budget led to some very, very bad decisions. First of all, news reports indicate that Gavin Wheeldon’s ALS only made £7 million in revenue last year. The Ministry of Justice contract is worth £45 million per annum, i.e.,almost seven times as much. ALS, therefore, is sort of a tiny mosquito that suddenly swallowed two pints of blood and is about to pop like some grisly water balloon.

Computer- and network-driven efficiencies were promised which turned out to be non-existent. The idea was that, by not having to source their own interpreters, individual courts would save time and money. However, while it makes sense hat court staff would spend less time on this task, it is not evident that this represented a monetary cost for taxpayers. The ALS case thus seems to me to constitute a pretty obvious case of the failure of computerized centralization to generate the magic efficiencies promised by some databases. Of course, simple incompetence on the part of ALS and general lack of preparation on all parts could also be a factor here. But, in any case, the MoJ has no one to blame but itself. The idea that the amount of inefficiency in the old system was such that the simple introduction of a database and call center would allow ALS to slash interpreter rates from £30 to £16 is so disingenuous as to be either the product of sheer stupidity or the tacit hope that by outsourcing the service, the Ministry would be able to ride out the outrage from the interpreters. (Considering the reports that Tory MP Crispin Blunt, the undersecretary for prisons and youth justice, has stated that interpreters were grossly overpaid, stupidity seems to be jockeying for first place here.)

A very complex ecosystem that worked fine was clumsily replaced with a hastily prepared and crude database that focused solely on costs at the expense of qualifications. The old system sounds like a well-functioning market that was simply obliterated by the ham-fisted decision to abolish it and move to a single, monopolistic operator (ironic for the party of free-market liberalism). Moreover, ALS, as a monopolist was entitled to draw rents, in the form of profits, from a system that previously worked fine without that monopoly. Seriously, how twisted is that? The deal is more reminiscent of Bourbon France in the 18^th century than free-market Britain in the 21st.

Court interpreting is a difficult profession that probably was already underpaid. By seeking aggressive pay cuts of 30% or 40%, the MoJ and ALS probably pushed the per-hour compensation below what most qualified professionals were willing to accept for a demanding and sometimes depressing job. To use the language of free-market economics, the market cleared at £30. Anything below that point probably triggered not so much a strike or a walkout but a repricing by the market of other freelance activities. Suddenly, maybe taking on 10,000 or 12,000 more words a month from an agency did not sound so bad, considering you don’t have to pay for fuel and you can stay home on a rainy day. (Look up the term "opportunity costs," Crispin, you half-witted product of centuries of inbreeding.) Thirty quid might just convince you to drag your weary bones 100 kilometers to help out at a deposition. Twenty-two quid…? Maybe not so much.

The sleaze factor in the translation sector should not be overlooked. Relative newcomers like ALS that are only focused on revenue should immediately raise concern. Mr. Wheeldon is an attractive, sharp man who can probably make a convincing presentation, but due diligence seems to have been sadly missing. The company repeatedly bleats that it was created nine years ago in the founder’s bedroom. While Wheeldon’s entrepreneurial spirit should be commended, it is a little childish to be impressed by that sort of “origin story.” Exhibit A: There are reports that one Czech interpreter registered her pet rabbit in the company’s database. Jajo the Rabbit was apparently welcomed with open arms into the ALS database. (Jajo, by the by, has a Twitter account.)

All in all, the ALS catastrophe is a perfect storm created by a spectacular collision between the urgent need among developed governments to cut costs willy nilly, on one hand, and the onrushing train of the “anything goes,” “quality bad, four legs good” translation philosophy that is currently in vogue, on the other. Mr. Wheeldon of ALS thinks, like so many cutting-edge l10n entrepreneurs, that translation is a commodity, so the interpreting slot at a murder inquiry can be filled by any warm body at half price. In this case, since a rabbit is warm blooded, he fit the bill quite nicely. Perhaps in a few years technology will have evolved so much that reptiles will also fit the bill. Who knows? The world is changing so quickly...

Is this McLocalization's Waterloo? Yeah, right. You bet. My prediction is to expect more debacles like this in the future.

In the Simpsons episode referenced above, Homer finally averts the meltdown by playing “eeny, meeny, miny, moe.” Perhaps the time is approaching when Mr. Wheeldon will have to resort to this solution. The problem is that solving this mess is way more complicated than shutting down a nuclear reactor.

Further reading

To read more on the ALS issue, visit any of the following links:

The best round-up, from Channel Four news.

Jill Sommer’s comment on the issue.

Another story on Jajo the Rabbit.

A Guardian piece on the growing brouhaha, from February.

Lawyers begin to decry the collapse of the interpreter system.

A Guardian piece from earlier this month that chronicles the growing boycott.

Tory Cabinet figures begin to distance themselves from ALS.

The view from one judge.

Mr. Wheeldon puts on a brave face in the middle of the storm.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Press Release: Lionbridge Technologies Announces Innovative Freelance Rate Structure

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:16:00 +0000

As part of its mission to bring better service at every-day low prices, Boston-based Lionbridge Technologies (NASDAQ:LIOX) has unveiled an innovative pricing structure designed to align the remuneration of its freelance workforce with the company’s long-term interests. As of April 1, 2012, the company will now tie the rates it pays to its freelancers with the performance of its shares on the stock market. The announcement was made by Didier Hèlin, the company’s VP for vendor management, from an undisclosed location using capital letters cut out by hand from the headlines of Sunday’s Boston Globe which were then glued onto a blank piece of company stationery and mailed to several major news outlets.

For illustrative purposes, a freelancer who earned $0.12 per word of Spanish to English translation in 2007 will now earn $0.06 per word from now on, based on the hair-raising 50% plunge in the company’s market capitalization over the past five years. “We feel it is a very transparent way of linking up our dismal performance as a listed company with the ever-decreasing rates we pay freelancer vendors,” stated chief executive officer Rory Cowan after being tracked down using a court-ordered ankle monitor. “Why should our schmuck shareholders be the only victims of my incompetent leadership?”

The company’s stock—currently rated unanimously by Wall Street analysts as “a worm-ridden dog that should be taken out behind a shed and put out of its rabies-infested misery”—closed yesterday at a price deemed by one amused onlooker as “as close to a penny stock as you can come without actually costing less than one dollar.”

