Twenty years ago I got rid of all contracts with translation agencies except for two. Beginners used to compile databases of translation companies and use those to generate personalized mail-merge letters offering to work for very little. When IBM and Microsoft released DOS 3.3, the Proprinter 2 and QuietWriter 3, translation shifted from Europe to America, and “very little” was pretty good. Over time, Europeans learned code pages and bought Windows and the market flattened with the entry of pauper labor.
The recessions that followed the Biden/Reagan Crash of 1987 and the Bush Jr Asset-Forfeiture Crash of 2008 wrecked the profitability of most middlemen. Yet translators are mostly stuck in a time machine, relying on pestering spam instead of personalized mailmerges. Every day I get propositions like:
Salutation: Dear “Hey You” Attachment: some dreary CV in Word, which is a vehicle for macro viruses Qualifications: no test passed, no language degree from a real university and no knowledge of math, physics or chemistry
All of these go straight to the trash. Once in a blue moon someone will address me by name, but instead of a link to their website or blog, they attach a dreary PDF. The truth is that anyone with enough language skills and entrepreneurship to be worth asking for help already has his of her own website and writes his or her own bids and NDAs. Translators who want to be taken seriously by law offices, engineering, geology, mining or oil companies, or doctors, manufacturers or what-have-you need websites with taking bilingual CVs, not spam with attachments.
I have boilerplate bids I have used for 20 years, and for a fee make these available to colleagues who will do me proud. Same goes for NDAs. For more on this see A Beginner’s Guide to Handling WIYRdos.(link) Don’t send me “Hey You” spam with Word attachments and no proof of ATA certification or a website. Instead, make your own website and/or blog–and make it attractive.
Mine have served me well for 20 years and freed me from ever again signing lengthy, one-sided “agreements” that never commit to actually paying me–much less doing it on time. Be an entrepreneur, live by your wits and build up clientele by offering satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. Pretty soon beginners will be sending you spam with Word attachments begging to be exploited.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
Does the altruistic initiation of force in defense of socialism make germ warfare attacks OK? (link)
Reason magazine had been my trusted source of news I can afford for four decades. Their investigative journalism is top-notch and often diametrically contrary to the findings of the looter press. Remember the Love Canal crisis? Of course not! Reason reported that government officials forced the owners of the sealed pit to hand it over or they’d take it by force. That was how a coercive bureaucrats got to put a children’s playground on a chemical dump. They and the Kleptocracy media then blamed laissez-faire greed when a state agency tore open one end of the pit causing leaks. That got memory-holed in a hurry.
The communist dictatorship from which the epidemic spread will not allow foreign physicians and real scientists to test blood samples of Wuhan lab workers. To the Kleptocracy media, the dictatorship controlling China–like ecclesiastical bodies of older religions–is a credible and reliable source of objectively true information that it won’t allow to be verified for reasons of faith. But isn’t China also the dictatorship that–by altruistic coercion no less deadly than that practiced by Germany’s brand of christian national socialism–killed an even greater number of people than its German counterpart?
