Art envy

I recently read an article about Picasso’s Blue Period by American art critic Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post March 31, 2022 issue. Not impressed with his interpretation of Picasso’s mindset regarding his paintings during this period, I read a bit more about it in a Spanish website. Jesús Zatón‘s commentaries (in Spanish) seemed more comprehensive and better documented. Two thoughts: either the first critic is monolingual and hasn’t read previous reviews of Picasso’s blue period in Spanish (or Catalan) or he prefers to offer his own opinionated take on the subject.

A third thought tugged at me: Do I wish I painted such pieces like Picasso? I don’t even know how to paint, but I admire his skill. I had the pleasure of visiting the Picasso Museum in Barcelona a few years back, which gave me time to consider what his skills expressed. Since I am no painter, I have no desire to envy Picasso. However, there’s an overlap between admiring a painter, a composer, an singer, etc. and feeling a certain degree of envy for their evident abilities. On the other hand, what translator hasn’t heard a nontranslator wish he or she could write in French, Polish or Spanish after seeing our work?

Is this mild-mannered envy we mix with admiration a character flaw? I think not, since that vibration between admiration and envy draws a path for our own desire for excellence, our own drive to achieve a degree of craftmanship as translators. One could take a piece of sculpted wood, a bust, and admire the artist’s attention to detail, how polished the piece is. All I have to admire is the product of the artist’s work, in the same way users read a poem or subtitles in their own language. The user can only discern the author, as if he were a ghost who left a distinctive imprint on the wood or the page.

The experience is different when we witness a musical performance. That’s why I feel more enriched when I see a live or video performance of a piano or orchestral recital; the artist (understood, he or she is interpreting the composer’s piece) moves his fingers across the keyboard or slides his arm over the cello as he glides the bow on the strings. Listening to the same work on CD, vinyl or a streaming platform is not the same, regardless of how beautiful the composition is. In fact, the composer’s brilliance in music is enhanced and complemented by the musician.

Since translators do not perform for an audience, do they still admire other translators? You bet. Many, many times in my career I wished, with a tinge of envy, I could have rendered that particular phrase so elegantly, and I look at my own attempt as insufficient, rough on the edges, forgettable output. Fear not, I don’t feel tormented by the shadows of better translations haunting me at night. Even an imperfect translation is its own reward in our solitary offices.

Picasso Museum, photo furtively taken in 2017.

We admire beauty and elegance in works of art and marvelous musical compositions, among other artistic expressions. Self-expression is not nearly enough to constitute beauty. That’s why excellence and craftsmanship are so central to works of art, the well-known and the unknown. To admire a translated text of any kind, the text has to be beautiful and elegant to some degree, besides fulfilling its utilitarian mission. If a text is only utilitarian or functional, bereft of a sliver of elegance or neatness, it doesn’t deserve much admiration, let alone envy. A translator only becomes a craftsman (or craftswoman) after realizing this truth.

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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.

Artistic sources to my craft

Translation is an individual craft to me, honed over years of practice. We usually say “experience” to lump together all the specializations and texts we’ve worked on, as well as all the types of media formats those texts were encased in. Ask the average translator on the street about the sources that feed her translation craft and she’ll probably say love of languages or an inclination to read foreign literature. The following is not intended to one up anyone’s sources of inspiration, however, but to share the aspects that have been feeding my work as a translator.

First, it’s the need to read from all available sources. I don’t limit myself to reading about the heart’s anatomy if I’m working on a heart disease document, nor do I feel my research is bounded by medical vocabulary alone. I would read an economics news, peruse over a text describing a weather phenomenon or let my mind wander around articles on capitalization, a new movie or threaded holes for mounting a piece of equipment. To the untrained eye, I’m wasting time reading nonmedical material, but that’s not how language works. Other texts inform my writing.

