Sound familiar? Well here’s a little something Younghusband at Coming Anarchy has shared with us:

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Companies have combined the power of humans and computers to simultaneously double the speed of translation and nearly halve its cost. Where each translator once converted 2,500 words a day at a cost of some 25¢ per word, they can now offer 5,000 words a day at around 12¢-15¢ a word.

Marvelous. This translator makes the same amount of money per day, according to this math, but turns out twice as much text in the target language. Efficiency up, global understanding up. But there are problems here. A few quick, unorganized thoughts:

Problem 1: We aren’t worrying about the fact that this means only half as much time can be spent on proper rereading by the translator and editing by a fresh pair of eyes. The hybrid approach of MT to begin and a human to polish the turds that are MT output means there’s an unhappy person in the mix now—at least I don’t think many people are happy about wrestling with clumsily translated text. I can’t stand it when I’m dealing with stuff a human put together, and even that clumsy human translator is leagues ahead of a machine, and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

Problem 2: The editors who deal with machine output are, ideally, bilingual and capable of doing the translation themselves. If something looks truly odd in your target text, going back to the source text to figure out what’s going on is the only way to set things straight. (Well, there’s actually another way: the monolingual editor just makes a wild guess. I didn’t say it was a good way.) In other words, the ideal form of this man-machine mind meld involves taking a translator who used to be crafting his own sentences and making him clean up the ones a computer spits out at him. Job satisfaction in this new world? Heh.

Problem 3: Don DePalma, chief research officer at a translation outfit, notes that companies need to get their information out there in front of customers in their own languages. “When you’re dealing with anything really expensive or that potentially involves a long-term financial decision—like life insurance or stocks—customers prefer to have information in their own language,” he says. But this is precisely the sort of text that needs to be handled by a specialist, and the companies that sell “really expensive” products will be the very last holdouts still using human pros for the entire process. (It would be fun to see someone trying to market life insurance via Google Translate and an editor in Bangalore, though.) It’s fine to trot this out as proof that companies will need to pay more attention to localizing their material for various markets, but it’s a poor example to bring into the “MT is the future” article.

Problem 4: This.

With [human-assisted machine translation] systems, text is fed into a computer program that tackles the first round of word and sentence conversion using statistics, language rules, or matching with past translations. That covers about 90% of the work. A human then steps in to correct mistakes, clarify sentences, and refine the language for the intended audience or market.

Anyone who’s done translation (at least at a level going beyond churning out crap drafts for rock-bottom prices) or editing knows that the 90% figure here is sheer idiocy. Experienced translators don’t tend to work in phases like this (pump out rubbish at blinding speed and then go back to correct spelling and grammar errors and think about tone and style); they have all these tasks in mind as they go through their text, and it’s hard as a result to define percentages for the effort going into each one of them. But I think the thing that makes translating between human languages a steep challenge for computers is the need to “refine the language for the intended audience or market.” Computers can’t recognize context like that. Humans can, and for human translators, keeping that context in mind and crafting a target text that meets the needs of style, readership, and client preference accounts for vastly more than 10% of their effort. I’d suggest flipping this formula around and saying that the computers handle a tenth of the work, not nine times that amount.

Problem 5: “Language translation is far from being mastered by humans, computers, or any mix of the two.” This is just annoying. It reeks of creationists’ “teach the controversy” demands for equal time for unequal worldviews. Using languages to communicate is what humans do. Birds fly. Fish swim. We talk. What mastery there is in the field of translation belongs entirely to people, and articles like this one need to be written from the perspective of how close computers are to reaching that standard.

Anyway. Enough problems. I’m of two minds when it comes to predicting the future of machine translation. On the one hand, I think the human capacity for language is too deep and too broad for machines to ever take it over completely, and even if 90% of clients end up happy with dirt-cheap mediocrity, the 10% of clients still paying for human quality will represent a healthy chunk of a growing language-services pie. So the good translators will still be making money, and it won’t be by massaging the output of a Google data center.

