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.
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 IngenierÃa Informática por la Universidad de Pensilvania, dondetambién estudió LingüÃstica 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.
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| Jon Voight as Milo Minderbinder in the movie version. |
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.
