Dispatches from the Content Tsunami

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Last week, TV writer and broadcaster Tom Scharplingtweeted exciting news:

@scharpling
I cannow reveal the Big Announcement: Michael Lewis is writing his next book aboutme. It's gonna be called RADIO MAN. Very exciting!

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190124529006292992

Two hours later, however, the big news hadsoured slightly:

@scharpling
Badnews. It turns out that the Michael Lewis writing a book about me was aspambot. Beyond disappointed. 

https://twitter.com/#!/scharpling/statuses/190156016103600129

Yes, it appears that the Low Quality ContentTsunami is slowly seeping into popular consciousness. We are staring into theblack abyss of low quality texts, to which translators must add a multilinguallayer of Low Quality Translations to complete the Literary Sandwich ofthe Future.
Picture yourself, for instance, relaxingnext to a Caribbean beach while using your smartphone to post-edit amasterpiece by Israeli Nobel-Prize-winning pyscologist Daniel Kahneman, Fast and Slow Thinking. Life is easy.The sun is shining. Solicitous waiters bring you a healthy lunch silently, soas not to disturb you.
Wait, no. Rewind. It turns out that DanielKahneman’s best seller is called Thinking,Fast and Slow. What you are post-editing is a deceptively similar tomewritten by an entity called “Karl Daniels”. See what the scumbag ConentTsunami-ers did there by choosing a fake name that sounds sneakily likeKahneman’s? Unfortunately, the book is no longer available from Amazon (I couldKICK myself! However, Google Books managed to at least salvage some memory ofthis oeuvre in its vast Babelian library).The non-Nobel book, according to Geoffrey Pullum of the LanguageLog, is:

acompilation of snippets from Wikipedia articles and the like, dressed up like abook. Edited by robots for you to buy by mistake. It's a spam book, part of the"gigantic, unstoppable tsunami of what can only be described asbookspam"

Yes, the world has been enriched by thisbook by about the same degree as it has been by all those Nigerian scam emails.
But wait, Hal Karl Daniels isn’t theonly binary brain that has been busily recycling low quality content to add tothe giant tidal wave of information that is going to make us all rich andenlightened. Perhaps you can apply your post-editing chops to the littlereports produced by a company called ICON Publishing in San Diego founded by acomputer science professor called Philip Parker (Is automated publishing thefuture?):

Parker'sproduction costs are only 23 cents per book because they're made by computers. Algorithmssearch through incredible amounts of data from published research andgovernment reports. That info is then plugged into a book format. It's kind oflike a very high tech form of Mad Libs. Parker came up with the idea in the'90s when he was writing economic reports.

Oh, wait, the book cost 23 cents to make.Not per word. I mean the WHOLE ENTIRE book cost 23 cents to make. It is highlyunlikely that anyone will pay even $0.01 per word to translate it, which isclose to below subsistence level in most countries on Earth. So scratch thatopportunity. On to the next thing.
Heard about the recent spate of flashcrashes driven by stock trading algorithms? Well, it seems that the computerprograms that feed on news and use them as signals for buying and selling mightbe taking their cues from othercomputers. Which is always reassuring when you mention computers and gynormousamounts of money. Ever heard of the phrase feedback loop? This is from a recent article by Evgeny Morozov ("A Robot Stole my Pulitzer"):

Forbes—oneof financial journalism’s most venerable institutions—now employs a companycalled Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about whatto expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it somestatistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readablestories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificialintelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”Don'tmiss the irony here: Automated platforms are now “writing” news reports aboutcompanies that make their money from automated trading. These reports areeventually fed back into the financial system, helping the algorithms to spoteven more lucrative deals. Essentially, this is journalism done by robots andfor robots. The only upside here is that humans get to keep all the cash.

Maybe Narrative Science needs a couple offinancial translators moonlighting as post-editors? Once again, though, theproduction cost of the source text is so negligible as to make out-and-out rawMT the likeliest candidate for translation.
If you truly expect binary recursiveness tofeed you, perhaps you can write to the company that published Computer Game Bot Turing Test andpropose your services as a post-editor into Spanish or French for this instantclassic. Computer engineer Carlos Bueno describes the book as follows (I am indebtedto Spanish IT translation über-geek @jordibal for thisanecdote):

Letme tell you about another book, “Computer Game Bot Turing Test”. It's one ofover 100,000 “books” “written” by a Markov chain running over random Wikipediaarticles, bundled up and sold online for a ridiculous price. The publisher,Betascript, is notorious for this kind of thing.
Itgets better. There are whole species of other bots that infest the AmazonMarketplace, pretending to have used copies of books, fighting epic price warsno one ever sees. So with “Turing Test” we have a delightful futuristicabsurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book aboutcomputers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to haveused copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printedand read.

But take heart, not all low quality contentis attributable to computers. Last week it was reported that China had censoredthe sex scene in the 3-D version of Titanic.Many online news outlets (Daily Mail, MSNBC, Entertainment Weekly, E Online…) includeda statement from the Chinese Ministry justifying the move thusly:

"Consideringthe vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for atouch and thus interrupt other people's viewing. To avoid potential conflictsbetween viewers and out of consideration of building a harmonious ethicalsocial environment, we've decided to cut off the nudity scenes."

Too good to be true… and it was. Gawker reports thatthe quote came from a satirical website:

Tonsof English-language news outlets are running with this quote even though, guys,it's obviously not real. The rumor probably originated with thisblog post, which fails tomention the joke aspect. 

TheChinese state news agency Xinhua reports that "there is no officialresponse to the roll-back of the censorship policy concerning the 3Dfilm." 

Also,the Chinese movie-going public are not medieval villagers; they understand how3D works.

And, in closing, a widely circulatedarticle estimates that a good chunk of the Content Tsunami is actually sexvideos:

It’sprobably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total datatransferred across the internet. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123929-just-how-big-are-porn-sites/2

Humorist Stephen Colbert paraphrased thefinding thusly: “Thirty percent of all internet traffic is porn, according to a new reportby the New England Journal of Underestimating Everything.”


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. Feel free to join his LinkedIn network or to follow him on Twitter.