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Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

nytimes.com

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Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#11

Post by patio11 »

Quality translation is not cheap. This is partially because there are numerous places where the market for it is not as efficient as it could be. However, it is mostly because it is freaking hard. (I do J->E technical translation for the day job on occasion. You need to have a superset of the knowledge base of an intermediate Java engineer to do it well. I got to rewrite a description of what a SQL injection attack was written by someone who had never used SQL, who faithfully translated a description they found in a well-known Japanese desk reference for engineers. They produced comprehensible English which was, well, wrong.)

Come to think of it, translation is a classic market for lemons, isn't it. The people who need it the most are the least capable of assessing the quality of the deliverables, which is why everyone here has heard of All Your Base Are Belong To Us. This results in both people paying absurd amounts of money for mediocre translation and, hmm, large companies thinking that their crowdsourced translation presents their company in the best possible light.

There's so many ways a crowdsourcing solution like this can go wrong. I wish I could show you a concrete example but I don't have any good examples of Japanese businesses that used the technique off the top of my head. If you guys want I can dredge up an example or two from Facebook or whatever, but I'm not quite as plugged into the Japanese Internet so I miss most of the inevitable snickering.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#12

Post by kingkongrevenge »

shabda wrote: post #10
mhp wrote: post #3

Welcome to the free market. If there are people that want to do this for free for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is happy with the translation they do, then why should anyone else care? If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)

Welcome to the free market. If there are people who want to sell drugs, and people who want buy drugs are happy with it, Why should anyone care? 1. Because its unethical. 2. Because its bad for society. There is a reason minimum wages and employement laws exist.

Um, there is nothing wrong with selling and buying drugs. Nobody should care.

Minimum wage and unionization laws exist to protect certain laborers at the expense of lower skilled labor.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#13

Post by byrneseyeview »

It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the person you're talking to is a great way to start a conversation that ends with them writing a check.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#14

Post by Dilpil »

shabda wrote: post #10
mhp wrote: post #3

Welcome to the free market. If there are people that want to do this for free for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is happy with the translation they do, then why should anyone else care? If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)

Welcome to the free market. If there are people who want to sell drugs, and people who want buy drugs are happy with it, Why should anyone care? 1. Because its unethical. 2. Because its bad for society. There is a reason minimum wages and employement laws exist.

I accept your first argument, and reject your second.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#15

Post by paulgb »

mhp wrote: post #3

Welcome to the free market. If there are people that want to do this for free for LinkedIn and LinkedIn is happy with the translation they do, then why should anyone else care? If you want to revolt against people working for free when they should be paid, come see what some of the "interns" in NYC have to do in journalism and fashion (and even more industries now there are no jobs out there)

That's what I first thought when I skimmed the article, but if you look again article implies they were targeting professional translators. It's not "wrong", and Mr. Irwin may have overreacted, but it shows a lack of tact from LinkedIn.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#16

Post by wheels »

patio11 wrote: post #11

Quality translation is not cheap. This is partially because there are numerous places where the market for it is not as efficient as it could be. However, it is mostly because it is freaking hard . (I do J->E technical translation for the day job on occasion. You need to have a superset of the knowledge base of an intermediate Java engineer to do it well. I got to rewrite a description of what a SQL injection attack…

There's a huge gap between trying to do translation as a non-professional and the amount of effort required for a professional. I dated a German / English -> Hebrew translator for a while and despite me being better in both German and English, she could translate much more effortlessly from German to English than I could. It's a skill that's separate from raw language ability. She'd just read a line and then immediately start pounding out the translation.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#17

Post by Vivtek »

byrneseyeview wrote: post #13

It sounds like this is really exaggerating. LinkedIn accounts ain't cheap, and they do give you ways to contact other professionals. If you could ping someone and say "I'm interested in doing some translation; for an example of my work, check out the official Romanian version of LinkedIn," that would be great. Simply being able to say that you contributed to a site used by the person you're talking to is a great way…

Speaking as a professional translator, I have to agree. But I'm also speaking as an open-source developer, so I'm used to that model, and the translation industry isn't. It sounds to me as though LinkedIn could have approached the matter with some tact, but it should be said that translators as a whole are pretty prickly. We have to be. The better we are, the less visible we become.

And it's a common scam in the industry (less so now that we congregate online) to take a document, break it up into chunks, then send each chunk to a freelancer as a "translation test" to be done free of charge. I think this LinkedIn thing hit some people that way.

But yeah; mostly, this is one of those sound and fury things.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#18

Post by Vivtek »

wheels wrote: post #16
patio11 wrote: post #11

Quality translation is not cheap. This is partially because there are numerous places where the market for it is not as efficient as it could be. However, it is mostly because it is freaking hard . (I do J->E technical translation for the day job on occasion. You need to have a superset of the knowledge base of an intermediate Java engineer to do it well. I got to rewrite a description of what a SQL injection attack…

There's a huge gap between trying to do translation as a non-professional and the amount of effort required for a professional. I dated a German / English -> Hebrew translator for a while and despite me being better in both German and English, she could translate much more effortlessly from German to English than I could. It's a skill that's separate from raw language ability. She'd just read a line and then immediat…

Agreed. I translate one and a quarter million words a year. After a while it truly becomes second nature.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#19

Post by physcab »

mhp wrote: post #7
rriepe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interns get the benefit of experience. They get to meet people. They get to try out an industry without actually committing to a full-time job. The LinkedIn translators wouldn't have gotten any of that. It's one thing to sample a career without pay, and another to do a job for free.

Ok, so don't contribute? No one is forcing you. Are you just as upset about people fostering rescue animals for free? Why aren't people outraged that they aren't paid. How can you decide the motivations for someone who wants to volunteer their time to do this?

Both points made above are valid. While not a great PR move, LinkedIn is entitled to make that kind of decision and honestly I hope they get what they paid for (nothing).

Something that the free market does not take into account though is fairness or ethics. I'm not an economist, but I have enough sense to know when people are being taken advantage of and that I think is wrong.

Re: Translators Wanted at LinkedIn. The Pay? $0 an Hour.

#20

Post by endtime »

physcab wrote: post #19
mhp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so don't contribute? No one is forcing you. Are you just as upset about people fostering rescue animals for free? Why aren't people outraged that they aren't paid. How can you decide the motivations for someone who wants to volunteer their time to do this?

Both points made above are valid. While not a great PR move, LinkedIn is entitled to make that kind of decision and honestly I hope they get what they paid for (nothing). Something that the free market does not take into account though is fairness or ethics. I'm not an economist, but I have enough sense to know when people are being taken advantage of and that I think is wrong.

>Something that the free market does not take into account though is fairness or ethics.

Actually, the free market is the most fair of all systems, at least for some reasonable definitions of "fair".

>I have enough sense to know when people are being taken advantage of

No one is being forced to do anything. This is a consensual arrangement. So how is anyone being taken advantage of?

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