In House Financing is making a comeback in the Canadian market. When I first entered the car business in 1995 there were very few options for people who had credit issues such as bankruptcy, written off accounts, judgements or collections to be able to obtain financing for a reliable vehicle. I was lucky enough to work for a dealership that had an in house leasing company and we were able to sell cars to these people before the sub prime lenders came on the scene.Over the past several years there have been many companies come into the Canadian automotive financing market to fill the need for most of these customers. They are relatively large national and international financing companies. They have signed the majority of the dealerships across the country to refer business to them. In 2005 there were no fewer than 7 such companies doing business all across the country with many others doing business in certain markets in the country. At the time of writing this article in 2010 there are only 4 remaining and they have tightened up on their lending practices because there is less competition in the marketplace. Of note the 3 sub prime lenders that were doing business all across Canada that are no longer in the marketplace were international lenders with 2 or the 3 based in the United States. When the financial crisis occurred in America we lost them due to their parent companies consolidating their operations into the United States.It has been this tightening up of lending practices that is beginning to make a need for In House Financing at the dealership level once again. Today there are more and more clients who have credit problems and are in need of special financing solutions as they no longer qualify for financing from the mainstream sub prime lenders.Many car dealerships are growing tired and frustrated at spending a lot of time and money in advertising to get customers into their dealerships to sell them a car just to have the lenders turn their customer down. It has been this frustration that has led many of them to take another look at an old concept and begin financing these customers themselves. So slowly but surely there are In House Financing, In House Leasing and Buy Here Pay Here programs starting to pop up all across the country to service this new marketplace.There is very little difference in the various financing programs from a consumer point of view. They all work basically the same way. You have to give them a down payment that the dealers require to offset the risk they are taking in financing these type of high risk clients. Most of the down payments range between $500 – $2000 and are either used as money down on the loan in the case of In House Finance and Buy Here Pay Here programs. The out of pocket money is used as a security deposit and first payment in most In House Leasing programs. The security deposit can be used to buy out the lease at the end of the term without having to come up with any money out of your pocket at that time. No matter what the money you give the dealership is called, by the end of the term it is used to pay down on your vehicle.The other major difference in these programs is how the vehicle is registered by the Registry of Motor Vehicles in your province. With the In House Financing programs the vehicle is registered in your name on the registration and a chattel mortgage is placed on the vehicle at the Registry of Deeds in your province. The chatel mortgage make it possible to repossess your vehicle if you default on the loan the same way a bank or finance company can. With the In House Leasing programs the vehicle is registered in the name of the leasing company with you being registered as the plate owner of the vehicle. The Buy Here Pay Here programs are usually run by a smaller dealership and they sometimes register a chalet mortgage the same as the In House Financing Programs but often they get the customer to register the vehicle in their name and then return to the dealership with the ownership paper and sign it over to the dealership. This way if the customer defaults on the loan the dealer simply registers the vehicle back into their name and repossess it from the customer. At the end of the day it really doesn’t matter which program you choose to use if you don’t make the payments they will repossess your car but if you make your payments you will not have any problems. Remember all of these dealerships are interested in you keeping your vehicle. They are usually understanding if you are going to be a couple days late with your payment as long as you let them know beforehand and make arrangements to get caught up right away.These dealers live in the areas they work in and are usually very helpful and are willing to work with you. Most of these dealerships require that you place full coverage insurance on your vehicle but some of the smaller Buy Here Pay Here dealers will allow you to just have basic car insurance because the vehicles they sell are usually fairly inexpensive and full coverage insurance just doesn’t make sense.The hardest thing about financing a vehicle through these dealers is usually finding them. With so many dealerships advertising Guaranteed Auto Approvals, Bad Credit – No Credit Car Financing and the like but most of them do not have any options for you if you are declined by the national finance companies. You end up spinning your wheels looking for a dealer who will work with you causing you to either give up or get frustrated and buy a cheap car privately with whatever money you can come up with.
Google Translate Serbian Tool – Should Human Translators Be Worried?
