Generations

The LinkedIn controversy this month got me to thinking about some of the generational differences there are in the translation world, related not just to Internet use and technology but also to attitudes and approaches to the profession. There are things I have heard of and now participate in, such as blogging; there are things I have heard of and do not participate in, like tweeting; and there are things that I have never heard of--and for those things I must rely on my kids and other young people to educate me.

I can remember my own grandmother once asking what the point of a microwave is; “it’s just an expensive hotdog bun warmer.” I find myself now asking similar questions of younger colleagues, reminding me more and more of my grandparents. With the HDTV transition happening this year, for instance, I found myself wondering why I bother having a television at all. Looking into cable and satellite TV packages, I have literally stopped, jaw agape, brain shorting--failing to comprehend all the possibilities, and prices. (Note to cable and satellite companies: you have no idea how to communicate clearly to your potential customers about your products, do you? Just admit it.)

One thing I have been enjoying on TV, actually, is the AMC series Mad Men, which is a deliciously anachronistic look at 1960s America through a Madison Avenue lens. Every episode is good for a shocked chuckle at vignettes of rampant smoking and drinking, including a pregnant woman giving no thought to smoking, drinking, and eating steak tartar; of supposedly professional men sexually harassing a female coworker openly in an elevator with an African American operator by the panel; of a child running around the house inside a dry cleaner’s bag to be scolded merely for leaving her mother’s clean clothes on the floor; and of a husband consulting with his wife’s Jungian psychotherapist like a parent checking in with a child’s teacher. Ah, we’ve come a long way, Baby.

Now imagine yourself working as a translator circa 1960. Way more translators worked in house in those days than as freelancers, actually, so being a freelancer would be somewhat novel--perhaps a part-time gig between other jobs, or a summer pastime for a teacher or professor. You might even freelance only from time to time as a favor to friends working in international business. You would likely actually be doing more work translating into your second language rather than from it into your native language (which is taboo nowadays, professionally). If you were a full-fledged freelancer, you would probably have a manual typewriter, maybe even a new-fangled electric model; however, you might just as well be doing most of your translating longhand as a draft before typing your material out on a typewriter rented by the hour at the library. You would have hundreds of pounds of physical reference and reading materials around, plus a hundred extra pounds of checked-out library materials, and an overfull Rolodex with phone numbers and addresses of contacts who specialize in your translation areas. Your long-distance bill would be immense, since you’d be spending long hours on the phone to people in country in Asia or Europe. An in-house situation allows people to confer on problems and issues as well, so that's another reason why being a freelancer would be relatively uncommon. Depending on where you lived, you might risk scandalizing your bourgeois neighbors by having immigrant and Mormon friends (shocking, I know)--who with their missionary and language work would be invaluable people to know in the areas of language and culture. You would be able to specialize in only one, maximum two, subject areas; without the Internet, there would just be too many physical-world obstacles to having the background or reference material in more than that. You would fill three or four ash trays before having to clean them out every other day.

Even now, in 2009, there is a bit of a disconnect between older translators who don’t even have Web pages of their own, egad, and younger translators who have standard and smartphone-compatible versions of their Web pages. Older translators are less likely to be interested in professional Web sites, blogs, and RSS feeds (and may not even know or care what these are); younger translators are less likely to keep notes in notebooks or do any legwork at all, or make phone calls, to find the right answer to a problem. Younger translators are more socially isolated in many ways because they hardly see any need to step away from the computer at all.

What other changes have you noticed in the past thirty years? Or, for the younger set, what kinds of things do you find mystifying your older colleagues?