Schalke 04 players feature in friendlies in US - a random overview

The much-reduced German squad which flew to Florida a few days ago includes a number of Schalke players. Questions emerged from the US-Belgium pairing pertinent to Schalke as well. Was emerging young stalwart Julian Draxler a force to be reckoned with in the same midfield mix as Ecuadorean Antonio Valencia of ManU in Orlando or simply "gutted" (knackered) from a long season? My verdict: exhausted and a bit too tentative with his body language and what his team-mates wanted to do with him, or he with them. '

The chemistry should have been there for him paired up as he was with familiar faces like Roman Neustädter or Lars Bender - the new scoring menace - from earlier national team efforts: in fact I saw Draxler's teammate Benedikt Höwedes more conspicuously driving forward as a fullback on the "rampage"- but I guess that catches your eye since you only expect Höwedes to infiltrate the Ecuadorean area without it being a set piece a few times a game from the back four. It is probably part of an offensive scenario decided on by the coach, though it makes him look like a captain getting people fired up, which is already his job in Gelsenkirchen.

Those Multilingual Americans and Germans

Various reporters have given Jermaine Jones good but not top marks for his performance in their team's 2-4 loss against Belgium last night. He is a tenacious and tough defender with great range, but sometimes not-quite-so-steady performer going forward, unless it is aerial. He has been tested in quite a few BL and European campaigns and getting a deserved audition in a lead role under Jürgen Klinsmann: I hope he takes his at times hotheaded over-ambition and the potential for unprovoked macho yellow-worthy fouls to heart as a problem worthy of being remedied, as otherwise it will trip him up.Aresenal players Per Mertesacker and Lukas Podolski put in solid to eye-catchingly dynamic performances respectively, with former Schalker Heiko Westerman, HSV regular Dennis Aogo, and former Leverkusener René Adler representing yet another trio of players from one club - Hamburg HSV. Joachim Löw is cleverly platooning in this reduced 19-man test squad in a way where small sub-units are from one team and thus know each others' moves. Hats off to that sagacity.

I hope Dennis Aogo can acquire a fair bit more aggression so as not to suffer the falling out of grace a too fancy, but insufficiently stout playing style lead to with Piotr Trochowski.

Mertesacker and Westermann are good for headers on set pieces and corners, besides their obvious defending acumen.

As for more areas where players can improve: can these still-rough elements be refined even more by the coaching staff, can a Timothy Chandler be coaxed into being a more lethal closer and controlled strong athlete - and not just be a speedster with a good solid rack of a body. Witness the scoring threat Jonathan Pitroipa now is with Rennes in France, nearly tripling his goal-scoring rate compared to his Hamburg stint. I feel this can be achieved with a young player, especially if the coach of the US team is a former gem of a striker and communicates closely with the regular coach at the player's club.

The fleet-footed attacking Sidney Sam made his German national team debut in tandem with slightly more capped team-mate Lars Bender - thus only lacking Stefan Kießling for a 3-fold Bayer Leverkusen subset of the Nationalelf from the opening whistle. I don't think Mr. Salazar used his whistle again for about 35 minutes after that, encouraging injury-prone fouls. But without top Bundesliga scorer Kießling on the field, that meant soon-to-be Borussia Mönchengladbach-ian Freiburg standout Max Kruse could prove his mettle in his debut, showing good mobility on and off the ball, and the Leverkusen trio - alas - only became a trio when Stefan Reinartz filled in for Neustädter, whose assist to Lars Bender bolstered his chances for inclusion for Brazil in 2014.

Can sharpness/presence be taught?

Last night, during live German TV satellite coverage of the game in Orlando, I think I heard Jogi Loew scream: "Aaron Hunt, play defense!!" at the top of his voice, to snap him out of a bit of lethargy (the season was tough upstream slog, but with career-high 11 BL goals for Hunt) just seconds after he was subbed in. But in his defense, Hunt is a very experienced player with CL cred who paces himself, with dashes of speed when it counts, dishing off smart give-and-goes, and seam-slicing passes at pace and getting off strikes on goal, when it matters, or from the PK spot. This offsets calorie-saving "paced" running on the field or a "down" and inattentive moment as was perhaps seen in the US-Belgian friendly yesterday.

