Smartling Can’t Translate its Own Website, but its CEO Questions My Use of English Plurals

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First, some background: Many moons ago, I ran across atweet by a translation company called Smartling proudly announcing the launchof its website in Spanish. I visited said Spanish website and was mildly surprised to discover that it was actually in English (“English” is technical jargon we translationgeeks use for “not in Spanish”). This little vignette came to mind this past weekwhen I detailed my hilarious encounter with a Pinterest employee who insistedthat a mangled blog post in Spanish announcing its crowdsourced translationeffort was written by “professional translators.” When given evidence to thecontrary, she finally confessed that she had used her mother to translate thetext. This rollicking anecdote closed with a two-sentence comparison betweenthis incident and the aforementioned “Case of the Smartling Website that was inSpanish Except that it was in English.” There the incident would have ended,except that Smartling’s CEO—a Yeti with the whitest, most translucent mane Ihave ever spied on an earthly creature a pale, blond chap by the name ofJack Welde—decided to correct me in a jargony comment. His main arguments werethat: 1) his company does not do crowdsourced post-editing and 2) thatcrowdsourcing gives him gigantic brain boners. To which I replied that 1) hiscompany most certainly does do crowdsourced post-editing and 2) crowdsourcedtranslation makes me a sad panda because of the abundant evidence that itprovides subpar results.

This is Jack Welde, struggling to stand
out against the background

This prompted another onslaught by the nowvery frenzied and irate woodland creature. I now reproduce it with snide interstitialremarks written by yours truly (because it’s my blog and I do what I want):

Nope,incorrect again. I'll try to keep my response less "jargon-filled",so you can follow.

Douchy and passive-aggressive, but I’ll letit slide. Go on, Johannes.

1)I've never said we do "post-editing". As a professional translator,you certainly know that the term "post-editing" generally means humanediting over machine translation, which is not what we do. You've chosen"jargon" that you hope will be provocative with your readers, even if100% incorrect.

The following quotes are taken from Smartling’swebsite, Jack-O’-Lantern. You add caveats that machine translation is not asgood as human translation (to which I must parenthetically add: “DUH!”) butthen proceed to gush to your clients that “MTis a great way to see the power of your new language site, and might jump-start your professional or crowdsourced translationeffort. You can choose specific parts of your site / app to be machine translated…MT can be a valid choice for some organizations.” In the previous paragraph,you state that “our platform integrateswith several popular MT services, so you can create a fully SEO compatible sitein minutes.” I don’t know, Jackie-Chan, but that sounds a lot like you’reenabling crowdsourced post-editing to me.

2) Wedidn't fail to translate our own website.

Beg to differ, Jackeroo. A company thatdoes website translations and is not capable of translating its own website canbe accurately described as a “web-translation company that failed to translateits own website.” I think this is irrefutable. However, I suspect you havetaken too many Tony Robbins courses and now you think you can play mind trickson inferior minds. Well, you have forgotten that to play Jedi mind tricks, YOUHAVE TO BE A FLIPPING JEDI!
If you announce to the world that you havepublished the Spanish-language version of your website and it turns out to be inEnglish, you have failed. The Big “F.” FUBAR. Fracasado. Finito. Something inGerman that is bad and starts with “f”.  

Youwere clever enough to snap a screenshot almost a year ago that showed someEnglish on our Spanish home page. We had made some last minute changes to ourEnglish copy, and the Spanish translation was not yet complete. So we had achoice of 1) delaying the launch, 2) using poor quality MT, temporarily, or 3)leaving it in English for the short period of time before it was fullytranslated by the professional translators. We chose to launch, and I would makethe same decision today. It wasn't a big deal, and the translation wascompleted quickly and professionally, and was deployed via or softwareimmediately upon completion. Most importantly, this "incident"certainly has not hurt our growth as a company.

