Identity theft

This is the first time, it has concretely pointed out to me.
Two days ago I received a mail from a translation agency in Germany, for which I occasionally work. They asked me, whether a job application from someone describing him(her?)self with text portions from my public (multiple translator sites) profile actually came from me.

NO, it did not!
Somebody has set up a gmail address with my name:
blasejewicz1979@gmail.com
and offered his (her?) services to that translation agency.
THAT is impersonation, or identity theft.
The person is question is a thief = criminal!
If anybody comes across the above mail address ... you are dealing with a criminal.

When I searched the help section of Google, I only found, that THEY cannot (and will not) do anything about this and was referred to
https://complaint.ic3.gov/
Internet Crime Complaint Center

There I DID file a complaint about identity theft.
Although I do not expect anything to happen ...

According to that translation agency, this (fraudulent applications etc.) is SO frequent, that they do not do anything about it.
Probably you cannot do anything about it.

This sheds some very interesting light on the integrity and health of the human race!

マイクロソフトの奴隷

翻訳関連の仕事は殆ど例外なくマイクロソフトの○○ソフトで仕上げろと要求されれる。
パソコンを買う時も最初からマイクロソフト製品で埋められている。その会社が自社の製品で世界征服を目指しているのは秘密ではないだろう。
その製品は他の製品より遥かに優れている訳でもない。
例えばマイクロソフト本社内の多数のＰＣをイントラネットに繋いでいるサーバーにはマイクロソフトのＯＳではなく Linux がインストールされている。
そちらの方がセキュリティーがマイクロソフト製品より上だ。なのにマイクロソフトは世界の人々に自分の製品を容赦なく押し付けている・・・

マイクロソフトの「商品」を使うにはマイクロソフトの奴隷にならざるを得ない上、奴隷でいたければ定期的大金支払わなければならない→「バージョンアップ」等と名乗って。

私はそれが気に入らないから出来る限りLibreOffice はフリーソフトを使っている。本来 "OpenOffice" であったが、Oracle と言う会社に買収されてから開発者の半分ほど反発し、LibreOffice の分岐を造った。Libre = Liberty = Liberty = 自由の意味。単なる「無料」ではない。自由を確保しようとしているものだ。
私はは奴隷より自由でありたい。よって、「自由」を強調するソフトを使う。

Crowdsourcing = reintroduction of slavery

Japanese writing (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

or: craft dumping

Most likely I just don't get it. Crowdsourcing. The new business model everybody is fretting about.
From what I have seen or been offered, I think there is no other way of calling this but slavery.
Unless, of course, I am missing some very important points.

Let me name a few examples. And since the companies involved actually DO advertise this worldwide and WANT to be seen ... there cannot be much of an objection to me citiing their names.

1)    Today (7/20) from a "job offer" on Proz.com ->
"Appen Butler Hill is excited to announce ... crowdsourcing solutions for multiple annotation projects.
Crowdsourcing allows researchers to collect lots of interesting data points from a wide variety of individuals ...
We would like to invite you to participate in this extra task and EARN SOME CASH ... These Human Intelligence Tasks, called HIT’s, are used in a wide variety of applications – data annotation, multimedia, sentiment analysis, and search engine result evaluation.

How will I get paid for this task?
• Each task is assigned a rate per HIT. This rate varies by complexity of the task, but typically ranges from $0.01 - $0.10 per HIT submitted."

Let me get this straight. You, me, everybody participating in this "exciting opportunity" performs some "HIT".
Which appears to be some form information search.
Trying to paint a rosy picture, assume you can complete one HIT job in 5 minutes. You get paid 0.01 - 0.10 USD. Make it an average of 0.05 USD.
Then your hourly payment would be 0.05x12=0.6 USD/hour. Or 0.6 x 8 x 5 x 4 = 96 USD/month for a full time job!
At the same time I do suspect, that our friend Appen Butler Hill WILL actually make (a lot?) of money.

Another example. 2-3 days ago I received a "job offer" from one of those crowdsourcing sites. I registered there just for the fun of it.

"Greetings from Translia.com. The following job is posted on Translia.com, which matches your languages.
Job ID:  Job xxx
Source language: Japanese
Target language(s): English
Total words: 80
Translator rate (points/word): 7.3
Translation fee (points): 580
(one point is valued USD0.01)"

That is 580 x 0.01 = 5.8 USD.
Also not a rate I would jump up and turn the computer on for.

Finally. The other day I went to some sort of "job fair" in Tokyo. There too was a company trying to go into this crowdsourcing business.
The company calls itself "anydoor", based on a Japanese comic.
Its pamphlet said:
"Would you like to earn money?" .. and on the backside：
"Make Money
Get paid for your work via PayPal account.
Start translating and earn money now!"

Yet, their calculation and offer include following:
a standard job of about 720 Japanese characters (about 2 pages translation) will be paid 2 USD, or 0.02 USD/character -> about 1/50th of the usual rate.
Assume you can translate 2 pages in 40 minutes (often it will take longer), you get an hourly payment of about 3 USD/hour, which would mean a monthly salary/income for full-time work of about 500 USD/month.
To the best of my knowledge it is simply impossible to survice (not to speak of "live") on that money in Japan.

If this crowdsourcing is a new "smart business solution", I am sure some smart people will get very rich from sucking the intellectual blood of the "population at large". Not to mention that they a complete fool out of those old-fashioned translators, who still believe their job is a "craft" .....

クラウドソーシング

先日仕事探しに東京まで言って "Job Fair" と言ったエベントに参加した。幾つかの会社、大半外資系、が人材を探していることだった。

先ず目をつけたのは「翻訳業務をサポート」する人を探していた会社。どのような仕事かと聞いてみてとても信じられない話を聞かされた：

目指しているのは品質ではなく、何より安さ、とその次速さだけだ。通常の翻訳（和英訳、私の場合技術論文など、では単価が原文の一文字当たり9円前後）より遥かに安い：720文字分には２ＵＳＤ＝一文字当たり0.2円　→　通常のレートの50分の一！

なのに貰ったパンフレットに（表に）：　"Would you like to earn money?" そして裏面に：

Make Money

Get paid for your work via PayPal account.

Start translating and earn money now!

しかし、どんなに簡単な文章であっても、720文字分＝凡そ2ページの翻訳は2-3分で出来ない。早くできたとしても40分を考えて見ましょう。真面目に翻訳するなら1時間の方が妥当な数字。でもとりあえず40分で考えて見ましょう。時給に直してしまえば凡そ330円。神奈川県便りによると神奈川県の正式の「最低賃金」は840円となっている。一日8時間働いて、週五 日、で月給が5万円・・・

これは "earn money" とは言えるだろうか。月に5万円でどうやって生活すればいいのだろうか。

私は翻訳者としてそのような「奴隷制度」をサポートするのは道徳にもとるとしか思わざるを得ない。

そして「翻訳者」は一種の職人だ。まともな翻訳者はそれなりの「職人気質」があるはず。それはこのような制度＝ビジネスで踏み潰されてしまう印象だ。

だがお客さんが喜んでいるのなら、日本や他の先進カ国で真剣に仕事をしている職人が全員失業させられ、残ってしまうのは格安＝品質の悪い＝意味不明な「翻訳？？？」それでいいのでしょうか。