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 bureacratic 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.
Written by Carlos Mijares Poyer, writer, poet, journalist, translator and marketing professional from Guilford College and Pine Crest School cmijarespoyer@gmail.com
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Category: Translation Services
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