YouTube's Updated Design Experiment

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YouTube tests yet another interface and this time it's both for the homepage and the video pages. For the first time, Google's navigation bar is added to YouTube. The sidebar from the previous experiment includes some options that used to be placed at the top of the page and used to be persistent. Now you have to click "My subscriptions" every time you go to YouTube's homepage if you want to remove reccomendations.

The upload button now has a drop-down that lets you go to the video manager and the analytics section, while the browse button has been removed. You can no longer go to the "inbox" from the homepage. When you click the button next to your Google Profile avatar (which is also new), YouTube sends you to the settings page, where there's a tab for the inbox.



Video pages have a button that toggles the sidebar, so you can quickly access the feed, your subscriptions, the history and other sections without having to visit the homepage. It's interesting to notice that most YouTube sections have a consistent feed-like interface, whether they're displaying videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, playlists or your history.



Here's how you can try the new interface. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser's developer console:

* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"

* Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=u8uWhAyPa3U; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

To go back to the standard UI, follow the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

You can also check the previous UI experiments for the homepage and "watch" pages.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Download the Videos You've Uploaded to YouTube

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YouTube lets you download the videos you've uploaded to the service, but the feature has a lot of limitations. "You can download MP4s of your own uploads, so as long as they do not have any copyrighted content or an audio track added through the Audio tool." But that's not all: "there is a limit of two downloads per hour for downloading your video to MP4. The Download MP4 button will not appear next to your videos if you've already downloaded two videos in an hour."


The limitations are absurd, considering that they are your videos and you've uploaded them. There are many services and apps that let you download any YouTube video, but they break YouTube's terms of services.

Fortunately, Google's Data Liberation launched a much better feature in Google Takeout: download the original videos you've uploaded to YouTube with one click. That's right, no more limitations, you can download all your videos and it's the only way to get the original versions, not the videos transcoded by YouTube. "No transcoding or transformation - you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out," explains Google.


Hopefully YouTube doesn't find out about this feature and cripple it with some preposterous limitations.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

More Funny Directions in Google Maps

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Google Maps no longer recommends to swim across the Atlantic Ocean if you want to go from the United States to Europe. Google found a better way: "sail across the Pacific Ocean".


Google's directions from New York to Paris are quite straightforward: go to Seattle, then swim across Pacific to Hawaii, swim again to Asia where you are directed to drive through Asia and Europe to reach France. After only 519 hours you're supposed to reach the destination.

{ Thanks, Anon. }

New Interface for Google Mobile Search

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Google's mobile homepage and search results pages have a new interface. The homepage only links to Google Image Search and you have to tap a button to find all the other Google services. The idea is reminiscent of the "hidden" navigation menu launched last year and quickly replaced by the black bar.

Search results pages don't include the menu, so you can no longer open Gmail from a search page and you have to go back to the Google homepage first. The search box has been shrinked, there's a bigger Google logo and the links to specialized search engines are displayed below the search box, just like in the tablet interface.







Here's a screenshot of the old interface:

Chrome Frame, Bundled With Google Toolbar

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If you install Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, you may notice that Google installs an additional software: Chrome Frame. It's a plug-in that renders some pages using Chrome even if you use Internet Explorer. Web developers can add a meta tag that enables Chrome rendering if Chrome Frame is installed and that's especially useful if a page uses technologies that aren't supported by Internet Explorer (for example, HTML5 video in IE6, canvas in IE7, SVG in IE8).

"Google Chrome Frame seamlessly enhances your browsing experience in Internet Explorer. It displays Google Chrome Frame enabled sites using Google Chrome's rendering technology, giving you access to the latest HTML5 features as well as Google Chrome's performance and security features without in any way interrupting your usual browser usage," explains Google.


There are many Google services that use Chrome Frame: Google Calendar, Google Drive/Docs, YouTube and more. Now that Google Apps dropped support for old IE versions (IE6 - 2010, IE7 - 2011, IE8 - November 2012), Chrome Frame is the only way to use Google Apps if you can't update to a new IE release or switch to a different browser.

To see if Chrome Frame is installed, you can go to a site like YouTube or Google Calendar, right-click and see if there's a menu item called "About Chrome Frame". Another option is to type gcf:about:version in the address bar and see if a similar page is displayed.


To uninstall Chrome Frame, "use the standard Add or Remove Programs tool in the Windows Control Panel (called Programs and Features in Windows Vista and Windows 7)". It's not clear if Chrome Frame is only installed for new Google Toolbar or if the future updates will also include Chrome Frame.

Ray Kurzweil Was Right! Humans and Machines Are Merging!

