The Hamster Who Translated 10,000 Words a Day (and Other Urban Legends)

(Before you say anything, I am fully aware that writing the word “hamster” and “urban legend” in the same blog post is simply asking for it. I can just picture the flood of misguided visitors, but what the hell…)

Whenever translators huddle around a campfire and toast marshmallows, there is an oft-heard urban legend:

I have seen translators deliver 10,000 words of post-edited MT a day (provided that the MT is high quality). At $0.05 a word that’s $500 a day or $10,000 a month. Not a bad salary for a freelancer.

I, personally, would like to meet this character. I’ve heard so much about him/her. Is he bathing in the glory of his $500 words a day? Does she spend nice, long vacations in the Caribbean? Is he stress-free and high on life? Are her dimpled cheeks rosy from the daily kiss of the Mediterranean sun on her complexion?

Quality: Useless Luxury or Strategy for Success?

Sí, soy un romántico del fútbol tal y como lo es Cruyff. Nos gusta 

este fútbol de ataque, atractivo y bonito.

Xavi Hernández

Barcelona plays Manchester United for the Champion’s League Cup on Saturday at London's Wembley Stadium. The question on everyone’s mind is whether ManU manager Sir Alex Ferguson, a living legend, will go out and try to defeat the Catalans aggressively or, alternatively, defend conservatively against the tactically superior opponent and try to grind out a one-goal victory through a lightning counterattack.

If he decides on the latter option —and some great managers with players just as fantastic as his Rooneys and Chicharitos have done so, to my utter amazement (Gus Hiddink with Chelsea a couple of years ago, Arsenal’s Arsène Wenger a couple of months ago)— Ferguson will be taking a leaf out of the playbook of Barcelona’s arch-enemy, “Mouriarty.” I am referring to the dark lord of modern defensive football-soccer, Portuguese grand master Jose Mourinho, currently coaching Real Madrid. For people who don’t watch the sport, Mr. Mourinho has become one of the world’s most successful managers by creating a very conservative and defensive style of play reminiscent of old-style Italian catenaccio.

The reason children play football is because they see videos of Pelé, Maradona and Zidane doing amazing pirouettes with the ball on the field. The Mourinho philosophy consists in taking that sport, ripping out everything that those children love about it and throwing the bloody carcass out on the pitch.

He stands in contrast to everything that is represented by his Real Madrid’s arch-rivals: Barcelona. Whereas Mourinho prefers to build a defensive Maginot Line and strike on the counterattack when the opponent is disorganized, the culés practice a style based on possession through superior skill and unbelievably complex passing schemes to try to get as many goals as possible. Mr. Mourinho, in contrast, doesn’t play for a heap of goals. One-nil is good enough, thank you very much. Style and panache are all very fine and well, but it is worth nothing if in the end you don’t bring home the bacon. Argentines describe stylish football as possessed of fantasía, and that is exactly what the Mourinhos of the world believe: style is fantasy, a pure fancy. It doesn't exist.

The debate between adepts of the Mourinho philosophy and Barcelona’s style has many facets, but it boils down to an essential clash of world views: what is more important, winning or winning beautifully? Style or just showing up? Quality or pragmatism?

I believe it is a false dichotomy. Beauty for beauty’s sake is sterile. Barcelona’s “receive, pass, offer” is not the revival of the Baroque in football. Quality is a strategy for success. Don’t defend by dropping back and placing ten men behind the midfield line. Defend by possession. Retain the ball. Wear your opponents down by denying them possession. Make them run. Make them dizzy with your passes. Force the opponents to foul you. Defend by attacking. And then attack, pass, dribble, pass again and try to drive the ball into the net before they know what hit them.

Is stylishness a sure fire road to success? Yes and no. Barcelona’s record of titles over the past few years is impressive, but the defeats are just as stunning.

Negativism, cynicism, gradgrindism, all of these are also roads to achieving results. If you don’t believe your players are as good as Barcelona, you tell your defensive midfield men to come in strong and intimidate the diminutive Messis and Xavis. You don’t let your multi-million-dollar strikers roam freely but rather you have them man-mark the wingbacks.

