The French have a word for IT

Computers were invented for data processing; everything else is a bonus. In many instances, though, you can substitute the term “a bonus” with “spectacularly inappropriate”.

This was brought home to me by a recent article by Michael Benis in ITI Bulletin, a periodical of the Institute of Translators and Interpreters. For all I care, the magazine could have been for circus jugglers or Spitfire pilots. What matters is that the profession is concerned with real-world, real-time skills that have nothing to do with computing but it has (like almost every other profession) been sold down the computing river.

The article asked: what has technology done for us over the last 20 years? Some findings were predictable – that the internet is a wonderful research tool, for example, and translators working at home adore wireless networking because it means they don’t have to live with Ethernet spaghetti.

Other findings were rather more revealing. Notebook PCs were described as being “more expensive, less powerful and less robust than a desktop”. The article also said notebooks are very popular among translators “who don’t absolutely need them”.

Funnily, this tallies with my own view of notebook PCs, despite colleagues insisting that these devices with their stupid little keys, baby-sized screens, fiddly pointing devices, cut-down specs and hopelessly gargantuan price tags are what I really need.

If you thought that was scathing, Benis’ view of scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) software was no less dismissive. Scanners were described as “little more than half a photocopier or fax”. OCR software was considered only good for “quick and dirty word counts... where recognition accuracy doesn’t matter”. Show me a professional translation job where accuracy doesn’t matter.

On a brighter side, the article was not as critical about machine translation and speech recognition as you might expect. Oh, but read on: machine translation is supposedly best used for tasks such as translating Canadian weather reports, while speech recognition is “an excellent way to prevent or cope with repetitive strain injury”. These last two options are symptomatic of computing being inappropriately oversold to a profession that can’t really benefit from it.

I once received a CV from a French job applicant who referred to himself as a “vedette” – a “bright new star on the scene” in colloquial language. Unfortunately, he used machine translation, with a more correct definition of the word “vedette”, and so described himself as a “high-speed motorboat”.

Surreal, certainly. But that’s what you get when you use a hammer to turn a screw.