“Machine translation”. Translators shudder to hear those words! It is partly in disgust, due to a firmly-held belief that a computer will never replace a superior human translator (like us!), partly because we are scared stiff that it will! So we either vehemently deprecate machine translation, or we carefully skirt around the subject and hope, for example, that our customers won’t find out about the Serbian-English-Serbian translation tool, recently made available for free by the almighty Google (link below)!Because the fact is that Google’s translation tool, which now provides automatic translation into English of Serbian websites and of copy-pasted blocks of Serbian text, is really surprisingly good (we will not discuss Google’s English-Serbian translation tool in this article, i.e. the reverse direction, as it is pretty awful right now)!Rather than acting as if it didn’t exist, we think it is better to get this subject out in the open and examine its implications for the clients of translation companies and for the translation industry in general. So this will be the first in what is planned to be a series of articles looking at automatic and machine translation, both in the context of Serbian-English translation and of translation in general. In this article we will look briefly at the quality of Google’s automatic Serbian-English translation and explain why we do not think translators and translation companies working in the Serbian-English pair should be too concerned for their livelihoods right now.An example of Google’s Serbian English translationLet’s carry out a little experiment first. We took a paragraph of Serbian text (taken from a Serbian Wikipedia article) and pasted it into the Google Serbian-English translation tool.A human translation from the Serbian to English would read something like this:A translation memory is comprised of segments of text in the source language and of their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not handled by translation memories, these are dealt with by terminology bases. Research has shown that many companies using multilingual documents use translation memory-based systems.Within a few seconds, Google Translate outputs the following translation into English:Translation memory consists of segments of the text in the original language and their translation into one or more target languages. These segments can be passages, paragraphs, sentences or phrases. Individual words are not in the field of translation memory, but they deal with terminoloske database. Research shows that many companies have multilingual documentation systems used to translating memory.Can you understand it? Apart from a few problems the translator had in identifying passive/active constructions and an unknown word, of course you can! It’s certainly a lot better than any Serbian-English machine translation tool we’ve tried before. If you look at what an old-style machine translation (which shall remain nameless) did to this paragraph, maybe you can begin to appreciate how good Google Translate is:Prevodilacka store sastoji oneself off segmenata textual on izvornom jeziku too njihovog prevoda on unity whether over ciljanih jezika. Those segmenti might lie flinders,pasusi,recenice whether fraze. Pojedinacne reci did not of domenu prevodilacke memorije,vec oneself to them bave terminoloske baze. Istra%u017Eivanja pokazuju ought mnoge kompanije wo there are visejezicku dokumentaciju koriste sisteme with prevodilackom memorijom.I beg your pardon? That was supposed to be English, in case you were wondering! And NO, we did not doctor this in any way! Also, if anyone can tell us what “flinders” are, then they know more Middle English than we do!Google Translate is perhaps not as successful with all texts as it was with this one, but it is certainly a major improvement over the above example in practically all cases! So perhaps translators should think twice before discounting machine translation from Serbian to English (and other languages, if this is anything to go by).What makes Google Translate different?Google’s system is a little different to previous machine translations in that it uses a statistical method to analyse existing translations from Serbian to English and applies what it has learned to the new text. Old-style systems merely use a dictionary to translate texts word-for-word by “brute force” and tend not to be very successful. However, it should be noted that Google themselves have recognised that their statistical method has now hit a wall of diminishing returns and it is unlikely that, as the technology currently stands, the standard of translation will be able to improve appreciably, and that goes not just for Serbian and English, but for all language combinations.Death-knell for human translators?So are we crazy to tell you all this? After all, translation companies rely on the (paid) work of human translators! What happens if all your clients go off and begin using Google Translate free of charge? Indeed, we have already seen examples of amateur translators supplying “translations from Serbian into English” that have clearly been carried out using this tool! It is only a matter of time before translation companies begin receiving “previously-translated” texts (texts that suspiciously resemble Google translations!) from clients and being asked to “just proof-read this” for a rate considerably lower than a translation from scratch would cost.Well, we would like to talk about a few reasons why you and your clients should know about Google Translate for Serbian and English and why we think translation companies need not fear for their business:
A translation business should value transparency and seek to work within the realities of the market – it does not make long-term business sense to “hide” valuable resources like this from our clients! Besides, they will find out about it sooner or later! Rather, we should accept the reality that tools such as this bring to the translation industry – the market will always be changing and we need to be prepared to adapt, not cling to an outdated reality.
We should want our customers to use Google Translate for Serbian-English translation! After all, the vision of a translation company should be to enable their customers to communicate with other markets and cultures. So if this tool helps a client who only understands English to understand a text in Serbian, then you have surely gone some way to achieving this vision!
But the core of the issue and the reason translation companies have nothing to “fear” from Google Translate is what you have been suspecting all along: computerized, automatic translation is not going to replace professional human translation from Serbian to English (or any other language) any time soon. Or let’s phrase it as a question: would you, as the marketing manager of, say, a Serbian company wanting to do business in the West, entrust the translation of your website or of your corporate magazine into English to a machine translation tool? The simple reality is that, no, you would not.
This is not necessarily to knock automatic translation tools – they are after all a soft target for us superior human translators! They may well have their applications, and we may discuss this in another article. This is merely to say that any business that is serious about a given market, given the current quality of machine translation, will settle only for a professional, human translation of their promotional materials. After all, we said Google’s Serbian English translation was good, but it’s not THAT good! In fact it’s not nearly good enough.Perhaps in a future article we will also take a look at some of the differences between machine translation and human translation and investigate some of the reasons why, despite the remarkable advances, and the positive things we have said about Google Translate, automatic translation software is not currently a serious choice for professional translation – from Serbian to English or in any other language combination – and why it may never be. Indeed, we have some deep concerns about possible misuses of a tool like this, in an environment where even now translation is often not taken seriously enough.In the meantime though, check out the tool and perhaps open up a whole new world of translated Serbian web content that you could not access before! Try Google Serbian-English and English-Serbian translation here.