Love of orthography or correct spelling comes in second. One of the subjects in my elementary school in Callao, Peru was, unsurprisingly enough, Ortografía. Aiming for correct spelling in all my working languages is not some perfectionistic quirk. I care about the reader, the actual translation user—who is never the client, the project manager or the translator whose written work I’m editing. Plus, Spanish has what Nadeau and Barlow call the culture of language: native Spanish speakers aim for excellence in language usage, and the reader expects that, no matter his or her educational level. Therein lies a particular kind of aesthetic; besides, misspellings are like image artifacts: they detract from reading comprehension and knowledge acquisition.

Journal writing, which I started at age 12, comes third. I’ve kept all my journals from my teen years and my young adult years as well. Translation is an act of communicative writing; it follows that one needs to excel at writing in order to excel at translation, and good writing precedes good translation by years of diligent preparation. Naturally, I had just basic knowledge of the Spanish language when I was 12, but I already knew all of 23 Spanish prepositions and the couple dozen verb tenses, and how to use the subjunctive. My first journal entries weren’t publish-ready nor polished writing, and they were rather descriptive and mostly pedestrian: things I did from day to day. It was much later that I developed the skills to describe states of mind, feelings, complex facts, my friends’ personality traits and so on. But journal writing is just one way to exercise ourselves in writing. Your way could be poetry or storytelling, or something else altogether. The point is that a translator is an early or precocious writer.

Music, so much its own universal language, is a fourth influence. Although I do not play an instrument right now, I’ve been inevitably drawn to instrumental performances—Camerata Bariloche and other orchestral groups in my native Córdoba, Argentina. Writing and music composition share some concepts: phrasing, cadence, leitmotif, euphony. I did a bit of baritone tenor singing for eight years in lieu of playing an instrument, which satisfied my eagerness for having music in my life and for sharing it.

But what’s the parallel of music and translation? As with all good writing, a well-crafted translation is euphonic and is highly legible. A translation should be precise, elegant and purposeful in order for its user to find it useful and acquire the requisite knowledge. But let’s not confuse precision with elaboration. Ideally, a well-crafted translation is devoid of ambiguity and clunky syntax. For a song or an instrumental piece to be properly enjoyed, it cannot be just rough cuts or approximations. Likewise, producing a “sufficiently understandable” translation (the province of MT and NMT) is not enough. Sadly, the current culture of speed is working against yielding proper translations.

Calligraphy, a fifth artistic aspect, has exerted a powerful influence on my work. This was a subject I took for two years at a business high school in Córdoba, Argentina. Why calligraphy? Because it was considered essential to learn to write ledger entries with good penmanship. We learned to write in gothic and italics with nib and ink. I would rediscover calligraphy decades later when I started to study and perform desktop publishing for my clients.

In Spanish, we have a saying, to do something con buena letra, that is, slowly and carefully, or to behave in a proper manner. Translators prefer to rewrite a previous translation for a client because (a) it’s less expensive than editing it and (b) the resulting output is fresher and cleaner in writing, not a reinterpretation of what another translator did. So it makes more sense to do a translation thoughtfully to avoid a do-over. I suspect that most do-overs—that is, translations that the project manager thought were final and complete but are full of errors—are one of the consequences of this culture of speed. Will the pasta boil faster than following its natural course? Will cement for a building slab set faster than its natural course dictate? Will typing faster than 90 words per minute bring about a polished contract? Human minds cannot process information and knowledge faster than the human brain allows. There is something refreshing and reassuring of good results if we approach translation as a craft and not as a string of words to be cast on demand.

So what are your artistic influences in your work as a translator?

Turntable travails: a Goldring Elektra, a Red Ed or something else?

What does a turntable stylus have to do with translation? A lot, actually. Let me start with a small identification issue I recently ran with one of my cartridges.

Breaking off my usual discussions on translation, I’m sharing now a bit of vinyl addiction by posting a short blurb and pictures of a used cartridge I purchased: black body, red needle cap, weird connection pins, made in Japan:

Top of cartridge

Right side of cartridge

Bottom side of cartridge: connector pins

Red like the Goldring Elektra

Cartridge at rest

The cartridge with the red cap looks like an expensive Goldring Elektra, but it’s actually a Red Ed custom cart (short for cartridge) manufactured in Switzerland.