On the other hand, though, if the scientists ever crack this mystery wide open (perhaps by giving up on computers with nothing but 0s and 1s to deal with and creating new machines that function more like a brain) then we’ll get our translating machine. I’ll be out of a job, along with all my translator and interpreter buddies. But of course we’ll have plenty of company in the unemployment lines, since computers with real thinking power will already have taken over more menial tasks like piloting airplanes, writing software, drafting legislation, teaching children . . .

A quick translation of this year’s election poster for Matayoshi Jesus, running once again in Tokyo 1. If I were doing this as a proper translation I would get rid of the repetition and the WALL OF TEXT single paragraph approach, but then you wouldn’t get the full impact of the original, would you?

MATAYOSHI

Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, states that certain people must “slice their bellies open and die.” This seppuku represents the very spirit of the Japanese sense of responsibility. Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, speaks of the attitude that “money is most important; money is everything” and the economy built on belief in the supremacy of profit as the “instigator and source of sin and crime.” This economy brings about war, conflict, terrorism, murder, suicide, industrial accidents, pollution-related disease, poverty, and starvation that kill more than 50,000 people every day in Japan and around the world. Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, is the only one who can protect the lives of these more than 50,000 people who die each day. Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, can accomplish this through his World Economic Community, Japan, and World Economic Community. Therefore, all who would politically interfere with or obstruct the World Economic Community, Japan, and World Economic Community of Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, are the killers of those 50,000 people who die each day. These are the candidates opposing Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, in the Tokyo 1 District in the House of Representatives election, who include Yosano Kaoru, Kaieda Banri, Tomita Naoki, Mac Akasaka, and Tanaka Junko. Therefore, Yosano Kaoru, Kaieda Banri, Tomita Naoki, Mac Akasaka, and the others must slice their bellies open and die. Tanaka Junko, too, must of course slice her belly open and die. This is because it is only meet for those who would kill others to die themselves. Furthermore, their deaths will not mean a final end for them: Matayoshi Jesus, the one true God, will cast them into the fires of Hell. The same goes for all voters who support them. Let all know these facts and heed the stand being taken. Unless they do, there will be no protection for the lives of the Japanese and the rest of humanity. Gain a full understanding at my Website.

World Economic Community Party Chief
Matayoshi Jesus (Mitsuo)
http://www.matayoshi.org/

Some of the maps are Japanese productions, but others were taken (stolen?) from other sources. The maps of Guam, for instance, appear to have come from the US Corps of Engineers and Navy Department, and have Japanese text overlaid on them; many of the maps of Indonesia are Dutch in origin. Fun to browse through, even if you don’t have a pressing research need. (I titled this post “Asia,” but the maps extend to charts of Europe, parts of Africa, and the Pacific rim, too. Lots to choose from.)

(Via The Map Room; link seen on the NBR Japan Forum.)

Expressing a view of Mifune Toshiro’s world in to the plate, and the food he loved the most, to your satisfactory.

Unfortunately, the class doesn’t extend to the English portion of its website. Hence the translation sales angle. Go for a meal, thank the owner for the culinary experience, and mention that you’d like to help brush up the multilingual site so it matches the stature of the man whose name is being borrowed.

(Via @Nictos.)

Today the deal was on a company called EM International, which is about to announce a contract with JC Penney to produce furniture, or something. “It’s trading at $4.00 now. I won’t tell you it will go up to $10.00, but I can say that it will be trading at $6.25 within three or four months,” goes the guy. This is a deal to show me just what ACM can do for me and make me a loyal client.

A quick bit of Googling for EM International + JC Penney turns up this message board discussion in which two people report the very same EMIE/JC Penney story. Long story short, maybe I should have tried to keep the guy on the phone and get more info on the outfit to pass on to the authorities, rather than say “mm hmm, maybe not” and hang up on him.

Anyway, the most important thing to take away from all this is: Vast wealth! I gots me some of it, and they knows about it, yes they does.