You tell me…
Good Reading: The Adventures of a Physicist, by Luis Alvarez, is available without leaving your chair on Amazon Kindle. This is the scientist who invented the detonator for the Nagasaki bomb that ended WW2. With his geologist son Alvarez also developed the bolide impact theory of mass extinctions. The dinosaurs–and most other species–were wiped out suddenly. Alvarez explains how a meteor or comet the size of Manhattan or Tinian can again wipe out ignorant or lazy species. Remember that before voting to elect looter politicians who peddle influence and seek to ban human engineering from the solar system.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
After the takeover by freelancers in 1980, once successful passage of a translation test became a requirement for the privilege of voting in association elections or running for office, the ATA de facto became the American Translators Association. Suffrage was also offered to translators of extremely rare languages for which no tests were available, on recommendation of two active members. The primary upshot was that actual translators of verified competence were put in charge of making ATA policy after earningthe accreditation of their peers. The disadvantage was that owners of translation agencies could no longer make policy unless they first passed a translation test. Thus began the Golden Age of the American Translators Association, thanks to Ben Teague and Patricia Newman.(link)
Unhorsed translation agency owners made it clear they were discontented, and wanted their unquestioned authority restored. Individuals not competent to pass a written translation test were just as unhappy as people who drop out of college, and for the same reason. These two disgruntled classes were soon exploited by the American Society of Association Executives, which proceeded to retask the bylaws, install its own well-paid Executive to supervise ATA board meetings and make sure that our “elected” officers never receive so much as a penny for their efforts. Regular mail-in ballots used by similar associations were abolished by repeating unsubstantiated assertions, and a “proxy” system was installed so ALL votes are basically handed over to boardmembers. The ASAE also made sure that its own attorneys and soi disant “experts” were consulted on all policy matters. The new order’s big project sought to undermine our translator testing program and burden the ATA with its salaried hirelings. The ASAE itself advertises a staff of 47, not including attorneys–whose particulars are not easy to find.(link)
People unable to pass a simple translation test and too stuck-up to admit the fact, pestered the board members until “peer review” opened a loophole through which passed a flood of people unwilling to sit for a test–including some translation company owners. Agencies were thereby able to regain voting control over the Association as the ASAE tightened its own control over the the board of directors, orchestrating a series of single-candidate “elections.” Members who had earned the right to vote by passing a written test were shocked to discover that it suddenly cost over $350 a year to keep credentials they maintained for $50 during the 1980s. Younger members were pressured to buy tickets to conventions, etc., “or else” lose their credentials through added continuing “education” requirements which, to some of us, were not unlike extortion.
A so-called ASAE expert was paid 55 cents a word to produce an essay recommending that non-members be allowed to take the test. They could then qualify for exploitation by translation companies as certified translators. Almost nobody able to actually translate and vote thought this was a good idea and the motion failed. The extent of decay is such that of ATA members claiming the ability to translate Portuguese, only 1% have passed the tests from and into that language. Wannabees and beginners lacking ability yet inveigled into joining are clearly numerous enough to outvote actual translators who have clearly-demonstrated ability. A board appointed via single-candidate elections and run by a representative of a “Society” that staffs it with multiplying staffers it selects and puts on salary–is anything but a representative democracy.
The ASAE and the translation agencies it represents never let go of the idea of making translation tests serve their own purposes rather than those of translators. Instead of financing their own separate association with an independent testing program, they cling like brood parasites to the existing pool of tested-and-true translators. ASAE/agency plans to debauch the renamed certification testing program into a rubber-stamp handmaid service for agencies backed by an Orwellian managerial corporation is still at the top of a single-minded agenda that does NOT benefit professional translators.
Now they are back. As before, they are selling yet another ill-dissembled attempt to attain that purpose, papered over with insincere assurances and undisclosed “criteria” for packing the membership by adding pliable voters. And no wonder! The current germ lab viral epidemic has crippled the ASAE Executive’s ability to draw income by mandating attendance at conferences. It therefore comes as no surprise that a story was packaged-up with yet another attempt to “restructure” to favor volume and quantity at the expense of ability and quality. If you haven’t seen their pitch paper, write me.
If you believe colleges should hand diplomas to students who flunk exams, then put them on the Board of Regents, you’re what they want. If you believe that discrimination on the grounds of ability is baaad and that a goood rabble in ignorance is what the ASAE and translation companies need to help keep translators in their place, they have found their minion. **
But if you perceive that the ASAE resembles a vampire herding a large mob of potential translators into empowering a minority of middlemen to exert control over the tiny core of actual certified translators that make the association worth having, then reject the puppet board’s latest rewrite of the usual gambit. I will gladly sign a petition to be rid of ASAE control and management and hire and to pay actual tested translators suitable remuneration for their valuable service on the board–once they win a real election with at least two candidates in the running. –J Henry Phillips, thrice-certified Life member, now in my 33rd year with what was, when I joined it, a genuine translators association worth keeping alive.
