I missed all the, um, fun...

I generally disregard requests to participate in surveys, especially when I'm up to my pelvis in alligators, trying to beat down a deadline. However, I just went back to look at a request I got from LinkedIn, based on some skinny I've learned via Twitter (where I had changed my location to somewhere 3-1/2 hours on the other side of GMT, so as to help throw chaff at certain location searches).

Here is question 3 from the LinkedIn survey:

What type of incentive would you expect for translating LinkedIn site? (check all that apply)
( ) Upgraded LinkedIn accounts
( ) I would want to do this because it’s fun
( ) Highlight your LinkedIn translation work on your LinkedIn profile (You’re the #1 translator of LinkedIn in [language name] )
( ) LinkedIn Translator Group Membership
( ) Translation leader board recognition (You’re the #1 translator of LinkedIn in [language name] based on submitting [number] of translations!)
( ) Other (please specify)

Conspicuously absent from the list of choices is the one professional translators value quite a bit ("Getting paid").

Via Matthew Bennett's blog come an interesting set of questions:

10 big crowdsourced translations questions for LinkedIn

The debate about crowdsourcing and web companies using crowdsourced translations has been going on for a while now (most famously with Facebook), but here are ten questions professional translators were asking about LinkedIn’s efforts today.

In a year when Ernst&Young rank ‘talent management’ and ‘reputation risk’ in their Top 10 list of global business pitfalls, any company with translation needs would also do well to reflect on their own answers.

1. Do you realise that incoherent translation will communicate incoherent thought and an incoherent image to your foreign users?
2. Are you willing to offset the increase in user numbers with a certain number of foreign language users thinking your translation - and therefore your company - sucks?
3. What happened to better sales copy = more sales/conversions? Does that not apply for some strange reason to translated texts in foreign languages?
4. Would you also consider crowdsourcing your other departments - copywriting, marketing, accounting, legal advice and strategic planning?
5. If, for arguments sake, we say that a crowdsourced translation could be 70% of the quality of a professional one, is a 70% quality standard acceptable for your product and for the other areas of your company? What would happen to your business if you applied a 70% quality standard in accounting, sales, server uptime or programming?
6. Is free really a cheaper option with the image of your company or are there hidden costs you should be considering in unrealised sales / sign-ups?
7. Is that reduced sign-up/sales/advertising rate sufficient to offset the apparent cost of free or would you get better returns paying for professional translation and having the extra users/sales?
8. If your customers are professionals, why have you decided to annoy a group of your professional translator users? Doesn’t this dent your image somewhat?
9. Do you not understand the benefits that a professional translator with years of multi-lingual, cross-cultural experience on hundreds of projects can bring to your project?
10. Do you understand the difference between someone who more or less speaks two languages and a professional translator?

Good questions, but based on my experience, not ones too may people care to answer.

Meanwhile, back on my hard drive, I've got 2600 source words left to translate before the end of the day!

Cheers...

UPDATE: Hey! It's a survey, so I took it, because a message isn't useful if it doesn't get to where it needs to go. My response to the last question, soliciting any additional comments:

Wow. And all this time, you had me thinking LinkedIn was a professional organization. Do you also ask for volunteers to do your marketing? IT? accounting? If not, why do you ask professional translators to work for essentially no remuneration? Pathetic.

What else is new?

An article at ars technica refers to a study published in an academic journal suggesting that animations in PowerPoint presentations actually hinder audience comprehension.

And that applies what one might consider to be the most benign animation, the so-called "builder," in which some number of points related to a topic can be made to appear on a slide one at a time, one below the other, allowing the presenter to comment on each point before going on to the next. (That it applies to presentations where the originator took, as a design requirement, the need to use at least four different animation effects per slide should not even be open to discussion. :^)

It also reminded me of a horrendous job from some time ago, involving PowerPoint, where you couldn't actually see most of the presentation unless you ran the bloody thing, because a hefty percentage of slides relied on animations that built several slides worth of information into a heap on one slide that sort of made sense when viewed in presentation mode (the same result could have been achieved by breaking each such slide into the requisite number of "ordinary" slides), but which was untranslatable without a huge amount of dismantlement and reassembly.

But what am I going on about? I just completed my first pass through a job that will linger in my memory for some time, associated with a word that starts with the letter "s" (and that word ain't "shiny," let me tell you).

PowerPoint is evil.

Cheers...