Beg to differ again. Your analysis of yourown brilliant decision making is deceptive, Jack-in-the-Box. My recollection ofthe incident is slightly different: I followed a link to your homepageannouncing a Spanish-language version, I saw what a piece of crap it was, andthen I tweeted a snarky tweet about it, as is my wont. Since all you tech start-upsspend more time monitoring Twitter than actually working on your corecompetencies, one of your employees asked what the problem was and then immediatelyfixed it on the run.
That is different from your version,Jack-a-rino. You didn’t make aconscious decision to publish a crappy website. You pushed out a crappy website translation because that is what yourcompany basically does. Because translation for you is an afterthought. Itis the excuse for vacuuming up all that yummy venture capitalist cash andbuying your little toys. Your company’s mission could just as easily becopywriting or raising pet rocks or teaching math to Austrian midget horses. Peopleand companies like you work in reverse to inventors. Innovators see a problemand engineer a solution. Edison saw darkness and dreamed a light bulb. You seea fad for crowdsourcing and say: “How can I get the Jack-Dog some of thataction? Woof!” As long as the business plan has “social media” and “website”and “crowdsourcing” somewhere on page one, you get a foot in the door. The coremission of the matter is what you solve (or make up) after you have the funding in your bank account.
Of course, the “incident” as you describeit (why use scare quotes?) is not the end of the world. However, allow me tobreak down your decision flowchart as follows: a) I run a company that translateswebsites; b) I launch my own company’swebsite in another language; c) the version of my website in Spanish is actuallyin English.
Faced with this daunting challenge, your options,as you describe them, were as follows: “1)delaying the launch, 2) using poor quality MT, temporarily, or 3) leaving it inEnglish for the short period of time before it was fully translated by theprofessional translators.”
Seriously, what would Henry Ford do? Let’simagine that the prototype of the Model-T lacked wheels. Imagine Ford’sdecision tree looked like this: 1) delay the launch of the Model-T; 2) replaceit temporarily with a horse; or 3) leave it without wheels for a short periodof time hoping the customers won’t notice. And then imagine that Ford decidedto choose option 3 and tell potential customers that if the car had wheels,they would be driving through the countryside. Finally, imagine that someschmuck on the street walked by and said: “Ha! Old Man Ford’s mechanicalcarriages don’t have wheels!” And then imagine that Ford berated theslack-jawed yokel who had the gall topoint out something that obvious.
What would you do if you were Ford’s investorand he described his options the way you just described yours. Would you: 1)give him a Chuck Norris roundhouse kick to the nuts?; 2) knock his teeth outwith a baseball bat?; or 3) suspend all future injections of cash into a failedbusiness?
I am sure that 1 and 2 would be tempting,but on the whole— given the polite customs of the early 20^th century—theinvestor would choose 3 and swiftly fly away.
Dude, you run a company that translateswebsites and yet your own Spanish website isn’t in bleeping Spanish! And thenyou claim that unprofessional crowds can do it just as well! By what possiblemeasurement? By your own? By the criterion of a company that translateswebsites and isn’t capable of translating itsown website?
My melanin-deprived homey, do you reallyfail to grasp the beautiful, tender irony of the entire anecdote? Do you reallywant to engage in a flame war with a random blogger when the evidence ofincompetence would make most responsible businessmen run into a corner to crylike a 12-year-old girl?

3) AsI said in my prior comment, many of our customers use professional translatorsto perform translation -- translators like yourself (although you seem prettyangry, and not much fun to work with...)

Does that mean you’re not going to hire me, Jackie-O?My dream was always to work for a fly-by-night tech start-up that probablywon’t be around six months from now… (Sob!)
Seriously, Jumping-Jack-Flash, I’m abarrelful of laughs. And you, my Polar-bear-colored friend, are hilarious too.If we could only hook up, we would create a rocking comedy duo: The TranslatorWho Stared at Websites and The Crowdsourcing Snowman (did I mentionthat Jack is disturbingly, almost supernaturally,white? I swear to God that if I didn’t believe in goblins I would have troublesleeping after incurring the anger of this elfin woodland creature).
My chromatically challenged friend is, afterall, a garden variety sociopath. A sane man would have realized that the “Spanish website thatwas actually in English” is just an embarrassing episode and would have letsleeping dogs lie, suppressing the memory with alcohol. A sociopath, incontrast, decides to engage in an angry polemic with the passerby who pointedout that English and Spanish are, when all is said and done, not the samelanguage. But there is not even a hint of embarrassment in Jack’s discussion ofhis company’s goof. The L10N Web 2.0 companies are so divorced from realitythat a CEO seizes upon overwhelming evidence of his own incompetence as anopportunity to teach the world the beauties of crowdsourcing.
And then he nimbly shifts from defense andboldly goes on the offense.

