"Could it be possible?! This old saint in theforest has not yet heard of it, that God is dead!"
A young mommy is reading a book to herlittle daughter. Children’s books are filled with illustrations and words in big,big fonts. They also use simple, short words. Typos stand out that much more. Shecomes to a page in which the book depicts a sheep and has the word “sheep”written in big tall letters. Except the word is misspelled: SHEIP. She goes online to a social media site to post a picture of the offending book and, implicitly, comment on how standardshave fallen and “what is the world coming to?” etc.
Okay, I’m a forty-year-old man who has nochildren. At this age, you notice that the lack of children introduces a major wedgebetween your world view and that of other people who do have children. Theyhave this wary, self-righteous attitude about the world, as if it is full ofdangers and bad, bad stuff that is lurking behind every bush to turn their preciouslittle babies’ brains into mush. Moreover, being a first-time mommy for some women becomessuch an integral part of their identity that they have to insert the factin the prologue of every sentence. (By the second or thirdchild, I’ve also noticed, the babies start to begin to be shunted to a spot fartherand farther back in their sentences.)
Anyway, the cride coeur about the mangled sheep led to a discussion about the meaning oftypos in general. I said something along the lines of not understanding thefetish about proper spelling and grammar. My view is that, beyond a certainpoint at which we have to follow its rules, it has a lot to do with a slightly patheticpetit-bourgeois flaunting of cultural capital (I did not actually say it thisway, I only implied it tactfully). To me, it sounds like a cheap way of saying: “I went to college, but not to studyanything useful like biology or building bridges, but to do angry, post-feministdeconstructions of The Scarlet Letter(conclusion: it is patriarchal) and To theLighthouse (also patriarchal, albeit in a more indirect way). And afterthat, I got married and had a gaggle of babies.”
We live in such a relativistic worldthat there is no way to get a rise out of anyone by saying anything offensive anymore.You can make jokes about the Pope, the Dalai Lama, the Sai Baba, or any otherreligious leader with a funny hat, but not a peep ensues. You can satirize anyone’spolitical ideology, whether on the left or the right, and no one challenges you.
But beware of the passions you can unleashif you have the temerity--nay, the uncouthness--to express the opinion that propergrammar and spelling are perhaps not the ideal indicators of intelligence!
Snap! Oh, no he didn’t!
This mommy adopted a very “mommy”tone with me (although I am probably ten years older than she is). The tonesubliminally meant: “I am a mommy! My job is to make the world safe for my daughter.Irresponsible, childless miscreants like you do not understand this sacredduty.” She suggested that following these rules can be compared to “hygiene”and that they are “the reflection of a beautiful mind.” To which I responded thatbeauty is more than following rules and that, as far as hygiene goes, there isa difference between washing your hands before supper and compulsively scrubbingyour hands 78 times a day every time you think some random crazy thought.
Except I know this woman is also an l10nentrepreneur who is very much in tune with the faddish notions pouring out ofSilicon Valley about how Low Quality is the future. Which created a certaincognitive dissonance for me. So I tried to gently steer the conversation inthat direction: “I’m curious. What do you think of the theory that quality doesn’tmatter and that the ‘TEP model’ in translation is obsolete?”
You could literally see the light bulb goingon inside her head: “Ohhhh! Right!” (Facepalm!)
Immediately, her tone changed. In a flash,she went from mommy-ish to very corporate-y and jargony. It was like watching ametamorphosis, from Mommie Dearest rantingabout wire hangers to the lady from the friendly folks at Omnitouch. She wrote: “I like it. It is amodel conceived to make many expensive copies from an initial model. When thatis the case, it is the best.”
Which means… uhhhh? (My brain hurts!) I musthave missed that l10n seminar. I was probably dawdling with the croissants andfree coffee, or reading a printed book, or doing some other unproductive idiocy.
The thing is that, by this point, I was alreadymentally writing this blog post. I was all in.
She continued: “However, if you givepriority to agility (software, tweets) over other things, you make differentconclusions. I’m not dogmatic.”
Boom! Gotcha. So I went in for the kill. I turned the conversation around 360 degrees back to theexact point where it began, with the bloody, mangled sheip-sheep: “But maybe theeditor of your daughter’s book isn’t dogmatic either and just has differentcriteria about which texts require quality control.”
Check and mate.
Again: Boom! Which I’m sort of proud of,because, like George Costanza, the perfect witty riposte usually only comes to mehours after I need it.
I wish I could relate the rest of theconversation, but here it abruptly ended. My interlocutor declined to continuethis fascinating philosophical exchange.
So her silence opens the door for me tocomplete the dialogue in my head. In there, the silence says: “Quality is dead,oh future post-editor, but if you dare show my child a misspelled sheep or amachine-translated children’s book, I will tear out your eyeballs like alioness defending her cub!”
Which sounds to me a lot like some Tea Partynutcase saying: “Take your government hands off my Medicare! Not in my backyard!NIMBY! NIMBY!”
Miguel Llorens is a freelance financial translator based in Madrid who works from Spanish into English. He is specialized in equity research, economics, accounting, and investment strategy. He has worked as a translator for Goldman Sachs, the US Government's Open Source Center, and H.B.O. International. To contact him, visit his website and write to the address listed there. You can also join his LinkedIn network by visiting the profile or follow him on Twitter.
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