Footnote ** “All historical changes finally boil down to the replacement of one ruling class by another. All talk about democracy, liberty, equality, fraternity, all revolutionary movements, all visions of Utopia, or ‘the classless society’, or ‘the Kingdom of Heaven on earth’, are humbug (not necessarily conscious humbug) covering the ambitions of some new class which is elbowing its way into power. The English Puritans, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks, were in each case simply power seekers using the hopes of the masses in order to win a privileged position for themselves. Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to make use of the masses, and the masses would not co-operate if they knew that they were simply serving the purposes of a minority. In each great revolutionary struggle the masses are led on by vague dreams of human brotherhood, and then, when the new ruling class is well established in power, they are thrust back into servitude. This is practically the whole of political history, as Burnham sees it.” —George Orwell, Second Thoughts on James Burnham (link)
Clarity isn’t oversimplification
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
The abject terror with which both halves of the force-initiating kleptocracy now face each other is an opportunity not to be missed.(link) In one fell swoop, every voter with any capacity for independent thought can multiply a single ballot’s clout into a Sword of Damocles.(link) The beautiful part is that each libertarian spoiler vote’s sword can, with Solomonic impassivity, force all champions of the initiation of force in violation of individual rights to sue for peace by changing their platform demands and repealing their victimless “crime” laws.(link) Why not make the looters Sue for Peace on Drugs?
Libertarian vote share model predicts 9.2 million presidential LP votes in 2020.
Republican Richard Nixon added a War on Drugs to the War on the Vietnamese, the War on Poverty and the War on Women. Nixon’s Moral Majority televangelism deftly purchased the cooperation of the looter media via the Nixon Anti-Libertarian Law, then co-opted George Wallace’s Ku-Klux Kollectivist demands and parlayed them into the Republican Gentlemen’s Agreement to break up the Solid South.(link)
Democrats STILL favored Wallace’s racial collectivism in 1974!
By this mechanism (and some gunfire), Eugenic pseudoscience again became law and prisons filled with nonviolent hippies, black and brown folks, all thanks to the transubstantiation of victimless trade into imaginary crime.(link) Pregnant women nevertheless managed to escape religious fascism’s trap thanks to the Supreme Court’s adoption of a 1972 Libertarian plank into its Roe v. Wade decision.(link)
Democratic party communists promptly adopted the “War on X” concept in more garbled terms. “No Justice, No Peace” is another demand to surrender to communism no different from the “Freeze” movement disemboweled by the Second Amendment. “Just say No” (or be arrested) was a Biden favorite. “Black Lives Matter” is the same appeal to racial collectivism as “Saving American Lives” is an exploit of nationalism used to mask the identities of government-backed killers.
Logistics replacement curves describe choices that change(link)
But now that BOTH the GOP and Dems favor men with guns shooting kids over plant leaves, and asset-forfeiture confiscations of homes, vehicles and bank accounts of innocent people, the stupidest thing anyone can do is vote for either party’s candidates. Republican asset-forfeiture as exorcism of Satan will ruin the economy even faster than the creeping communism favored by the Dems.(link) After that it guarantees they will win the post-Crash elections just as Dems won from 1932 to 1948.
This false alternative happened when Germans abandoned freedom
Listen to what they say about each other and it hasn’t changed. For the last eleven campaigns both looter parties have struggled to ignore the Libertarian party and sworn the other would destroy America.(link) Suckers and cowards repeat this endlessly–even fake libertarians.(link) Vote for the superstitious initiation of force to save us from the communist atheist initiation of force was what Von Mises, among others, intimated to help elect Hitler.(link) A looter vote says only that another cowardly 0.00000007% of Americans wants to be coerced toward fascism or communism. A Libertarian spoiler vote says 20 times louder: sever that hand from the till! Let the chips fall where they may–I will settle for nothing less than freedom from coercion and full individual rights!(link)
Why be a coward or a sucker when by having some integrity you make twenty times the difference for yourself and your loved ones? Winning is improving your lot. Losing is surrendering to the machine! Make a real choice.
Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926featuring the usual beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
The Smith & Zurcher Dictionary of American Politics, updated in 1944 from Smith’s 1924 edition, very cautiously “defined” fascism NOT as religious socialism during WWII, but rather:
fascism. The authoritarian political system and totalitarian social regime evolved by Benito Mussolini and his followers of the Fascist party in Italy after 1922, hence any actual political system such as the regimes of the German Nazis or the Spanish Falangists inspired by the Italian model or comparable to it. Also any set of ideas which advocates the destruction of democratic parliamentarism, every kind of personal liberty, and the pluralistic social order; and which demands instead the institution of an irresponsible political dictatorship, supported by a single hierarchically organized party, the regimentation of all forms of social and economic activity under a regime of totalitarian governmental control, and the liberal use of force, violence and arbitrary power in the process of government. Fascist ideas have had no great currency in America, although they have been advocated by the so-called Silver Shirts, the German-American Bund, and like organizations.
This reads as though several layers of qualifiers and editorial comment were added to distance the NSDAP from both U.S. parties and those of so-called allies. It also conflicts with another definition in the same source. The authors did not define National Socialism as Christian, which Hitler’s 1920 platform most emphatically did. Instead:
National Socialism. The authoritarian, totalitarian and imperialistic doctrine of German Fascism developed by Adolf Hitler and his followers after 1923.
Desperate over the declining popularity of books after decades of government schools and inane teevee, dictionaries have taken to redefining anarchist as what Republicans have been labeling libertarians since 1972. Many had already redefined liberal as the label Republicans applied first to Liberal Party members demanding repeal of the Prohibition Amendment, then to Democrats for copying that wet plank and winning the next five elections.
Both of these retaskings of language into vehicles of misleading execration have been added to less particular American dictionaries with a straight face. Everyone else in the world is baffled that Republicans managed to get U.S. dictionaries to refer to liberals in exactly the way Hitler did, with the insinuation that all such creatures were at best communists and at worst, puppets of international stock market jewry.
But those same foreigners, all of them socialists of one variety or another, received the U.S. Republican redefinition of libertarians–as bomb-throwing communist terrorists with no party of their own–with the childish delight that altruistic self-deception enables.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
F Scott Fitzgerald and Brenda Dean confound prohibitionist censors
Another example of the Bowdlerization of American English is the way Yankee tourists have replaced the plant leaf products imported into Florida. This was about the time F. Scott Fitzgerald was replaced by Mod Squad informers and Miami Vice narcs in the American language. The above headline gives the flavor of “settled science” 100 years before Global Warming became America’s new favorite hobgoblin. Brenda Dean, gorgeous English lady with an occasionally powdered nose, turned up in news stories about how “drug parties” threatened civilization long before they were replaced by the more recent pseudoscience of Ozone Hole and Global Warming scaremongering.
If half the stories were true, there would be hardly a person alive in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia or Bolivia. All those countries are crushed into poverty and caudillo corruption by the sheer weight of exported American prohibition, pseudoscience, and violent laws. It brings to mind the saying that you may esteem a man of many words–and many lies–pretty much alike.
Now observe that the Mexican and Brazilian Constitutions each include pretty close to 70,000 words. The US Constitution is more like 5000–7500 with all the Amendments. People vote with their feet to escape countries with lengthy, convoluted and Byzantine constitutions. If those places were democracies, they could simply remove 65,000 words from their belief-encrusted looter constitutions and abolish a truckload of rights-violating laws. So why do they instead try to sneak into the USA?
This brings us to the entrenchment of looter parties. The GOP and Dems, both subsidized by the Nixon anti-Libertarian law of 1971, publish platforms that between them add up to about 70,000 words. The Libertarian Party platform is only 2700 words and takes maybe a bus ride to read from cover to cover. The Nixon scheme for using tax laws to subsidize entrenched cleptocracy campaigns, exported to South America, provided Juntas a mechanism for keeping cartels alive by throttling all possibility of libertarian spoiler vote pressure repealing bad laws. The Nixon law, like a “souvenier” left on the porch by a stray dog, leaves them no democratic alternative.
