LJ Idol 9.24: The Cupertino effect...

[alexpgp]

To err is human; to really screw up requires a computer.
(with apologies to Alexander Pope)

Some years ago, I had to write a letter to a potential client explaining how I would go about making sure that interpreters assigned to work at a high-level bilateral technical meeting would "provide error-free services."

This was a real head-scratcher of a challenge, because interpreters, whose job consists of orally translating what people say to each other, back and forth, in the course of a discussion, create no tangible "thing" that can be checked before it's "used." Once an interpreter utters something, the cat—so to speak—is out of the bag. By comparison, translators create a written text, the quality of which can be verified before delivery by having an expert compare the translation to the original and make any necessary corrections.

In the interpretation industry, the standard response to a requirement to "provide error-free services" is to swear up and down that you use only qualified people with extensive experience and impeccable track records to do the work. And there, with the word "people," lies the rub.

People have an annoying tendency to make mistakes.

Sometimes, a mistake is made by those screening the qualifications of the people who will be doing the work, and you end up with the situation similar to the one President Carter found himself in during a trip to Poland in late December 1977, when his State Department interpreter turned Carter's "when I left the United States" into "when I abandoned the United States," and went on to say something about "your lusts for the future" when the President spoke of the desires of the Polish people.

Sometimes, a mistake is the result of stress or surprise, as was the case during the famous "kitchen debate" between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at the American National Exhibition held in 1959 in Moscow. There, during a discussion of the merits of the capitalist and communist systems, an emotional Khrushchev finally burst out with the statement that the Soviet Union would "catch up with and surpass" the United States, and then uttered an obscure idiomatic expression that basically means "We'll show you!" (with overtones of "We'll teach you a lesson you won't forget!" and the merest hint of "Your punishment will be severe!"). The situation was so stressful and the phrase so unexpected that the interpreter momentarily found himself at a loss, and he interpreted Khrushchev's phrase literally, as "We will show you Kuzma's mother!"

And in the end, sometimes—let's face it—you don't have to do anything or be anyone special to misunderstand what someone else has said. (How many times have you had a conversation that, roughly, follows the template "I said this—no, you said that"?) This stuff happens to interpreters, too, from time to time.

I finally decided that the best way to ensure high-quality interpretation was to assign two interpreters for any particular assignment. It's an expensive solution, but if "provide error-free services" is the overarching criteria, having people back each other up the only reasonable solution, the idea being that if the "working" interpreter makes a mistake, the "listening" interpreter can jump in quickly and fix things.

So, using my word processor, I wrote a very persuasive letter to the client, read it over, and then spell-checked it. I then fired up a newly installed faxing application and copied the text of the letter into it. After making sure the recipient's company name and fax number were correct, I positioned my mouse cursor over the "Send" button on the screen, and pressed the mouse button.

And just as I did so, my eye was drawn to the recipient's last name in the salutation. As my mouse button made a soft "click," I was horrified to see that Bloomstein had somehow turned into Bloodstain.

Keeping the button depressed, I felt much like the unfortunate infantry soldier who has just stepped on one of those land mines that arms itself when stepped on, and then waits for something else to happen before blowing up. I considered my options. I thought about disconnecting the computer's power cord or the modem cable, but both were connected to the back of my computer, which was under my desk. I was stuck.

Just as I was about to pick up the phone and call for someone to come unplug my computer, I realized that the faxing application would not actually send the fax until I released the mouse button while the cursor was over the "Send" button on the screen. So I carefully moved the cursor away from the button on the screen and released the death grip I had maintained on my mouse. Nothing happened. The fax remained unsent. Embarrassment—or worse—had been averted.

However, a new problem arose. When I changed the name back to "Bloomstein," it doggedly reverted to "Bloodstain." What was going on?

After digging around in the program's settings, I discovered the faxing application was configured to "autocorrect" text entered into the message field, and apparently, "Bloomstein" was not a word recognized by the program, so it was replaced by something that was in the program's dictionary. After making the appropriate changes to the configuration, I changed the name back one more time and, after making sure it remained unchanged, sent the fax.

As it turned out, my letter swayed the client and my proposed solution was adopted, but the sweetness of that victory will always be marred by the knowledge of just how closely I had come to alienating the client by having a computer program "help" me make what would surely have been a hugely embarrassing error.