Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

CEO Spoofing Scams

There have been increasing numbers of reports recently of CEO spoofing (なりすまし) of internal company emails that are actually from criminals looking to have the recipient send money somewhere.

A common scenario is one in which the president or some other senior executive asks an employee to send money, usually not revealing that action to other employees. The email will be fashioned to look authentic.

It now looks like I have received a similar email, spoofing me—it was a terrible job, however—as the sender sent to an alias email address I (the CEO) use only for receiving inquiries.

The immediate giveaway was that it was signed in a way I never sign my emails, but rather the way my name is written only on my physical business cards.

It asks me to start a group on LINE (an immediate “thug tell”) and tells me that there is “no need” for me to invite other people. It’s understandable that they don’t want me to invite other people, since they know that would alert others who could alert me to the scam.

I am instructed in the email to send the QR code of the group to the criminal and they will take it from there. Right.

The most disturbing thing about this is not that it is an email from a criminal—millions of emails from criminals are sent all the time—but that it clearly used a written form of my name in the signature that you can only learn by receiving my business card.

This criminally intended email was addressed to an email address that is not associated with a targeted employee, but that had been exposed in automatically harvestable form on a government website for quite some time. I removed the address from that site long ago, but it is surely in the database of cyberthugs and making the rounds, based on the spam that is collected in my spam folder on my server.

The lesson I see from this is that at least one of the persons to whom I have given my physical business card, probably recently, is a criminal. I don’t give my business card out lightly, however.

I can just imagine what happens to the many people who plaster their email addresses all over cyberspace, a very reckless strategy.

Lesson learned. I need to be more careful with even my physical business card.

My suggestions for the increased security risks these days are:

(1) Never put an email address you use for daily business emails anywhere online in a form that can be automatically harvested by criminals. Posting it as a graphic is one option, but even those graphics can be decoded by criminals.

(2) If there is a danger of some other entity putting your email address online (and advantage sometimes, of course), use only an alias email address to avoid disclosing the associated “real” email address that you normally look at and send from.

This enables you to tell where people got your email address. and that is made even easier by creating numerous purpose-specific aliases.

Never disclose an email address online that you can send from as an inquiry address, as your inadvertently sending from it can compromise it by verifying it for criminals.

(3) If possible, print your name on your business cards in a form that is slightly different from what you normally use in daily business emails.

(4) Beware of handing your business card to reception desks at trade shows and to hotel front desks. I slightly suspect that the criminal email I received was because of handing my business card over to a tradeshow receptionist. The organizations that run those trade shows for manufacturers here in Japan are not necessarily looking out for the security of the visitors to the trade shows they run for their clients. I am considering changing the email address to a new alias address on my business cards every time I order 100 or so.

Additionally, although it’s a different problem entirely, I once gave my business card to a hotel and was soon deluged by spam from the hotel group, the spam being sent from some someplace in Southeast Asia, and it took forever to get myself off the list.

The above suggestions about email aliases might not be easy unless you have registered your own domain, but with use of things like Gmail being quite unprofessional and the increasing need to interact with direct clients as a survival strategy, professional translators aiming at surviving would gain an advantage by not using free email for business.

AI Bubble Bursting? It Doesn’t Matter for translators.

Predictions that AI is a bubble that will shortly burst are becoming more common. These predictions appear to be not from investors, but rather mostly from people who stand to lose if AI succeeds.

The bubble for AI investors might indeed burst someday, but it is clear that AI has already succeeded in significantly reducing the need for translation brokers to purchase translations from professional translators, and the brokers are replacing professionals by using AI to create translations in-house, and then have them post-edited, mostly by former translators with no options. The result has been that many professionals have been left with little translation work, have been reduced to doing low-paid post-editing, or have simply left translation as a way of making a living. These outcomes are a measure of AI’s success.

Professional translators, rather than anticipating with joy the bursting of the AI bubble, should think about current ways to survive in their chosen field of endeavor, in which the work sources (translation-brokering agencies) for the majority of freelancers are already rapidly replacing professional translators with AI systems they use themselves.

Neither freelance translators nor their organizations are giving sufficient attention and thought to this situation. Their focus appears to be on pointing out the failings of AI or claiming without evidence that everything will be fine if translators just “adapt” to the new technology. It looks like translation organizations are not able to bring the hard realities to their members. It is clear that things will not be fine and, in fact, it is clear that the model of freelancers getting translation work from agencies has already largely crumbled. But those organizations are struggling to maintain the appearance of relevance as their member are losing actual relevance.

The boiling frogs need to hop out of the AI pot before it is too late.

JA-EN Translation Note 003: 矮 in the world is this happening? All dwarfs are not created (or translated) equally.

In the field of astronomy, the term dwarf star has a long history. That history dates back far before the word police would raise their eyebrows and raise a fuss about dwarf being offensive. Perhaps little person star would be more acceptable.

That history has followed the term into the Japanese language, where the expression 矮星 has long been used and is still used to refer to dwarf stars, including on numerous pages of the website of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

In the age of the word police, however, the demotion of Pluto to the status of dwarf planet presented an opportunity for the authorities (at least here in Japan) to allow the ideology of political correctness to intrude into language. The result is that the term is treated differently between Japanese and English.

Whereas 矮星 is still apparently accepted for dwarf star in Japanese,矮惑星 for dwarf planet is avoided, surely for fear that the word police would coming knocking on the door of the transgressors. The NAOJ website gives a nod to the dwarf planet use in English, but avoids mention of 矮惑星 in Japanese, preferring to use the safer English term dwarf planet in running Japanese text, rather than use the dreaded 矮 character. In English, it is not the fault of the NAOJ.

One example, from a FAQ page of the NAOJ website:

太陽系のdwarf planetとは、「太陽の周りを回り」「十分大きな質量を持つために自己重力が固体としての力よりも勝る結果、重力平衡形状（ほぼ球状）を持ち」「その軌道近くから他の天体が排除されていない」「衛星でない」天体である。

Another method used to avoid 矮 is to call these dwarf planets 準惑星.

I guess the only thing that language realists can be thankful for is that the language revisionists have not yet banned 矮星 for dwarf star, but perhaps the day will come when we will see that character banned in dwarf stars as well. Time will tell. In any event, I would render these planets as dwarf planets in JA-EN translation.