How to succeed in business/ALS (GB) und ein Weblog zu Finanzübersetzung

Miguel Llorens in Madrid has a weblog called Financial Translation Blog, which is new to me. It’s subtitled ‘A dose of skepticism to guard against localization hype, courtesy of Miguel Llorens, an English-Spanish financial translator’

And he did a wonderful job on Gavin Wheeldon, who sold ALS to Capita in December riding on the hype of the Ministry of Justice contract for court interpreters which has since gone so badly wrong.

Wheeldon appeared a few years ago on a TV show called Dragons’ Den, where entrepreneurs try to convince a panel of potential investors to give them money. Wheeldon failed to do so, but didn’t he do well in selling last year?

Miguel has done a fantastic job on this story in a post called ALS’s Gavin Wheeldon: A Case Study in Cheap Translation, in particular giving a link to a video of Wheeldon’s performance on Dragons’ Den – and other links too.

He prefaces the story with a nice quote from The Producers:

Bialystock: Step 1: We find the worst play ever written.
Step 2: We hire the worst director in town.
Step 3: We raise two million dollars. … One for me, one for you.
There’s a lot of little old ladies out there!
Step 4: We hire the worst actors in
New York and open on Broadway and before you can say
Step 5: We close on Broadway, take our two million, and go to Rio.

(Got this link from Judith on the ITI GerNet mailing list)

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