BY: CARLOS
E. MIJARES POYER DATE: MAY 3, 2012
GENRE:
TRANSLATION ARTICLE
The
Cowboys of Translation
Caracas, Venezuela, is
the most insecure city in the World -in all senses. You walk through its concrete jungle of over 7
million souls, boggling the streets searching survival, it is perhaps your city
too, a common panorama Taking the public
transportation and boom you are immediately in the Urdaneta Avenue. What you
don´t know its that your entering the Wild
Wild West of Globalization, with its neosocialist government buildings,
banks and offices and excecutive meandering to an fro in the corruption of
yesteryear. A phantom Rolls-Royce custom
made in purple wine races through the avenue.
When the oil runs out, and the steel, and the pretty women and other
energy resources it will become a ghost town, which was once a commercial
mining town, and walking you see multicultural races from Spain, Italy, Germany
and Colombia and now the cubans, yes, the cubans. Avenue Urdaneta is the wild wild west and its
men are cowboys, yes, they have modern guns, and there, in one of those towers,
are the Cowboys of Translation. They are merely teen-agers like Billy the
Kid, following the example of an older cowboy who hires them.
They
are foreign language students, some learning French, mainly English and Italian
or German, it is their pick, there are several universities offering
services. They desire to be language
teachers, absent minded about the sickness of low payment salaries and
exploitation, and the hindrance and noise caused among linguistics of the
serious profession, of translation. Have you ever seen a translation
sweatshop? We have them here. Perhaps they can appear somewhere else like a
bureaucratic phenomenom. There are no
serious translation organizations, they play with the number of words and
pages, affecting the profession of translator and languages. Translator calling each other and searching
each other through google asking to see the other´s rates. If someone calls a legitimate translator,
they will contract you for the translation, and then, and only then they call
the cowboys of translation on Urdaneta Avenue, who do not speak English
correctly, and translate false versions of content and form, are there ready to
steal the project from you. Most of
these sweatshops are directed by corrupt lawyers, that through payments obtain
translation certificates and are sworn translators and they pay the cowboys,
those children -a measely salary. When
you need a translation contact a serious translation office, the third world is
full of these cowboys in all trades, it is the mediocrity of a society that
aspires to fall and decline even more.
The
concept of the Cowboys of Translation has no allusion to the American
Wild West of hollywood movies, but here gun fights among translators happen
virtually through the phone, and clients aware of the low hanging mangoes take
the opportunity to pay less, to people who are transcending to be professional
translators, writers and linguists in the world awning in the presence -all in
the presence of God.
The
cowboys use the lasos which is word
in the english language, look it up, which is the rope to catch cattle to catch
clients it all coordinates the universe of offer and demand.
