Look What They’ve Done to My Brain

The last twelve notes from music that I was listening to on my radio today, just before I went to sleep, were hidden deep down in my subconscious all night long while I was sleeping.

Until they emerged again, unexpectedly, the next morning.

It was not the music of spheres, resonating throughout the universe all the way to my bedroom. I eventually recognized them as the first twelve notes from a movement of Dvorak’s “In Nature’s Realm”. I could not remember the rest of the music, only the twelve notes that were floating around and around in my brain for what seemed like hours.

I could not get rid of them until I turned on the radio to chase them away with other music.

It happens to me every now and then, for instance when I drive my car and listen to a music station – hours later I sometimes start hearing the last oldie that was on the radio just before I turned it off. It’s usually just a tiny fragment of the song that somehow does not want to let go of my ears hours later until it is finally chased away by a different tune.

The Germans call it “einen Ohrwurm haben” – to have a worm in one’s ear, and that’s exactly what it feels like.

Just like fragments of music can infect our ears with well hidden music worms, invisible messages containing fragments of information, misinformation, and propaganda can infect our conscience without our knowledge or approval.

This is basically what modern marketing is based on, and that is precisely why we are subjected to a marketing overload from the moment we wake up in the morning and look at our smartphone: the idea is to keep planting worms inside of us until we fall asleep so that the worms can keep working on us overnight as we sleep.

The worms of yesterday’s information, misinformation and propaganda that were planted in our brains the day before must be reinforced and re-inserted every day.

Otherwise, in the absence of the last twelve worm fragments of information in our mind, combined with another dozen squiggly maggots of what appears to be information, we might start to think for ourselves.

And when people start thinking for themselves, what they often demand is CHANGE.

The tragicomical Brexit fiasco, the undemocratic selection of Donald by the Electoral College Trump (as opposed to a democratic election) to the office of US president despite his loss to an almost equally unpopular presidential candidate by millions of votes, and the recent victory in the French presidential election of a young candidate who is so new (relatively speaking) that he has yet to form a political party as I am writing another silly post, coming on the heels of a win by an equally young politician in Canada, who like so many other politicians coasted to victory on the strength of a famous name, clearly show that the whole world is hungry for CHANGE.

Most people may not be quite sure what kind of change they want, but the one thing that people living in different countries and on different continents know for certain is that they do want a change from the current status quo because they see that things don’t work for them the way they used to.

One of the most powerful catalysts for change is technology. From the technology of the printing press, which after more than a thousand years canceled out the monopoly of the Catholic Church on the interpretation of the Bible, to streaming, which made mighty cable TV companies irrelevant to millennials, it is clear that no matter how well established and powerful a government or an industry may be, it better keep a watchful eye on what is happening in the technology sector.

The translation industry is certainly eager to embrace technological change by promoting what it calls language technology. It constantly demands that invisible peons working in its entrails (that it refers to as “Dear Linguists”) adopt as many labor-saving language technology tools as possible and use these tools in their daily work.

The reason for this demand is clear: the more “Dear Linguists” use this language technology, the less money they will make and the more profit will thus be left over for the movers and shakers in the translation industry, the rightful owners of “Dear Linguists.”

The push for obligatory adoption of so-called language technology tools started about fifteen years ago with the demand for obligatory use of CATs, Trados in particular, because these tools made it possible to reduce the word count by a large margin, and word counts are the basis on which most translators are paid.

This particular wage theft scheme was perpetrated so successfully by the translation industry that most translators who send me their résumés, and all newbie translators, proudly and prominently list their mastery of Trados software as evidence of their professional qualifications, along with a statement that “rates are always negotiable.”

Instead of providing proof of professionalism based on their education and experience, translators advertise their willingness to be cheated out of remuneration for their work by the way CATs are used by the translation industry. They are so desperate for work that they are begging the translation industry to abuse them as much as possible, in exchange for a promise of work.

The next chapter of technological change in the translation industry is likely to be based on editing of machine translation by invisible human beings who, although they are not quite translators, should theoretically be able to edit the raw output of machine translation systems that are riddled with well hidden mistranslations so as to remove most mistranslations from this output.

These people, not quite translators, called post-processors or editors (or even copy editors!) of machine translations, would be paid even less than translators who are forced by the translation industry to use the larcenous scheme of how language technology tools ought to be applied by the obedient peons.

The last time I was contacted by a translation agency to become a machine translation “copy editor” I was offered the princely sum of 1 cent per word for “copy editing” of machine translations.

The changes resulting from new technology can be beneficial to us, but they can be also harmful, depending on whether we are able to use new technology for ourselves, or whether we allow other people to use it against us.

Some people swear by CATs and say they could no longer translate without them. Some people, myself included, never used them and never will because they find them too constricting and unsuited to their particular field of translation.

Many translators, myself included, use machine translations, but only use them for their own purposes rather than for the translation industry’s purposes.

When I have access to machine translation, which is most of the time because most patent application can now be easily translated for free from just about any language into English with a few mouse clicks, I print out a machine translation to use as a resource listing technical terms that I may, or may not, use in my own translation.

But what I would never do with machine translation is what the translation industry tells me that I should be doing with it – namely edit out the hidden mistranslation worms from it to transform it into real translation.

Even if translators were paid hourly rates commensurate with their education, skills and experience for post-processing of machine translation, which they most certainly will not be, most translators understand that to edit machine translations is the wrong way to go for the myriad reasons I keep mentioning on my blog.

In my field of patent translation, probably the most important reason why such a practice must be avoided is the fact that precisely because the machine translations may at first glance look very good, many mistakes that are unlikely to be caught by a post-processor will necessarily creep into the final translation.

It is relatively easy to banish the nuisance of an unwanted ear worm of music from our consciousness. All we have to do is turn on the radio and listen to different music.

It is much more difficult to resist the worms that are being planted in our consciousness by the translation industry, an industry that is celebrating technology tools and equating them with a valid replacement for human brains.

But tools are only tools. They cannot replace human brains. They can be very useful to us, but only if we use them for our own purposes.

But they can also do a lot of damage to translation, the product of our work, and to our profession, if we allow the translation industry to use these tools against us.