Blog

I woke up this morning to an invoice over $500.00 in my email inbox to my personal PayPal account, sent via PayPal. It looked real. It felt real. All the links were pointing to the correct URLs. The email didn’t seem to have been spoofed. Even the funky letter/number combination in the footer of the email looked real.

Read More

With all the hype about ChatGPT, I decided to try it out myself, asking it to explain the concept of neural machine translation and a more exotic concept from my particle physics research past. Feel free to compare its explanation of NMT to my earlier blog posts.

The upshot of this “test”: Caveat emptor! If you ask ChatGPT to write an article (or even your homework) for you, you should carefully check the content, or better yet, write it yourself. Because it turns out that ChatGPT is very good at inventing references that don’t exist.

Read More

– An Introduction to Business Structures in California

• What, if any, is the difference between a sole proprietor and a freelancer?
• What’s the difference between a DBA (doing business as) and a fictitious business name?
• Should I form an LLC, if so, do I need to hire a lawyer?
• Several of my clients told me I need to incorporate after AB5 took effect in order to do business with them–with AB2257 superseding AB5, is that still true?

If you’ve asked yourself these and similar questions, this workshop is for you!

Read More

Scams apparently come in cycles. These days, a scam that was very prevalent in 2020 at the beginning of the pandemic is resurfacing with a vengeance. The scammers send out “employment/job offers” that read roughly as follows:

Dear Interpreter/Translator,

Your listing (contact information) that was published on [insert directory or association listing here] has been reviewed by our HR Department at [insert name of random huge corporation here] and we are pleased to invite you to an online interview/briefing exercise.

Read More

Recently, I’ve been quite busy attending several virtual conferences, presenting at some of them, and recording videos to be presented at upcoming conferences in the near future.

Two weeks ago I attended and presented at the wonderful virtual conference Together Again (from afar) organized by the Oregon Society of Translators and Interpreters (OSTI). The title of my presentation was “Bias in Neural Machine Translation,” loosely based on this blog post here.

Tomorrow I am honored to be part of a panel discussion “Ask the Experts” at the Innovation in Translation Summit. My pre-recorded presentation entitled “Can you build your own MT engine?” will be featured tomorrow, October 6, and will be live for 24 hours.

Read More

Recently, claims have surfaced that neural machine translation (NMT) produces the same quality as human translators, that is, several NMT providers claim to have achieved or even exceeded human parity. In this article I want to investigate these claims of human parity. An introduction to neural machine translation can be found here.

Read More