When asked if that meant freelancers would profit if the company’s stock defies the private projections of Wall Street analysts and actually rises, Lionbridge PR VP Mitzy Wallerstein laughed hysterically and blurted out: “Are you kidding?! If we ever pull out of this death spiral, OF COURSE we are going to change this policy. For a freelancer, working with us is tails you lose, heads you lose even worse.”

When reached for comment, self-proclaimed translation visionary and part-time trainspotter Renato Beninatto described the announcement as an “intriguing development” and the potential “first step in the most incredible corporate turnaround story since Ford Motors rolled out the Edsel, Coca-Cola unveiled New Coke, Napoleon Bonaparte returned from Elba, and Hitler invaded Russia.”

Disclaimer: None of this is actually true. This post was written purely for satirical purposes. LIOX CEO Rory Cowan does not wear an ankle monitor, as far as this blog is aware.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Cheap Translation Will not Save a Single Starving Somali Child

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 21:54:00 +0000

Have you come here to play Jesus

To the lepers in your head?

--U2, "One"

There is basically just one way of cutting costs in translation. That is because the central cost in any translation process is human labor.

Do I need to spell it out? The only way to cheapen translation is to slash the rates you pay translators with the cruel zest of Ming the Merciless. That’s it. That’s the only game in town. Go downtown. Force your freelancers into urban poverty.

So, basically, if you have ANY sort of business plan that involves making translation cheaper, you are not Henry Ford or Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or the guy who invented Post-Its. You’re just another low-rent hack who wants to profit from the reserve army of the unemployed.

I will say it one more time: Cheap translation will not save a single Somali child from starving. If you want to save Somali children, go to bleeping Somalia with a 50-pound bag of rice. DO NOT fly your fat ass on a jumbo jet to a localization conference 1,500 miles away from home to give the same hacky speech you’ve given in Madrid, Los Angeles, Santiago de Chile, Tokyo, and London.

Cheap translation is only an incredibly unimaginative way for some second-rate “entrepreneur” to turn a quick buck while providing bad service. And, as the ALS debacle proves, it is often a recipe for disaster rather than a vehicle for generating value. Dressing it up under the guise of some sort of dubious technological advance does not make it any better. Or you any less culpable.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Seth Godin, Sturgeon’s Law, and the Content Tsunami

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 11:32:00 +0000

(Homer hits zombie on the head with a book.)

Lisa: Dad! Wait! Stop! That’s the last book in the world!

(They look at the cover. It is the memoirs of Arsenio Hall.)

Lisa (changing her mind): Ahh… knock yourself out…

(Homer crushes the zombie’s skull with the book.)

—The Simpsons, “Tree House of Horror XX”

Seth Godin writes in a blog post that, as a teenager, he read all 250 science-fiction books in his high school library (“From Asimov to Zelany”). He reflects that reading the entire corpus of a single genre is impossible nowadays because of (say it with me) the Content Tsunami:

As the deluge of information grows and choices continue to widen (there's no way I could even attempt to cover science fiction from scratch today, for example), it's easy to forget the benefits of acquiring this sort of (mostly) complete understanding in a field.

Now, Godin is well worth reading, but he is a Web 2.0 hyper and a naïve technology millennialist if ever there was one. I have news for you, Seth. Even in the 1970s, reading 250 sci-fi books barely scratched the surface of the genre.

Godin’s comment is typical of how techies erroneously view the current changes in media: “People used to read before, but the book is dying; we are being buried under a mountain of written material broadcast by the Web; everything is changing quickly; some day soon we will have Google implants in our frontal cortex; the keyboard will be relegated to the dustbin of history.” In this specific example, the belief is that, once upon a time—usually thirty or twenty or forty years ago (fill in the blank)—there was much less reading material and one solitary reader could obtain a first-hand view of all the literature in any given field.

That is just not the case. And it hasn’t been the case for a very long (looooong) time. Nowhere is this truer than in the realm of literature. Any reader in 1850 who wanted to read all the novels published in Great Britain up to then would have needed three or four lifetimes to do so. This challenge has always daunted literary criticism. You see, even the most erudite critic has not read the whole of even first-line literary classics. Many nineteenth and twentieth century specialists don’t have that much regard for the classics of previous centuries. I have personally ascertained that Old English specialists at leading universities do not have a lot of time to read the latest 800-page brick from Jonathan Franzen or Haruki Murakami. The humanities—like science—are becoming increasingly compartmentalized. That is undeniable (and, incidentally, also one of the factors behind The Great Stagnation). However, my point is more wide-ranging than that.

My point is that even people specialized in relatively narrow periods (say, the British novel from the 1850s to 1914) are still facing a Content Tsunami. The Victorian scholar who wants to read all of the stuff vomited by 19th century printing presses will still find a mountain to climb. Even the Victorian specialist really only bases her sweeping theses on a discreet “sampling” of all the stuff produced in the Age of the Novel. The Content Tsunami has always been with us. That is why gifted readers such as Harold Bloom or Umberto Eco tower above the rest of us (not just because of their acumen but also for their sheer ability to digest mountains of books). And even they can sometimes look a little amateurish when straying out of their fields of expertise. Personally, I’m not a big fan of Bloom, but he obviously has read everything he discusses. However, when he adds the odd Latin American author to his indigestible books on the Western Canon, it is easy to see how uncomfortable he is when outside of his comfort zone. I mean, he probably read Vargas Llosa, but the level of enthusiasm simply is not there.

As an undergraduate assistant, I helped the philosophy department index purchases made for the library. It included many (many) tomes of Harvard University Press’s Loeb Classical Library. If you thought classical literature only produced Homer, Virgil, the Athenian dramatists and a few fragmentary poets (basically what I was taught in Literature of Latin and Greek Antiquity), boy, were you wrong! Those people in the pre-Christian era didn’t have much papyrus or abundant ink, but they sure had a lot of time on their hands! Reading the whole of what was written just in Western Europe before the fall of Rome or the birth of Charlemagne would take up a good chunk of your life.