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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.

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

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Bialystock: Step 1: We find the worst play ever written. Step2: We hire the worst director in town. Step3: We raise two million dollars. ... One for me, one for you. There'sa lot of little old ladies out there! Step4: We hire the worst actors in NewYork and open on Broadway and before you can say Step5: We close on Broadway, take our two million, and go to Rio.—The Producers (2005)
The tribulations of Applied LanguageSolutions (ALS) are everywhere in the blogosphere these days. It remains to beseen whether the company will hold on to its monopoly of court interpretingservices in England and Wales despite its dismal performance to date (the catastrophe is discussed hereat length). 
However, allow me to take a step back, because ALS CEO GavinWheeldon’s overexposure to the British media provides a cornucopia of materialto conduct a brief case study of cheap translation in flagrante delicto, as it were. Watching Wheeldon’s TVperformances on Dragons' Den and The Secret Millionaire, you literally seethe yucky pig lips being inserted into the paste processed by the sausagemachines. Wheeldon as a businessman (and a moral specimen) is truly riveting, albeitin sort of the same way that Hannibal Lecter is fascinating as a gourmet.
1.- Thereis no Revenue from Free Translation (!)
The following exchange is from his appearance in the BBC’s Dragons' Den. The format isas follows: five independent and separate private equity investors hear pitchesfrom entrepreneurs and decide in front of the camera whether they will investin the businesses. The ten-minute clip is a fascinating snapshot of the cheaptranslation 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 forhype value (bubble, bubble, toil and trouble),despite the absence of any real substance.




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

Dragon 1 (Richard Farleigh): You do two things. One onthe Web and the other one is actually live translation…
Wheeldon (interrupting): It’s human. The one on theWeb, it’s machine translation. It does it instantly. It does it on the fly. Theone 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 twoactivities?
Wheeldon: There is no revenue from free translation. It’s allprofessional translation.
Farleigh: So all your 3.2 [million]…
Wheeldon: It’s all human translation. Professional translation.

Did you catch that? It is so pristine andsimple that you almost expect it to come from the mouth of a Zen master. “Thereis no revenue from free translation.” What!? Listen to that, world: NO REVENUEFROM FREE TRANSLATION!
So there it is: Free translation does notprovide revenue. The simplicity of this tautology is so beautiful, soabsolutely beautiful, it brings the slightest little tear to the eye, like atwelve-year-old watching the closing scenes of E.T.
Can you imagine that? It’s hard to make money from free stuff! We shouldframe this phrase and hang it above the desk of every Cheap Translation CEOacross the world.
I can imagine Henry Ford going: “Youknow, 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, itturns 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. Headds 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 betweenthis figure and his own due diligence. He calls Wheeldon on it. The buddingl10n entrepreneur replies that the 15 P/E for a £6.25 million valuation is basedon “net profit.” Now, I am not an accountant, but net profit could (and usuallydoes) mean almost anything. And, inthis case, it means even less than that. After some prompting, it turns out thatthe slippery Mr. Wheeldon means “profit including [i.e., before] tax,” which,if anything, should actually be called “gross profit.” Listen to the investorschooling the weasely presenter like a stern schoolmaster:

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

You have to hand it to Wheeldon. Caught red-handedin a transparent bit of obfuscation, he doesn’t even flinch. At most, he only seemsslightly deflated. Paphitis, smelling weakness, presses on: the real P/E for a4% equity stake costing £250,000 based on profits of £300,000 is not 15, but awhopping 21 to 22 times earnings (which in technical financial terms is “super-duperhigh” for a company outside the tech sector). Wheeldon accepts the analysismeekly, 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 thatway…
Paphitis: You come and ask me to invest £250,000?! And you askme to teach you at the same time?!