In a word, you abandon style (whose very existence you doubt) and fall back on mind-numbing tactics, like the long ball to the opposite goal. The defining moment of this year’s Real Madrid-Barcelona matchups is Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the best strikers of all time, throwing his hands up in despair and urging his reluctant teammates to attack along with him. As he stated to the press later, the coach had told them to hang back, defend and only attack in the last fifteen minutes to snatch a 1-0 win.

So a superior style is no guarantee of success. It has only allowed Barcelona coach Pep Guardiola to have the slenderest of razor-thin edges in his one-on-one record against Mourinho.

F.C. Barcelona can certainly lose on Saturday. That would be disappointing on many levels.

But I can guarantee that it is far more entertaining to watch the blaugrana lose than to watch Mourinhismo get the upper hand any old day.

And if Barcelona wins with style, the victory is so much sweeter.


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.

Are Translation Prices Really Dropping?: A Thought Experiment

 

Code Monkey like Fritos

Code Monkey like Tab and Mountain Dew

Code Monkey very simple man

“Code Monkey,” Jonatahan Coulton

Some very ubiquitous people in the MT Crowd are fond of saying that translation costs are going down. And many translators parrot them despite the absence of hard data to confirm this. Recently, the head of an agency formulated a version of this belief in a blog post: “[M]any of the translation services will continue to get cheaper and cheaper until eventually, MT will be able to do them for free.” And he proceeded to rattle off the usual McLocalization suspects: machine translation, crowdsourcing, Death Star agencies…

I am pretty sure somebody swallowed a caveat. And a rather large one at that. Nonetheless, if you analyze this belief about falling prices carefully, you will come to see that it is nonsense.

Let us suppose, purely for the sake of this thought experiment, that the entire annual output of the entire global translation industry is one billion words. All languages, all companies, all activities related to translation, from the lowliest hamster to the fattest “MLV.” Let us further suppose that the average cost of translating those one billion words was $200 million. That comes to an average per-word rate of $0.20.

Imagine now that I copied and pasted another one billion words into a single Word file and pushed that sucker through Google Translate. Imagine, furthermore, that even mighty Google’s servers don’t balk at chugging down that massive ton of garbage and, after, say, a few weeks, I get back an MT’ed final file. My cost per word would be zero per word.

(Of course, there would be a cost to Google for the Biblical amounts of resources I have wasted on my little antisocial effort, but that is irrelevant for this thought experiment. Let us further assume that Google can’t track me down even with those Google Maps cars that go around the world with little cameras on them.)

(I go AWOL with a new identity and end up eating Fritos while watching Sopranos re-runs in some fleabag motel.)

The fact remains that a massive drop would have occurred in the cost per unit translated. If you average out the cost of $0.20 for the original billion plus the zero pennies per word of my GoogleT experiment, the average, overall cost of translation would now be $0.10 per word.

But what does that have to do with anything?

What would my massive sophomore prank have to do with the cost of producing the original billion words?

Ipso facto, presto change-o, thanks to my machinations, translation costs would immediately plunge to $0.10 per word. I would have halved the cost of all translations with my little prank. In the entire world. In one fell swoop.

But what actual impact does my little act of cyber-piracy have on the first billion words?

It would still cost $0.20 per word to produce those original billion words.


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.

Don’t Let Web 2.0 Memes Do the Thinking for You

I woke up this morning to find out from Kevin Lossner’s blog that there is a price war between SDL and Kilgray. SDL slashed the price of Trados Studio 2009 from $895 to $420. Okay, interesting industry news. I had heard of this previously during the week thanks to a snarky blog post from one of the MemoQ people. Inevitably the self-appointed neighborhood localization guru has to weigh in with a bit of received pop wisdom: "Forget about price wars! TM companies should give their stuff away for free!"

So this is his message, transmitted via a tweet: Sorry, Kilgray and SDL, the right price is free!