Readers have always been tiny little wanderers upon a Himalaya of linguistic output. People who have not studied the humanities are astounded by the current masses of text produced by other human beings, but that sense of awe stretches back much farther (perhaps in oral cultures there was also a Content Tsunami; maybe somewhere there was a hunter-gatherer oppressed by the sheer amount of epic poetry he had to listen to). It is a sign of ignorance to think that this is a new phenomenon. Think about this for a moment: What we actually inherited today from Antiquity is merely a tip of the iceberg of what was actually written. This tip (all the Ancient writing still extant) is all that is left of many hundreds and hundreds of volumes that were lost down the ages in that great chain of transmission (and destruction) from Greece to Rome to early Islamic culture to Medieval Spain, up through the Italian Renaissance and beyond. A lot of stuff was either considered too insignificant or erroneous or blasphemous and was either obliterated or recycled (see: palimpsests). This creates an instance of what economists call “survivor bias.” The time-bound technologist thinks that readers in Antiquity didn’t have to exercise critical faculties in deciding what was worth reading.

The challenges that search engines seek to solve have always been with us. There is even an entirely new discipline, pioneered by literary critic Franco Moretti, that seeks to map out massive corpora of novels statistically in order to run them through computers. The hope is that this will provide insights that are unattainable by individual readers. As Moretti tells it:

''A canon of 200 novels, for instance, sounds very large for 19th-century Britain (and is much larger than the current one), but is still less than 1 per cent of the novels that were actually published: 20,000, 30,000, more, no one really knows -- and close reading won't help here, a novel a day every day of the year would take a century or so.''

Obviously, there is a geometrical progression in the amount of written material. That is undeniable. But that progression (and the accompanying anxiety) has always been with us. To extrapolate from this geometrical progression to make trendy assumptions about business or culture is superficial. Seth Godin might have read 250 sci-fi books as a pimply high-school freshman but, even then, the corpus of fantasy and futurist fiction was far larger than that. Godin only swallowed a tiny sampling, impressive as it may be.

In fact, it was science fiction that gave rise to an indispensable analytical tool for discussing the Content Tsunami: Sturgeon’s Law. When someone remarked that “ninety percent of science fiction is crap,” Sturgeon famously retorted that “using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap.” Brilliant! Sturgeon's quip penetrates to the heart of any discussion about the mountains of text that surround us. It reminds us that Godin is wrong on two counts: 1) he is wrong about the past, in believing that he read most of the science-fiction corpus up to that time; and 2) he is wrong about the present, in believing that the daunting task of managing all the information that flows our way is qualitatively different from what has been the task of the literate person from Parmenides to the present.

The challenge is not in how to “manage” the deluge of “information” that washes all over us. That is a phantom that only exists in the minds of people not trained in the art of critical thinking. The point of education is basically to provide us the skills that guide us through the ocean of sentences produced by fellow human beings. Real value lies in identifying the 10% (or, IMHO, less than 10%) of the Content Tsunami that is worth reading (or translating). Real value lies in helping others discover the margarita in the midst of the refuse produced by the porcos. The belief that this task can be delegated to a search algorithm or a translation engine says more about you than about the real world.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

Machine Translation, "The Shining," and My Crush on a Faceless Canadian Bureaucrat

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Homer: So what do you think, Marge? All I need is a title. I was

thinking along the lines of "No TV and No Beer

Make Homer" something something. Marge: [timid] "Go Crazy"?

Homer: Don't mind if I do!

--The Simpsons, "Treehouse of Horror V"

Let me begin with an impossibly obscure instance of centralbankese. A policy statement is the kind of text that “Low Quality Translation” theorists say is ripe for computerization because it is repetitive. Check out this little quatrain, taken from a recent statement put out by the Bank of Canada:

To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place will be eventually withdrawn, consistent with achieving the 2 per cent inflation target.

After puzzling over this monstrosity for several minutes, I realized that most of the cognitive dissonance for me came from “current material excess supply” (it just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?). Let us run it through Google Translate:

"En la medida en que la expansión continúa y el suministro de material excedente actual en la economía se absorbe poco a poco, algunas de las medidas de estímulo monetario considerable actualmente en vigor con el tiempo se retiró, en consonancia con el logro de la meta de inflación del 2 por ciento."

GoogleT is correct in providing “en la medida en que” (I would have used “en la medida que,” but you have to give some points for Google Translate); the verb tense in "continúa" needs changing to the subjunctive "cointinúe"). All in all, the first snippet of the MT version is OK. But the GoogleT sentence gets more and more garbled after “current excess material supply.” What the phrase means, of course, is “current and significant excess supply.” “Material” here is an adjective (GoogleT guesses incorrectly that here it is a noun). But even if GoogleT had guessed right, it would still have a mountain to climb. The question here is: “excess supply” of what? Is it monetary supply or unused capacity utilization or unsold inventory? Or all of them? My hunch is that it refers to the supply of money, but that is a decision I would have to consult further.

The “Crap Quality” ideologue believes that this messy human element (the undecidability of this hyeroglyph) can be elided in the case of “non-literary” texts. And the solution goes something like what I am about to describe. Imagine, for example, that we take all of the central bank policy statements written since the dawn of time (yes, back even to the times of the Roman Imperial Central Bank) and take all of the translations of those statements and upload them into the Universal Central Bank Policy Statement Translation Engine (the UCBPSTE©). Chop it all up and run it through the algorithm.

Is the translation still deficient? “No problemo,” as Americans say. Just take every single text that has ever been translated since the time of Cain with its original and cram both into the engine. What? Still garbage? Nothing doing. Let’s get large crowds of hamsters to translate all manner of texts to enrich the database. Eventually, given enough data (pant, pant), we will have an answer for our troublesome “current material excess supply.”

I am here to tell you that this is unlikely. That forgets two problems. The first (and lesser one) is that central bank policy statements are willfully obscure. The Canadian bureaucrat who wrote the unfortunate “current material excess supply” is not just a bad writer. He practices to be a bad writer. He will be cranking out impenetrable hieroglyphs until the universe stops expanding and collapses back upon itself and we are all crushed as matter expands further and further to create an infinitely cold, infinitely empty void.

The second (and more important) obstacle is the lack of repetitiveness in something as complex as language and history (two areas not bound by strict rules). The “Crap Quality” people talk about the Content Tsunami, right? That means there should be a large enough (and ever increasing) corpus to solve most translation conundrums. To gauge the scale of the challenge, let us ask ourselves how many times in the history of humanity have the words “current material excess supply” been strung together by a hominid with opposable thumbs. Let’s do a Boolean search on the Internet using quotation marks to get exact hits for the phrase.

