Translation and interpreting by an openly curmudgeon carbon-based professional
Some business discussoins, some relevant to translators/interpreters, others not.
The way to succeed is to call yourself the founder of a startup and then create content that leverages buzzwords in the startup ecosystem.
That will make you stand out and scale your story, giving it reach, while demonstrating your alignment in the age of AI.
You then pass out puke buckets to readers of your content.
There are numerous videos going around that warn of the not-surprising reality that Google is, as a default, scanning all your gmail content to train AI. The videos tell you how to turn that default setting off.
That’s fine, but a better solution that provides advantages other than just freedom from data scraping is not to use Gmail at all.
I have a Gmail account, but I never use it for email exchanges. I only send email using addresses associated with my own domain and use gmail just for subscriptions to newsletters and the like.
While it appears that billions of people use Gmail, it is not professional looking and shows that you didn’t care enough to pay just a little bit of money to get a real email address. This is particularly significant for people using email for business.
Gmail screams cheap and not seriously committed. People need to discard the ideas that everything that is useful must be free.
Are people coached to make formulaic LinkedIn videos?
Many I’m shown by the Microsoft algorithm feature individuals holding a tiny microphone in one hand and wildly waving their other hand in every which direction, while they breathlessly spurt a message laced with every business buzzword you can imagine and some that no one can imagine or understand.
Their message will “land” (can we please ban that word?) and it will be a very soft landing, because there usually is not much hard content in it, but rather mostly an apparent desperate belief in the “LinkedIn success” fantasy.
Sorry, perhaps that should be persons on the cretinism spectrum.
This morning I was greeted by an email purporting to be from the translation broker MotionPoint, an entity appearing to have an actual office, which is somewhat unusual these days for such brokers.
Not surprisingly, however, it was sent from a Gmail address, and the name of the sender in the header was that of a rapper, of all things, who surely has nothing to with translation brokering.
The cretin who sent the email uses a different name inside the email and that name has no digital footprint whatsofuckingever. Perhaps it was just sent by an ad hoc project manager tasked with finding likely victims.
The email address they sent this to is an inquiry-specific email address I use, which can only be learned by viewing a webpage on my website that clearly indicates right where the email address is that I don’t deal with agencies. Are these people just mentally defective?
Maybe they thought I was bluffing? Whatever.
It’s either a translation broker or someone stupid enough or with such a low self-esteem that they want to spoof being a translation broker, of all things, meaning they’re aiming low to make sure they hit their mark. There are no socially redeeming qualities in sight.
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 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 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.