The needle or stylus looks like an ordinary pin for untrained eyes. We place the vinyl record on our turntable, lift up the pickup or tonearm and place the needle on whatever song we want to listen to. As far as we know, the needle is just a thin pin that runs the record grooves and, by the magic of electricity and magnetism, reproduces wonderful sounds to us.

So, why are there so many cartridges and styli (needles) selling for as little as $25 and for as much as $5,000? And where’s the parallel or comparison with translation?

I’m getting to that, so bear with me. Translators are like turntable needles: they all look like much the same: French, Arabic, Spanish or Japanese translators, they just decode English texts and code them in their own language by some sort of magic. And voilá, foreign language words, like an exotic song, appear written on paper or screen. If a translator uses health care instead of care or healthcare, who cares, right?

Chances are you and I grew up listening to vinyl records on a Philco or other budget equipment. To make it family friendly, manufacturers used entry-level needles and other parts. If you were an audio pro back then, you would have shelled out the big bucks (hundreds of dollars, even thousands) to buy top-of-the-line tables, arms, carts and needles. If you have heard the same concert, say, Brandenburg II, with the same budget equipment year in and year out, you might think your recording is the best…until someone shares a multichannel recording on a Bang & Olufsen equipment or a Technics turntable for you to have a listen.

A good record deserves the time it takes to be listened to. Same thing with a good translation: it takes the right mediator (the translator) and the right equipment to write a translation that will serve you not just for today or for this month, but for as long as your user needs it.

Translation craftsmanship and the culture of quality

What do the terms quality, accuracy, precision and perfection have in common? They share an almost mathematical trait of exactness, of measuring by numbers. They also point to something concrete, tangible, almost physical. Days can be measured in hours and seconds. Cargo space in cars can be measured in cubic feet. Even unseen things can be measured, as the gravity of an asteroid or planet or the wattage of an electric current.

The above list of terms, which bring to mind a rhythm of their own so grounded in facts and data, reflects more of an industrial or technological domain. Within an industry, sets of instructions can also be measured by quantity, length and even objectiveness. Any technical writer worth his ink will tell you that a technical document containing instructions to install a boiler cannot have personal opinions on the make and model of the device or whether it’s painted in pretty colors. Simply put, those attributes are foreign to the goal of a technical document.

I recently watched how a Western-style mounting saddle is being made on TV: the different rawhide pieces, sheets of tin to provide strength to the seat, the kinds of needles and strings used to sew leather, the warm-water treatment of the main piece of leather to make it pliable and flexible, etc. revealed the work of highly skilled artisans and saddle makers. The kinds of tools a saddle maker uses have their own names and unique purposes. Never mind the specialized terminology. Just the step-by-step portrayal of such an involved and logical process gave the viewer a sense of pleasure and completion, even to someone who doesn’t ride horses, far removed from the realities of saddle making. The craftsmanship is there for all to see and appreciate.

The same could be said about other industrial processes: beer, waffles, bread, the soon-to-be-extinct Twinkies, bricks, cars, boats, etc. For example, we seldom see craftsmanship in the making of a car because most automobile plants are virtually robotized and human workers only assemble parts, install electrical harnesses or push buttons and pull levers. Their function is important and essential, but denotes no particular creativity because everything has already been designed and determined in advance: the length of a certain panel or the number and color of knobs on the dashboard. Putting them together and running  some quality tests afterwards is all they have to do.

But if you see an industrial process involving some secret sauce or combination of ingredients, or some unrevealed temperature at which something is forged, baked or heated (because it’s confidential), you can see a glimpse of craftsmanship. Someone —not a machine— thought about the different proportions of a certain formula or the best temperature at which to subject a certain material for best results, and decided on a formula by trial and error or because it has been handed down from generations past. That’s craftsmanship, the human touch, the unmeasurable attribute.