Take for example

Every time the name Christian Benteke comes up, I think of Robert Lewandowski's similarly excellent shielding of the ball when controlling "service" passes, something the two accomplish with unmatched poise, basketball-like positioning skill (box out! to "clear the boards!") and pure strength,with burly physical presence made lethal by adept ball skills in their closing and attacking game.

Seeming nonchalance

Generally speaking, Jerome Boateng and Mesut Özil also both look deceptively nonchalant on the pitch - but that is just appearances - Özil will beat you down the sideline 70% of the time if you are not sharp, and Boateng won't let you outsprint him to a knocked-free ball or to the end-line 95% of the time. I am sure a player like Goodson for the US always wants to have that hustle on defense when it counts. Zooming individual and hopefully one-off errors to the size of Iran in Reagan's mental 1970s/80s world map though, may be counterproductive.

US Outlook and comments about Klinsmann salary

Hopefully, the strongly up-ticking soccer game in the US will see reporters and fans get behind the US players no matter what their "provenance" and Jürgen Klinsmann, no matter what detractors say, while he earns his pay both for qualification and hopefully being a presence in its WC group, for starters. Hopes beyond that are of course fervent, and, as Grant Wahl posited, exacting "damage" in a knock-out phase a likely aspiration given the 2010 showing, provided the team chemistry can come to a good boil, gel and be turned into a much-anticipated Brazilian tournament standout squad.

User manual translations market cornered. Market riddled with charlatans.

User manual translations vanish from market

The business for translating German-to-English manuals for technology companies has shrunk dramatically for "normal-priced" freelance translators. I have noted this nosedive in the manuals business because all incoming orders for this type of work have come to a complete standstill here in our office.

 
An informal benchmark/unheard of dumping price

I have asked several colleagues who agree about this trend, and we have made an educated guess - a "guess-timate" - that the combination of technology, with leveraged and reusable translation memories, and end customers sending most or all work to agencies who have reduced their prices by sourcing suppliers who oftentimes offer to do work for 3 or 4 to 6 cents (euro-cents) a word. I was asked via the proz.com platform to do 2,500 words for 5 cents a word just today - of course the deadline was before April is more than a few hours old (this year) and the rest would only be placed as an order (10,000 more words) if you agreed to the pain up front.

The aggregate effect has killed off the normal wage market for translating manuals (from German to English) in Germany.

 
The market for homeowners who vacation 3x a year, but are translators

Forget the very respectable pay of the Foreign Office or some of the major government-run banks which pay over or far more than €1.70 a line = 25 euro-cents/word, or boardroom briefings, which can be quite sensitive and call for experience and linguistic acumen, which is paid at a rate of at least 22 cents per German word - yes German words are longer, so there are sometimes "only" seven words per line in a text.

There is a market for respectable work for a fair price, but it has been pummeled to the size of a battered meatball by price-cutting procurement practices.

Good pay on a feudal see-saw

But at the same time, if the department who drove the prices down then sends an agency a total of two days of work on a Friday morning, they expect the translator to work on the weekend for no extra pay and the job delivered on Monday afternoon - after the agency had part of Monday to check your work. This means they take the liberty of not warning a trusted supplier in advance and assume that good people will be available, with no regard to time off, which translators need, no matter how late they request rush work to be completed.

Meanwhile, at the factory assembly line workers earn time-and-a-half for holiday/weekend work.

So if a Fortune 500 German conglomerate issues a news item of 650 words, an agency will (be expected to) charge anywhere from 20 to 25 cents a word or higher, or be "guilty" of ruining standard market prices. However, the agency translator is not allowed to bid to the agency; he or she is only allowed to "swallow" the predetermined pricing of 11 cents/word.

The tacit agreement is regular work for the agency translator for one set fee, no matter how hard or easy the content or the damage which could result from the delivered product not making the right impression. 'Friß oder stirb' is the German adage for this, meaning "Take it, or leave it." ... but using language reserved for animals.

 
Tarred and feathered for starting dialogue

All backtalk is squelched, and your name thrown off their supplier list if you call them out.

Been there. Done that.