The investor’s rebuke is harsh enough thatit wipes the smile from Wheeldon’s face. The narrator sums it up: The valuationcited by Wheeldon is based on projected earnings (i.e., not actually in the bagyet) and it included taxes (i.e., money investors will never see).
Now, none of this is outrageous, but notethat Wheeldon has been caught in the space of three minutes in several worrisomefabrications. You might argue that the professional investors pictured on Dragons' Den do this for a living, but isit at all possible that Mr. Wheeldon’s creativity with the truth played a rolein securing the contract from the Ministry of Justice? I have my own opinion. Ileave 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 governmentgilts at 5% interest or, alternatively, you can invest it in the buddingbusiness of McTranslations Inc. in exchange for a 4% equity stake.
If you invest the quarter-million pounds inthe British government bonds (the risk-free rate), within one year, you will haveearned 12,500 pounds as interest.
If however, you take that chunk of changeand sink it into the H.M.S. McLocalization Titanic AppliedLanguage Solutions, at the end of the year you have a claim on 4% of theprofits, which the chief executive officer “estimates” at £300,000.
Do the math. That is £12,000. That is 500pounds less than the laziest, safest,most unimaginative thing you can do with your money, aside from leaving it torot in a savings account at a negative real interest rate. The British Governmenthas never defaulted on a loan since it started asking for money centuries ago. Howdoes that compare to a company founded nine years ago in some dude’s bedroom inManchester? Is it more or less dependable as an investment? Once again, I leaveit to you to arrive at the answer.
The thing is that private equity guys suchas the Dragons only become interested in businesses that make sexier returns—onthe 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 translationis 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 ifyou provided quality at heftier margins. Wheeldon raises the long-term idea offloating on the stock market within five years for £60 million. Another Dragonshoots 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/rewardratio for me, it doesn’t stack up,” says one.
Nonetheless, Wheeldon does get a tentativeoffer from Dragon Duncan Bannatyne, of halfthe money (£125,000) for more than doublethe equity stake (9%) he sought. Which is one way of saying: “You, sir, are a finepurveyor of bollocks, but reality is far less rosy.”
In conclusion, the Dragons liked him as asalesman, but they were turned off both by the sector and the valuation, sothey turned him down. Cheap translation strikes out.
3.-A New Hope: Capita Steps In
Okay, so that is that. The thing is that, onlythree months ago, the FinancialTimes reportedthat 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 aquarter 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 Dragonsfor!”
However, two things have to be taken intoaccount. First of all, the Dragons' Denclip was filmed several years ago, so you have to discount the erosive impactof inflation. Secondly, the private equity fund jumped in only after ALS secured the mega-juicy Ministryof Justice contract that has raised all the Sturmund 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 howthat breaks down revenue- and profit-wise totally skew the assessment of Wheeldon’spie-in-the-sky valuation. The Capita buyout was a bet that ALS would executesuccessfully on a recurrent contract with a good government client, pure andsimple. Moreover, the MoJ would represent more than 90% of the company’srevenue 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 SalesmanshipCorrelation?
The alpha and omega of the entire ALSdebacle is the man himself, Gavin Wheeldon. His personality comes across forcefullyin the Dragons' Den clip: smarmilycharming, slightly sleazy, quick on his feet, evasive, and not overly analytical.It is easy to imagine him courting civil servants and cabinet ministersdesperate to make budget cuts with ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky promises about60% efficiencies. Sadly, these exchanges were not filmed. However, a simpleGoogle 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 nationwidefirestorm in the UK. But after checking the footnotes and hyperlinks, Irealized that, OMG, those were actually things he said to journalists! Thoseare 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 wasringing up and pretending I was this huge translation company when really itwas just me in the back bedroom with a phone and PC. I won the contract andthen thought: oh my God, how on earth do I deliver this?

Is there any chance that this is the modusoperandi used to secure the mega-million-pound contract from the Britishgovernment? Who knows? For me, in the mouth of the chief of a tiny company thatis awarded responsibility for providing thousands of interpreters to the entirelegal 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’sdescription of him as a child during an interview for hisappearance in The Secret Millionaire:“My nickname for Gavin was our small Arthur Daley, my dad always said if hedidn’t end up behind bars he’d end up making a fortune!”
Who was Arthur Daley, you ask? CheckWikipedia. He was a character in a 1970s British TV show who is described as follows:

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

The entry goes on to note that “the nameArthur Daley has become synonymous with a dishonest salesman or small timecrook.”
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.

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

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

One of the problems is that if you say advertisingis the only official business plan for open information, you’re invitingeverything to turn into bullshit. You know, over time. It’s just a fact. WhatI’ve noticed with Silicon Valley start-ups is that there is this ideal time afterthey 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 withbullshit and then their value goes down. Like, three or four years aftersomething starts, then there’s good information. A year or more later, it’s allcrap. That’s just the way it is. I’ve seen that in Google search results. SinceI work with Microsoft, I shouldn’t… but in a way, it’s true.

They get gamed. It’s what happens. Thething is, uhm. Uhhh, God! It’s weird with network effects! The validity of theinformation 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 ofgraduate students in engineering. Because we want them to be entrepreneurs andshow up with their start-up at "South By," right? A couple of years ago, we hadthese guys show up and they said: “We have this great idea for a start-up! Andhere’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 thisinformation for his friends, so that they can come in and find these girls.” AndI’m like: “Is there even the slightest chance, EVER, that this thing will haveany 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 sellliquor ads. We don’t expect there to be good data ever. It’s all based onfantasy.” They got an A-plus.

