Category: Ramblings

Just say in Japanese what we say in English.

Several years ago, a potential interpreting client emailed me to ask about interpreting for a business meeting that was scheduled in only a few days. After emailing back promptly to ask what the subject matter was, but not getting any substantive response, I called and asked what the meeting was about. The reply from the non-Japanese fellow was “Oh, you don’t need to know that.”

Huh? I explained to no avail why I wanted to learn about the subject matter and why he should also want to tell me about the subject matter. After a few more attempts to pry some information out of this guy about the meeting, he proceeded to explain interpreting to me. “You just say in Japanese what we say in English, and then you say in English what the other side says in Japanese.”

It was so comforting to get this lesson in interpreting. I would never have guessed what interpreting was.

I explained that he would need to look elsewhere for interpreting, which appeared to leave him puzzled. That was probably the most clueless prospective interpreting client I have ever encountered.

But that is not the end of the story. About ten days after the date of the originally scheduled meeting, a woman from the same company calls me with precisely same meeting parameters (“interpreting” in a “meeting”). When I started explaining that more information was required, she realized what she had done. “Oh, you’re the guy who wouldn’t help us the last time.” Guilty as charged. The call ended promptly when she realized it wasn’t going anywhere and neither was I.

That left me wondering whether they had found an interpreter the last time and the interpreter was not successful in working with that minimalist briefing, or whether something else had happened.

The place was a tiny company that appeared to be involved in credit card settlement services, and was staffed by two foreigners, both Japanese-incapable and both clueless about interpreting. I am not sure if they ever acquired some clues, but my attempts at educating them had come to an end.

Would you like some AI help writing that note? No, I’m good.

There is a great deal of discussion these days about silicon-based AI helping carbon-based individuals write. I do not use any of the many available online writing assistants.

While I wasn’t looking, however, Apple installed just such an AI feature right on my iPhone. Now, when I write a note off-line, I am presented with the option of having it rewritten, including selecting one of a few styles, and even giving the writing tool my own instructions on how to rewrite what I have written.

As a test, for one note, although it was not a plea for assistance, I told it to “make this sound like a plea for assistance.” It worked, but the result was written in a style that is not mine and with expressions that I never use.

The availability of such functions on a device that almost everybody already owns raises the specter of a world in which many people are able to write things that, well, they not able to write, and in a way they are not able to write them (or write anything, perhaps), and this could suggest a persona that they cannot rightly claim as theirs. Essentially, it is AI-assisted persona authenticity spoofing.

This does not bode well for either people whose livelihoods depend upon writing or people who must judge others or make decisions based on what others write. Let the reader beware, and let the writer be real.

Why didn’t Ms. Tanaka attend that meeting?

This question came up in an examination of a Japanese deponent, a middle-manager at a company here. The examining attorney did not know whether Tanaka (not the actual name) was male or female, but they were on the organizational chart of the department holding the subject meeting.

The response was “This was an important meeting, and we don’t normally have female department members attend such meetings.”

The court reporter typed “urge to kill” and quickly took it off the screen. Only the attorneys and the interpreters saw it. The deponent probably wondered why some of us were reacting with smiles to what was for him a straightforward explanation, based on traditional Japanese corporate culture. I suspect the deponent figured it out when he was spoken to by his attorneys at the next break.

Some Thoughts on Content Theft and Unlawful Use

There has been a great amount of discussion recently about AI developers scraping copyrighted material from websites and using it to train AI. Some have said that prohibiting AI from learning from copyrighted material would be a death sentence for AI. One recent kerfuffle was caused by AI being able to convert user-submitted photos to images in the style of the well-known Ghibli anime studio.

One thing that appears to be slipping through a crack, however, is that just about everything uploaded to cyberspace has a copyright that is held by someone. It’s not just famous authors’ works, or images and movies that are commercially produced. It’s just about everything written or created and uploaded into cyberspace. including material that has been uploaded unlawfully.

Yes, in some jurisdictions the content needs to be registered in order to bring civil litigation, but most everything in cyberspace has a copyright holder, including the huge amount of material that has been unlawfully published. And a copyright notice is generally considered sufficient to at least indicate the intent of the rightholder. The actual establishment of copyright does not generally require registration. It comes into being the moment a work is committed to a tangible form, and that includes online content.

People appear to have become accustomed to—and by their silence, permissive of—theft and unlawful publishing of copyrighted material in cyberspace, and in particular on social media platforms. Perhaps this has made the general public more willing to accept or be resigned to the next step in the enterprise of stealing content—scraping of content for AI learning.

As someone who has twice had a considerable amount of my company webpage content stolen and unlawfully published by thieves in China, this is of personal concern to me.

So, what about protecting content from scraping? When I searched around for methods to do that recently, I found some strategies. However, I also found a lot of strategies for defeating those protective strategies. Essentially, there were people telling others how to scrape websites without being detected or blocked.

It could be that the only ultimate solution is not to publish anything in cyberspace that you don’t want stolen and unlawfully used. If you want to learn what someone has written, thinks, or creates, you might ultimately need to ask them for the related content. The proliferation of unlawfully published or otherwise used material looks like it is taking the Internet in a direction not envisioned by its creators.

How exciting: A clueless interpreter broker in the US

Sometime around 2005, I received an inquiry for deposition interpreting from what appeared to be a one-person broker in the US. Although I have almost never worked for brokers, in a moment of weakness (and because she agreed to my high fee) I accepted the assignment. What ensued was a good demonstration of the value that most brokers do not and cannot add to the process of deposition interpreting.

After much effort, with scant case information from the broker (because she had scant information), I was able to discover what case the deposition was for; the broker didn’t know and probably didn’t care. I discovered on my own what law firms were involved and contacted the relevant attorney who would be examining the witness. Surprise; it turned out to be the CEO of an airline here in Japan. An additional surprise was that it was the CEO of an airline involved in a different case with an airline client of mine, although the involvement did not represent a conflict that would preclude me from interpreting for this deposition.

When I told the broker who the deponent was, the reaction was “How exciting!” This is a good demonstration of how brokers for interpreting services can operate without any knowledge of, or interest in obtaining information about the specific cases for which they are brokering interpreting services.

I never heard from that broker again, and that was just fine with me.