A pandemic-driven normal

The days before the WHO declared a pandemic, I was, like many others, wishing it didn’t come to that. I wished it went the way other impending epidemics, like SARS and Zika virus, went: regional disasters that wouldn’t touch my world. Once the pandemic was declared, I hoped it would fizzle out in a few weeks, hoping against reality that this was just a flu variety, not a new disease. Denial, denial, denial.

Once local authorities started to impose stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, curtailing even the most inconsequential movement­­­­­­‒such as going to the store for a can of sardines you don’t need­­­­‒felt invasive. Most people started to buy more staples than they needed. Yes, I stocked up on toilet paper, disinfecting towelettes and alcohol gel like the rest of them. I started to feel imprisoned in my own container of life.

When the order came to work from home, my employer had already asked us to do just that a week before. My decades of experience as an independent translator showed me all I needed to do to be prepared. The transition was seamless. It took me 2-3 frantic hours of rummaging through my cubicle to grab what I needed: computer equipment, monitors, architectural books and dictionaries (I work at a CAD software firm), mugs, power cords. I settled into my work at home routine, first at a hotel as I was in the middle of a move, then at my new house. The traditional living room laid out by a spacious kitchen was comandeered as my home office: far more spacious indeed. Having all of my dictionaries and reference books, not just those given me at work, helped matters greatly. I’ll tell you why.

I’m an advocate of profusely reading something, anything, nothing and everything to do with the text to translate. My cubicle shelves were insufficient to hold all that I need to consult while at work. Roaming from the office to the kitchen to fix a cup of tea or heat up my prepared lunch was a welcome break from the task chair. Walking from my chair to a shelf holding a particular book or dictionary felt liberating. I felt indeed at ease; no distracting voices or conversations from some afar cubicle or from a nearby aisle. No bits of jarring conversation about code or sales or trips that stole my attention away from the text on my screen. And no need to put on my earphones to isolate myself into a musical coccoon of my own making, my ears swimming in notes while my eyes rowed through lines of text.

Amid my comfort, I could fully imagine what my life could’ve been had not I secured my current position in late 2018. The consequences were palpable: I would’ve added myself to the throngs of underemployed or underhired independent translators plying their trade against the increasing silence of nonresponsive customers or lost customers, many of whom are small operators or translation agencies whose own clients dwindled in number or simply disappeared. Government help for freelance professionals came right on time for some, too late for others and never for others even. I cannot begin to imagine their desperation at seeing their sources of income disappear or drop to a trickle, not enough to pay for day care, rent, medicines or other necessities. Comparisons, however, are a cruel luxury and don’t solve problems. Yet I felt fortunate enough. A year passed, I was more established in my position, secure under a steady roof, with plenty of food and toilet paper. I knew we were all paying the price of involuntary isolation: no more seeing our coworkers or associates, no more meeting in person for interviews, chats, classes and conferences. We started to climb a steep hill of expectations as vaccine work progressed and we began to see the light at the end of a long, solitary tunnel.

But a year or more of isolation takes its toll psychologically and socially. We are all changing and become changed because of this. That this is a historic moment, living, trudging, wading across our own world pandemic is no trite statement. We are awoken to new realities while deprived of our old ones. We need to talk about both kinds, mourn the permanent and temporal losses and tentatively contemplate our new gains, even if they don’t seem advantageous at first. For those who love to travel, being told not to is painful enough. Being unable to plan to travel is even more painful, I think. The operative word here is to plan.

We are so used to plan for everything, even if we don’t consider ourselves so methodical and asinine about the details. Just going shopping and getting lost in the aisles of our local supermarket was more than going shopping. It meant random encounters, unexpected purchases, welcome sights of colors, faces, frames and shapes. As ordinary and repetitive as these habits of ours may sound and be to ourselves, we needed them. In the best of scenarios, we would encounter a friend or relative and exchange a touch, a handshake, a hug, our eyes could talk even if we had no words to express. In the workplace or in a classroom, we’d think we were there just for the content, the new stuff to learn. How wrong we were! It turns out that zoomified meetings are filtering out all that is human. It’s not enough to see and smile at each other across screen (the glass cage, as Nicholas Carr puts it); we need to aprehend the fact, consciously and unconsciously, that we are in front of each other physically, that we can touch or not touch, see and not see. We are not just faces but embodied individuals who are members of a society and segments of that society: classroom, profession, workplace, picnic, dinner, playground.

