"The translators have no bread," said the buyer with some alarm.
"Let them eat MT," the head of Purchasing replied.
O globalised world. That has such translation services in't!The people who brought you Each time we fire a “professional linguist”, our quality improves parts 1, 2 & 3 now offer the world the Cheating Translators platform, which is not a new social media venue for those of us with libido issues, but rather an opportunity represented to identify the use of machine translation in work received.
The result of this stunt analysis of my work is very revealing:
There's a link there on the "printout" to the bozo agency who dreamed this one up. The Germans have a lovely word for this. Unseriös. These idiots promote some sort of "cloud" based scam for slicing and dicing texts to be translated and doling the bits out like bread and soup in a charity kitchen to save us all from the horrors of life as independent translators without a Benevolent Protector.
This is just one of the many carnival sideshows to be enjoyed as the Great
I wish them good fortune and godspeed. All of them. I hope the softened pitch for postediting paradise succeeds alongside the full frontal flashers of purely automated workflow. I hope all the big translation agencies of the world join the party and inhale deeply of whatever solutions get passed with the pipe. Really. I can't imagine a more delightful result for me, my business and those whom I honor and respect in the written language service professions. It would be delightful also to see VoiceMT implemented for the benefit of my interpreting friends.
I dream of a world in which the dirty carpet of service providers is hoovered free from those who don't belong on it as these are sucked safely into the bag to "support" machine processes. Those remaining will then be less distracted as they focus on processes that really matter, waste less time in conversation with fools (thus enabling the difference to be better recognized) and produce results that make a real difference.
It just occurred to me that there is nothing preventing them from manipulating the output of their "MT cheating" thing so as to make the results look bad for even good translators. The coding to do that would be trivial.
ReplyDeleteWell, Riccardo, what really gives me a good laugh is that the "quality" they are trying to sell with their system is just a crappy crowdsourcing scheme with some truly appalling elements. I won't waste the keystrokes to describe it; anyone who truly cares to see the depths at which the bottom dwellers operate is welcome to do the research. I hope they are wildly successful and that all my customers' competitors use their services!
ReplyDeleteKevin, that was a given for me, considering their "every time we fire a linguist..." post.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I'm wondering which slice of the market their aiming at with their page: color-blind kindergarten inmates? The page seems designed by the same people who designed the playgrounds attached to too many McDonalds.
Talking about stupid and redundant tasks .... God bless the people who are promoting this!
ReplyDelete