Aha! We get 21,000 hits. This bodes pretty well for computer-capturable repetitiveness, since it increases the likelihood that this tough nut of a phrase was translated.

Alas! Our “Crap Quality” theorist will feel a distinct pang of disappointment. And perhaps an extreme terror, not unlike Jack Nicholson’s wife in The Shining as she inspects her hubby’s literary handiwork. Yes, it is as if the Internet has been maniacally scribbling “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again. (Oh, faceless Canadian bureaucrat, I love you!) The 21,000 instances of “current material excess supply” come from the same sentence quoted 21,000 times. The point is (if it needs explanation) that “current material excess supply” is made up of non-problematic components (taken singly); the problem is that when you string them together, they create a unit that is not susceptible to statistical deciphering. The further point (and the objection to “Lower Quality Translation”) is that there are potentially infinite strings like “current material excess supply” out there, unspoken. And they are far more frequent than engineers who have never translated a word in their life think. So a rose is a rose is not a rose.

1. Material - Excess - Supply - Forex-Tribe.com

www.forex-tribe.com/.../material-... - Estados Unidos - Traducir esta página

19 Aug 2011 – ... the statement: To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, ...

[PDF]

The Bank of Canada today announced that it is maintaining its ...

www.pavaomortgages.com/.../... - Traducir esta página

Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary ...

3. Bank of Canada holds key rate at 1% « CREA News

creanews.ca/.../bank-of-canada-holds-key-rate-at... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – The Bank said, “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some ...

4. Release of the Monetary Policy Report - Bank of Canada

www.bankofcanada.ca/.../opening-statement-81/ - Traducir esta página

20 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

5. Mortgage Cents

mortgage-cents.com/.../index5009.html?&conten... - Traducir esta página

"To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary ...

6. Monetary Policy Week in Review - 23 July 2011 - Central Bank News

www.centralbanknews.info/.../monetary-policy-... - Traducir esta página

23 Jul 2011 – Bank of Canada (held interest rate at 1.00%): "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the ...

7. BOC Removes “Eventually” From When To Withdraw Monetary ...

www.dailymarkets.com/.../boc-re... - Estados Unidos - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

8. SEPTEMBER 2011 MARKET UPDATE | The Uniacke Newsletter

www.uniackenewsletter.ca/?p=2523 - Traducir esta página

1 Oct 2011 – According to the Bank of Canada, “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is ...

9. Bank of Canada Holds Overnight Rate At 1%, May 31 2011 | The ...

theinvestmentblog.net/.../bank-of-canada-maintai... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – ... stated that maintaining the overnight rate but warns “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the ...

10.Global Monetary Policy Week in Review - 23 July 2011 (Guest Post ...

www.econmatters.com/.../global-monetary-polic... - Traducir esta página

23 Jul 2011 – Bank of Canada (held interest rate at 1.00%): "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the ...

Siguiente

Page break by AutoPager. Page( 2 ). LoadPages

Resultados de búsqueda

1. Still At 1%

www.mises.ca/posts/blog/still-at-1/ - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

2. Canada | Divestor

divestor.com/category/canada/ - Traducir esta página

To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary ...

3. Chris Sperber : Re/Max Ocean Pacific Realty, Comox : Blog

chris-sperber.com/blog.html - Traducir esta página

20 Jul 2011 – The Bank said, “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some ...

4. No hints when BoC will start tightening | Advisor.ca

www.advisor.ca/.../no-hints-when-boc-will-start-t... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

5. Bank of Canada leaves interest rate unchanged - CityNews

www.citytv.com › Life › Money - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

6. Interest Rates - The Globe and Mail

m.theglobeandmail.com/.../article204102... - Canadá - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

7. Bank of Canada holds rate, sees hike on - Ottawa SUN

m.ottawasun.com/.../bank-of-canada-hold... - Canadá - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

8. BOC Rate Statement Invigorates Loonie — Forex News

www.topforexnews.com/.../boc-rate-statement-in... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

9. Canadian Monetary Policy and Outlook Not Changed – Currency ...

currencythoughts.com/.../canadian-monetary-pol... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – ... and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in ...

10.BoC Leaves Key Rate Untouched at 1.00%

www.canadianmortgagetrends.com/.../boc-leaves... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – ... Pending continued economic expansion and absorption in "the current material excess supply in the economy...some of the considerable ...

Anterior

Siguiente

Page break by AutoPager. Page( 3 ). LoadPages

Resultados de búsqueda

1. July 19, 2011 « PrefBlog

www.prefblog.com/?p=15745 - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, ...

2. TheRecord - Bank says it will raise rates if economy continues to...

www.therecord.com › News › Business - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

3. Bank of Canada warns of rate hikes to come

money.canoe.ca/.../07/20110719-093156.html - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – ``To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

4. Bank of Canada sees hikes on the horizon - Business - CBC News

www.cbc.ca/fp/story/2011/07/19/5124658.html - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

[PDF]

Released: September 2011

images.kw.com/.../09_TMIRE_Sep_CA_2011.p... - Traducir esta página

Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
15 Jul 2011 – the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary policy stimulus currently in place ...

6. CAD Extends Gains After Bank Of Canada Statement » ForexNews.com

www.forexnews.com/.../cad-extends-gains-after-... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

7. Monetary Policy Week In Review - 23 July 2011 | iStockAnalyst.com

www.istockanalyst.com/.../monetary-policy-wee... - Traducir esta página

23 Jul 2011 – Bank of Canada (held interest rate at 1.00%): "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the ...

8. Mortgage Rates Remain the Same!

www.chriskeleher.ca/.../8_Mortgage_Rates_Rem... - Traducir esta página

8 Jun 2011 – "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

9. Bank of Canada Holds Interest Rate at 1.00% - centralbanknews ...

seekingalpha.com/.../196703-bank-of-canada-ho... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – The Bank commented in its statement: "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is ...

10.Canada economy - Pier 16

www.pier16.ca/category/canada-economy/ - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

Anterior

Siguiente

Page break by AutoPager. Page( 4 ). LoadPages

Resultados de búsqueda

1. 2011 July « CREA News

creanews.ca/2011/07/ - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – The Bank said, “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some ...

