Valluanino

I may be back home, but I’m still in Verona with Mumford and Sons in my mind. No fancy stuff, no special effects, just our energy. 🎵

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. 😮‍💨

🎵 Mumford and Sons Tour Dates

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!)

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.

Despite his many herniae and general aches, he often travels around Southern Italy working in the fields during periodical harvests (fare la stagione, as we say in Italian; literally, to do the season), dealing with off-the-books recruiters (read: kapos) and small business owners (read: slavers) who show their bestial selves whenever he asks for decent pay for a decent job. “These negri, coming here thinking they own the place. What the fuck are they thinking?, that they’re the masters?”.

Several of his many brothers died in the past few years. Some were casualties in the current Sudanese civil war. One of his sons was killed last year, among the firsts after conflict broke out.

He came by some weeks ago and showed me some pictures and videos he received a few days prior. Opening fire on civilians is normal. Everyday routine. Drones bomb open markets without a single care: piles of bodies, people with limbs torn to shreds wailing in pain among the indifference of passersby. In this one video, a person’s belly was cut entirely open; three militians surrounded the body and started playing with the insides, dipping their hands like in a pot of meat stew, stirring flesh and organs and unravelling the intestines like a ball of yarn.

While I struggled to suppress a barf and tried looking away, Ali was almost serene in his own resignation. As he said: in our lives there, this is routine. What’s “not good”, he said, is that they specifically targeted a street market. “That’s not good”. Everything else didn’t appear to stir him much. I wonder what else he might have seen.

Side-note. For a few months, Ali was among the recipients of a State minimum-income program, the so called “reddito di cittadinanza” (citizens' income). When he suddenly stopped receiving it, he blamed the stereotypical Italian bureaucratic mess and moved on with his life. A few weeks ago, he was served a formal complaint by the finance police: the State of Italy argues that he received this sum while not residing in Italy. He’s been in Italy for almost 15 years on a special-protection permit. He has a codice fiscale (a kind of social security number that allows access to public healthcare). At the local police headquarters they know he lives here because my dad registered an actual, official, one-hundred-percent legally binding statement declaring that Ali is our guest at our cottage, including the address and everything else required by law. Still, he’s being investigated for… like, fraud against the Italian state? Apparently, other friends of Ali are being investigated as well, and they’ve been in Italy for years too.

This is what happens when your government is run by fascists, I guess.

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.