This makes its latest overture to the translators among its membership an offensive one. This post gives the gory details, but to summarize, LinkedIn invited translators to participate in a user survey, which kicked off with questions gauging their interest in helping localize the site for other language markets and punched them all in the face with the “how would you like to be compensated?” reply options: a badge to put on your profile, an upgraded account, or just the satisfaction of having helped out. Nothing involving money.

A number of translators immediately filled the “additional comments here” bit at the end of the survey with snide, insulted, and angry comments, to judge from the reactions I saw on Twitter. The fallout for LinkedIn has been a considerable drop in its image in the eyes of translators and booming membership in the “Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses” group hosted right there on the site. (To his credit, LinkedIn representative Nico Posner has been posting in that group’s discussions and trying to explain the company’s move, but the explanations aren’t swaying anyone.)

Why is this? It isn’t as though LinkedIn is the first outfit to try to get a bunch of its content translated for free in this way. The TED Open Translation Project gets the TED conference talks translated and subtitled in a range of languages, all by volunteers. (The site also notes that this project is “generously supported by our sponsor Nokia,” but I guess that generosity doesn’t extend to money for the people doing the work.) Since the TED videos are all released under a Creative Commons license, though, they are free to use, repost, and share with others, so it isn’t as though the TED people are trying to make money off of the labor of the folks producing the translations.

I wrote last May about the way Facebook got its site interface translated into various tongues through the crowdsourcing approach. Here we’re getting closer to the unpleasantness that is a for-profit firm begging for freebies. Two differences, though: First, the Facebook approach used pro translators toward the end of the process, to go over the close-to-final output and make sure it wasn’t still amateurish. (This is admittedly something LinkedIn could be considering.) Second, it fired up a translation application and let any and all comers jump right in and take part, rather than asking experienced translators to do the grunt work without pay. (Which, it should be noted, has not been without problems.)

Which leads me to the biggest mistake that LinkedIn made. The company actually sought out professional translators from among its membership and approached them with this survey. Rather than open the door to college students, who might be interested in the task and have the free time to take it on, or be interested in the potential minor benefit of a “I helped out” badge on their LinkedIn profiles when they try looking for a job through the site one day, the company came to people who can and do charge real money for exactly this sort of job and gave them the survey with no mention of that cold, hard cash. It’s not hard to see why nobody in this group is viewing this as a way to “accelerate their success.”

Anyway. I imagine that LinkedIn will eventually rope some translators-in-training into this job, save money and please the investors, and get localized for a number of new markets. But at the cost of some good will among the language professionals who until this week thought more highly of the site as a place to develop their professional identity online.

Semi-related aside

Chris Salzberg (until March this year one of the authors at Global Voices) gave a presentation in Tokyo recently on social media and translation, in which he pointed out that a group of 240 unpaid Chinese translators translate every article in every issue of the weekly Economist. (Not having attended the talk, I can’t say for sure whether he successfully made the connection between “groups successfully do translation projects on a volunteer basis” and “there is a business model” that his slide seems to suggest.) Chris has an article online at Translation Journal that’s also worth reading if you’re interested in cooperative translation efforts. When you’re talking about purely volunteer work for worthy causes, or unsolicited translations of a magazine that isn’t going to be localized and marketed in a certain country anyway, there are certainly situations where crowdsourced translation plays a valuable role.

Super bonus humor postscript

The About Us page on LinkedIn comes complete with a video whose subtitles you can change to a number of languages, courtesy of whoever produces the things with the tools over at dotSUB. The Japanese subtitles are quite obviously the result of machine translation with minimal human editing, or perhaps a second-year Japanese student with access to Jim Breen’s glossaries. If you read Japanese, by all means check them out; if you can’t, go to a site like Engrish.com and envision the same sort of thing, going the other direction. (I stuck screencaps of the subtitles over here in case you just want the text without the sound and newfangled moving pictures. Clicking the “Video Transcription” bar at the dotSUB page will get you the text data; make sure you select the language you want in the video frame first.)