2. Rates Stay the Same - The Very Best Mortgage Company

www.verybestmortgage.ca/.../Rates_Stay_the_Sa... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, ...

3. July 19 2011 – BoC: Holds Key Interest Rate 1.0%

www.ontariomortgagesuperstore.com/.../j... - Canadá - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the (Canadian) expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of ...

4. Bank of Canada: Key Overnight Interest Rate Left Unchanged ...

banknerd.ca › News - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – ... of Canada explained that we are seeing the Canadian economy expansion continue to the point where the current material excess supply in ...

5. Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate target at 1 per cent

www.wynsumhomes.com/news-events-details.ph... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

[PDF]

BANK OF CANADA

www.desjardins.com/.../ep110531.pdf - Canadá - Traducir esta página

Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
31 May 2011 – the overnight rate at 1 per cent. To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually ...

7. Bank of Canada holds rate steady | Vancouver Sun Blogs

blogs.vancouversun.com/.../bank-of-canada-hol... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

8. Read More... - Top Stories

m.ctv.ca/.../bank-of-canada-interest-rate-announ... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

9. Bank of Canada sets stage for next rate hike | Business | Reuters

ca.reuters.com › Home › News › Business - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

10.BOC Removes "Eventually" from When to Withdraw Monetary Stimulus ...

www.fxstreet.com/fundamental/analysis.../03/ - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

Anterior

Siguiente

Page break by AutoPager. Page( 5 ). LoadPages

Resultados de búsqueda

1. Consumer Prime stays the same at 3% – but for how long ...

blog.markherman.ca/.../consumer-prime-stays-th... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

2. BANK OF CANADA | Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate target ...

www.newswire.ca/en/releases/.../19/c6193.html - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

3. Foreign Exchange Rate Watch | Equity Financial Trust - Part 11

equityfinancialtrust.com/foreign.../foreign.../11 - Traducir esta página

Mr. Carney said the BOC and I quote, “ To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually ...

4. Forex News : Forex News and Commentary by FXDD

forex.fxdd.com/category/forex-news/page/13 - Traducir esta página

To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the considerable monetary ...

5. 13 | August | 2011 | Calgary Real Estate Review

calgaryrealestatereview.com/2011/08/13/ - Canadá - Traducir esta página

13 Aug 2011 – ... and will only occur “to the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed.” ...

6. Valueland Mortgages - Valueland news

www.valueland.ca/.../Bank-of-Canada---No-Cha... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

7. Weekly Forex Market Followup (July 18th - July 22nd 2011)

www.forextraders.com › News - Traducir esta página

22 Jul 2011 – CAD - BOC Rate Statement said, "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is ...

8. Bank of Canada Keeps 1% Policy Rate Saying Increases to Come ...

www.bloomberg.com/.../canada-keeps-benchmar... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg. “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually ...

9. Some relief from gloomy U.S. housing news in June and “knock on ...

www.reedconstructiondata.com/.../some-relief-fr... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – Those comments were as follows: “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is ...

10.Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate target at 1 per cent - Bank ...

www.bankofcanada.ca/.../fad-press-release-2011... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

Anterior

Siguiente

Page break by AutoPager. Page( 6 ). LoadPages

Resultados de búsqueda

1. Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate target at 1 per ... - Verisite

www.verisite.ca/rayparsi/mortgage_news/798 - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

2. Search - Forex Analysis, Currency Forecast, FX Trading Signal ...

www.actionforex.com/index.php?... - Traducir esta página

80 results – That's a far cry from the July statement that had said, "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the ...

3. Bank_of_Canada_holds_key_rate

seaandski.on.ca/.../Bank_of_Canada_holds_key_... - Traducir esta página

19 Jul 2011 – The Bank said, “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some ...

[PDF]

Canadian Mortgage News - Bank of Canada maintains overnight rate ...

archive.canequity.com/.../2011-05-31_B... - Canadá - Traducir esta página

Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
31 May 2011 – extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some ...

5. Rates Stay the Same - VERICO Integra Mortgage Corp.

www.debraowen.com/.../Rates_Stay_the_Same.p... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

6. Housing Analysis: Putting 贰 and 贰 together

housing-analysis.blogspot.com/.../putting-and-to... - Traducir esta página

1 Jun 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

7. Lethbridge Real Estate - Bank of Canada ... - Welcome to Localism

localism.com/blog/.../Lethbridge-Real-Estate-Ban... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, some of the ...

[PDF]

may 11.indd

www.central1.com/publications/.../may%2011.p... - Traducir esta página

Formato de archivo: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Vista rápida
the words “current material excess supply in the economy”, “considerable monetary policy stimulus”, and “reduction would need to be carefully consid- ered”. ...

9. Invade Canada » Blog Archive » Canada Keeps Benchmark Lending Rate ...

invadecanada.us/.../canada-keeps-benchmark-len... - Traducir esta página

31 May 2011 – “To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed, ...

10.Edmonton Real Estate Blog

www.firsthomepros.com/blog/ - Traducir esta página

8 Jul 2011 – "To the extent that the expansion continues and the current material excess supply in the economy is gradually absorbed,” the Bank of Canada ...

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

The Visionary Has a Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:44:00 +0000

perogrullada: f platitude, truism, obvious thing to say.

--Oxford Spanish Dictionary

Prophet III: There shall

in that time be rumours of things going astray. Ehm...and

there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are.

And nobody will really know where lieth those little things

wi...with a sort of raffia work base, that has an attachment. At this

time, a friend shall lose his friend's hammer, and the young

shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers, that

their fathers put there only just the night before, 'bout eight

o'clock.

—Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

The localization visionary awoke suddenly. In a trance, he began to discuss Apple’s latest quarterly results. It came to him as if in a vision that Apple sells a lot of iPads in non-English speaking countries. His brow furrowed. “There has to be some sort of profound insight here,” he muttered to himself. The disciples huddled around him in tense anticipation as the prophet mulled the vision inside his febrile, God-inspired mind. Until, finally, it came to him:

“Successful companies, like Apple, need a sound localization strategy to succeed in the global economy.”

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International, as well as many small-and-medium-sized brokerages and asset management companies operating in Spain. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.