This has meant fewer and fewer translators can continue to make a respectable income in a skilled profession where you have to be very good at 1) handling manuals content and all the related terminology/content management interfaces and 2) producing clear native-language subject-matter-expert level content for systems which are often highly sensitive or potentially dangerous.

A local profession of, usually, fluent emigrés who understand Germany and how it ticks is being systematically gagged and forced overseas or into the hinterland. You are a translator? No opera for you, no jazz clubs, just chickens and goats. Sorry. Yes, we do expect you to translate difficult operatic/classical music content, obviously, but you may only cultivate your abilities on TV or the Web. Hope that's okay.

Profit motive produces nameless bumblers
There are scores of agencies making 75 to 125 percent profit for checking and sending in what spotty quality they manage to get out of the very low-priced suppliers. If they check it at all. Rather than pay a fair price to the skilled self-employed contractor/translator, they remove part of that person's function and push it up the supply chain by having the missing quality tested/corrected/edited into the faulty product which is faulty because it is done by incompetent or unpredictable and (luckily?) anonymous individuals - many doing it as a housekeeper or on the side while the spouse supports them.

Cost-cutters without logic - what goes round, comes round

As part of this trend, companies like subsidiaries of major worldwide manufacturers with "cost-cutting" procurement divisions, only three years ago demanded a 4-cent and 2-cent reduction per word in agency pricing, respectively, without any explanation as to why. When our office said No Way! the work was sent elsewhere, so we are told by our agencies out in the field who try to find work for us.

Just before entering negotiations, the reason we were being approached, said our middlemen, was that there were huge quality issues from outsourcing the work to India at a cut rate over a period of several years.

That was not the reason for demanding a huge price cut - that was the reason for coming to a big city agency in Germany again, on their proverbial hands and knees. How schizophrenic. That brought collaborations which had been cultivated for half a decade to an abrupt end.

Shoptalk insights, the stench of greed

Before the arrangement ended, I would sometimes get agency work and find Hungarian and Romanian names in the translation memory, mixed in with my well-translated sentences, and found fairly bad errors in their content. This meant, to maximize profit, jobs where I had done the same product manual six times before were then sent to a slashed-price market for a couple years, where my translation results were leveraged to produce translations which could, somehow, be invoiced with the end customer. After all, their English was not really good enough to assess what they were getting. Mind you, I myself had to already give discounts for content repetition or highly similar phrasings. If a bad complaint came from the end customer, then I would have to step in to work on the company's manuals again - as the clean-up man - as they could no longer risk continuing with low-quality suppliers.

Please don't get me wrong, I have friends in these countries, be it Hungary, Romania, the Philippines or India - but I do not enter a school and try to teach Romanian or Hungarian, or Hindu or Tagalog, as a classroom teacher, which is what I consider doing demanding industry manual translations as a non-native speaker amounts to, while also even more dangerous and negligent. However, I readily train and teach my colleagues all about my language, even if I know they might "cut into" my market share, because I know I can count on those colleagues for larger projects, when we all help each other deliver translations in multiple languages. What I do insist on is complete bilingual competence and aptitude for the job.

 
Flummoxed by Benelux

Two years ago: a person who described herself as a translation industry association member bid for a Benelux job at 50% less than the normal price. The end customer, a wealth manager, said to me, hmmm: your price is far higher than the other bid, please explain. When I told him what the other bidder had done, he responded with silence, but felt named and blamed enough to place the order with me.

But he never ordered from me again.

 
Outsource yourself to the Carpathians

For four years now, a major international automotive company has actively recruited translators to work 40 hours a week at an Eastern European location through an agency located there, in a securely supervised building, on their computers, not your own, but without a permanent contract. The initial period of work would be up to six months for (3,500 euros/month four years ago) 4,000 euros a month (recently offered).

Agreeing to such an offer may seem lucrative, but there is no guarantee that the automotive placement agency in eastern Europe would keep you busy after six months, and you would be neglecting your regular business with customers - or have to work evenings to keep those clients happy, too. This is an example of how a trade in Germany has been attacked by globalization. Basically they want to "own the translator" but not offer the terms commensurate with owning their time: a full-time position, as opposed to a time contract.
 