To use the word “quality” to try to measure such handiwork is almost patronizing. Granted, we speak of good quality whenever we feel a perfectly smooth and polished leather in a pair of boots, or the lack of burrs in a polished skillet, or the soft border of a very good sheet of paper that doesn’t give us a paper cut. We speak of high quality pictures on a TV when we detect no dead pixels, no smudgy black transitions. Can we speak of high quality poetry or fiction writing? When we read a paper on a topic we care about, like job reports, climate change or safety in public places, do we judge them in terms of quality…or whether they address those topics properly? To me, using the word “quality” in any degree to describe the attributes of a piece of writing is akin to using a stainless steel spoon to measure and weigh the love of a child.

I propose we return to basics and leave alone the bad metaphors based on the making of solid objects. I propose we talk about translation craftsmanship. When we view translations written from the viewpoint of a craftsman, we may appreciate their unique character, even their so-called flaws. We begin to focus on how well written a translation is and not on the number of errors we seem to encounter. The actuarial obsession with which some companies seem to focus on an error-free translation, creating splashy graphics and mind-numbing statistical models to explain how each error in grammar, terminology and syntax should be counted, measured and measured again to provide a picture of quality is a slippery slope to numbing criticism of translations.

Have you ever encountered a completely error-free handbook, speech or clinical trial report in English? Talking about translation quality sometimes feels like talking about the natural imperfections of the wood made to build a cabinet or a table. We lose sight of the whole picture as we focus more on errors and how to avoid them. We make less intelligent judgments about what constitutes good writing in translation because we are too busy counting words, lines of text and commas. We end up thinking like a calculator rather than a human being.

When was the last time you wrote something and felt happy with the final copy? When was the last time you sat down to write an email reply that actually had a coherent subject line on top, a proper salutation and not just “Hi,” and addressed all the points requiring an answer? Do you feel qualified to critique someone else’s writing style? Why, or why not? After all, if you can read complex texts, why shouldn’t you be able to write them and weigh how others write them?

Shouldn’t we start with ourselves and cultivate good writing in order to recognize it in others? Craftsmanship means taking pride in your own work and recognizing good work and giving credit to others for it. Craftsmanship means doing purposeful, complete things with your hands and your mind. Translators are writers, wordsmiths, artisans of the written word, not industry drones that slap words together in other languages.

See spots run

All languages are equal, but some languages are more equal than others.

Paraphrasing the (in)famous quote from H.G. Well’s Animal Farm, «All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others,” I find myself thinking of a soup of random but oddly connected ideas: pigs, languages, words, and spots. Why spots? British painter Damien Hirst’s endless artwork collection of spots, carefully arranged color dots named after pharmaceuticals.

In my list of random ideas, there’s an undercurrent: commodification. According to Merriam-Webster’s, it means turning something that is not supposed to be a tradable object into a commodity. Look around in your house or office. Are there any objects that are uniquely wrought and made? Maybe that purple sweater knitted by grandma? Or perhaps that loaf of homemade bread you made two days ago? Did you make the bread from scratch? Of course. Where did you bake it? In an oven, a bread maker?

My mother used to bake homemade round breads and pastries for sale, fresh out of a brick-and-mortar hemispheric oven. My father built it for her in our backyard when I was a preteen. That oven was very useful to my mother for several months. I only cared for the pastries. Even though my father was no skilled bricklayer, his oven was similar to thousands of other mud ovens. Whatever we do with our hands remains unique, not line-assembled like a plastic toy or an SUV. Working things with our hands has many benefits but, how many people bake their own bread these days?

A mud oven

Take another commodity: books. A Gutenberg-printed bible in 1455 cost “the equivalent of three years’ pay for the average clerk” (from http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/press.html). Nowadays, you can get a nicely bound bible for 5 bucks or less. Thanks to industrialization, many handcrafted items became commodities and arrived in our homes. In mine, for example, most items are commodities: books, computers, kitchenware, clothes, pieces of furniture, CDs, DVDs, consumer electronics, foodstuff, rugs, office supplies, lighting fixtures, even the paint on my walls. But it’s not just objects that have been commoditized. Services such as electricity, water, cable Internet and phone service are all commodities.