The Content Tsunami Hits the Shores of the Iberian Peninsula

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:21:00 +0000

The amount of content is exploding like the Big Bang, we are told by the intellectual midgets who speak at localization conferences. Really? If the amount of content is expanding exponentially, why are so many people paying peanuts to other people to create more low quality content? Wake up, people. There is no Content Tsunami! There is a Data Deluge, but content is not data. Content is text, which is human-made and meaningful in itself. There is a deluge of economic, astronomical and demographic data, but all of that is meaningless outside of a context. A text, in contrast, is meaningful outside of any context as long as there is another human being left alive to read it. Data. Content. The two things are radically different. The localization guru’s willful ignorance of this distinction is just a dramatic illustration of his lack of intellectual honesty (and his hunger to make a quick buck and get his hands on that trophy third wife).

The need to create mountains of cheap content is real, but it has very little to do with any mythical Content Tsunami. It is more to do with some of the weird and quirky ways in which the Internet is organized. For whatever reason, the Lords of the Cloud (read: “the Googlevi Twins”) have decided that certain arbitrary aspects of a website are indicative of its importance and should therefore be used to determine its position in a Web search. Those features are basically two: amount of textual content and frequency of updating.

And presto, with that simple formula, you have the recipe for a lot of crap content. Moreover, you have an incentive (Milton Friedman, hello!) for creating a lot of crud that—like the aborted demon-spawn of Ragnarok and Sauron—should never have seen the light of day. The Low Quality Translation Movement is simply the localization industry's arm of the Content Tsunami. Its main get-rich-quick scheme is to sell cheap translation as the answer for cheap content and (crucially) trying to suck the entire translation industry into this model of second-quality garbage under the cloak of technological progress. But I preach in vain. I can see Kirti Vashee rolling his eyes and raising his hands in exasperation: "There are even people who deny the existence of a Data Deluge!" Translation: "See!? See!? You see the kind of crap I have to deal with!?"

That is why I am so relentless in going after the l10n hype-meisters who endlessly lecture us about the Content Tsunami. The latest example of this drive to create rivers of meaningless content comes from Spain. A journalist answered an advertisement for creating online content and received an offer you just can’t refuse. It was 0.75 euro cents for writing 800-word pieces. Yes, you read right. Not 0.75 euros per word. No. Less than one euro for 800 words. That is 0.0009375 euro cents per word. Well, in the year that indignados became a worldwide buzzword, the journalist decided to go online to complain about this. Needless to say, the hashtag #gratisnotrabajo (“I don’t work for free”) became a trending topic for a couple of days on Twitter.

Here is my translation of the job ad: “Journalist wanted. Compensation is €0.75 per article, which must contain a minimum of 800 words.”

But wait… there’s more (and this is my favorite part): “Texts will be subject to certain conditions of quality control—spelling, punctuation, semantics and expression.”

I just love that. We are paying less than a ride on the Madrid Metro for 800 words, but your texts will be subject to quality constraints. Seriously, if the objective is to write large amounts of crap content, why don’t we just get computers to do it? Lackuna, maybe there is a fortune in it for you.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.

The Undercover Economist Follows Up My Podcast Suggestion

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 16:56:00 +0000

As you know, my religion is skepticism. I flatter myself that even in front of the pearly gates, I would be withholding judgment up until the moment I am really, really ushered into the eternal hereafter of bliss, seventy-two virgins and all the pepperoni pizza you can eat. I was not educated as a scientist, but I have a healthy admiration for science as a type of controlled skepticism. Now, for the practicing skeptic, there is no better brain fodder than Tim Harford’s More or Less podcast on the BBC. Harford is perhaps best known as the author of the highly recommendable Undercover Economist, one of the pop economy books for general audiences that have become so popular in the past decade and which spawned the column on the Financial Times of the same name. The More or Less program is not directly concerned with economics; rather, it mainly consists of minute analyses of statistical data that generally conclude that most of the figures bandied about in the media and by pundits are pretty much rubbish. (If you are into finding out what drives skeptics to be so caustic about the media in general, I can’t resist plugging Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks).

Now, some weeks ago, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela stated that the fact that he, President Lugo of Paraguay, former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva of Brazil, current President Dilma Roussef of Brazil, and President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina all got cancer was evidence of (wait for it) a secret CIA plot. Although Chávez has accustomed world media to batshit claims, this was outrageous enough to warrant some passing coverage. (A friend of mine joked that maybe Chávez will make his next few appearances covered in aluminum foil to ward off the CIA’s top secret cancer ray). Anyhoo, the incident is indicative of the distortion of reality and reason that is a feature of daily life under the Bolivarian Revolution. A statement that would have previously led people to question the mental health of the head of state is just a weird little footnote to fill up some air time. Another feature of the statement is that it is typical of the extreme paranoia that characterizes the Latin American left: the CIA as an all-powerful, hidden demiurge that controls everything. This creates the same problems that the concept of evil creates for the idea of an omnipotent God. If the U.S. spy agency is all-powerful, how did it allow episodes such as the Mexican Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, Chávez, Morales, Lugo, Juan Domingo Perón, etc., etc., etc.? It reminds me of a line in De Niro’s Good Shepherd, where one character asks why you never place a definite article before CIA, and another one responds: "Do you put the word 'the' before God?" (Back in the fifties, the acronym CIA was not preceded by a definite article, contrary to the case now.)

Therefore, a bunch of aging leftist Latin Americans get cancer and the best hypothesis is that the CIA has a cancer ray. William of Ockham must be rolling in his grave. Not being a statistician, I am unable to work out the probability. So I wrote to Harford and suggested that this claim was right up the alley of the More or Less team. He agreed and devoted the first part of this week’s podcast to the issue. And here it is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/moreorless

$#*! My Localization Guru Says (‘Crowd’ Translation Means Nothing)

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 20:01:00 +0000

Do words mean whatever you want them to? That’s what Humpty Dumpty claims in Through the Looking Glass and it seems that the localization pundits who pop up in every single ~~translation~~l10n conference also believe this. And when called on it, they fall back on half-digested relativistic mumbo-jumbo about sociolinguistics. Who knows? Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps their words can mean anything they want them to. So, instead of listening to a localization pundit, maybe it is more useful (and, BTW, cheaper) to stay home and read the instructions on the back of an aspirin bottle to learn about internationalization of business processes in a multilingual context. Because if words mean anything, the aspirin bottle can tell you how to manage large-scale multilingual projects.

