"Thank you for your servitude!"
When the sewer clowns take over business and society.
The last two months have been interesting, with what feels to me like a convergence of bad business and social trends. As a US citizen, I am of course distressed over some outcomes of the recent election in that country and the endorsement of fascism by nearly half of participating voters. And I haven’t yet figured out how to respond to hopeful questions from those in my adopted country, Portugal, like “The military can stage a coup and fix this, right?” I prefer my banana republics as a clothing brand, but not all of us are given that choice.
I’ve hesitated to return to the keyboard in a serious way, because I thought that with a few weeks’ break or perhaps a few more, I could make some sense of all this or at least find a little refuge in some value-neutral technology teaching. But such “neutrality” is an illusion, and I think that a great part of my distress at the election outcome lies with an unconscious hope that US politics might have continued on a path that recognizes the value of the many peoples who are the weave of that country’s social fabric, and that the abusers and trolls would be washed back into the sewers from which they emerged and then on to some distant, deep place where their toxic spew would pose less risk to those who, at the very least, just want to live and let live.
My naive hope was that somehow politics would do better than what I’ve seen happening in my corners of the business world. Yeah, I know. Dream on.
I hope that you, the reader, do not think I am trivializing the potential horrors of the incoming US regime by hinting at similarities in its outlook with some of the dehumanizing practices I see with the increased depersonalization of vendor management, ill-considered automation and SI (stolen intelligence, a more appropriate term for the fraud commonly referred to as “AI”). For me, it’s all rocks and gravel on the same bad road to nowhere good, though it could be fairly argued that those political rocks are more like falling boulders from high, dark cliffs.
The fumes emitted by the ass clowns of business and politics share a common scent of disrespect for human dignity and disregard of truth in favor of unearned profits.
In the early days of my involvement with the language services sector some 24 years ago, the widespread technical ignorance and incompetence of the players on that stage worked very much to my advantage, and I was able to form quite a number of personally and financially satisfying relationships thanks to some basic skills in data migration and other information technology challenges, as well as reasonable skills in a few languages and good knowledge of some scientific and legal subject matter. The people I met were, for the most part, decent folk committed to providing good service and fair value, and they usually knew what they didn’t know and respected the expertise of those who could cover that deficit for them.
Twenty years ago, the service market for translation and interpreting was far more fragmented than it is today. Well, fragmented is how it was often described in any case. Almost as if it were broken and needed mending. But perhaps it was merely better adapted to the diverse needs of businesses and individuals for communication, with more scope for those able and willing to meet those needs to act in good faith and do so.
Monopolies are never a good thing, neither for the end customers who have fewer choices available nor for the translation plantation workers who wordcrop for ever diminishing returns and have ever fewer alternatives. The oligarchic intermediaries and aspirants to that role may do better financially for a time, but eventually the poor diet of automated wordwanking and other manipulations takes its toll, and the lucky ones do a little M&A1 jig before they are yanked ignominiously from the stage.
The sleazy suck-ups at Slator2 may be outraged by my use of the term trashlation, but objectively that is an accurate description of the at-best mediocre mess of NMT, LLM and MOUSE spew extruded by today’s Linguistic Sausage Purveyors (LSPs) and marketed as ready-to-use for marketing, safety reference information, critical litigation briefs and whatnot. Pure word waste, really, and deadly in a worst case, as the Portuguese banker who died in a South African prison found when the translated documents that might have kept him alive by extradition were rejected after they were utterly botched.
Whither education?
The louder voices for continuing professional training and university education related to language service careers too often advocate a relationship with technology that is more likely to lead to an individual’s undoing in the medium term, while ensuring a big portion of short-term misery. It is now widely acknowledged by those who have begun taking on post-editing jobs for machine trashlation and AI spew that patching such messes very often takes longer than doing a good job from scratch, and compensation offered by the wordwank brokers is a fraction of sustainable earnings in too many cases. A qualified semiconductor engineer, previously in high demand for knowledgeable translations in his field may pressured now to accept average rates for sweatshops in Bangladesh, because after all, everything he needs to know for the job is saved in the trashlation memory, isn’t it?
What are the responsibilities of educators in such circumstances? Is it to invoke the fearful mantra that AI won’t replace you, but someone using AI will — is it that? One hears a lot of bullshit like that in social engineering attempts to force compliance with an utter lack of useful standards.
I prefer to focus my teaching on aspects of technical problem-solving or truly useful workflow organization, and I try to stay out of discussions related to an individual’s language qualifications or, God forbid, much of what I saw in the textbooks during my brief fling with a translation masters program in Birmingham nearly two decades ago. But I’ve often had the sense, which I sometimes act upon, that more that guidance on language or technology, language service providers may need skilled instruction in self defense.
For some of the abusive practices I’ve seen in the sector, that might involve smashing an elbow into some delinquent payer’s jaw, but more usefully that could involve teaching hostage project negotiation, legal pursuit of arrears, or simply walking away. Learning to recognize scams. Understanding contracts and that companies with rigid, non-negotiable, punitive terms and illegal payment practices are “partners” on par with the Russian government; they are utterly unreliable, should be avoided or dealt with in the harshest terms when they fail to satisfy commitments and the law.
Life’s too short to play in the sewer with clowns.
merger and acquisition
a propaganda organization funded by the worst of the worst in the trashlation sector, see
https://slator.com/
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