After spending their years as coordinators for international relations and picking up some translation skills along the way, some soon-to-be JET graduates think about making the move to the language services industry. There are plenty of people out there working as translators, but how did they get that work?

A quick look at the situation might make it seem like a Catch 22: employers are all looking for someone with relevant experience, but you can’t get that without finding an employer to take you on. This might come across particularly in specialized fields like financial or legal translation.

Not all is hopeless, though. There are ways to market yourself more effectively to potential employers, and there are things you can do right now to prepare yourself for the job search when the time comes. The first of these things is fairly obvious:

Get Good

You’ll have an easier time getting a job as a translator if you’re more talented in translation to begin with. There are four tasks you’ll want to pursue during your time as a CIR in this connection:

1. Do jobs. This goes without saying, really. If your CIR assignments involve translation, focus on that work and polish your skills while you produce the texts your employer needs. If you aren’t doing much translation, look around for projects you could propose—a multilingual municipal website, signage for local tourist sites, and so on.
2. Get feedback. This is something that’s not always easy to do, but ideally you want to show your work to native Japanese speakers, who will tell how you’re doing in staying faithful to the source material, and native speakers of your language, who will set you straight when what you write looks like it came from a robot instead of a human author.
3. Network. If you’re involved in an online forum focused on your current job you’re doing this already, to some extent; take part in discussions on translation techniques to focus that networking. (This could be a good way to get the feedback you need, too.) Consider joining groups like JAT or SWET (see the links below), or at least attending their meetings when you can; you don’t need to be a member for that. Go to IJET or an ATA meeting. Industry people you’ve met in person are people who will remember you later when you come looking for a way into the industry.
4. Pay attention. Read plenty of Japanese—to get better at it, but also to get more knowledgeable about what’s being written about. Read plenty in your own language, too. You need to develop an ear for appropriate, persuasive voices in the different fields where you may one day do work of your own.

Get Focused

Most established translators will tell you that the way to success in this business is not to do anything and everything that comes your way, but to specialize in an area you enjoy. (This should also be an area with real demand for translation services. Lots of people like manga, but the population that’s paying real money for translated manga isn’t large enough to support a lot of well-paid translators in that segment. In other words, don’t think of entering a field where your competition is a bunch of college students working for free.)

It can help to think of high-quality, high-paying translation as a donut. In the middle are all those people (I was one) who started off with language skills and not much else: Japanese majors, linguists, aimless bilinguals. On the outside of the donut are all the industries that make up the modern economy. It looks like this:

As the pure linguists develop an interest in some particular field, they learn more about it. The more field-specific knowledge they gain and pair with their language talent, the better they are at translating things related to that field, and the more money they can charge for it. The people on the outside, meanwhile—many high-paid translators fall in this category—begin with a career and experience and gain the language skills as they go on. In the end we all find ourselves in the donut. (Needless to say, we all continue learning on both sides of this equation throughout our careers; nobody starts off with perfect command of two languages, or encyclopedic knowledge of an industry.)

Get a Job

There are freelance and in-house translators, and the former will often claim that they are in the best position: they make more money, they pick their clients, they set their hours. The latter, meanwhile, will point out that they don’t have to do sales, write estimates, bill clients, withhold their own taxes, or pay for their own office space. There are pluses and minuses on both sides.

In the early part of your career, though, the pluses are overwhelmingly on the in-house translation side. It’s possible to start out by marketing your services directly to clients, but it’s far easier to let the company’s sales department do that job, while you focus on becoming a better translator.

The Japan Times carries classified ads on Mondays that usually contain at least a few translation job offers. The paper also has an online ads section, so take a look there, too. The Honyaku, SWET, and JAT mailing lists all see occasional job postings. Lurk on the lists (membership is only required for the last one) and respond to things that interest you.

Joining JAT, as mentioned above, is a way to meet translators; it’s also a way to create your very own member profile on the JAT website. I get a few emails each month asking me to sign up for freelance work or get in touch regarding a project. You can also set up a profile at Honyaku Home, which doesn’t cost a thing.

