Imagine A World Without Translators
I’ve just posted a note on Facebook to call people’s attention to my Facebook Page here, the one that I set up for my professional service, not my Profile page.
Understandably, my Facebook Page doesn’t attract many visitors. Thanks to View Insights I know that there are a few visitors, they probably take one look, and move on in search of more interesting stuff. What’s in it for them? Nothing of value, unlike “10 Hot Tips To Get Caviar With Breakfast Tomorrow.” 
Translation may be a boring topic, but that’s mainly due to the fact that people take translation for granted, so they have forgotten its real value. So the short comment I wrote to go with the note got me thinking. And this leads me to:
Imagine a world without translators. By now you know that I mean, of course, human translators.
photo credit: we-make-money-not-art
How would countries and people communicate, beside telepathy, smoke signals, or learning 6,000 different languages? Some argue that translators are not needed anymore, that machines are a cost-efficient replacement, that a universal language would be sufficient. Some believe in science-fiction and Santa Claus. But I don’t think that even in prehistoric times humans spoke one language. My guess is that they had translators already, back then. And translating is probably, probably, one of the oldest trades.
Back to our modern world: Take the current French PR mission in China. How could the French government hope to talk to the Chinese government, given the present situation, through robots and GTalk, and not start a war between France and China? A machine-translated document almost escalated into a diplomatic incident between The Netherlands and Israel last year.
Are you are a reader? If you read foreign fiction, how would you understand the plot, get a mental representation of the characters, unless someone, picking words with utmost care, weighing this one against that one, hadn’t for example produced the best translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?
Are you interested in what is going on in the world? Are you prepared to learn at least 5 or 6 equally difficult languages?
Are you a marketer, a businessman trying to sell goods and services in foreign markets? How are you going to convince the rest of the world of your intrinsic importance, unless someone, somewhere is there to relay your pitch? Do you think that Seth Godin wrote this in French?
So I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine a world without translators. Or am I mistaken?
April 22nd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
We would probably have a world language and whilst there would be definite benefits to it, we would lose so much in the process – such as all the wonderful literature in all the languages that would become dead. So I am grateful to the translators in the world such as your good self that cross the language barriers and thus unite the world.
April 23rd, 2008 at 4:51 pm
It’s difficult indeed. I remember once hearing somebody saying that we are surrounded by translation. They were right. But as you pointed out, probably because it’s so common, people tend to give it for granted or to forget that such and such author does not write in French/Italian/Tamil, etc. I don’t think there could ever be a world without translators, at least not as long as humans insist in socialising and communicating.
You are definitely right when you say that translating one of the oldest trades!!! 
ildas last blog post..Small words, big concepts
April 26th, 2008 at 10:11 pm
@Katherine I do think that mankind would lose a lot by adopting a single language and those who predict that English will become some kind of ‘universal language’ are already envisioning that it will go the same way as Latin, i.e. spawn a number of dialects that will become separate in the same way that French and Italian and Spanish separated over time. So… more work for translators
@ilda People grumble when they have to accept the need for translators, but they would complain a lot more, if they had no translations!