are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?
machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world
I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.
(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)
I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.
(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)
I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!
Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?
The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.
You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.
But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”
You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!
It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”
Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.
This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.
So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.
So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!
It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)
And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.
And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.
what if public libraries were open late every night so that:
- children and teens who cant get home until a later time have a safe, warm, well lit, populated area to socialize, charge devices, rest, etc
- children and teens have a safe place to go to stay away from danger
- people who have jobs that take up most of the day would still have time ANY DAY OF THE WEEK to go use the libraries facilities (printing, computers, etc)
This is exactly what public libraries are trying to achieve - public libraries as a third place is a whole thing - it’s just that the funding isn’t there (yet).
Libraries need and deserve so much funding
I’m going to apologize if this post comes off as sounding very aggressive, but having just been through one of the most stressful experiences of my entire career in libraries:
if you want this, you need to be at your local community government meetings. you need to be talking to your representatives. you need to be out there Lobbying.
Just a few weeks ago, my library, me, my coworkers, we had to write letters, send emails, make phone calls, speak at council meetings, just to beg our aldermen to give us our usual funding. Which they didn’t even give to us last year. Losing last year’s funding forced us to cut staff, hours, and all of our databases. If we’d lost this year’s funding? two positions would have been gone and we would have likely had to close on Saturdays. On Saturdays. The day of the week most of y’all working M-F jobs actually have time to go to the fucking library.
And do you want to know how much money we were asking? We were asking for an increase of approximately 13 cents a person.
13.
Fucking.
Cents.
ACROSS AN ENTIRE YEAR.
No one seems to understand how libraries are funded. It’s not just Free Stuff. It’s your tax dollars being paid back into your community. It’s crowdfunding. The highest cost anyone in my community pays for the library a year is approximately $250. Divide that up. That’s just $4 a week. That’s less than a coffee. It’s the equivalent of purchasing about 10 hardcover books a year. For that price, you could have access to every book that has ever been written, a place to go that’s not a bar, programs for kids, teens, and adults, educated staff that can help you find the answers to your questions, and so much more.
You want these late-night libraries? You want all this stuff? Start fighting for it. Start showing up. Start making phone calls. It’s not going to come out of thin air. Start fighting to erase the idea that taxes = evil. Start fighting to spread the understanding that taxes are what help us build a better society.
Make sure the people who represent you know that you want this. That this is where you want your tax dollars to go. That this is what you want them to support. That you are willing to see your tax bill go up a few more dollars for this.
Because otherwise? None of this is going to happen. Libraries are going to keep cutting their opening hours. Keep cutting staff. Keep cutting programs and databases and collections.
We NEED your support, and we need more than just a post on Tumblr. We need to see people show up and speak out.
Ever wondered how libraries are funded? Here’s a very informative post, along with a plea for our help.
jedi who do three point landings from eight floors up and make the earth shake. jedi who seem like they move silently because they can blur just the edges of your awareness so you never hear them coming. jedi who move as fast and sudden as a predator going in for the kill and they can be on you before you can blink. jedi who can hide underwater for almost an hour breathing the force instead of air. jedi who always catch things before they hit the floor almost like they knew it was going to fall
i just think that if you can draw on the force at the heart of the universe to enhance your physical capabilities, you should get to be a little scary about it
the thing about jedi is that they grow up surrounded by other jedi, so i think younger padawans must forget how this looks to other people all the time, and older jedi probably have to curb it a little in polite society, which gives you potential great moments where they suddenly show what they can really do
super late addition to this post but also this is why animation is the superior medium for star wars i won’t be taking criticism
Meet AleiKah, the half Tengu-Tiefling witch from Mendev, up in the Broken Lands. She intends to join the Pathfinder Society and lend her support to keeping the people of Golarion safe.
