#7: We're back in the saddle đźŽ
Summer was hot and long. Most of us were able to take some time off, and we hope you were able to do the same, but you may have noticed that there was no August edition of Textual Healing. This was a conscious choice – we didn't have much going on, and instead of sweating in front of a laptop we chose to do whatever it was we did in the summer (beach and long siestas for me).
But we're back now baby, and we're ready to lock in (for a few months until the Winter holidays). We've got a lot of projects on the go, so the next edition should be bursting at the seams. But for now, here's what we've been up to.
TECH WORK = TECH SALARY?
Habemus new Translators Against the Machine Article! This one was sent to us before the summer by Thalia Sutton, a US-based freelance manga editor and proofreader who has watched her profession get slowly eroded and devalued, to the point where it's hard to envisage anyone doing it for a living any more. The article is a tad longer than our previous ones, and it's built on a very thought-provoking argument, which can be summarised thusly:
- As literature moves online it becomes content like any other
- Language work therefore becomes tech work, where language workers of all stripes are reclassified as "quality control", more akin to underpaid programmers or data workers than the wordsmiths of yore
- Since we work in tech, we should be paid like tech workers
- There are a bunch of reasons why that isn't happening, but you'll have to read the article to find out what they are.
Alex Minshall
Fancy yourself as a Translators Against the Machine author? You'll have to get in line because we've got several articles in the pipeline, but please do send us your pitches. You can read the open call here – feel free to share it liberally with your friends, family, colleagues, acquaintances, neighbours, etc.
NOT-ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS
Summer's usually a low ebb for work (summer holidays innit), but we have had some bits over the last few months, most of it beyond the confines of the language in which I'm currently writing (English innit).
We handled English>German translations of a couple of articles for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, both of which are solid pieces and worth sharing in their original forms.
The first is an interview with Pelle Dragsted, a Danish politician and author who argues that the left needs to stop seeing socialism as some kind of future utopia. Instead, he says that it already exists – "alive and thriving" to use his words –alongside the capitalist structures we know and hate. He takes the example of Nordic Socialism (apparently a term coined by Tr*mp et al) to illustrate how a strong public sector and robust workers rights coexist with capitalist structures.
The second is another interview, this time with Belgian MEP Marc Botenga, who has been vocal on Europe's complicity in Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza. Here, he criticises the EU's role in both actively supplying weapons to Israel and passively maintaining the status quo by not applying trade sanctions. He also explores the disparity between EU treatment of Russia (now on its 18th round of sanctions) and Israel's impunity.
He explains it all in much greater detail than I can here, but it does seems that years of public pressure might finally be paying off: EU leaders are now pushing for sanctions, though it remains to be seen how effective they will be. You can read the interview in German here.
And with no English involvement whatsoever, we also did the Portuguese>Spanish translation of the "Voices of Social Business" dossier for the Maimona Foundation, an Extremadura-based non-profit who aim to stimulate and foster business development in the region. You can read it 👇here👇.
Fundacion Maimona
And to round off the "saddle" theme, here's an image we've entitled "How Your Email Finds Me":