While it is true that internet-enabled technologies, mobile phones and the like have allowed us to continue to work and resume our connectivity, we are slowly and painfully realizing that no amount of technology can substitute for the absences we have been suffering during this pandemic. We are becoming aware of how sterile and mechanical our conversations and interactions are becoming through the internet ether. We are also realizing that modern life is not just about apps, iPads, podcasts and Excel worksheets: we need to experience museums, street music, live concerts and theater, we need to smell the street odors, the scent of familial and stranger faces and bodies, our feet need to feel the pavement, the hardfloor, the carpet, the grass, the sand, the water underneath, our hands absolutely need to feel the air that circulates around our bodies, whether outside in a park or sidewalk, or inside in a coffeeshop. Our ears need the din of random conversations across the street and across the table. None of those things will come through technology but through our own selves when we step outside and engage others.

This engagement will come soon enough as pandemic conditions begin to improve in our cities and countries, but this return to engagement won’t come evenly or synchronically. I fear that some parts of the world will continue in chronic pandemic mode because they lack a robust health care system or enough vaccines, or because their economies are in tatters and will remain so for years to come. In a way, they’ll be relegated to a dusty and forlorn cubicle of humanity until better days come. But engaged we must all become if we want to live. Sometimes, the best connection is the low-tech type: I feel relieved when I talk to a friend or sibling over the phone, better than on FaceTime or via Zoom. Freed from the screen slavery, I can focus on pauses, voice cues to certain emotions, and the flow of words. Sometimes a sentence comes out more paused because it invites a counterargument or a comment; but sometimes the statement gushes out in a rush because its speaker needs to say his piece and I must discipline myself to listen more intently.

I’ve read sanguine comments about the future of telework from some LinkedIn posters. Zoom and computers forever, we can work from home wherever we call it home; we can still be more productive and innovative and we are better for it, as if digital nomads were our perennial calling. Yet this focus on productivity sounds, as ever, so much like assembly-line work, joyless work, busy work. My country, the United States of America, is noted for its large strides in worker productivity and professional productivity: faster is better, technology has all the answers. If life were that simple. I prefer to focus on meaningful, slower work, going back to the artisanal side of things. After all, how can I hope to reconnect with my fellow human beings if I become robotic and sterile as a PDF document? I’m afraid we translators are turning into a pretty joyless technobunch. Exhibit A: go to most loclunches or professional virtual meetings and the main talk is translation tools or some new technology marvel to work faster or more efficiently. There’s nary a word about the pleasure of finding the right expression or style without resorting to some technological crutch, like an app or website. We tend to regurgitate data, not converse; we declare others’ opinions from some blog as a proven and unassailable truth while eschewing actual debate of ideas. It is as if our half-cooked or parroted opinions have the veneer of authority if we only mention a technology or declare subservience to some technological marvel, like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. We don’t want to risk ridicule or unpopularity. We, professional, well educated translators, are sounding more like a convention of dunces, babbling about SEO words like innovation, creativity, productivity, customers, advancement but we keep it safe. That is, superficial. Ergo, superficial talk is safe talk.

To engage with another human being, as limited as we find ourselves under this pandemic to do, is to be able to talk to an actual or potential colleague or friend with all the attaining risks: risk of sounding stupid, risk of having our idea rejected offhand, risk of being unable to steer the conversation the way we want it. You know, talk with all our insecurities in sight, no so-called imposter syndrome or some other psychobabble excuse. I, for one, want to be able to resume such exchanges asking for nothing in return except for a human expression. Nothing more human than eye contact without the aid of screens.

The inverse way of disrupting translation practice

I recall a sunny colleague calling me a Luddite on the Proz.com platform some years ago. The reason, vaguely recollected now, was that I chose to criticize a technology. It might have been translators using iPads, I don’t know. I confess to feeling jaded after reading numerous headlines about this or that technology increasing a translator’s productivity or how we should embrace AI, MT or some other technoacronym to bring home the bacon.

I also remember a translation agency owner (the agency, Antler Translation Services; Peter Wheeler the speaker) speaking at a New York Circle of Translators meeting in 1991. He spoke about translators pecking at a typewriter and fearing the desktop computer. That statement made a profound impression on me because a) I was a recent graduate with a translation diploma and b) I didn’t yet have a computer. I was enthusiastic, feeling paradoxically both new and at home among these translators who were challenging each other to move forward. Adopt the PC! seemed to be Mr. Wheeler’s proposed mantra.

We’ve come a long way in these intervening decades. That gentle push to embrace more efficient technologies has long been replaced by a less considerate and forceful thrust to board the fast-moving treadmill of technomarvels: CAT tools, TEnT tools, terminology extraction utilities, notebooks, laptops, mobile phones, file converters, project management and invoicing applications, webinars. They all march to the thrilling and shrilling marketing tune of each brand. And speaking of brand, we are told to imagine and develop our “personal brand” and speed network, smile and email our way into the hearts of new clients.

Your mind is not a cog. Don’t act like one.

But serious minds demand facts to support this whirlwind of tech-enabled innovation, creativity and get-the-rates-you-deserve chorus. No matter, the oft-cited Bureau of Labor figures extolling the double-digit year-on-year growth figures for the translation and interpreting profession will see us through.