What about that Catch 22 described earlier? You need experience to get the job to get experience . . . But you can get some of that experience earlier. Freelance work is a way to get your feet wet, and can be done on the side in some cases. (All situations are different, of course; you may want to check with your employer to confirm that this is all right to do.) In addition to the above sites that let you put together an online profile, magazines like 通訳翻訳ジャーナル and websites like スペースアルク contain lots of information on translation agencies. The shotgun approach can work: send your resume to 50 agencies and do the trials that some of them send back. You can apply directly with companies like Simul International, too; see the Simul website for information on doing a trial and registering as a freelancer. Even my employer has an open invitation to people who want to do work for us.

When a company says something like “three years experience required,” it often isn’t a hard requirement. When applying for jobs, don’t forget to add a mental or equivalent to the end of phrases like those, and boldly send your application in just the same. The worst that can happen is a “No thank you” note or phone call, and you won’t have a job with that firm—but that’s exactly where you are right now. Be confident, too. You don’t have years of experience as a full-time translator, but CIR experience shows that you’ve functioned in a Japanese office setting, doing many of the tasks these employers are looking for.

Consider also casting your net a bit wider. You may want a job as a translator, but look at the ads for positions like “in-house editor” and “communications specialist” as well. These are jobs that can involve lots of brushing up other people’s translations, but once you’re on the inside of an organization doing this work you will have a shot at taking it on yourself. And because translation is a writing skill in the target language, producing copy for a company is a good way to get better at all forms of writing, including translation. Even executive secretaries do their fair share of translation work, and can find themselves transferred to divisions doing purer word work later on.

Get Informed

Below are some links to online information that you might find helpful:

Articles About Translation (Language Realm)
A good collection of essays on the language services industry. The “Translation as a Profession” series in particular is worth a look.

Getting Started as a Translator: Gleanings from Honyaku
A collection of posts from Honyaku mailing list threads going back to 1994. Very applicable to the field, even a decade or more later.

Translation as Vocation
A slideshow that accompanied a March 2007 presentation on ways to break into the field of J-E translation.

John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice
Not on translation per se, but it’s a worthwhile read for all people who want to write words for money.

Honyaku
This is a mailing list where translators facing problems in a job ask for help. There’s also occasional discussion of matters peripherally related to dealing with words on pages, so it can be good to lurk and learn. Job offers come down this pipeline from time to time, too.

The Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators
This group holds monthly meetings on topics you may find interesting. The mailing list is free to join for nonmembers; become a member for reduced admission to those meetings and a spot in the SWET directory.

The Japan Association of Translators
This group also holds monthly meetings in Tokyo, as well as other places in Japan and around the world from time to time. The profile you can create here as a member will attract messages from agencies looking to add people to their rosters. JAT organizes the annual IJET conferences (coming up next in Miyazaki in April 2010), which are great to attend. The organization was also crazy enough to elect me director as of May 2009.

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘who’ and the numbers ‘1′, ‘2′ and ‘3′ are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages. What’s more, words like ’squeeze’, ‘guts’, ’stick’, ‘throw’ and ‘dirty’ look like they are heading for history’s dustbin – along with a host of others. . . .

Looking to the future, the less frequently certain words are used, the more likely they are to be replaced. Other simple rules have been uncovered – numerals evolve the slowest, then nouns, then verbs, then adjectives. Conjunctions and prepositions such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘but’ , ‘on’, ‘over’ and ‘against’ evolve the fastest, some as much as 100 times faster than numerals.

(Side note: This press release is really poorly written. Par for the course for language researchers, huh?)

It would be interesting to see similar research done on Japanese. What little I remember of the Heian-era stuff I studied back in the day was very different from what gets spoken in the streets of Tokyo today, although I suppose the numbers have remained relatively constant, and using the same kanji over all those centuries has given the vocabulary an anchor of sorts to keep it more static.

(Via the Tomedes Blog.)