So the thing is these business plans don’tdepend on real information. And that’s a problem for society. 

One of the advantages of making informationbe real and grown-up and consequential, which means there’s money behind it andpeople are making a living and that someone is responsible for it, is that itwill 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.

Quality is Dead, Except in My Backyard

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"Could it be possible?! This old saint in theforest has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"
A young mommy is reading a book to herlittle 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. Shecomes 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 standardshave fallen and “what is the world coming to?” etc.
Okay, I’m a forty-year-old man who has nochildren. At this age, you notice that the lack of children introduces a major wedgebetween your world view and that of other people who do have children. Theyhave this wary, self-righteous attitude about the world, as if it is full ofdangers and bad, bad stuff that is lurking behind every bush to turn their preciouslittle babies’ brains into mush. Moreover, being a first-time mommy for some women becomessuch an integral part of their identity that they have to insert the factin the prologue of every sentence. (By the second or thirdchild, I’ve also noticed, the babies start to begin to be shunted to a spot fartherand farther back in their sentences.)
Anyway, the cride coeur about the mangled sheep led to a discussion about the meaning oftypos in general. I said something along the lines of not understanding thefetish about proper spelling and grammar. My view is that, beyond a certainpoint at which we have to follow its rules, it has a lot to do with a slightly patheticpetit-bourgeois flaunting of cultural capital (I did not actually say it thisway, I only implied it tactfully). To me, it sounds like a cheap way of saying: “I went to college, but not to studyanything useful like biology or building bridges, but to do angry, post-feministdeconstructions of The Scarlet Letter(conclusion: it is patriarchal) and To theLighthouse (also patriarchal, albeit in a more indirect way). And afterthat, I got married and had a gaggle of babies.”
We live in such a relativistic worldthat 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 otherreligious leader with a funny hat, but not a peep ensues. You can satirize anyone’spolitical ideology, whether on the left or the right, and no one challenges you.
But beware of the passions you can unleashif you have the temerity--nay, the uncouthness--to express the opinion that propergrammar 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 tonesubliminally 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 sacredduty.” 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 thatbeauty is more than following rules and that, as far as hygiene goes, there isa difference between washing your hands before supper and compulsively scrubbingyour hands 78 times a day every time you think some random crazy thought.
Except I know this woman is also an l10nentrepreneur who is very much in tune with the faddish notions pouring out ofSilicon Valley about how Low Quality is the future. Which created a certaincognitive dissonance for me. So I tried to gently steer the conversation inthat direction: “I’m curious. What do you think of the theory that quality doesn’tmatter and that the ‘TEP model’ in translation is obsolete?”
You could literally see the light bulb goingon 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 ametamorphosis, from Mommie Dearest rantingabout wire hangers to the lady from the friendly folks at Omnitouch. She wrote: “I like it. It is amodel conceived to make many expensive copies from an initial model. When thatis the case, it is the best.”
Which means… uhhhh? (My brain hurts!) I musthave missed that l10n seminar. I was probably dawdling with the croissants andfree coffee, or reading a printed book, or doing some other unproductive idiocy.
The thing is that, by this point, I was alreadymentally writing this blog post. I was all in.
She continued: “However, if you givepriority to agility (software, tweets) over other things, you make differentconclusions. I’m not dogmatic.”
Boom! Gotcha. So I went in for the kill. I turned the conversation around 360 degrees back to theexact point where it began, with the bloody, mangled sheip-sheep: “But maybe theeditor of your daughter’s book isn’t dogmatic either and just has differentcriteria 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 mehours after I need it.
I wish I could relate the rest of theconversation, but here it abruptly ended. My interlocutor declined to continuethis fascinating philosophical exchange.
So her silence opens the door for me tocomplete 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 amachine-translated children’s book, I will tear out your eyeballs like alioness defending her cub!”
Which sounds to me a lot like some Tea Partynutcase 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.