An aside on inflation/cost of living

Notice how the pay figure in the above section has gone up, maybe because people are hard to find for that, or because of inflation?  There has been no inflation-adjusted pay raise for translators for over ten years that I have heard about. Period. Inflation-adjusted income has dropped by up to 30% in Germany since the 1980s, and my US inflation calculator says that if my line price remained unchanged since 2001 but in the same period something which cost a dollar back in 2001 now costs $1.25 to $1.30. That means across the board there has been at least a 25% price discount through creeping inflation from 2001 to 2013. Robert Conrad would say: "I dare you to raise your prices now, after over ten years, by say a modicum step of 10 percent - I dare you." Tell all your agencies who have paid 90 cents a line for 12 years the price is now: €1.15 or €1.20 and wait for your phone to ring while it gathers dust. If you misplace your smartphone, in this case it won't matter.

Upshot? Dialogue not desired

If I reported finding bad results in the "translation memory" my agency provided me with, I was essentially ignored. If I asked why I was not given work for that customer for two years, I was ignored. As an individual, we are powerless to stop practices like these unless the agency and end-customer view us professionals on the local market as partners, with respect and real dialog going in both directions. Good work attracts good clients, everything else is pearls before cutlets.

The precarious playing field
That is why I value the relationships I now have with my intermediaries and end customers. Unfair practices outlined above are not given any oxygen in the customer-supplier relationship and you can afford to live a modestly (comfortable) life, avoid working weekends about 1/3 the time, have children (imagine!), become a grandparent eventually, without wondering - like so many in Munich, Hamburg and New York City wonder, if you will have to move to a hovel when you turn 70, and occasionally take a longer break from the impossible deadlines caused by content producers unwilling/thoughtless enough to not give translators advance warning about when they will finish their work (on time) like we always have to.

If you have identified any of your practices in this blog post, I hope you will consider it free advice (to stop doing it), meant in the spirit of mutual respect.

Coverage of Champions League on various fronts

The southern German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, had no trouble trusting its reflexes - and featured the news of the 4-0 victory by local Bayern Muenchen side as it outclassed the outstanding and famous Barcelona team in a 4-0 exhibition. It was a perfectly executed game plan masterminded by Jupp Heynckes, but which the team might have won anyway, without the deft strategy they carried out on the pitch. Big front page lead story yesterday on sz.de

Hats off to Dortmund, especially the fans who showed they can close ranks behind one of their team's young player in loyalty despite the Bayern Munich people choosing the eve of the Dortmund side's match against Real Madrid in the CL semi-final (in a war of attrition and legal poaching) to announce signing Dortmund's star player, who played very well, incidentally. Yes, I mean Mario Götze (Goetze).

But I am leaving my hat squarely on my head for the editors at Suedeutsche Zeitung for showing favoritism. Today, the news of the equally impressive, perhaps almost historic, but in fact against-many-odds win of Dortmund against the other top club from Spain, Real Madrid in the same competition, managed to coax its way into the 4th or 5th spot on the page at sz.de. Okay, some people might go and throw weisswurst (or a Nuremberg bratwurst) or epithets at the newspaper's building if Dortmund gets more coverage than Ulli Hoeness's illegal tax evasion and alleged kickback (get it?) from adidas. But I know they won't respond to this, they have never once responded to my e-mails to their editorial staff with useful hints, but I know they are busy deciding which stories to run first, second, third, fourth, and - yes Dortmund's win - fifth. After a higher-ranked news item on many German companies not paying minimum wage. And the news-worth(ier) story of Seehofer denying he showed favoritism to Hoeness. Horst Seehofer, Christian Social Union chief and Bavarias prime-minister once said: when Bayern Muenchen is doing well, Bavaria is doing well - and the blue-and-white checkered Bavarian legal audit authority (Rechnungshof) says there is a chronic lack of tax investigators who might track down more people suspected of tax fraud such as Ulli Hoeneß (Ulli Hoeness), president and CEO of Bayern Muenchen.