To illustrate this little piece of wisdom, let me tell you a little story (identities have been concealed to protect the guilty):

A l10n guru tweets this:

"Crowd" xl8 of a medieval mss (link)

Like the fair-minded skeptic I am, I click on to the article in question. It is from the Chronicle of Higher Education. A 12th century manuscript was discovered by chance in an American university library. The professor decided to involve her graduate students and a few undergrads in the process of transcribing, describing and translating the text. Here is the description on the project’s homepage:

In January 2011, Professor Marie-Claire Beaulieu and her Medieval Latin students, in collaboration with Alexander May and Christopher Barbour, set out to learn more about the Tisch Miscellany. Each student chose to work on a leaf according to his/her personal interests. As each student progressed in learning to decipher the hand or print of their leaf, interesting and surprising discoveries were made… These discoveries required patience and hard work. Since each leaf is unique in the collection, each student had to get used to a different set of idiosyncrasies such as inconsistent abbreviations, non-standard letter-forms, and scribal errors. Furthermore, working with unedited or unknown texts implies complete self-reliance on the part of the editor. Students had to make educated guesses to resolve abbreviations, decipher difficult hands, or fill lacunae in their leaves without referring to other scholars’ work.

So far, so good. But note this: nary a mention of a “crowd” so far. Incidentally, a lot of academic research is actually done by graduate students. Do you think an academic showman like historian Niall Ferguson actually writes the mega-bricks he publishes under his own name? Translator, please. Ferguson is the Stephen King of academic history. He should really be called “the committee called Niall Ferguson.” Just in the past three years he has regurgitated three 500-plus-page behemoths on Sigmund Warburg and far broader topics, such as why the West dominated the world, not to mention a little tome on the history of world finance (an adulatory biography of Henry Kissinger is due to come out this year). He also flits around the globe teaching everyone why the budget deficit will sink the American Empire, pops up on Bloomberg with alarming frequency to flash his perfect coiffure, AND, in his spare time, hosts documentary miniseries for British television. Again: please. Look in his acknowledgements to see the underpaid Harvard grad students who never see the light of day while they scribble the professor’s latest magnum opus by candlelight. Niall Ferguson himself is an instance of “crowd” scholarship.

But I digress. The author of the Chronicle piece interviews Professor Beaulieu and breathlessly inserts the buzzword: "Do you think such "crowd" translation, in which the participants aren't experts but just students interested in the subject, is the future in your field?" The professor being interviewed pushes back a little, resisting the imposition of the buzzword:

Someone doesn't need to be an absolute expert on a manuscript to translate it. If you give an undergraduate the proper tools, they can do a fantastic job. This is something my colleagues in the sciences have realized for a very long time. Undergraduates frequently work in labs on major projects.

Now notice that the professor says that the future is that undergraduates can work on graduate projects. But that is a far cry from saying that we are going to learn oodles about the Middle Ages once we mobilize a mob of slacked-jawed yokels to pore over books of hours and Carolingian chronicles. No, perhaps those kids aren’t absolute experts, but they do need a smattering of slightly arcane knowledge (uhm, ecclesiastical Latin and paleography) to carry the process through successfully. Let me stress this point: Getting undergraduates who have studied ancient languages and codicology isn’t exactly the same thing as posting digital images of a manuscript on the library’s website and asking every unemployed Joe Schmoe with two semesters of community college to provide his two cents on an 800-year-old text. This is hardly the crowdsourcing Nirvana where you make a cattle call and thousands of amateurs comb over British parliamentarian’s expenses, Wikileaks’s document dumps or Sarah Palin’s emails.

No, this was fifteen handpicked undergrads and grad students who were chosen by the professor to work in a closely supervised environment on a highly technical project. This use of “crowd” is a clear instance of how buzzwords become so omnipresent that they cease to have any meaning at all. They become ethereal fluff. Like oxygen, we never notice it because it is so abundant. If a word means anything, it means nothing. File it under “synergy,” “proactivity” and a thousand other business memes collected by Unsuck It. Perhaps that will teach your mind to drift off in the middle of an l10n conference when you hear this buzzword, because it has the same function as the “ohm” in transcendental meditation: a meaningless incantation designed to set your conscious mind at rest and dull your critical faculties.

Being the skeptical gadfly that I am, I called out the pundit on her acritical retweeting of pablum:

Me: The headline has nothing to do with the text. They are often chosen so they will be RTd by people who don't read the article.
Pundit: I'm happy to let them define "crowd" as they wish for their context -- it's an interesting exercise
Me: Interesting, perhaps, but not very valid from an intellectual standpoint. Meaningless terms beget meaningless thoughts.
Pundit: Most sociolinguists would beg to differ. People get to choose how they use language. That's how it evolves.
Me: Lazy relativism. Only the insane give any meaning they want to words. Or poets. Meaning is defined by rule-based convention.
Pundit: We owe a lot of words to linguistic creativity. Thanks, Shakespeare! The people trump language purism every time.

(A language purist? Me? By the way, if you're reading this and wondering when exactly I decided to kick your ass, it was at "language purist".) In summary, a classic case of terminological sloppiness being concealed behind a tornado of relativistic mumbo-jumbo. I leave you with another, more illustrious, case:

'There's glory for you!'

'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'

'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'

Alice was too much puzzled to say anything; so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. 'They've a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they're the proudest — adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs — however, I can manage the whole lot of them! Impenetrability! That's what I say!'

'Would you tell me please,' said Alice, 'what that means?'

'Now you talk like a reasonable child,' said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. 'I meant by "impenetrability" that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life.'