Which is pretty breathtaking. Okay, let’s say you believe the price should be nothing. Fine. You paid your $6.99 to buy Chris Anderson’s Free from the discount rack at Wal-Mart. Despite the fact that you paid real money for the book, you swallowed the thesis that stuff in general should be free (you’re not big on logic and you have a hard time perceiving irony) and that this is the only way to make money in the twenty-first century (I know it sounds idiotic but, unfortunately, I actually did read Anderson’s book). Great. Cool. So, armed with your Web 2.0 meme, you venture out to spread the new Gospel. Everything should be free. Free love! Free parking! Free Mandela! Free falling! Frito-Lays! Free free! Free TM tools! Whatever…

So you write: “The right price is free!”

I disagree, but okay. The thing is that in the next breath you go on and say the most amazing thing: Or at most $99!

Wait… what? It’s like we’re in some insane bartering situation: “I am going to charge you nothing for this Persian rug… Or $99… I don’t know… Nothing, $99, it’s all the same isn’t it? We’re all going to die anyway, right?”

Ninety-nine dollars? Do you have some sort of short-term memory disability? Do you not remember the price suggested in the previous sentence? It was nothing (!).

Zippo. Nada. Zilch. The big doughnut.

How can you go from nothing to ninety-nine dollars as a suggested price point?

There is a bleeping chasm between zero and ninety-nine dollars.

And it’s not ninety-nine bleeping dollars!

Jeez…

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.

Would You Like Some Fries With Your 6,000 Words a Day?

Is this the future of the translation industry?:

The other aspect of the problem is the long-term increase in technology-driven unemployment, largely owing to automation. In one way, this is a sign of economic progress: the output of each unit of labor is constantly rising. But it also means that less units of labor are needed to produce the same quantity of goods.

The market’s solution is to re-deploy displaced labor to services. But many branches of the service sector are a sink of dead-end, no-hope jobs.

The quote is from a recent column by Keynes biographer Lord Robert Skidelsky. The question as to whether this depicts a likely path for the translation sector is not motivated by the automation issue, which, as I maintain over and over, is overblown by compromised pundits and “the-sky-is-falling” Chicken Littles. On the contrary, the real question is whether translation, a service industry in general, is becoming or will become a McJob.

Ultimately, this is a question not for collective action or high-minded intellectual discussion but rather a function of your individual approach toward the market. Are you swimming upstream to provide greater added value? Are you finding a comfy niche with hefty profit margins? Or are you taking that post-editor shortcut?

If the latter, begin by practicing: “Would you like some fries with those 6,000 words?”

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.

Big Data: Another Silicon Valley Fad

George: If it was a regular salad, I wouldn’t have said anything. But you had to have the BIG SALAD!

(Seinfeld)

One of the narratives of the current tech bubble is closely related to the Content Big Bang. This explosion of data (aside: I don’t think text is necessarily “content” and much less data) is at once a challenge and an opportunity. According to this piece of groupthink, although managing the deluge of data and storing it is a problem, harnessing this flood of bits and bytes provides manifold insights for data mining. More powerful computing technology, we are told, will open the doors of this future.

But guess who was also a fan of Big Data? The preeminent military strategist of the past twenty years. No, not David Petraeus. I mean Donald "Unknown Unknowns" Rumsfeld. Tim Harford writes in a recent essay to promote his new book, Adapt, that the early (failed) Pentagon strategies in Iraq focused on routing tons of combat data to central headquarters, which processed it and then spit out tactical recommendations like a real-time version of Risk:

It is also a story about the role of technology in decision-making. The U.S. military placed increasing emphasis on the use of “effects based analysis of operations” – using massive amounts of data and computing power to allow commanders at headquarters to absorb information and react quickly, moving units around like chess pieces. Such techniques are hugely useful in some circumstances – a “shock and awe” campaign – but even then they do not always perform as advertised. We’re now discovering that in many campaigns, it is the decision maker on the ground – a captain or even a regular soldier – who has the information that counts and the ability to use it.