Speaking of reading during commutes, Prohibition and The Crash contains a wealth of evidence that government bungling and pseudoscience caused the Crash and Depression. The book is live on Amazon Kindle (a free app) for the cost of a mug of craft beer.
This week the AMS (American Meteorological Society) sent a letter chastising Scott Pruitt for keeping an open mind on the question of man-made global warming/climate change. The letter (here) referred to the AMS institutional statement on the matter, and summarized their position in this paragraph: In reality, the world’s seven billion people are causing climate […]
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Google Paddypower and you’ll find that Irish bookies are betting 2 to 1 that the pro-choice party wins and the pro-life-after-death prohibitionist party loses. Naturally the losers are screaming to the libertarians for help as their hulk flounders. The same thing happened in 1844.
The high-tariff Whigs claimed to be against slavery in speeches to abolitionists. But nobody believed anything a tax-and-spend looter politician swore. Back then, before teevee, any fool knew that the dishonest–them that believed in thievery and robbery–had no problem with lying either. Here is one such rebuke from the Hartford Times in October of 1844:
The Liberty Party and Cassius M Clay–Since the speech of the Pilgrim nephew of the great embodiment in the city, the Liberty Party has held three public meetings to take into consideration his proposal to them to abandon their separate organization and go over in a body to the support of Henry Clay; and they have met this proposition in just the manner that every rational man supposed they would. The consummate folly and impudence of the Whigs in trying to make it appear that their candidate is worthy of the votes of the abolitionists, is the best of evidence that they consider that the success of their causes depends upon those votes. But they cannot get one of them. Abolitionists know, as well as the Whigs themselves, that the system of slavery never had a bolder and more uncompromising advocate than Henry Clay. They know that he declared in his place in the Senate, not six years ago, that he should continue to oppose “Any scheme whatever of the emancipation, gradual or immediate;” and that the liberty of the black man could only be established by “subverting the union,” thus echoing back the unholy sentiment of a distinguished southerner, that “slavery is the corner-stone of our republic.”
So the Republicans completely destroyed the economy in 2007, yet vow to continue to support civil asset-forfeiture looting. Their platform vows never to repeal such looting, or the press gangs of military conscription–to say nothing of the communist manifesto income tax plank of 1848 which became the 16th Amendment. But they have the gall to whine to libertarians that as comrades-in-arms “we” ought to support their murderous and destructive policies because Creation Science prophesies that the other looters will, in the future, do worse than send federal killers after us for prohibition and cause crashes as in 1929, 1998, 2007, with a flash crash in 2010. With friends like God’s Own Prohibitionists, who needs enemies?
Farfetched? The exact same thing happened in 1929. Prohibition and The Crash details the mechanism whereby Republicans handed Herbert Hoover the Jones Five & Ten Law and Willebrandt’s Tax and asset-forfeiture strategies. By September 2, investors could see what was coming… LIVE on Amazon Kindle, with a free app that makes a cellphone into a history book.
The Wikipedia has been a focus for infiltration by cranks with axes to grind, socialist orators, pseudoscientific panic-mongers, prohibitionists, looters, thieves and wannabee dictators. Donate money if you must, but please donate to a worthy cause. The Wikipedia is NOT that worthy cause.
I personally consider the Libertarian Party a worthy cause. For similar reasons I have thought of giving to the NRA, LEAP (policemen against Prohibition), Naral (pro-choice) and other causes to which I am sympathetic. But I conclude that none of them can possibly succeed if LP.org fails. I do on occasion turn a tiny contribution over to Project Gutenberg the way I’d pay library dues, but this has a lot to do with a linguist’s profession and need for research material.
Resumo: não dê dinheiro para a Wikipédia. Foram infiltrados por hostes contrárias à liberdade humana e à honestidade (que chegam a ser a mesma coisa).
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
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