The Battle of Two Wolverines for Our Minds at BP16 in Prague

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.

He said, “My son, the battle is between two “wolves” inside us all.

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

 The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed”.

An excerpt from: You Are Not Alone – by Frances Black

I am sorry I haven’t been posting much this month. But I have a good excuse – I just came back from BP (Business Practices) 16 Conference 2016 in Prague, Czech Republic.

Unlike during my trip to the last translators’ conference – IAPTI 3 Conference in Bordeaux IAPTI 3 (International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters), a Conference held in Bordeaux, France in May of 2015, there were no major harrowing, nearly fatal experiences during this trip to a city that I used to know so well when I lived there for over a decade more than 30 years ago.

This time I only missed the connecting flight from Frankfurt to Prague when Lufthansa sent a message about a gate change to my iPhone, which prompted me to run for about 20 minutes from one end of the Frankfurt airport to the other, only to be told by a smiling German girl at the information desk that the gate had been changed again and that now I had to traipse on my tired feet back again to the same end of the airport where I had started the long journey of a thousand gates to my final destination.

Final destination for the day, anyway, not like in the films Final Destination 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, the “Pentalogy Horror” where everybody dies in the end.

“Fortunately, you don’t have to hurry now, Mr. Vitek, your flight is leaving in an hour so you have plenty of time”, said the German girl when she saw how heavily the overweight old man in front of her was perspiring with a smile that seemed more than slightly sadistic to me.

Other than that, the trip went without a major glitch, especially considering that during my last trip to France a few months ago, my plane was diverted to another airport, which felt like a fiendish and terrifying hijacking. After that I had to spend the night in an overpriced hotel in hot, humid and dirty Atlanta, a young French guy who was sitting in the seat next to me then threw up on me after his second cognac (and instead of apologizing, he just sheepishly avoided looking at me during the rest of the flight), and for good measure I found that Air France lost my luggage when I finally made it to Bordeaux as you can read in this post.

But let’s get back to the topic of my post today, namely a few of my impressions from the Business Practices Conference BP 16 in Prague which ended only a few days ago. Because I tried to attend as many sessions at the conference as possible, sometime I would even visit half of two consecutive presentations if I could not make up my mind which one might be more interesting. Most were excellent and a few where kind of mediocre, I thought, although all were in my opinion worth listening to.

I will try to briefly compare, or contrast, two sessions in my silly post today. So as not to get sued, I will not name names, although it is possible that commenters will mention the names of the speakers later in the comment sections. Unlike the Democratic and Republican parties which see the need to prevent third parties from being able to participate in the political process as their main duty, I do believe in democracy and I do not prevent commenters on my blog from participating (unless they really piss me off for some reason).

One session was given by a young and relatively inexperienced translator who for the purposes of my silly post today will be representing one of the wolverines fighting for translators’ minds. Incidentally, I do not mean anything negative by the animal names inspired by the old Cherokee tale that is a favorite of motivational speakers and that inspired the title of my post today. Since I was also one of the speakers at the conference, I too was a grey wolf fighting for translators’ minds in my presentation about patent translation at BP16.

I believe that we, wise and experienced wolves and wolverines, can do important work … provided that we actually know what we are talking about and have something to say.

The main topic of the session of the first wolverine, a translator turned motivational coach, was how important it is for translators to understand and be accommodating to change, the only constant in our lives, as Heraclitus of Ephesus so eloquently put it 2500 years ago. The changes that she was talking about were mostly technological changes so cherished by “the translation industry”, such as fast computers, algorithms and machine translation, cloud computing, crowd computing, optimized management systems, the emergence of mega agencies, the use of computer assisted tools (CATs), technical tools enabling competition with translators in developing countries and other scary things like that.

Well, scary to us, human translators, but so exciting for “the translation industry”!!!

We have to understand these changes and learn how to adopt them in our own line of work if we want to survive, the first wolverine was saying in her presentation. She was using slides with graphs that were demonstrating on colorful rising and falling curves the progress of machine translation that seemed to be pretty exponential, at least in her graphs. We have to anticipate that within about 10 years, there is likely to be a breakthrough in machine translation that will result in something that is almost as good as human translation, she said.

When I raised my hand to point out that “the translation industry” has been claiming that machine translation that will be “just as good” or “almost as good” as human translation would be here in about five years is something that “the translation industry” has been saying for the last 30 years, she just nodded her head but did not pursue the thought further. (I felt bad for disrupting her train of thought.)

The conclusion that most translators would probably reach from her presentation would be that we translators have basically two choices: either we stop foolishly resisting technological changes and bravely adopt “translation technology” or “language technology” as human translators using technological tools for the purposes of “the translation industry”, for instance by becoming human post-processors of machine translations, or some of us may choose to become highly valued specialized translators in certain coveted fields who can more or less afford to ignore “translation technology”, (because they are so special, by which I mean both the fields and the translators).

