This guy thought up DeathBed: The Bed That Eats Peopleand f****ng finished it! That means one of two things happened. He either henever had a moment’s doubt. He hit that typewriter every day. "And thenthe pillow starts to smother… Ohhh! This is awesome! Reach down, God! Give me ahigh five! Boom!” Here’s what’s worse. What if he had moments of doubt, ANDTHEN F***ING WORKED THROUGH THEM? That’s so much worse for me. What if he wasgoing: “And then the pillow starts… What the f**k am I writing? I’m putting myname on this piece of… No! I will finish this!” He looked at his poster of thelittle kitten hanging from the tree saying “Just hang in there, baby.” And hesaid: “Yes, I will hang in there, kitten.”
You know one of my bugbears (or perhapshobby horses) is the Content Tsunami. It is the main pillar of the flimsybusiness case for Low Quality Translation. It goes a little something likethis: “Since the amount of content is exploding, we need low qualitytranslation to translate this flood of (low quality) information.” I want touse this opportunity to highlight one tiny little molecule inthe endlessly expanding ocean of the Information Big Bang.
The piece is published in the blog of aVery, Very Large Translation Agency that does a lot of Spanish post-editing at$0.02 per word and constantly badgers qualified professionals to join its ranksof underpaid drones. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “stupid is asstupid does.” The blog post I am discussing here is, perhapsuncharacteristically, not the productof a computerized copywriting program. I can safely say it was actuallyproduced by a human being. But, as Low Quality theorists are fond of remindingus, human authorship is no guarantee of quality:
Financialdocuments can be produced in a variety of file formats. Keeping this in mind,Trusted Translations is prepared to accept all types of files, and can deliverthem as ready-to-publish files if so required by the client.
Thank GOD for Trusted Translations! Wherewould we be without an unscrupulous, faceless corporation and itssemi-anonymous ten-dollar-an-hour blogger reminding us that financial documentscome in a variety of file formats? Thank GOD for the Internet! To think that asrecently as 1993 you couldn’t drive your PC on the information superhighway andcome across this banal piece of drivel.
But, as Jon Stewart says, “Wait, there’smore”:
Financedepartments, along with financial institutions themselves, are a key area inmanaging any type of business. Producing documents that hold very important andspecialized information, these departments often require accurate translationsof these documents in order to communicate financial information to abusiness’s own offices in another country, or to other companies. TrustedTranslations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range offinancial documents and has access to resources such as proprietary financialdictionaries, translations memories and expert industry-specific translators.
"Trusted Translations has experience quickly and accurately translating a range of financial documents..." Can you just imagine the anonymous blogger writing this sentence and crying out to God for a high five? Let’s parse this. Proprietary financialdictionaries. Yeah. If you place the search phrase “financial translation” inGoogle, your first result is a bilingual glossary that purports to bespecialized in finance, courtesy of… you guessed it! Trusted Translations, thefinest purveyor of Low Quality Translation. The glossary bears thedistinguished title of “English Spanish Dictionary of Financial Terms.” And,obviously, it was crafted by a bevy of “expert industry-specific translators” (?),who, I am guessing, are the ultimate arbiters of the text after it has beenprocessed by Trusted’s machine translators, Roombas, C3-POs, Wall*Es, andsundry translation memories. What do these “expert industry-specifictranslators” consider worthy of including in a financial glossary? Let’s see.“Go-go fund.” Yes, that comes up very often in financial documents… written in 1965. So, if you are everswallowed up by a worm hole and deposited in the year when I Dream of Jeannie was number one in the Nielsen ratings andVietnam was a distant place where a handful of Marines were spending thenastiest summer vacation ever, well, golly, Sarge, Trusted Translations justsaved you a lot of time!
TT’s contribution to the Content Tsunamiis, of course, nothing more than cheap SEO-gaming without bothering to actuallycontribute anything of any value to the Internet. My thesis is that this opportunistic online marketing ethos is indicative of its overall business philosophy (cheap, cheap, cheap...). Allow me to provide a samplingof the blog post’s internal hyperlinks. The phrase “financial translation”leads the accidental cyber-tourist to a cluster of articles (of similar quality)on issues as diverse as “financial translation teams”, “financial translationlanguages”, “financial document translations” (and, let’s face it, who hasn’tgoogled those Boolean phrases in the wee morning hours of some desperate,lonely Saturday night?)
And so on and so on. The thing that gets me is that TT positivelyRULES the search rankings. Not only does it broadcast its low quality contentin every single localization conference, it also dominates the online searchworld with the same iron fist with which Ivan the Terrible ruled early modernRussia.
“Stupid is as stupid does.” If yourtranslation provider uses Low Quality search engine optimization, what are theodds that it doesn’t use Low QualityTranslation? And passes it off as the work of “expert industry-specifictranslators”? Hmmmm…
Trusted Translation’s SEO strategy is justthe same adolescent hacker ethos that underlies Low Quality Translation, madeeven more grotesque by the fact that it is espoused not by teenage computernerds who don’t know any better but middle-aged gurus who should. Which leadsto an interesting observation. When they talk to translators, lower qualitytranslation providers preach the necessity of low quality translation (and,implicitly, correspondingly low rates). But when they talk to clients, thesesame companies masquerade as high quality translation providers. They mumble intheir clumsy corporate prose about “expert industry-specific translators.” Theybloviate about their knowledgeable post-editors. Meanwhile, these selfsamepost-editors are in a nearby supermarket check-out line trying to pay for babyformula with food stamps, praying to Yahweh and Harry Reid that the RepublicanCongress will extend welfare benefits for another six months.
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 his profile or you can follow him on Twitter.
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