Localization Word Counts, Part 1: Journey into Counting Dystopias
Posted on Tue, Nov 03, 2009
Today we have another blog from Christiane Bernier who shares an interesting story about a job that gave her counting nightmares!
One summer, during my student days, I took a job at a Department store where a girlfriend of mine had a part-time job. I didn't understand the details of what I would be doing, but I would present myself on the first day, promptly at 8:30 in order to be trained. The training, delivered by a group of 3 women in their mid-forties and fifties, took all of 10 minutes. As I learned what I would be doing for the next 12 weeks, I found myself studying their appearance. Their hair intrigued me as each had it coiffed stiffly into mounds and peaks like egg whites beaten for meringues, and no movement of the head, no matter how quick, managed to disturb even a lock. As they spoke, I could perceive small whiffs of a toxic combination of hairspray and remnants of cigarette smoke that triggered a fit of sneezing. One of them handed me a box of tissues, which I accepted, while nodding that I understood what I was going to need to do. "Don't hesitate to ask for advice, if you see you are falling behind. Between the 3 of us, we have over 30 years of experience doing this, and so there are little tricks to getting it right."
What I had been carefully selected to do was to check inventory, and my job involved filling out, with an HB pencil, a form tucked into a clipboard, where I would list all the sku's I had inspected on the "floor" and in the backrooms of the store, and putting down the total amounts I had counted. During my first week, I counted towels and linens, pillows and blankets, bedspreads and tablecloths, my sneezing fits persisting throughout. Week 2 was sneezeless and a little more fun, as I counted in the toy department. By week 3, I had been promoted to counting jewelry, a highly risky enterprise as it regularly resulted in the employee being fired due to "missing inventory." I survived jewelry week and then moved on to the electronics department.
The problem was not the pay or my colleagues who were always complimentary of my work: forms were legibly completed and I worked at a good pace, skipping the smoke breaks they invited me to. The problem was that leaving work in the evening, I could not stop counting. Sitting in the bus, I would count the number of seats, then the number of empty seats, the number of people standing, and the number of people seated. I would arrive home and open my fridge and cupboards to make dinner, and oh, what a mistake! I would proceed to counting their contents: numbers of bottles, then boxes, then cans, then bags, only to re-start counting by categories of the food pyramid (produce, milk products, meats, poultry and fish, eggs, nuts, cereals and bread, finally oils), then by state (solids versus liquids), then by colours. The problem, again, was that I could not stop counting and my nights were equally filled with exhausting counting sprees. I swiftly bid farewell to my SKU sorority despite their pleas for me to stay, and that I had the stuff to turn this into a career. I took a research position, this time to evaluate the stocks of African literature books in Montreal university libraries, and so I spent the rest of the summer filing through library stacks, inventorying and indexing books, which mysteriously put an end to my earlier counting nightmares.
I think that explains my being so moved by the word-counting misadventures of Laverne Davenport (which I talked about in my last blog). Thank goodness manual word counts are a thing of the past in what is surely the localization industry's Modern Times. Nowadays (dare I say, in our postmodern era?), machines, instead of people, count the words for the translations that we do. And the tools for counting have grown in sophistication, not just counting those words, but neatly parsing them into word count categories. Clients of course have moved us to hierarchize these word count categories into the equivalent of a food pyramid. And so the diet we've been put on has, at the bottom of the pyramid, 100% matches and repetitions, which must constitute the bulk of the "calories," then above these are fuzzy matches of various levels, and finally, at the top, are those words that must be in spare quantities: the New Words. Our word counting technologies organize our world and the work, into these categories. I wonder: what would other occupations that trade in words look like if they were put on our Mediterranean diet?