Branko’s Weblog

Once upon a time there lived a beetle that wanted to be an elephant.

What is an elephant? its friends wanted to know. Is it something you can eat? Can you stroke its hair? Does it have cable television?

I don’t know, the beetle said, but I am convinced it would be great to be one.

An elephant that just happened to pass by had overheard everything, and was surprised. Am I something you can eat? How do I taste? What is hair? Do I have cable television?

The elephant lifted the beetle off the ground, held it in front of its left eye, and asked: what is a beetle?

A witch who also just happened to pass by transformed the beetle into an elephant and the elephant into a handsome fellow whom she chained to the clammy wall of the small castle a few miles into the forest. There she stroked his hair until he went crazy. And then she stroked his hair until he died. And then she stroked his hair until he had none left.

He was a very good bullshitter, by which he meant a very bad one.

A couple of lessons I learned from my distributed translation experiment:

1. Don’t worry about volunteers showing up. Initially nobody seemed to be interested in participating, but after a while somewhere from ten to twenty people turned up, which was more than enough for my purposes. I had advertised my experiment in four places: this blog, the Dutch forum at Distributed Proofreaders, a chatty general purpose Usenet group, and a mailing list for (non-literary) professional translators. OK, so do worry, a lot. :) Thing is, if you’ve made something interesting, people will come and take a peek.

2. Don’t just dabble. I set up the site as minimally as possible using the very simple Usemod wiki. Usemod is great because it so small; you can easily modify it if you have simple needs. Unfortunately, spammers found out about the site rather quickly and began hitting it heavily. If I had used better developed software, such as the Mediawiki, I could probably have turned on all kinds of anti-spam measures that were now not available to me, and that would have been too much work to develop. Even then I could probably have switched to Mediawiki, but that seemed too much work to me for a simple experiment. In hind-sight that would have allowed me to keep the experiment running, so it’s a pity I chose not to take that path.

3. Don’t underestimate your volunteers. I had assumed that the level of quality would be fairly high, but perhaps a little too consistent; and in order to remedy this I had planned to add a few bad translations myself (remember, the experiment was to measure differences in consistency). Not necessary, it turned out. The quality of submitted translations was both high and varied.

4. Let your volunteers find things out for themselves. I had planned a translation dictionary, but nobody used the pages I set up for that. No need to provide your volunteers with things you think they would need, only provide them with what they actually need.

Looking at other translation projects:

5. There are more ways to skin a cat. My experiment was set up to find out what happens when different volunteers tackle one paragraph at a time. That idea was borrowed from Distributed Proofreaders, where volunteers work at one page at a time. My fear was that you cannot slowly build a literary translation when every translated paragraph ends up with a different style (Wikipedia syndrome). My hope was that you could solve this problem by having post-processors try to smooth out the differences.

Harry auf Deutsch worked this way; volunteers would each get assigned a small bunch of pages; then chapter managers would iron out the differences chapter-wide, and a book manager would do something similar for an entire book.

I have since seen another distributed translation project that takes a radically different approach. Although volunteers there are still free to tackle a work one paragraph at a time, in practice they work on much more, sometimes even on entire novels at a time. The difference is that they limit themselves in the quality levels they try to achieve. The first volunteer or set of volunteers uses software to generate a machine translation. The second volunteer for a work tries to produce a rough translation from the machine translation. The third tries to clean up that rough translation a bit.

Summary: two years ago, I asked people on the internet to help me create a public domain translation of a public domain source text, Poe’s The Tell-tale Heart. The goal was to help establish whether it was possible for a disparate group of translators to create a literary translation. You will find both a description of the experiment and the results below.

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Once upon a time there was a fairytale that yet had to be told.

Teleread has a short bit about the Fiction Bitch, an author who will critique your purply prose in no uncertain terms (I wonder what this sentence would net me) out of hatred for bad and mediocre writing.

When I was about twenty I had a pen friend who was nuts about so-called ’student’ magazine Propria Cures. PC, as it is generally abbreviated, is a satirical magazine. Supposedly written and edited by students, it often has staff that would have been kicked out of university decades ago.

Not sure if I remember this correctly: but apparently, my friend and her friends thought it way cool if you got a mention in the magazine. The editors used the letters page to bitch about bad prose, and sometimes praise good writing.

I had as few illusions about the quality of my writing then as I have now; in order to be printed, thus to be cool, I had to write something that would strike the right level of badness.

I managed to craft a song, a cheerless little ditty about ‘the environment’, of which they printed the refrain. I cannot remember it all, but it went something like: “De bomen gaan dood / De bomen gaan dood / Milieuproblematiek / Groot is de nood”. (The trees are dying / The trees are dying / Environmental problems / Large is the distress. It rhymes in Dutch. Honest, it does!)

Their comment: “Our waste-paper basket shares your pain.”

A family of four returns from its prematurely interrupted ride through the polder and bikes straight into the bustling market. The mother leads and the father closes. They are all wearing brightly coloured rain gear, with the hoods drawn closely over their heads, making them look like mutant smurfs.

The rain is going rat-tat-tat on the leaves of the trees of Sarphatipark. Thousands of drops on thousands of leaves, like drums at a convention of monomaniacs.

Then wilful gusts of wind tear apart the clouds overhead, and suddenly parts of the street are ablaze in the sunlight. Pedestrians have to shield their eyes from the bright reflections in pools.

Near the park, a front door opens in a stately house, and a small child is let out. It starts stomping its rubber boots with joy in every puddle it can find, while its mother tries to extract a carriage from the house.

For the first time in weeks, the streets smell like streets.

There are those who moan that “this is not summer.” I don’t think I understand them.