The benefits of commoditization are evident: affordability, predictability of cost, ease of manufacturing, standardization of manufacturing processes, performance and delivery, ease of use, easy transfer of goods and services across borders, just to name the most important. For us, consumers, affordability and ease of use stand out.

Globalization made commoditization a truly international phenomenon. Almost overnight, there were no borders, tariffs were lowered, products, services and jobs began their fluid transfer among nations and territories. In America, we live an economic paradox: we have an unprecedented access to affordable goods from all corners of the planet, and we want products with better quality at lower prices. The downside is that we lose jobs to other nations in the process —not just China. If the goods we so prize were made in America, we would be paying several times over for them…and we wouldn’t be a happy lot, would we?

Works of art used to be unique. Paintings, sculptures and installations worth tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars, even millions of dollars, cover the walls and floors of many a museum in urban centers across the globe. Why are they so costly? Because they are unique. But then, we have another paradox: the commodified painting that is also expensive, intended for the wallets of the one-percenters.

Damien Hirst’s simultaneous exhibits in all 11 of Larry Gagosian’s galleries around the world consist of more than 300 spot paintings. These art objects come in different sizes and color palettes but share two themes: perfectly round color spots and grid distribution. Not all of these paintings were made by Mr. Hirst, however, but by his assistants. I saw some examples in the January 23, 2012 issue of The New York Observer this week. Granted, the paintings are mesmerizing in all their blahish glory. The most anyone paid for a Hirst spot painting, named 3 -(5-chloro-2-hydroxphenylazo)- 4, 5-dihydroxy-2, 7-naphthalenedisulfonic acid, was £1.8m (from http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Seeing-spots/24530). You can see a reproduction here and judge for yourself if this painting is worth more than 2 million dollars.

Damien Hirst's Valium (online reproduction)

But Damien Hirst is a well known painter, a brand in itself. His paintings draw higher-than-premium prices because of who he is and what he’s done, even though his spot paintings make you yell “My daughter could have painted thaaat!” Some art pieces are more equal than others, and so are other products or services.

Consider your product or service, how much it cost you to produce and deliver to market, and how much you price it. Even if it is a commodity, if your product or service is rare or unique enough, and useful enough, it will command a premium sticker price. Imagine your product to be a premium water bottle. Supermarkets stock those for $1.5o -$3.50 apiece. After a bottle is drunk and tossed into the garbage, what is its price? A few cents for recyclable content.

Consider now your product or service and the messages surrounding them that help to sell them or use them, such as ad copy, marketing collaterals, documentation, handbooks and instructions. How much value do they add to your product or service? Are they recyclable or transferable? In case you sell overseas, do the translations of said accompanying messages add value to your product or service?

Your product may look like millions of other products. Your service may sound like thousands of similar offerings. At a distance, all of them look the same, just like Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. Will Heinrich, The New York Observer’s resident art columnist, has this to say:

“…the medical-white canvases are decorated with perfectly round, appealingly candy-color spots…The colors, although sticking to a narrow, consistent palette, do not strictly repeat in any one painting, and they’re so precisely applied that the spots look like stickers…Even the white backgrounds stop perfectly short at the edges.”

Hirst’s formula to make his spot paintings unique was the unrepeatability of the color dots, which brings uniqueness to his commoditized art. Likewise, the texts that promote and sell your products and instruct on their use may as well share this distinctive trait of unrepeatability: your company style and tone permeates the texts to create the look and feel your customers have come to expect from your offerings. So should your translated materials. Your message —in English or in foreign languages— does not have to be a commodity just because it is printed on commoditized paper, html or pdf.

A skilled word artisan can make this possible by spotting the inherent and vibrant patterns in your writing, and then casting fresh servings of texts in foreign-language flavors that are pleasing to the eye of the discerning consumer. Whether it is an MSDS, a help file, a tool’s instruction manual or a brochure for your new service, don’t relegate them to your customer’s blind spot. Make them visible. Make them valuable.