What is Professional Translation?: The Quality of Smartling's Spanish Website

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Some men are born mediocre, some men achievemediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major ithad been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stoodout as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met himwere always impressed by how unimpressive he was. ― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

And,sure, he is an honourable man.
—Julius Caesar,Act III, Scene 2
If you recall, a couple of months back I had a curious experience when Pinterest called for its users to crowdsource the Spanish version of the site. The thing was that the blog post the company used toenergize its crowd was not so much in Spanish but rather in what becomes ofSpanish after a bloodthirsty psychopath chops it up into itty bitty pieces,stuffs the remains into the trunk of his car and drives away. The Pinterestemployee behind this monstrosity insisted it was perpetrated by a professionaltranslator. I countered by saying: “No uh.” And she finally relented andadmitted that her mother had done the translations (although she was careful todelete the smoking gun tweet in which she attributed the work to her mom). Anyway,my narration of this ridiculous affair was crowned by a recollection of a similarincident when a crowdsourced “t9n” company called Smartling proudly announcedthe launch of its Spanish-language website. The funny thing is that whatSmartling calls “Spanish” is not so much strongly influenced by the tongue thatemerged when the Angles met the Saxons met the Normans. No, it actually is the tongue that emerged when the Angles met the Saxons met the Normans. Itweeted the fact that Smartling’s “Spanish” website was actually in “English” (whichis, like, a whole other language). This prompted frantic tweets from an employeeasking what the problem was. After I informed her, she equally franticallyrushed to put up some sort of Spanish version online.
As I described elsewhere, this two-sentence comparison between Pinterest and Smartling prompted a backlash from the very irate chief executive officer of the latter company, Jack Welde. In his rebuttal of my criticism of crowdsourcing, he statedthat “there is plenty of work for professional translators, especially the goodones. And Smartling is delighted to work with some of the best translators inthe business; we respect their craft and the high quality work they do.”Earlier, he had noted that “many of our customers use professional translatorsto perform translation -- translators like yourself (although you seem prettyangry, and not much fun to work with...).” Anyway, trollish comments aside, Idid promise that I would publish a slightly more detailed appraisal of 1)Smartling’s own Spanish language website, (which I suppose would have beenassigned to these “professional translators” Welde claims to work with) and 2)a sampling of the websites of Smartling’s own clients.
Let us begin by recalling the main highlightsof the Welde Translation Philosophy. He is quick to stress that for technicalmaterials, crowdsourcing is not appropriate:

Wouldwe recommend crowdsourcing the translation of legal content, highly technicalmaterials, or financial content? Nope, we would recommend professionaltranslation from translators skilled in that vertical -- perhaps someone likeyou... But for companies with a passionate community of users who know theproduct or service intimately, crowdsourcing translation using high-qualitytools to manage the translation process among a large group of participants canbe a terrific way to increase community engagement -- and typically with muchfaster turnaround.

In his view, crowdsourcing is idealfor social media purposes. The other main pillar of his pitch (and also heardoften) is that crowdsourcing is not done to save money, but rather to enhance users’ engagement with the platform:

It'sgenerally not about "the money". I'm pretty sure Pinterest can affordto pay for professional translation, but I suspect they are looking toincorporate their existing passionate community into the translation process asa means of increasing engagement -- while moving at the speed of Web 2.0businesses.

Thegeneral message is that Smartling’s platform is agnostic and neutral. You canlocalize your website using an agency, in-house translators or your website’s users.I assume that Smartling’s own website was translated using these much-vauntedprofessionals. Listen to the CEO extolling the output of the professionals heemploys: “Smartling is delighted to workwith some of the best translators in the business; we respect their craft andthe high quality work they do.” Now look back at the quotes from the Smartling boss and see how many times the highlighted phrase "professional translators" pops up. It is obviously an important part of his pitch. It is reasonable to expect that proof of the high quality provided by these translators can be found in theface that Smartling presents to its Spanish visitors, I imagine. So let’s return to the sceneof the original crime. Let’s click on the language tab of Smartling’s home pageand go through the looking-glass.
Inmy view, translation is something that can be done by any bilingual, withdiffering levels of success. Professionaltranslation, in contrast, is the product of thought applied to the everydaytask of translation. Viewed under that light, it isreadily evident that Smartling does not employ professionals even for its ownwebsite, since very little real thought has gone into the work. It is not somuch that Smartling’s bilinguals are incompetent, but rather that they do not have anyexperience in the difficult task of laboring over a message in one language andthen coming up with an equivalent in another one. And that is why thetranslations Smartling facilitates for itself and its clients sound a littlelike the end-of-year project completed by heavily stoned middle schoolers for their Spanish101 required credit.

Look, for instance, at the website’s menu. “Traducción de la comunidad” as an option for “Community translation” is wrong.To give you an idea of how wrong it is, when you back translate it, you get “Translationof the community.” “Traducción comunitaria” would be a better option. “Kit demedios” as an option for “Media kit” is just embarrassing. 