'That's a great deal to make one word mean,' Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)

The Wisdom/Madness of Crowds: Obama, Hillary, New Hampshire, and Me

noreply@blogger.com (Miguel Llorens M.) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 15:40:00 +0000

One of the “pop economy” ideas now in vogue is the wisdom of crowds. It is often invoked as the theoretical foundation of crowdsourcing. The idea in its current incarnation is not all that new and has some very respectable origins in economic theory. It can go as far back as Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Much of modern economics is fascinated with complex (social, economic, online) systems that function without centralized organization. Capitalism is one such system… up to a point (leaderless movements such as Occupy Wall Street or the Spanish indignados ironically imitate markets in their attempts to create non-hierarchical modes of organization). Milton Friedman’s classic example of the pencil is one point in case: thousands of people spread all over the world collaborate to obtain the wood, graphite and rubber to make the humble pencil, but none of these people know each other and no unified, central authority coordinates their work. There are no über-project managers coordinating all this movement to and fro of goods and services. No, the massive organizations that work together to build a simple pencil do so in the absence of a central planner.

One recent application of this idea is the fad for prediction markets. You can go to InTrade and make a bet on a mesmerizing variety of world events. Do you think Ahmadinejad will be ousted as Iranian president by December 31? You can make that bet there. Do you think Sarah Palin will jump into the Republican race? Ditto. It is a corollary of the efficient markets theory. According to this very influential current of thinking, one single individual cannot know what will happen in the future. But if a market is large enough and liquid enough and fair enough, those markets (which, remember, are the aggregation of choices made by thousands or millions of investors) are powerful indicators of the future. The same principle underlies our interpretation of bond markets: the variation of U.S. Treasury yields can be taken as a proxy for what investors think about the medium-term future of the economy.

I became a punter at InTrade during the 2008 U.S. presidential elections. And I had a really bizarre experience that taught me a lot about the value of the wisdom of crowds.

I was determined just to make small bets (and InTrade does allow you to make tiny, tiny bets because trading commissions are very low). I can’t have wagered more than $30 or $40 in tiny bets of a dollar or so. I don’t remember exactly what my strategy was: whether betting against conventional wisdom or making small bets on unlikely outcomes. But it was something along those lines. Anyway, in January 2008, as primary season (four years ago exactly) was revving up, I probably had ten or so bets on the first few Democratic and Republican primary races. Then I just lost interest. In InTrade. Not the election itself.

First of all, if you recall, Obama won the first primary in Iowa. Against all odds, a black man won in Iowa! I distinctly remember his victory speech. I had heard all the buzz about Obama, but I had never actually seen him speak. Then he got up on that podium. His posture was strange. He didn’t look straight at the audience. He just sort of looked askance at some point in front of him. He wasn’t at all euphoric. He was incredibly calm. He lifted up his hand and said, with that intonation: “They said this day would never come…” I literally felt chills. I had never seen anything like that. I had read about similar speeches. I had seen the tape of Bobby Kennedy speaking on the night Martin Luther King was shot. I have read Lincoln’s speeches. I read a book on Miguel de Unamuno’s “venceréis, pero no convenceréis”. But to actually see a performance like that live was totally different.

Anyway, Obama’s victory in Iowa probably blew all my bets to hell. I just lost interest in the InTrade game and got swept up in the media-driven soap opera of the campaign. The conventional wisdom that the race was Hillary’s to lose immediately shifted after Obama’s upset. Whereas, before Iowa, Hillary only needed to tap dance her way to the nomination, she was now written off. Completely. Obama was crowned as the certain Democratic candidate. Hillary was yesterday’s news. Maybe you don’t remember the events of that amazing week. I remember checking my InTrade markets. Effectively, the market was now giving Obama an above 90% chance of winning in New Hampshire, the second primary, usually held one week after Iowa.

The thing is I got bored with my bets and did not change them. And here is the key detail: I had a bet on Hillary winning in New Hampshire. Not that I actually thought she would win. It was just that I was so uninterested in the game, I left an old bet on. And then something amazing happened. You must remember it. Hillary Clinton made a campaign stop in which she sat down to speak to a group of women in New Hampshire. It was the usual political rhetoric, but the strain was visible. Clinton made remarks about what a mistake the electorate was making by choosing the wrong person (many pundits honestly thought Obama was unelectable). And then someone asked her how she was holding up. And then the most amazing thing happened. Her voice cracked. “It’s hard,” she managed to say and then her eyes welled up. The world watched in wonderment: “Oh my God, she was showing some real emotion! Hillary Clinton is a human being!” I can’t say I ever liked her, but it was a real moment. You felt all that she was feeling. All that work, all those years of being the perfect student, the Stepford wife, the good daughter, all the humiliations that led her to that moment and it was slipping away, right when it was in the palm of her hands. How could you not feel some empathy?

So it was a strange, touching TV moment. Even memorable, perhaps, but Mrs. Clinton was still heading for a crushing defeat. All the polls put her well behind Obama. And then something even more amazing happened. I remember following the CNN coverage via the Internet and simultaneously watching my InTrade positions. The first returns, oddly, had Clinton winning by a small margin. Not a strange thing with small percentages and early returns, as any political junkie can tell you. But the InTrade market moved. It trembled the tiniest little bit. Obama’s odds of winning went down from about 90% to about 85%. Hillary was still cruising for a bruising. And, since my bet on Hillary was still on, I started to make a little money on my one-dollar bet.

I won’t drag it out. As return after return rolled in, Hillary Clinton achieved a lead and maintained it against her younger and flashier opponent. Although I liked Obama, it was delicious watching the position on the InTrade screens. With every new percentage announced by the networks, the Obama and Clinton lines got closer and closer and closer, until it was 50-50, and after 60% of the returns were in, the roles were completely inverted. Hillary Clinton was being given a 95% chance to win New Hampshire and Obama only 5%: with 92% of the votes already counted.

My one-dollar bet was now worth about $14. A one time 1300% gain is nothing to sneeze at. And if you’ve ever had one, it feels a little like winning the World Cup. I know now why some people get hooked on gambling. And why traders can get hooked on what they do. Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t have those genes. I’m not dumb. I recognized what had happened. My indolence in maintaining my old bets had left me exposed to a positive black swan, a nearly impossible chance occurrence which, oddly, happens more often than our misguided theories about statistical probability and the wisdom of crowds would suggest. I simply pocketed my ill-gotten gains and exited the market. Never to return again, nursing an (overall) ten-dollar loss (more or less) and a little bit more (individual) wisdom.

So you ask me if markets are rational? If they can predict the future? If crowds are better at telling the future than an individual?

Well, the InTrade market did predict that Hillary Clinton would win New Hampshire… about two hours after she actually won the state. So there you go.

Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.