I’m not a big fan of anonymity in general.I take it for granted that you are not really putting yourself in any danger byexpressing your opinions about something as wimpy as translation. And if youfeel that expressing an opinion might endanger your career, you should simplyabstain from expressing that opinion. You shouldn’t have it both ways, becausethe quality of someone’s opinion is related to the degree to which you arewilling to stand by it with your real name. Moreover, I feel that, unless youare the employee of a company that might retaliate against you, you are beingcowardly. There is clearly a link between anonymity and troll-like behavior, amajor problem in current Internet culture.
Allow me to provide an example. I receivedthe following anonymous comment this week to a post on Gavin Wheeldon, thechief executive officer of Applied Language Solutions, a company currentlyembroiled in controversy because of its inept provision of judicialinterpreters to the courts in England and Wales (the grammar and spelling havenot been corrected):
Aswith everyone else, I'm equally appalled by the way in which this contract hasbeen handled to ALS - who are clearly incapable of managing it and who aretrying to pay peanuts to qualified staff.
Idisagree however with the vindictive way in which Gavin has been portrayed. Theissue is with the MOJ who have awarded this contract to a company incapable ofmanaging. MOJ have clearly sanctioned a huge drop in payments to ourinterpreters who do a fantastic job - assuming they had done their research(which maybe they hadn't) then their cost analysis would clearly dictate thedrop that the interpreters would need to take in order for the arrangement tobe viable. Why is there such an attack on the small guy? He's running abusiness - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whom howeverwork fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won alucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling offsuch an important service.
Youwill get no where personnally attacking Gary Wheeldon - you need to aim yourcriticisms at those who count and make the decisions.
He'srunning a business - there are thousands of agencies out there - (most of whomhowever work fantastically with the linguists and pay them well) and he's won alucrative deal. The issue is not with him but with the MOJ for ever selling offsuch an important service.
In a nutshell, that is the problem with theCheap Translation model. Nowadays, an agency is often just a sales team (ofmonolingual English speakers) and a stable of project managers (usually locatedin Eastern Europe). The sales people hook the bait (at any price), reel in the customer,and then turn the whole project over to the PMs, who look up a random name on thedatabase and then try to arm wrestle the lowest possible rate from the bumbling“vendor.”
The ALS debacle is the same dubious modelmultiplied by a factor of 3,000. The author of the anonymous message seems toimply that, even though ALS didn’t actually have a parallel database ofqualified interpreters, it was fully entitled to go out and snag themega-contract from the Ministry of Justice. Here is where I differ from the contributor's complacentview of McLocalization.
Anethical businessperson would have told the MoJ that undertaking aresponsibility as large as providing thousands of interpreters would takeyears. Moreover, to cut people’s wages in half overnight was not realistic. Thesystem should have been phased in over a period of at least five years, if notmore.
The decision to jump at the MoJ contract atany cost and under any circumstance clearly was a case of a tiny, ravenousamoeba trying to bite off more than it could possibly chew in a million years (inthis case, a morsel of food approximately the size of a killer whale).
My point is that this was both bad businessand bad ethics. However, people like Mr. Wheeldon, who first get the contractand then worry about how to meet the service (by his own admission to the Times), are totally devoid of ethics.E-T-H-I-C-S. Business is not just aboutclosing the deal. It is also about being qualified to provide the best possibleservice for a reasonable rate. The prevalence of people such as Mr.Wheeldon (and their chummy tolerance by people such as my sock puppet) issymptomatic of what is wrong with the l10n industry: shady businesspeople whothink translation is a commodity service that simply consists in matching aproject from a faceless online customer to an online translator profile cribbedfrom ProZ.com. I am guessing the author of the message is the head of such apirate outfit, perhaps looking to intercept an unsuspecting container ship somewhere close to the Horn of Africa.
True, the MoJ’s flying civil servants donot come in for a drubbing from me, but on the other hand they do not paradearound on reality shows to flaunt their raging sociopathic tendencies. Yes, thecivil servants should have done more due diligence. Simply auditing ALS’sdatabase of interpreters and doing a dry run of the system in one or tworegions would perhaps have alerted them to the feasibility of doing all ofthis. So, in that sense, they are equally responsible for this mess. Perhapsthey did so due to the pressure from their political masters. When I hear thecomments from the entity called “Crispin Blunt” about the whole mess, itbecomes quite apparent that there was acute pressure from the Cabinet to make atransparently awful decision due to the urgency of making budget cuts.
Yes, Mr. Wheeldon is not the only culpritin this mess, but the moral instincts he reveals in the media are a majorfactor in this entire tragic catastrophe. And the reigning professionalstandards among the many “thousands of agencies” cited by the anonymouscontributor, who see nothing wrong with Wheeldon’s modus operandi, should be amatter for concern.
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.
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