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The language is an extraterrestrial virus


And in general, the fact that in this industry work with material that gradually changes over time (sometimes in a matter of weeks or days, if we talk about things as different as terminology databases of clients, or perishable information as critical of) Hotels and restaurants, products offered on a platform of e-commerce, etc.), and thus what was once can no longer be equal. I think that we call future. And paradise is exactly like where you are standing right now, only much, much better.
Of course, first and foremost used to be different, right? Some translators tended to be burned at the stake! I wonder what some will think on the matter of my frustrated colleagues. No longer does (not literally, at least), but I can not stop thinking that still crosses to people by the mind. I guess that it is the reason why a text through different processes after the translation, editing, review and QA. Perhaps William Tyndale needed a quick QA just before delivering his translation of the Bible? As I believe that Mark Twain or Hunter Thompson (or maybe it was you) once said: the difference between the right word and the almost right, is the same as that between lightning and Firefly.


More recently, have put the look on how the language is mutating, a look inspired by Terrance McKenzie on the visible language, with the presence of technology and a possible our trend towards the increased use of abbreviations and instant communication-faster, more, right now. It is an interesting study. I mean that many people these days are communicating without words, not solo sin talk. Communicate without words: that already not so new habit of interacting with emoticons and animated gigs.
Then where does that leave us translators in the future? How would translators of last decades this type of glossiness 's visual language react now? Does it affect the task of the translator? Most likely not, already still missing us see a legal contract with emojis.Although Terrance McKenzie come to theorize that meetings with lawyers for example (and even spaceships, he says) will be handled using purely visible language for him it's more immediate, universal and direct. Once again, I can hardly imagine sealing a contract written with small symbols.
But: AHA! It is only that. What I'm writing now, which will later read and what later will result in at least another language, it is also that, a collection of symbols. William Burroughs said that the written word was literally a virus that made possible the spoken word. An Egyptian hieroglyph can be a symbol representing himself, but in Spanish or any of the modern languages, the word "computer" has no similarity with a real computer.
Therefore, Burroughs said that a written word is an image and that written words are moving images. Thus, any hieroglyphic script gives us a working definition of immediate to the spoken words. These are verbal units that relate to this pictorial sequence. And then, what the written word?, he wondered. It is a virus that made us speak.
Therefore, to those who are still reading I say: the translation is a viral mutation as the flu. Spreads (and it may even be an epidemic?). And what would be a sequence of emojis then? Another type of virus such time. It goes beyond spoken language. It could even go beyond the translation.

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