Does it still count as machine translation post-editing (MTPE) if it’s done after an AI first pass? Regardless of semantics: in my experience, having to do AI post-editing jobs means meticulously removing every single aspect that might make translating a somewhat “pleasing” job and replacing it with just checks for grammar, punctuation, concordance, term coherence, and whitespaces.
Paraphrasing something I read on a Discord server regarding AI and art: I wanted AI to do my proofreading and term-checking so I can focus on translating and writing, not for AI to do my translating and writing so I can focus on proofreading and term-checking.
Last month’s presentation of the 2025 European Language Industry Survey was grim. Translators are getting squeezed by agency consolidation on one side, and the rise of AI language models on the other. We’re losing our living fast and apparently not a lot of people care, since every hint of “innovation” in this sector is hailed by the media as the end of language barriers and the need for those pesky translators.
I cannot stress the dire scenario enough. It’s not imminent: it’s already here. My translation associate and I just lost a big client: an agency that was acquired by a huge industry multinational and decided that from now on we would receive only AI-output editing jobs at the eye-watering rate of 0,01 €cents per source word. No room for negotiations: like it or lump it. It wasn’t the only one, since we a few more clients just vanished over the last year.
I still think people are not scared enough of this whole thing.
I did it! Got two tickets for the Mumford and Sons concert in Verona on July 7. Presale went live at 10am CET and by 10:04 only a handful tickets were left, I got a bit breathless with anxiety by the end of the procedure. 😮💨
So, Mumford and Sons are coming to Italy on 7 July, then 19 and 21 November. Per usual when it comes to Italy, all dates are in the north, while I live a thousand kilometers away in the southeastern tip. This time, I don’t care. I renounced to too many concerts and events in Northern Italy over the past 5 years because I wanted or needed to save money and overtourism has caused all kinds of fares and prices to skyrocket. Not this time. This time, I’ll try snagging a few tickets.
World news have put me on a sour mood consistently for the past two weeks. I had to take a break from all current affairs and media last week because one evening I was literally weeping. As a European, I’ve never been more scared of the future. We’re alone, and our national leaders don’t care to cooperate.
🔗 “NokiApple LumiPhone 1020 SE” merges Windows Phone body with budget iPhone guts - ArsTechnica
Reminds me of my old, white Nokia Lumia 925. That phone ran hot like a small oven, but the feel of that polycarbonate back was absolutely top notch… like any other polycarbonate-built phone, basically. Plus, I’ve never been able to type as precisely and effortlessly as I did on Windows Phone. That keyboard was pure joy.
Ethnic cooking class tonight and we prepared pad thai. We used plain flour for wheat noodles instead of rice noodles because we wanted to do some stylish slapping action on the countertop to lengthen them. It was pretty tasty! 🍕 (no emoji category for “cooking”, so pizza emoji it is!)
About Ali
My dad owns a small cottage in the Salento countryside with a little parcel of land where we’ve been hosting Ali, a 40-ish years-old man from Sudan. I’m not sure about his age because he himself doesn’t know with certainty. Moreover, as he explained to us, filling this knowledge gap by asking the local Sudanese mosque or government offices would have exposed him to the risk of being forcibly conscripted.
Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna’s Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models.
Paraphrasing Keynes: if you download a dozen ebooks, you have a problem. But if you download a million, you don’t.
📰 Owner of spyware used in alleged WhatsApp breach ends contract with Italy
More news on the Italian state-sponsored spyware case that’s been picked up by, like… zero mainstream Italian news outlets. Contract terminated by Paragon for “breach of the terms of service and ethical framework”.
New phone number for my dad, and the first text is a WhatsApp scam
My dad’s a GP and he’s been using the same mobile number for the last 25 years, so everyone knows it. Recently, he’s grown more and more exhausted and resentful towards people who, in a way, abuse his patience, especially out of office hours (there’s a severe shortage of GPs and HCPs in general in Italy, so relationships with thousands of patients of a private practice when you’re just one person can feel like being mauled and wrestled among ferocious jungle animals, I guess). We managed to persuade him to the idea of using a separate phone with a separate number, just for family and few selected people who… have the right to invade his private life, let’s put it that way.
I bought him a Pixel 8a and a brand new SIM card (reminder: we live in Italy), with a shiny-new number that’s also quite easy to remember. To an Italian ear, “320” is a relatively old-sounding mobile prefix, but this didn’t raise any flag for me when I read the number for the first time. All this happened over the last week. I finished most data migration, general setup of accounts and apps, the case arrived – one of those cases with a front flap that opens like a book; a type of case I hate, but he literally can’t hold his phone any other way, he holds it from the case like a book; he went caseless for about three months before destroying his old phone because it just slips out of his bearish grip, so…
Well, we’re supposed to give him this new phone today. Three people know his new phone number right now: me, my mom and my sister – not even he knows it! But apparently, his brand new, entirely unknown phone number isn’t exactly unknown.
Hello, can I talk to you for a second?
Yeah. He doesn’t even have the phone yet, he doesn’t even know his number… yet this morning, I woke up to the first scam WhatsApp text. I guess that with his blind luck the phone company assigned him an old, previously deactivated phone number. As Chief Technology Officer of the family, I hope this won’t mean more problems to solve.
📺 Mussolini: Son of the Century
Based on the eponymous novel by Antonio Scurati. A prime, timely portrayal of the inner workings of a budding dictator in an exhausted, unequal nation dominated by an insipid oligarchy.