I could probably more or less agree with the last conclusion, although I would tend to disagree with most of the other things that this translator coach was saying. But if I had the transcript of the session in front of me, it would be in fact my pleasure to tear the entire presentation to pieces because most of the so-called facts and conclusions were in my opinion about as wrong as the anticipated technological breakthrough in “language technology” that will result in a machine translation that is almost indistinguishable from the way you or I translate.

But it would be a very long post, and possibly not a very interesting one. Fortunately, I will not be writing it.

The main topic of the second wolverine, an older and much more experienced translator, was about something else, although her session was about a related topic – namely about the elusive definition of what quality in translation means and whether there is a correlation between quality and price.

Full disclosure – I’m definitely biased here because although I only met the second wolverine in person at the conference a few days ago, I have been talking to the second wolverine online in various translation discussion groups for about 25 years now, and she sometimes also leaves a comment on my silly blog, usually when she is moved to do so by yet another insanity that I post online.

So don’t expect me to be impartial here. If I were a judge, I would have to recuse myself. But I am not a judge, so I can pretty much say whatever the hell I want on my own blog.

As I was saying, the topic of the second wolverine was about whether there is a correlation between price and quality. She had the same text, about one page, translated by about five translation agencies. At least one of these agencies used a machine translation that was then post-processed by humans (my hearts goes out to them, as does yours, I hope). The other suppliers included a cheap agency that uses cheap humans and a more expensive agency. Unfortunately, as I came late to her presentation, I did not have the color-coded sheets of translations corresponding to the more or less expensive LSPs, which I am told stands for “Lame Service Provider.” But the two young and very pretty translators sitting behind me, one was from Russia and one from Italy, helpfully shared them with me (thank you so much again if you are reading this).

Although I had less time than most people because my translation sheets were shared, the experiment has shown even to me that it was pretty obvious that there is a correlation between price and quality because machine pseudo-translation post-processed by a pitiful, cheap human, which was the cheapest solution, was so gratingly unnatural that I would hesitate to even call it a translation.

It did make sense, but after the spirit of the original text, which was a clever piece originally written by an educated French writer, was murdered by the machine translation, there was not that much that a human post-processor could have done with it. And anyway, given how little these human almost-but-not-quite translators are paid, why should they bother to do more than just remove the most glaring mistakes even if they had more time to do something with the cadaver on their hands, which they don’t?

The additional translations provided by other translation agencies sounded more natural, and some even sounded good or pretty good to some people. But the interesting thing was that when we got to vote about which translations were the best and which we thought were the most expensive ones, there was no agreement between the translators and the other translators who voted differently.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and the beauty or ugliness of a translation is in the mind of a translation critic.

We cannot measure objectively translation quality, although some translation agencies like to pretend that we can and that we do exactly that by using neutral and reliable quality metrics and standards that are internationally approved and agreed upon, called for example ISO (insert a number, updated for greater impact every few years), or EN15038 (this number is also updated for greater impact every few years).

Although the quality standards that some LSPs are advertising on their websites as an assurance of measurable quality are nothing but a big lie as they have nothing to do with the quality of the translators or translations and only relate to the way in which the papers are shuffled around a desk by various mendacious Lame Service Providers, they are very useful for advertising purposes, which is the only thing that matters in “the translation industry”.

But just like most of us can tell the difference between art and pornography, most of us can also tell the difference between a good translation and a really horrible one, which will always be the inevitable result of a machine translation, even a machine translation that has been subsequently post-processed by an underpaid human, as the spirit of the original text will always be killed by a non-thinking machine.

That, among other things, was what I took away from the presentation of the second wolverine.

The way I see it, the problem with the first wolverine was that she was looking at things only from the perspective of “the translation industry”, and also that she did not realize that the translation industry is not the translation occupation. She was sincerely trying to give good advice to translators, but her advice failed to take into account the fact that there is a big difference between these two concepts and that the “translation industry” is not the world. In fact, “the translation industry” represents only one segment of the translation market.

“The translation industry” needs us to work for them because otherwise it can’t make any money. But do we really want to work for “the translation industry” under the current conditions? And if not, what are the other options that translators have?

That question that was not examined in the first wolverine’s presentation at all. And yet, I believe that this is the most important issue facing translators at this point in time.

Let’s hope that she will eventually be able to examine the issue also from the viewpoint of translators, instead of just painting a picture of immutable reality to which we translators must surrender if we want to survive.

She probably will be able to do that at some point, I think she is very talented.

The second wolverine made translators look at the problem that “the translation industry” has with translation quality, which made her presentation so fascinating to me. She was thus also making us examine the sorry state in “the translation industry” while implicitly telling us that they way forward for the translation profession is to concentrate on quality, which is something “the translation industry” is often unable to even ascertain, let alone evaluate, as it is an industry of brokers who don’t really understand much about translation.

To me, the voice of the second wolverine at the BP16 Conference in Prague was much more interesting, much more important  and therefore worth to be listened to and fed in my heart.