A site menu is an object to which you devote a lot of thinking, because it determines how visitors surf your web page. It may be just 20-25 words, which usually can be translated in a few minutes. But you should devote several hours to choosing the words carefully in order to keep those fickle Internet visitors from being instantly turned off by a stilted and clumsy Spanglish roadmap.
“Factoid” was localized as “factoide,”which is a hallmark of the professionals who graduate from the Taco Bell Schoolfor Spanish Translation. Their methodology consists in basically adding an “e”or an “o” to any English word to make it sound like Spanish. The content of the“factoides” themselves are somewhat difficult to figure out. Check out number1:

¡Conuna población de unos 32 millones en 2010, los mexicano-estadounidensescomprenden el 63% de todos los hispanos de EE.UU. y el 10% de toda la poblaciónde EE.UU.!

First of all, why the exclamation marks? Theidea that a dry statistical fact is worthy of opening with an exclamation markin Spanish is dumbfounding. Answer: the exclamation marks are there because theoriginal English has one, which is precisely how non-professional translatorstend to work. 
Everything in these sentences is clunky, from word choice to thegrammatical sequence. The structure of the sentence transcribed above is a carbon copy of the original ("At nearly 32 million in 2010,Mexican-Americans comprise 63% of the U.S. Hispanic population and 10% of thetotal U.S. population!"). But it is the use of “comprender” for “comprise” thatjust kills any hope of reading comprehension. There is a bouquet of other word choicesthat would make a lot more sense and would help the reader more (incidentally,this tends to heighten the suspicion that this text is the product of a cursorypost-editing by an inexperienced linguist, but Jack claims emphatically that he doesn’t dopost-editing, “and Brutus is an honorableman”). A sentence such as this is the product of either a machinetranslator or a very unskilled human one, which for all intents and purposescome to be pretty much the same thing.

The same amateurish handiwork is evident in Mr.Welde’s profile page. The literal translation "hombre del renacimiento" as an option for "Renaissance man" is meaningless in Spanish. A professional translator would tell you that. Raw machine translation won't. Neither will a crowd of hamsters. They will also fail to tell you that acronyms as frequent as CEO and MBA have very nifty equivalents in Spanish. 
In the following sentence, the somewhat chaotic profusion ofcapital letters is once again the product of acritical copying from the Englishoriginal:

Eslicenciado en Ingeniería Informática por la Universidad de Pensilvania, dondetambién estudió Lingüística e hizo prácticas con el Profesor William Labov, ytiene un MBA de la Universidad de Cameron (Alemania).

And now observe this complete and utterfailure to even approximate the English original (He lives outside of NYC with his wife and children and can usually befound writing product specs at midnight, discovering new music or flying lightaircraft):

Viveen las afueras de Nueva York con su esposa e hijos, y es fácil verloescribiendo especificaciones de productos a medianoche, descubriendo nuevamúsica o pilotando aviones ligeros.

“Es fácilverlo escribiendo...” That, my friends, is the sound of the post-editor throwing his arms up in despair and screaming: “Screw this! I’m only getting five dollars an hour! Let theproofreader take care of this!” Either way, Welde has some gall to tout hiscollaboration with professional translators when he, defying belief, doesn’teven use them when his own image is at stake. Here is the back translation:

Helives outside of NYC with his wife and children and it is easy to see him writingproduct specs at midnight, discovering new music or flying light aircraft.

Why is it so easy to see Jack writing product specs at midnight? Hasn't he heard of walls? Does he do a Big-Brother type webcast of his home life? 
And so on and so on.
A reader called Juliana reported in a comment that the quality of the Portugueseversion of Smartling’s site is equally poor:

Bythe way, I'm from Brazil and decided to check out Smartling's "how itworks" section in Portuguese. Of course people will understand what'sbeing said there, but the writing is awkward, clearly unprofessional, garbledeven. I don't understand how people can extol the virtues of Web 2.0 and at thesame time not give a rat's ass about the quality of their content, since it'sall about ENGAGING PEOPLE THROUGH WORDS ON THE SCREEN.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I hopeI have provided enough evidence to prove that if Smartling does indeed useprofessional translators, it does not use very good ones.
Now, Mr. Welde is free to promote hisbusiness as he sees fit. However, his repetitive claim that Smartling employsprofessional translators should not go unchallenged, because a cursory inspectionof his and his clients’ websites clearly demonstrates that he doesn’t. My fear isthat Mr. Welde probably does not have any acquaintance with thenon-English-speaking world aside from that time in the mid-nineties when hespent a summer bombing Serbia from his laptop. 
His profile claims that he holds“a [sic] M.B.A. from CameronUniversity (Germany)”. Curiously, the Internet reveals that there is no CameronUniversity in Germany. There is a Cameron University in Oklahoma, though.