Now I know why Amazon keeps giving me such crappy recommendations after over a decade of feeding it data.


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.

Steve Jobs, Language Technology and Taste

Dear tech geek:

This is why Steve Jobs is a genius and you’re a dinkus.

  The clip is taken from the final minutes of a documentary entitled Triumph of the Nerds, from 1996. This is a transcription with emphasis added by me:

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is… I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way: in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their product. And you say 'why is that important?' Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea. If it weren't for the Mac, they would never have that in their products.

So I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success. I have no problem with their success. They've earned their success, for the most part. I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third rate products.

When this interview took place, Jobs was the disgraced boy genius who was ignominiously ousted from the company he founded. These words could easily have been taken as sour grapes from the loser in the great PC battles of the 1980s. Now, however, they are not as easy to dismiss after what has been called the “greatest second act” in corporate history, which began the following year and led to the iPod and now the iPad.

So now you have to pay attention. Because the triumph of Apple over Microsoft is not a story of victory through efficiency, but rather a trouncing of corporate competitors through design excellence and conceptual elegance. In a word, taste. Over vulgarity.

Indeed, the Apple story is a ubiquitous counterexample to a lot of faddish Silicon Valley nostrums broadcast by Wired.

While midgets dream of taking cultural processes and hacking them into assembly lines, the real giants of our times are thinking of ways to break the mind-forged manacles of the twentieth century.

Most research and discussion on machine translation comes from relatively uncultured technicians who look at translation and say “hey, that looks pretty simple, a computer could probably do that.” Over half a century later, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land remains bogged down in the outskirts of London. It is not the Crusade itself that raises hackles but the fanaticized or duplicitous leaders who tell us that the spires of Jerusalem are visible from Southwark if you stand on your tippy-toes. It turns out that a message in one language will never be 100% identical to the message in another language. That information is conveyed differently in different languages. That information encoded in language is hard to quantify.

A lot of the evangelicalism about language technology is marred by intellectual laziness. Whether you’re discussing Lady Gaga or red-shifting galaxies, whether you are an engineer or a computer designer or a poet, you should have the basic courtesy of using words with care. Some very aggressive discussions about the future of the translation industry appear to be undertaken by people who have never written a sentence in their life.

And I’m not asking for holographic Vladimir Nabokov to come down from the Cloud and expostulate on the wonders of the future while chasing butterflies. You don’t have to be a wooly trilingual professional who blogs about hemp cloth in his spare time to appreciate language.

In the clip, the founder of Apple is speaking about how early computers had fonts in which every letter was allotted the same amount of space. An “f” and a “t” placed together looked like “f t” instead of our current “ft,” in which the serif of the “t” elbows its way into the space below the swinging upwards loop of the “f” to form a pleasing whole. That sort of minute attention to aesthetic detail can only come from a profound appreciation of early printing and the artisans who produced incunabula. It is an eloquent example of how humanistic culture should inform technology.

That is sadly missing from current discussions about language and technology. The debate is visibly monopolized by people who are not translators and remind you of the Burt Lancaster character in Elmer Gantry. Or when it is former translators, it is people long on salesy pizzazz and not much in the old noggin. Or people who think translation is a commodity. These people probably don’t read a lot of literature and think any sentence is equivalent to any other. Well, they’re not. Different sentences are not equivalent because of a little thing called style. And if you can’t perceive it, you probably never will. And that is what Jobs was talking about.

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.

Television in the 1920s: Technology and Financial Bubbles Are Joined at the Hip

Television in the 1920s? How come there are no stories about millions of Americans watching Herbert Hoover's inauguration? In these times of technological bubble-blowing by both innocent fanatics and not-so-innocent snake oil salesmen, it is worthwhile dipping into our musty history books. “A new technology comes on the scene and, boom, prices drop to the floor, immediately.” This statement is representative of a naïve view of how technological change happens. But when you read a little bit about the past, you come to realize that this is not how the world works.