“I am a beast: I know when the season’s changing”, repeatedly says Luca Marinelli’s M. looking directly at the camera, with abyssal black, beastly eyes dominated by a single speck of reflected light. Yet, until the fatal moment when he finally comes to peace with the fact that “Fascism ought to be everything” – as his socialite mistress Margherita Sarfatti educated him, his every move is disloyal, unethical, cowardly and outshone by the strategies of the people at his side, who also crucially lack the charisma and the command of the language he masters. M. is an animal dominated by an instinctual lust for power despite everything, and Fascism becomes everything only when a torpid nation chooses to resign power, accountability and the right to brutally revolting violence. As the final episode of this first season suggests: when Fascism becomes everything, claiming self-accountability is having no accountability at all.
Directed by Joe Wright (Darkest hour, Atonement, Cyrano). Written by Stefano Bises (Gomorrah, The New Pope, ZeroZeroZero, Speravo de morì prima) and Davide Serino (1992, 1993, Il Re – The king, Exterior Night). Soundtrack by Tom Rowlands.
The series will debut on 4th February 2025 exclusively on Sky Atlantic and streaming only on NOW in the UK. US release date yet to be set.
⚠️ Content warning: sexual assault, gratuitous violence, blood, death, flashing lights.
Just saw the clip of a certain gaming website founder turned anglican priest throwing a Nazi-fascist salute. The way these techbros do the salute is so delicate it makes me laugh. As an Italian: real fascism would rip these guys to shreds… and they would embrace it. How cute of them.
Dear PM, I think you should ask someone else to translate 32k highly-specialised words in 10 days, especially considering I’m just one person, k? Bye!
This wasn’t the tone I used of course, but it might as well have been. QoL and having time for family isn’t worth feeling enslaved for pennies.
Surgery for this pretty girl was today. They found a small, vaginal soft tissue sarcoma, so they removed ovaries and uterus (to reduce the chance of recurrence due to hormonal changes) and they cleaned the margins where the mass was. Hoping the biopsy for a possible mammary tumor turns out fine. 🐶
Ctrl key not working in Windows 11 and Parallels Desktop
As a professional translator and a Mac user, I’m quite familiar with Parallels Desktop and running a Windows virtual machine just to have access to the biggest, industry-standard computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, like Trados Studio and memoQ. I could spend hours moaning about the woes they cause me, but here I want to talk very briefly about the most recent problem that occurred to me.
After a few weeks of jobs that required web-based translation tools (like XTM, Smartling and Phrase, previously known as Memsource), I received a project to be completed in Trados. I turned on my VM, opened Trados 2021, set up the project and discovered, to my great annoyance, that the main Confirm keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Enter) wasn’t working anymore. Since the Enter key and copy-pasting shortcuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) worked correctly, I assumed it was a problem with Trados. After resetting the keyboard shortcuts – which didn’t work – I hastily blamed the software on Mastodon, created a different shortcut (Alt, or Option on Mac, + Plus key, which on an Italian keyboard layout is right next to the Enter key) and set to work.
This week I received another job that required a Windows-based software, in this case memoQ. I checked-out the job from the server, translated the first segment, pressed Ctrl+Enter and… nothing happened. “What the hell…?”.
This time though, right as I was setting up another memoQ shortcut, I remembered that when I tried to solve the problem that occurred in Trados about a month earlier I googled something like “trados ctrl key stopped working”. This time though it wasn’t working in memoQ, so it could only mean that the problem was somewhere else, between Windows and Parallels Desktop.
After a brief Google search, I found a topic on the Parallels forums reporting that a certain Windows update broke some Ctrl key shortcuts, which was corroborated by multiple users. As it happens, the solution is temporary but simple.
From the Parallels Desktop preferences, go to the Hardware tab, then Mouse & Keyboard and click Open Shortcut Preferences. Here, click on the + button and manually enter the MacOS shortcut and the equivalent Windows one.
The software is in Italian, but it’s quite self-explanatory.
Top: the keys that you press on your Mac keyboard. Bottom: the keyboard shortcut that should be mapped in Windows.
Apparently, only some installations run into this problem and fresh Windows installs are immune as well. Though this is a workaround and not a final fix, it’s good to know that for once it’s not Trados' fault. So… sorry Trados, you have many many problems and even pressing Ctrl+Enter twice too fast breaks you to pieces, but I’ll give you a pass this time.
See this blog’s domain? I own the .com version as well, its registrar was Hetzner. I transferred it to another registrar today after almost a week from the first request only because I had to contact Hetzner myself to get them to manually unlock the domain. Weird, first time I had to do that.
How’s the international community on Micro.blog? English is the primary language and that’s quite clear, but I wonder if it’s just the Discover section that’s “biased” towards English or if other languages are just in such a small minority that they rarely pop up.
Declaration of intent
I spent last evening digging through a hard drive containing files from circa 2007. Other than countless photos of my family - I was among the first to have a digital camera in this apathetic Southern Italian town, and I used it a lot, I found the backup of my very old, tremendously juvenile Live Spaces blog. I was still in high school and my writing style was like most socially-awkward, geekish kids back then: when I was online, I was an absolute diva. But more than the style of my writing about Japanese rock bands and school teachers, what surprised me was the relative ease with which I could blog frequently and about anything I liked. I find that almost twenty years on social media, mainly on Twitter (I was never fond of Meta’s algorithms, they never really hooked me), did a number on my willingness to allow myself proper time to elaborate longer thoughts - to the point of discouraging myself from keeping a blog (like the old days) because nobody cares, it’s irrelevant, I’m irrelevant, see I can’t think through anymore?, I’m just tired.
Exactly: who cares? Given the recent events, it’s time to give it a shot anyway. The internet was a much better place back then, and I reclaim my small, awkward, beautiful patch of land.
I’m still a bit tired though - that never goes away.