RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/117394124070534910
In two sentences, @pluralistic explains my entire career.
I’m a translator. It used to be that if you wanted to know what someone had scrawled in a lab notebook in Hebrew - or on an affidavit, or a contract, or a medical file - you had to find someone like me who knew NOT ONLY Hebrew and English but also things about what we call the “domain of knowledge” - genomes or the finer points of legal terminology or the way anatomy works and the shifting acronyms for all things medical.
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In a world in thrall to *financial* power, expertise is the *only* substantial form of power that can reliably contest the power of wealth. Moreover, expertise is the foundation of other forms of power, such as labor power, which is what we call it when experts band together to combat financial power.
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A while back, clients started giving me automated translations and asking me to “correct” them. (Nope.)
I’d explain that the result would be much worse, and would take much more time, and the potential clients would insist - and I’d walk away.
By now, all my clients are people who have a lot resting on the results of the translation or interpretation: if you’re in a patent dispute where gazillions of dollars are at stake, nuance-free translation-shaped objects are not going to be enough.
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