Read up on the history of television. John Kenneth Galbraith mentions prospectuses of companies floated on the NYSE in the late 1920s that claimed every home in America would have a TV set by that fall:

Inevitably promoters organized some new companies merely to capitalize on the public interest in industries with a new and wide horizon and provide securities to sell. Radio and aviation stocks were believed to have a particularly satisfactory prospect, and companies were formed which never had more than a prospect. In September 1929 [the crash, you may recall, was in October], an advertisement in the Times called attention to the impending arrival of television and said with considerable prescience that the ‘commercial possibilities of this new art defy imagination.’ The ad opined, somewhat less presciently, that sets would be in use in homes that fall. (p. 46)

Stock prices in 1929 reached ridiculous heights, beyond any reasonable valuation. One of the justifications for the mad prices was that the innovative power of technology and American know-how was driving ever greater efficiencies that justified absurd stock prices without any relation to earnings, which were in some cases non-existent (as was the case during the late nineties Internet boom). Sound familiar?

I am not 40 years old yet and I’ve already seen this story play out twice: first, with the Internet bubble of the 1990s and, later, during the housing bubble of the 2000s. And now I’m seeing the same inane dynamic in translation, a frenzy fed in part by the much larger social media phenomenon.

Of course, TV sets eventually made it into every American home… in the 1960s. But we all know what happened in the interim: stocks cratered, millions lost their job, a decade of depression ensued and a second world war broke out. Instead of watching TV in their homes in 1932, Americans were lining up on bread lines, and in 1942 they still lacked TV but their children were losing their lives in tiny Pacific islands no one had ever heard of. Yes, stocks recovered and eventually regained their 1929 values… in 1954. Adjusted for inflation (i.e., in real terms), they only beat their 1929 levels a couple of years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.




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.

Some (Serious) Observations on the Duolingo Brouhaha

"Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wanted to make a million dollars, the best way to do it would be to start his own religion."

L. Ron Hubbard

The MT Crowd has reacted very defensively to the derisive reception of the Duolingo concept. I myself published a tongue-in-cheek post. However, any further discussion either for or against is futile in the absence of further information.

No one has pointed out the fact that the TED talk by Duolingo creator Luis von Ahn doesn’t actually explain how the system works.

In that respect, two observations are in order.

First of all, the ReCaptcha concept for digitizing books is old hat. If you’re struck by the “gee whiz” aspect of this system, you don’t really read the paper. Even I knew about it. However, the point I would like to make is that the identification of individual blurred words is a lower-order task than taking grammatically complex sentences of some length and providing an accurate equivalent in another language. That is where machine translation proves useless and that is where Duolingo will either achieve a breakthrough or bog down.

Second of all, if you listen to von Ahn’s presentation closely, you should note that he does not indicate how the system will work, even grosso modo. The closest he gets to a technical explanation is very vague. It comes in the crucial 30 seconds in which he describes how the translation process works:

Of course, we play a trick here to make the quality as good as [that of] professional translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator (circa 14:50). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQl6jUjFjp4

Of course, vagueness is his prerogative. He has a "secret sauce" to sell that perhaps could be easily copied, patents notwithstanding. So, basically, the success of Duolingo will boil down to how good the “secret sauce” is that analyzes the target candidates and creates a composite sentence out of the different options provided. That is what no one knows and I suspect no one will know for several months or perhaps years. The thing is that this "combination" is basically what machine translation does with its constituent corpora. Regardless of where the target candidates come from, the proof is not in the crowdsourcing per se. No, the proof is in the pudding that does the combining of the data, whether provided by language learners or bottle-nosed dolphins.

Let me add three observations that I find revealing about the whole episode. 

1.- I wonder whether Google’s interest isn’t due more to the hope of opening some kind of back door into the social media bubble by drawing in people wanting to learn languages for free. My view: this type of crowdsourcing is a case in which the crowd’s wisdom will only be as good as that of the best individual in the crowd.