Happy to quote these numbers, translation associations boost their MLM-grade conference offerings with promises of “networking that works” and other slick slogans. After all, hundreds and even thousands of members can’t all be wrong, now, can they? Is this the age of technomagic to transport us to a new era for translators? Can we really improve our lot as professional translators and the product of our labors with the flick of a technological wand? Call me a Luddite but I propose an antidigital approach to translation as a profession because I don’t care so much about my projected image as much as what I write in the form of translations.

I work with a team of translators. We use SDL Trados 2015. Our workstations hold 65 GB of RAM. All of our tools and applications reside in an internal cloud. That’s right—our desktop computers don’t have a hard drive to speak of. We enjoy a highly collaborative relationship with a team of workflow managers who take care of the mechanics of importing and exporting files, handling vendors and making sure our translation memories, termbases and other resources are on the right portals, waiting for us.

There are some unsettling trends that I thought were just my imagination, when I was working as an independent translator: not knowing how to use dictionaries, overdependence on Google hits to determine language usage, assessing translation quality by terminology choices, questionable research methods to determine sense and meaning in an original text or paragraph, overuse of bilingual dictionaries. I recognized some of these trends in the workplace, and they’re worrisome to me. These habits work to the detriment of two translation-related activities: reading and writing.

Reading is cheap and exposes us to a variety of genres and media, from advertisements to novels to specialized magazines and journals. Writing is likewise cheap and it can be done with almost anything over almost anything. I prefer the old writing instruments: pen or pencil, and a blank or lined sheet of paper. Before the reader tells me that reading or writing have little to do with advances in translation, productive tools and networking at conferences to get more clients, or raise rates to the level we all think we deserve, ask yourself: when was the last time you read something out loud? When was the last time you wrote a paragraph, a whole sheet describing, narrating or explaining anything?

Alone with your pen and paper, faced with the hum of your thoughts, try to make up a story, or describe an imaginary village or animal. Try rescuing a beloved teenage memory: your first day of driving a car, riding a bicycle, or seeing a sad face while riding the bus or subway. Consider what a dear friend told you about her day and try to put that in writing, just for yourself. Your mind, your hand, your eyes, your remembrances need no batteries. You don’t need to plug anything. Your high-definition screen in the mind helps you connect the dots.

Years ago I embarked on a sort of lone crusade to work more slowly, to give my eyes a little more time to read the originals I was given to translate, to read over the freshly mindbaked sentences I wrote on my CAT tool, to reconsider merging “segments” so that the language would flow more idiomatically and more naturally in written form. That endeavor, which I playfully called Keep calm and translate slowly, cost me dearly: rush-driven clients stopped calling me, tight deadlines deserted me, but I kept enjoying working with a select few clients who trusted me and with whom I developed lasting business relationships. But market forces being what they are don’t favor such unusual approaches and I was forced to go to the corporate world, where I am surrounded by technology. At least I am given enough time to work at my own pace as long as I am efficient.

Although our translation memories, built by other translators with different reading and writing habits, govern the way I review translations, whenever I am given a translation, I flex my mind muscles and put my own habits to work. I am free to apply my own research, reading and writing methods, techniques—not technologies— that bring me closer to the reader. I still harbor the hope that there is at least one reader who cares about language, about how things are written, who expects to savor a sentence, parse a paragraph, sense the syntax cadence that is carefully assembled for her use and decision-making. Because, no matter what technology you choose to translate with, the warm, distilled sense of human communication, whether oral or written, will always endure and transcend your technotoys.

El traductor como lector-autor

El siguiente es un ejercicio en redacción en mi primer idioma natal, el español. Quizás algunos lectores se sientan obligados a pedirme la versión en inglés (háganlo, si así lo desean).

Note: this posting is an exercise in Spanish writing, and Spanish is my first mother tongue. If you’d like to read this post in English, kindly ask me via a comment or email. Thank you.

Algunos de mis colegas ya saben que estoy matriculado en un programa de doctorado en traducción y terminología. Aclaro que más me interesa la traducción que la terminología; esta última es una disciplina multidisciplinar (como lo es la traducción o los llamados estudios de traducción) que merece su nota de bitácora por separado.

Una de las cuestiones que ha venido aguijoneándome desde hace años es la enseñanza de la traducción. Y el móvil de estos pensamientos surgió en un rincón inesperado: la redacción técnica en inglés. Allá por 1997 me había matriculado en una clase (tres horas crédito) dictada por un profesor de origen armenio o persa, muy afable y organizado. El programa, ofrecido por Cal State-Fullerton, se centraba más en los principios de redacción técnica más que en los programas informáticos que más de moda estaban entre los comunicadores técnicos del momento, como RoboHelp, DreamWeaver, FrontPage y Quark Xpress.