Barry Glendinning has jokingly identified the ingenious Kloppo, aka as His Kloppness, as an eccentric, Jupp Heynckes is not mentioned enough in reporting, and okay, saying the reason Manchester United failed to get farther (American leeches are supposedly to blame) is perhaps Victrola's Empire dog's Master's voice speaking with part of its cortex. Or joking that a Spanish center back will dally away the defeat with his supermodel dearest -- all this rather than actually providing insightful tea-time talk about football on the Continent - where was that again, oh dear, it's five already, bring me some Early Grey and some scaaahhns. Are those hornets out there, or that yellowjacket side from "Theremouth," near Sid-mouth and (S)port(s)mouth. Errr leeches, or verm(in)mouth.

But last night showed that a writer can wax lyrical in the moment: After some initial and realistically couched pessimism and making fun of Paula, Barry Glendinning predicts  Dortmund will be nasty to Mario Götze, which they were decidedly not: the wrath never appeared, only whistles for ref. He then comes through with wonderful commentary on the match: "Schmelzer ... smashed... a hopeful low diagonal hail-mary drive through the Real Madrid penalty area. The ball came to the feet of Pepe, but before he could hack clear, Lewandowski took possession with one touch of his right and performed a drag-back with his left before turning on a sixpence and sending an unstoppable screamer into the roof of the net from nine or 10 yards out."

Thank you Barry Glendinning, you have a knack for humor and very enjoyable commentary. The fans applauded Götze at the end, too, and you said they would deride him. Last night proved what great fan culture means. One budget against the other, an essentially majority non-Spanish side against an essentially majority German side.

Williston, North Dakota and Fracking

I respectfully submit that, if natural gas is coming from fracking, people and the land and water affected in the region would be better protected if companies such as Halliburton or Statoil were statutorily required to disclose all risks and all chemicals pumped into the earth and state in full candor whether their fracking practices harm(ed) the environment now or in the future. And if so, be forced to pay the price to meet a higher standard or phase out the practice.

Plus, existing laws which forbid mining and upstream gas operations not tenable or commensurate with good husbandry and good stewardship of lands need to be enforced. Is pollution happening? Is tainted/radioactive waste water being diluted and allowed to enter water treatment supplies? The resources and land need to be seen not merely as "ours to keep" and "exploit," come what may, but for us to respect and handle sustainably. This is what my Dad, who was director of the Dakota Leadership Program, woke me up about one November morning when Jimmy Carter was elected president. He was so thrilled that a conservator had been chosen to lead our country. I notice how silent people get when anything political is mentioned. And I hope Statoil has the guts to admit its ways are flawed and acknowledge their software helps in making harm happen more quickly.

A new thought comes to me: I once met a potato pathologist from Grand Forks, ND who was assigned to help work out what had blighted part of a potato crop in the Ukraine. We happened to be sitting next to each other on a long-haul flight and I recognized the worn round spot on the butt pocket of his jeans from his can of SKOAL, outing him as a Dakotan. Imagine: he was sent so far abroad to help reveal what was going wrong with farming the earth on another continent.

Perhaps soil and farming specialists can also help explain what's wrong with the approach being taken in their very own back yard in places like Williston, in a faraway corner of North Dakota, using Statoil's fracking expertise and proprietary and undisclosed chemical cocktail right in our potato pathologist's own state.

Young-uns, scrimmaging on the field and touchline

Back in September, I watched Tom Ince combine wonderfully down the left side with teammates Danny Rose and Jonjo Shelvley in an under-21 international in Baku, and voila, now Ince has popped 13 goals in so far at Blackpool, prompting Swansea/Laudrup to bid for him. Rose also rightfully bristled at racial abuse suffered in Serbia, and recent punishment handed down by FIFA against Bulgaria and Hungary were no doubt also spurred (pardon me) by the brawl after the Serbia match won by the England squad. If Swansea gets Ince, it will make their attacking midfield on the left more formidable. Explaining why Liverpool also wants him. When watching the match in Baku, Georgiana Turner said:
https://twitter.com/georgina_turner/status/243730787936108545
Rose-Ince-Shelvey are effective coming down left side (Zaha was having a less great night)

Lewis Holtby http://www.transfermarkt.de/de/lewis-holtby/profil/spieler_55508.html is also arriving at Tottenham in the near future, making the Rose/Holtby combo quite a formidable one, if they are fielded regularly together. Will see. Stay tuned for how this plays out.