Areyou saying that you are a better translator than every other professionaltranslator? I guess the citizens of Web 2.0 only deserve the quality youpersonally can provide?

This is what is known as a non sequitur,Hit-the-Road-Jack. Look it up. It is also a tried-and-true rhetorical tricklifted straight from the playbook of a five-year-old child. When someone landsa verbal zinger, you scrunch up your nose like a snot-head and go: “I know whatyou are, but what am I?” It is a classic, though.

Yourargument is tired, Miguel.

It is not an argument, Action Jack-Son. Itis a piece of empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is the basis for anargument, but it is not an argument in itself. An argument is something akin to“you are an albino cretin because of A, B and C.” The merits of the argumentwould depend upon the way in which A, B and C prove the proposition that youare, indeed, an albino cretin. Empirical evidence, on the contrary, can only berefuted by denying that the evidence is real or that it actually happened,which you have not done. You have just fabricated a counter-fairy tale, cast afew aspersions, mumbled some conspiracy theories about the UN and Microsoft,and called it a refutation of an argument.

Youare the equivalent of the Microsoft software engineer who claimed thatopen-source software wouldn't work because only professional softwaredevelopers working at Microsoft could produce high quality software.

And you, Jack-o’-nine-tails, are thetranslation world’s equivalent of the Bush Administration. It’s like we’restill living in 2007. Why is the “Mission Accomplished” sign so outrageous?Because the mission wasn’t accomplished and thousands of people were still going todie! It was, in fact, the opposite ofaccomplished. It was like… notaccomplished! Just like your Spanish homepage wasn’t in Spanish, but inEnglish, which is a whole other language from Spanish.
Why is the “heckuva a job, Brownie” sooutrageous? Because Brownie wasn’t doing a heck of a job andthousands of people were going to suffer!

Thefact is there is plenty of work for professional translators, especially thegood ones. And Smartling is delighted to work with some of the best translatorsin the business;

Really? Because the quality of yourwebsite’s translation indicates otherwise (but that will be the topic of anotherblog post I’m writing). Your website is a literal translation that does notsound very much like Spanish, but rather like a bad transcription of corporatejargon dictated through a bad cell phone connection.

werespect their craft and the high quality work they do.

Yes, every one of your comments dripsrespect. This takes us to the next paragraph, your Nessun Dorma of dill-holiness:

PS:Since you love to point out errors in other people's work, your headline onthis blog is inaccurate. From your own narrative above, it sounds like only oneemployee's mother may have been asked to assist with translation. And yet yourheadline says "Pinterest Uses Employees' Moms" -- in English, the useof the word "Moms", as well as the the apostrophe after the"s", means that more than one employee's mother was used fortranslation. But that seems to be inaccurate, from your own story. Were youjust trying to be provocative with your headline? Or do you lack the basicunderstanding of plurals in English (which would make me question your abilityas a professional translator)? Should I take a screen shot?

Tsk, tsk, tsk, Hugh Jack-Man. (If you hadedited out this paragraph, you would have saved yourself this public response.I even gave you a chance to rewrite the comment, remember? But you insisted. Sohere you go.) Sticks and stones, my man. Sticks and stones… Passiveaggressiveness is not an attractive trait, especially in a man.
This really is the non plus ultra ofentitlement. Faced with undeniable evidence of your own incompetence, yourdecide to go on the attack and question another professional’s competence. Butno defense is better than a good offense.

Miguel,anytime you want to have a real, honest, non-sensational discussion about themerits of professional translation vs. crowd translation (and even MT inlimited cases) -- and the best ways to manage the translation process -- I'd behappy to have that discussion. In the meantime, try to be cool.

If this is a morsel of this serious dialog,you can store it, Jack-meister (OK, I admit it, I ran out of “Jacks”). I canget more stimulating debate from the homeless dude panhandling on my corner whoconstantly warns me that the Queen of England has bad “joo joo.”


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.