2.- To proclaim it “crowdsourcing at its best” given the information at hand is typical of the type of quackery put out by our McLocalization pundits.

3.- Furthermore, the immense amount of buzz generated by a solitary 15-minute video clip that contains very little solid information (and the zeal with which it is already upheld by true believers) is typical of the data vacuum (and religious fervor) of speculative bubbles. 

Renato Beninatto may be a hot air system moving through the translation industry, but he is ideal material to diagnose bubble mentality. To quote from his glowing review of a system about which he knows next to nothing:

Let me put it this way: I choose to believe. 


(Scroll down to the comments section to read his profession of Faith.)



Amen, brother. Amen. 


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.

The Social-Media-Crowdsourcing Bubble Takes Another Step Closer to Parallel Universe

[Charlotte tells Carrie about a salesman who gives her free shoes because he is a foot fetishist.]

Charlotte: I don’t think it’s creepy. He makes me feel like Cinderella!

Carrie (shocked): Yes, just like Cinderella… (Thinks to herself): Sick, twisted, parallel-universe Cinderella.

(Sex and the City)

OK, we know MT output remains pretty poor and crowdsourcing only works for websites that are used obsessively for hours and hours.

So how can we leverage the leisure time of the otiose and ignorant to further the dream of bringing the world closer together?

Last year brought us the greatest philanthropic achievement of the McLocalization sector. There is, apparently, a dearth of material in the Thai language, which means that Thai farmers don’t have enough access to information in their own language (never mind the fact that they may not own computers or even have access to the Internet). Well, Thai peasants, you need no longer fear: the MT Crowd gives you… (drum roll)… MACHINE TRANSLATED WIKIPEDIA!

Their standard of living may not have improved much, but at least they’ve got a very detailed discography of Nat King Cole and a smorgasbord of information on the popular American TV show called Hee Haw.

Fresh off this magnum opus, the phalanx has come up with an even better idea: Let’s get people who don’t know foreign languages to translate stuff!

Why didn’t someone think of this before? Our resident Silicon Valley entrepreneur ripostes: “Just because it’s completely moronic doesn’t mean that it’s not a game changer!”

He proceeds:

“Yes, translate as you learn! Back in the olden days, you had to learn a foreign language to translate. Forget that, my brizzle! The world is moving WAY too fast for that antediluvian paradigm. What’s that you say? That we should learn a language before translating? Geez, Grandpa, go get your slippers and jump into your PJs: Matlock starts in half an hour.”

Sound insane? A new venture called Duolingo.com is enginnovating the future at the same time as it boldly goes where no lunatic has ever gone before:

Language differences remain a barrier for the global sharing of knowledge, and computers cannot process human language accurately. The more you learn at Duolingo, the more knowledge you make accessible to the world.

Since you create shared value when you learn, you don’t have to pay for using Duolingo. We believe language education should be 100% free.

Common sense would suggest that a language learner is probably the worst possible candidate to translate a text. (“Well, of course, when you put it that way, it sounds COLOSSALLY stupid…”). But thanks to the magic of crowdsourcing, people who don’t know languages become the ideal workforce for translating texts.

Seriously, guys, what’s next? Are we going to get dogs to translate random stuff on the Internet? Those border collies that know 1,000 words? Better yet: when are we going to crowdsource dolphins? (“We would only use the really, really smart ones. Duh…”)

When historians look back at the Social Media Bubble of the 2010s in search of a peak (i.e., the moment when things got so delirious that even absurd business models began to be taken seriously), I hope they take a look at this venture. Because it’s my candidate.

Of course, anyone pointing out that the Emperor is dancing around in his birthday suit (and, by the by, doesn’t actually know Mandarin Chinese) is a Luddite. Nay, an ignoramus who doesn’t understand that ever-increasing ingenuity is required to achieve this century’s loftiest dream.

No, not curing cancer. Not colonizing Mars, either. Not even realistic breast implants.

No. The Web 2.0 will break down language barriers to achieve the centuries-long dream of selling more online text ads.

Jesus wept.




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.