Jon Voight as Milo Minderbinder in the movie version.

Oklahoma. Germany. Different places, in myview. “Same difference,” in Welde’s world view. I shudder to think that thissame dude was picking targets during a NATO bombing campaign. If he employed the same geographicalacumen in that task that he uses in describing his alma mater, we may have a post-modern versionof Catch-22 on our hands.

And, totell the truth, Welde does remind me a lot of the Lieutenant Milo Minderbinderimmortalized by Joseph Heller in his classic satire about World War II. Minderbinderis a red-blooded, blond and blue-eyed officer who runs an illegal barteringoperation using matériel he stole from the Air Force. He justifies all hisactions by blithely stating that “what's good for M&M Enterprises will begood for the country.” The M in M&M stands for Milo, of course (he addedthe “&M” so people wouldn’t think it was a one-man operation). In oneclimactic scene, Yossarian’s plane is going down and he opens his parachute todiscover an I.O.U. from Minderbinder, who “borrowed” the parachutes’ silk tomake stockings for prostitutes.
Why is Cameron University suddenly transportedfrom the arid badlands of Oklahoma to the lush, green fields of Germany? Is itperhaps because Welde earned an M.B.A. online from Cameron University whileliving in Germany? That would be my guess. Is this, then, perhaps thecase of a slightly unworldly American businessman trying to puff up theinternational aspects of his CV because he runs a translation company but doesn’tknow any other languages? Possibly. Is it insane to point out that this littleobfuscation might be somehow related to the low quality of the translations on his own site? Who knows? 
The world is a mysterious place (albeit endlessly fascinating in its sheer absurdity).
(In a future post, I will publish a reviewof the localized websites of Smartling’s clients to determine the degree of successwith which these companies, in Welde’s breathless prose, have incorporated “theirexisting passionate community into the translation process as a means ofincreasing engagement -- while moving at the speed of Web 2.0 businesses.”)

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.

Build a global audience on YouTube by translating your captions

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(Cross-posted from the Official YouTube Partners & Creators Blog)

Growing a global audience on YouTube means having your videos reach many people, speaking many languages. So today we’ve made it easier for you to translate YouTube video captions into more than 300 languages. See more details in the help center, or follow the step-by-step instructions below:

Getting started
You’ll first need a caption track for your video, so if you don’t yet have one you can learn how to make one here. Select “Request translation” in the YouTube Video Manager, choose the languages you’d like to translate into, and click “Next.” We’ll create caption translation documents that you can now invite anyone to help translate, or you can translate yourself. To translate the captions yourself, select the language, and it’ll open up the caption translation document in the Google Translator Toolkit editor to help your translate faster.

 

Watch while you translate
To give you context on the captions, we’ve also embedded the YouTube video in the editor so you can watch as you translate. For several languages we’ll provide first draft of the translation using Google’s machine translation technology. We’ll also provide preview of what the translated caption looks like on the video so you can make sure the translated captions fit.


Publish and enjoy
Click “Publish to YouTube” when you’re finished, and we’ll publish the translated caption back to your YouTube video. If you’re not the video owner, we’ll notify the owner via email that there’s a pending translation waiting to be approved and published.

By providing translated captions, you’ll not only make your video globally accessible but also improve discoverability in other languages. Now you can increase your audience by reaching more people around the world.

Posted by Jeff Chin and Brad Ellis, product managers, who recently watched “Life in a Day” which is subtitled in 26 languages.

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" Easter Egg

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The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button from Google's homepage is no longer useful when Google Instant is enabled. When you click the button, Google usually sends you to the doodle gallery, but now the button is more special.

Mouse over the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button and you'll see one of these labels: "I'm Feeling Puzzled", "I'm Feeling Artistic", "I'm Feeling Playful", "I'm Feeling Hungry", "I'm Feeling Wonderful", "I'm Feeling Stellar", "I'm Feeling Trendy", "I'm Feeling Doodly". Each button sends you to a different Google site, so you can explore Google Trends, the Google Art Project, the World Wonders Project and more.





{ Thanks, Jérôme Flipo. }

YouTube's Updated Design Experiment

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YouTube tests yet another interface and this time it's both for the homepage and the video pages. For the first time, Google's navigation bar is added to YouTube. The sidebar from the previous experiment includes some options that used to be placed at the top of the page and used to be persistent. Now you have to click "My subscriptions" every time you go to YouTube's homepage if you want to remove reccomendations.

The upload button now has a drop-down that lets you go to the video manager and the analytics section, while the browse button has been removed. You can no longer go to the "inbox" from the homepage. When you click the button next to your Google Profile avatar (which is also new), YouTube sends you to the settings page, where there's a tab for the inbox.



