Localization People-Watching: Take 4
Posted on Mon, Oct 26, 2009
Today Christiane Bernier shares some excerpts from the "Concise Encyclopedia of Localization Professionals"...
Sitting in an artisanal French bakery owned by Guatemalans in little Italy in Montreal, listening to bits of conversations spoken with native and non-native accents, in complete and "broken" sentences, I'm struck with just how fascinating it is to observe such "displaced" people, in transit, in what becomes a life-long migratory journey.
I spoke to a translator friend about my people-watching interests and he revealed that for the last few years, he has been preparing a manuscript for a book about people in the localization industry, a sort of encyclopedia which he hopes to complete one day and publish. He reluctantly let me view in his office, a few of the entries he has written. He has made it a habit to keep triple copies of everything, in addition to diligently saving his work on an external disk drive, which when not in use, he keeps under lock and key. And so I was able to read from one of the coffee-stained paper copies he has. Undecipherable notes were scribbled throughout the manuscript, with new bits of information he had discovered about each of the persons he researched. His research method is rather fascinating. It has involved building a sort of genealogical tree of localization companies and localization departments at large corporations going back all the way to the 60's, and another tree with the people that worked in these companies. He admits to eliminating people that left the industry after working at one company only. His fact checking involves a sophisticated series of questions he has documented in correspondence with colleagues, superiors and customers of each individual.
Only on the condition that I make it clear that this is still a work in progress, has he has allowed me to share a few entries of his manuscript with you. I convinced him that this would allow his project to get some exposure. I'm also trying to convince him that encyclopedic books are passé, and that the new medium he should embrace for his compendium is a website, a sort of Wikipedia of the localization industry, a .... "Locopedia"?
Let me therefore introduce you to some excerpts of Francisco González' "Concise Encyclopedia of Localization Professionals". He apologizes for any errors or omissions in the entries below, and we both welcome any feedback you may have.
Gustav von Reiter
Dusseldorf, Germany 1957-
A localization manager at a chemical plant near Houston specializing in classified corrosive substances, he quickly acquired a reputation among project managers in translation agencies across the US and Europe for his unprecedented authoritarianism and compulsive micro-management. It is estimated that more than 60 project managers across the industry quit their jobs after long periods of incessant harassment by von Reiter, when their requests to be relieved of working on his projects were denied. At least two attempted suicides are known to have been caused by prolonged exposure to von Reiter's harassment. His practices were indeed unreasonable. He demanded 24-hour access to every project manager working with him in any part of the planet, and would systematically call them in the middle of the night, especially on Saturdays, to give additional instructions on ongoing projects, or, more frequently, to shoot a barrage of vicious insults about potential imperfections in a recently delivered one. By 1996, a Milwaukee agency called Chromatics instituted for the first time a three-strike policy for firing highly abusive clients that were judged to be potentially detrimental to its business health. Their practice caught on and by 1999 he had exhausted the patience of most translation shops in North America and Europe. In spite of repeated complaints to his superiors, he seemed untouchable. He is believed to be still plying his trade with total impunity, mainly with translation agencies in obscure and remote continents.
(...)
Eugenio Delgado (alias "The Brief")
Las Palmas, Canary Islands, 1967-
English-to-Spanish translator who lived and worked for a short period in the Boston area. A fierce and passionate loather of marketing blurbs in North America, he became progressively frugal in his translations of sloppy promotional sheets for various screw-and-bolt manufacturers in the US -- sheets where the main idea (low price, great quality) was always repeated over and over with little or no variation. After just a few months on the job his clients began to complain that the word count in the translations suffered inexplicably large reductions in the target language (in one well-known case as high as 75%). Delgado pointed out that he was guided by Baltasar Gracián's motto: "Good things, if brief, are twice as good," and he added that this aphorism was all the more true if applied to bad things instead of good ones. He also brought to the attention of his stupefied clients that he was being admirably honest and unselfish in following this minimalist approach, since he always insisted on being paid by the word in the target language. "You will find no other translator as pork-free and economical as me," he told them. It was all in vain. All his clients (2), quickly left him. He was stripped of his ATA certification after indignant complaints by one of them, and returned to the Canary Islands to become a banana harvester, cursing under his breath about "de hopeless idiotism of screw fabricators."
(...)
Laverne Davenport
Edina, Minnesota, USA 1956-
Sales Assistant at Gerald Grink & Sons, a translation firm in Cedar Rapids, Iowa (see entry on Gerald Grink) in the 1980s. Davenport ended up being assigned almost exclusively to the task of manually counting words on large printed technical manuals for agricultural machinery, in order for the sales department to produce estimates. According to those who knew her, she became increasingly depressed with her job, and could be observed, hunched and haggard over those enormous manuals day after day, pencil in hand, barely able to stay awake in the mind-numbing Iowa winters. Humiliated by what she considered inhuman drudgery, she turned to alcohol and drugs and was eventually fired during a particularly dark afternoon in November 1994, when her employer discovered that she had long stopped counting and was just jotting down fictitious estimates based merely on the thickness and weight of the manuals. When asked what she did with her time while pretending to count, she answered: I either sleep or daydream.
Once freed from this dismal work, her creative and fighting spirit resurfaced. She underwent successful therapy to kick her numerous addictions, wrote an essay for the Localization Quarterly describing her ordeal and inveighing against such practices, and thus came to the attention of Christy Niermeyer (see entry), a localization manager from Los Angeles who had long been mounting a campaign against the tyranny of the Word as an unmovable unit of measurement.
I must say that this last entry struck a chord in me, as I have given much thought to our industry's basic "unit of measurement," the word, which I will attempt to explore further next time.