¿Acaso podemos enseñar a otros a escribir? La pregunta es un poco tautológica y también se contesta sola en caso afirmativo. Todos aprendemos a hablar en la cuna cultural que nos toca. En esa aula de la vida y la familia, aprendemos los sonidos que refieren a esos glifos y símbolos que llamamos ya sea letras, palabras, idiogramas o pictogramas (según seamos de ascendencia europea, china o polinesia, etc.). A medida que aprendemos a dominar el encadenamiento de sonidos y palabras, vamos nombrando ideas, sentimientos, cosas y conceptos, en medio del ensayo y el error. Claro, cometíamos muchísimos errores, que a nuestros mayores a veces les parecían graciosos, encantadores, tontos o una combinación de todo ello. Siempre me maravilló pensar en que un niñito que yerra mientras aprende a hablar y a expresarse poco le importa que se rían de él. Es más, toma las risas y bromas como parte del aprendizaje, sin internalizarlas ni guardarlas. Comparemos esa circunstancia con la del adulto cualquiera que reacciona con un gesto ofendido cuando se le corrige la escritura, la puntuación o la gramática.

Aprender a leer es ese puente que todos cruzamos a tientas hasta que podemos expresarnos por escrito. Es una labor ardua y disciplinada que nos lleva mucho más esfuerzo que aprender a hablar. Y hay varios estadios de aprendizaje y de dominio, desde el nivel del tercer grado (por un ejemplo) hasta la categoría universitaria y más allá. Descubrimos, de adultos, que el habla y la escritura se especializan cada vez más tanto por razones tanto tribales como profesionales.

Aprender a escribir es una actividad continua que nos lleva toda la vida. A menos que decidamos quedarnos en un estadio, como el del trabajador en una fábrica de zapatillas, contentos con lo alcanzado y sin que nos interesen otras áreas del conocimiento, siempre necesitaremos armarnos de nuevos vocabularios y nuevos recursos retóricos para expresarnos por escrito.

Hay quienes están satisfechos con dar el siguiente parte sobre las vacaciones de una semana tomadas el verano pasado: “La pasé muy bien/Me divertí muchísimo/La ciudad era espectacular/Hice muchos amigos/Visité varios museos” y así sucesivamente. Los parlamentos se acortan, aunque desestimo la primera razón que nos parece obvia: que estamos apurados en la vida. No, no lo creo. Otro ejemplo es responder al amigo o pariente que nos ve luego que hemos visto una película de estreno. Solícitamente nos pregunta: “¿Cómo fue la película? ¿De qué se trataba?” Y le contestamos con frases remanidas como “¡Estuvo fantástica!/Era un drama basado en hechos reales ocurridos en la Alemania del siglo XIX/Era una de aventuras con Hombre-Araña y Tor; me gustaron las actuaciones y los efectos especiales”.

Y ahí se terminan nuestras habilidades redactoras.

Uno de los ejercicios que daba a mis alumnos de traducción años atrás era el de escribir un trozo de 150-200 palabras en el que me describieran un paseo, un monumento, una visita a una ciudad, etc. En lugar de recurrir a las expresiones cuasineandertálicas (si se me permite el humor), estos alumnos se veían entre impulsados y forzados a describir, armar oraciones complejas, usar varios tiempos verbales, además de adverbios, frases preposicionales y otros recursos conocidos pero caídos en desuso. Claro, algunos de los trabajos se leían como relatos formulistas y preenvasados, pero era un buen paso.

Traducir es leer y (re)escribir lo leído. Para que la traducción no se lea formulista ni tenga todas las características de un texto zombi, hay que cultivar buenos hábitos de lectura, los cuales siempre informarán nuestros hábitos de escritura. Es indispensable ir más allá de leer textos en nuestros idiomas natales; hay que seleccionarlos con cuidado, sin temor a equivocarnos. Ya sean libros, revistas, artículos, ponencias, intervenciones, libros, folletos, afiches, almanaques, tarjetas, etcétera, todo es útil. Que nada escape a nuestro ojo crítico.

Nuestros ojos son como un segundo cerebro que desempeña actividades tanto cuando están abiertos como cuando están cerrados. ¿O acaso no han cerrado los ojos cuando escuchan una melodía o después de leer un pasaje, a fin de visualizar lo escuchado o lo leído? Los ojos no son simplemente faros ni detectores de modelos visuales (pattern scanners). Es posible desarrollar y cultivar una vista estereoespacial, a la manera del sonido estereofónico, donde podamos aprehender diferentes pieles textuales, distintos matices y colores en las palabras. Si aprendemos o reaprendemos el arte de la lectura, más allá de su obvia utilidad cotidiana, estoy seguro de que podremos aprender a escribir con una soltura aún por descubrir, en la cual nos podamos reconocer.