Video pages have a button that toggles the sidebar, so you can quickly access the feed, your subscriptions, the history and other sections without having to visit the homepage. It's interesting to notice that most YouTube sections have a consistent feed-like interface, whether they're displaying videos from your subscriptions, recommendations, playlists or your history.



Here's how you can try the new interface. If you use Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Internet Explorer 8+:

1. open youtube.com in a new tab

2. load your browser's developer console:

* Chrome - press Ctrl+Shift+J for Windows/Linux/ChromeOS or Command-Option-J for Mac

* Firefox - press Ctrl+Shift+K for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-K for Mac

* Opera - press Ctrl+Shift+I for Windows/Linux or Command-Option-I for Mac, then click "Console"

* Safari - check this article

* Internet Explorer - press F12 and select the "Console" tab.

3. paste the following code which changes a YouTube cookie:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=u8uWhAyPa3U; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

4. press Enter and close the console.

To go back to the standard UI, follow the same steps, but use the following code:

document.cookie="VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE=; path=/; domain=.youtube.com";window.location.reload();

You can also check the previous UI experiments for the homepage and "watch" pages.

{ Thanks, Pascal. }

Download the Videos You've Uploaded to YouTube

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YouTube lets you download the videos you've uploaded to the service, but the feature has a lot of limitations. "You can download MP4s of your own uploads, so as long as they do not have any copyrighted content or an audio track added through the Audio tool." But that's not all: "there is a limit of two downloads per hour for downloading your video to MP4. The Download MP4 button will not appear next to your videos if you've already downloaded two videos in an hour."


The limitations are absurd, considering that they are your videos and you've uploaded them. There are many services and apps that let you download any YouTube video, but they break YouTube's terms of services.

Fortunately, Google's Data Liberation launched a much better feature in Google Takeout: download the original videos you've uploaded to YouTube with one click. That's right, no more limitations, you can download all your videos and it's the only way to get the original versions, not the videos transcoded by YouTube. "No transcoding or transformation - you'll get exactly the same videos that you first uploaded. Your videos in. Your videos out," explains Google.


Hopefully YouTube doesn't find out about this feature and cripple it with some preposterous limitations.

{ Thanks, Herin. }

Too Many Google Results From a Single Site

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I don't know about you, but there's a feature that ruined many of my Google search results pages. It's not that Google can't return relevant results, the problem is that Google tries to be clever and detects keywords that are associated with a site. If it finds one, Google will return a lot of results from that site. In fact, sometimes you'll have a hard time finding results from other domains.

Ever since its launch, Google promoted diversity and used host crowding to show "up to two results from each hostname/subdomain of a domain name". Sometimes Google displayed a link that restricted the results to that domain or subdomain, but users had to click it. Matt Cutts wrote in 2007 that "we did hear complaints that for some types of searches (e.g. esoteric or long-tail searches), Google could return a search page with lots of results all from one domain. In the last few weeks we changed our algorithms to make that less likely to happen".

Then Google introduced sitelinks and started to show more pages from a domain. Two years ago, a Google blog post announced that "for queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site". Since that announcement, host crowding was a thing of the past and Google started to include more and more results from a single domain.

I complained about this back in 2010 and mentioned that this feature could become annoying, but now it's much worse. Sometimes you can find queries that return mostly results from a domain. For example, when you search for [apple itunes] Google assumes that you want results from apple.com and starts to return a lot of irellevant pages. Sure, you can still find results from other domains, but 31 of the top 50 results are from apple.com.



If you search for [yahoo mail], Google returns a lot of uninteresting results from Yahoo's international sites, instead of including news articles, blog posts, reviews, tutorials.



Search for [berkeley college] and 26 of the top 50 results are from berkeley.edu. That's just too much. Having to constantly add to the query "-site:dominantresult.com" is annoying, not to mention that most Google users don't even know about search operators and shouldn't have to use them.

And this annoyance is not limited to navigational queries. What if you're not in India, search for [sony led] and Google's top 7 results are from Sony India? That's what happened when I disabled Google Instant and set Google to show 50 results per page.


Showing too many results from a domain is a bad idea because a search engine should offer information from multiple sources, while results should be relevant and comprehensive. Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but Google forgot to make the information accessible.

Query	Domain	Number of results in top 50
imdb ratings	imdb.com	49
imdb ratings are broken	imdb.com	46
google play	google.com	31
playstation	playstation.com	28
wordpress	wordpress.org	28
samsung led display	samsung.com	27