Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

Founder? Of What?

The popular self-applied title “founder” is sometimes (often, actually, in places like LinkedIn) just an aspirational buzzword, with nothing actually having been founded, and that can often be discovered without much effort.

If you must “stand out” (another overused LinkedInese expression I think should be retired), can’t you find a way to do it by demonstrating real achievement or skills? No? Want to fake it ’til you make it? Well, then found away until you find a way.

A new level of desperation by a Global South Linkedin user: Using AI to automate the process of clicking on click work

These days many freelance translators, post-editors, and anything-they-can-getters have apparently taken to sitting in front of their computers, constantly refreshing numerous pages of click-work sites in hopes of both clicking before someone else and offering a low enough rate to get whatever scraps fall off the click-work table.

Today, while scrolling through LinkedIn posts, I was presented with a post from a fellow in Cameroon offering a bot he says he developed to automate the process, so now you can more efficiently catch those scraps dropped from the click-work table. Brilliant, just brilliant.

Click-work dependency didn’t start recently, and now it appears to be the normal method of getting work for many people even not in the Global South who formerly actually made a living by doing translation.

Some Quite Unrelated Things I Have Learned Recently

  • 茱萸沢 is read Gumizawa. It’s a place in Gotemba that I encountered in an interpreting assignment this past week.
  • Drexel University in Philadelphia can find the diploma of a person who graduated more than a half-century ago but didn’t have a record of his student number (why would he, more than 50 years later?), and just told them his name, date of birth, approximate graduation date, and major. They found it, and the diploma—I don’t need something in a frame, but putting it in a frame is probably how they justify charging USD 150)—is arriving next week in a package that UPS said is 2 lbs, according to the notification I received today.

Things I learned last month:

  • I am not a bastard (at least in one sense of the word), attested to by the marriage certificate of my long-departed parents that I obtained from my hometown.
  • The purported Japanese name of Defense Language Institute in Monterey (at least as purported on a Japanese-language Wikipedia page about that school) is アメリカ国防総省語学学校. I guess it sounds more impressive. I don’t recall learning any “linguistics” there in the 1960s, but rather the language spoken in the country that was forced to change its name but not much else a few decades after I graduated.

The classroom time at DLI was more than 1500 hours. That’s equivalent to numerous years in a university language program. Although I had extremely good grades, I managed to lose almost all my speaking ability in that language quite quickly, but that is totally unrelated to the translation and interpreting services I currently provide.