Technology Learning Conquered Traditional Learning in Schools
Computers are in the schools. Whether they are in labs, in the library, in mobile pods, or in individual classrooms, the computers are there. But what will it take to ensure that these computers are used as high quality learning tools?Today’s high-tech innovations will have little effect on education if schools adopt them without building “human infrastructure” that includes adequate training for teachers, proclaims the Benton Foundation in their recent report, The Learning Connection. Schools in the Information Age. So just what is “adequate training” for teachers?According to more than 10 years of Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow research, to effectively integrate technology in education, teachers need to learn not only how to use computers, but specifically how to use computers for teaching and learning. At the same time the learning experiences being created by these educators must be re-examined, as technology changes both what is possible in the classroom, as well as what will be required of students when they graduate and join the workforce.In 1991 the US Department of Labor issued What Work Requires of Schools, a SCANS Report for America 2000, The Secretary’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills, defining the skills and attributes essential for workforce success. To the traditional basic skills of reading, writing and arithmetic, the report added listening and speaking, as well as decision making and problem solving. Beyond these basic skills, the report sited as vital the ability to identify, organize, plan, and allocate resources; to acquire, evaluate, and organize information; to work well with others; to understand complex inter-relationships; and to work with a variety of technologies.Not only do educators need to learn to use computers, but they need to learn to integrate them into the learning experience in a way that fosters the development of this higher order skill set. In many cases, this requires fundamental changes in classroom practice. Seating students in rows and having them complete drill and practice exercises, whether on the computer or on a ditto page, is unlikely to accomplish the ambitious goals implied by the SCANS Report.The vast majority of technology staff development programs have as their focus learning how to use individual software applications. Educators who have experienced this type of application training report that it does not have a significant impact on how they use technology in their teaching. That is, learning about the application itself does not translate into changing classroom practices, and thus has little or no impact on student learning.When learning about technology is firmly rooted in the context of teaching, however, the results are quite promising. Using a technology staff development model created as a result of more than 10 years of research through the Apple Classrooms of Tomorrow (ACOT), many school districts are seeing what happens when teachers are able to transfer their learning from the staff development experience into classroom practice.In order to have a significant impact on classroom practice and ensure effective technology integration, schools and districts must make a significant investment in a coordinated approach to staff development like the model based on the ACOT research. Real change requires providing educators with a sequenced program of quality staff development experiences, along with followup and ongoing administrative support.In Fulton County, Georgia, where they are in the second year of their technology staff development program based on the ACOT model, vanguard teams of teachers are serving as mentors within their schools, providing a model of effective technology integration for other teachers to follow. During the first year of the program these vanguard teachers participated in either four or six days of technology integration training offered through Apple Staff Development.During the two-day training sessions the vanguard team members experienced firsthand what it is like to engage in an integrated lesson with technology, while the course facilitator modeled an effective style of teaching in a technology-enriched, engaged learning environment. Technology skills were acquired in context. The learners (in this case the teachers in the staff development course, but it could as easily have been a group of students) were highly motivated to learn the technology skills to complete their projects, and the relevance of the technology learning was immediately evident.Building on the experience of participating in an effective lesson, the vanguard team members reflected on what they had learned and how they could apply their insights to designing integrated lessons of their own. On the second day, they were given the opportunity to redesign a favorite unit of instruction, integrating technology. Upon returning to their classrooms, these redesigned units provided an initial opportunity to experience integrating technology in their teaching. As they experienced the effectiveness of this new way of teaching, the redesign of other units followed.Over the course of the first year of the program, these vanguard team members became increasingly comfortable with integrating technology within their own classrooms and prepared themselves to serve as role models to other teachers. Now in the second year of the program, Fulton County is both expanding its vanguard team by providing the integration training to additional teachers, while at the same time empowering the trained vanguard teachers to share what they have learned with their colleagues.This seeding approach, having at least two teachers in every school who can serve as mentors to their peers on site, has proven effective in motivating teachers to take the risk and make the personal investment required to effectively integrate technology into the classroom.The CEO Forum on Education and Technology’s Star Chart establishes a “target technology” level for all schools to strive for that would give students regular and consistent access to technology to use as needed to support their learning endeavors, and have educators using technology to access information, communicate with students and parents, and for administrative tasks. They challenge all schools to achieve this target level by the year 2005.We won’t get there simply by putting computers in schools, nor by training teachers on how to use software applications. True technology integration requires supporting and training educators in instructional models that effectively integrate technology. It requires that teachers have professional development programs in which they can experience effective use of technology in service of teaching and learning, and that they receive the support required to modify their own teaching practices to replicate these models. Once the majority of teachers have their students using technology to gather, analyze and publish information, as well as collaborate on projects, we will know that technology is truly a tool for teaching and learning. At this point we will be taking advantage of the opportunity technology presents to prepare our students to become successful knowledge workers of the future.