(…) But if you are a translator who works at home, nobody cares when you like to work and when you like to sleep as long as you get the job done.

You get away with a lot of things as a translator that you couldn’t get away with in just about any other job. Of course, you don’t need to work wearing a dumb uniform consisting of a suit and a tie, which is what I had to put up with for the first 7 years of my working career when I was an employee in three different countries on three different continents. The same stupid garb was, depressingly, required in each of these countries. There is no commute and you don’t have to talk to anybody for days unless you want to. You don’t even have to answer the phone if you don’t feel like it since most customers, including potential customers, communicate with translators mostly by e-mail these days anyway.

While this sort of lifestyle is attractive to mildly weird people like myself, it can also be a dangerous lifestyle as some translators may ultimately develop a nasty disease called “translator’s dementia” (TD). I described the symptoms of this modern disease, which is affecting more and more translators these days, in this post. I am very proud of this post because as of today, it has 1.8 k likes on Facebook and 138 tweets, which is why I link to it in other posts every chance I get.

It helps to have a non-translator spouse who is relatively normal, but the problem is, even a relatively normal non-translator spouse may eventually become fed up with a weird translator. In fact, the TD symptoms described in my post about TD are obviously based on real symptoms of real translators. I have in mind in particular one translator who, although he owns a lovely house near San Francisco, prefers or preferred to work in the solitude that he could find only in the desolate, hot (or cold) and dusty attic of his house. The last time I saw him, 15 years ago, he had a wild, lost look in his eyes, and his wife was pointing an accusatory finger at him, saying these fateful words “This is not the man I married”. They must be divorced by now.

An important outlet that translators can use to try to minimize the impact of their often unconventional and bizarre lifestyle on their fragile psyches is nowadays found in blogs. Writing, or at least reading about our experiences on our blogs and sharing them with other similarly inclined people is not unlike lying on a psychotherapist’s couch and talking about one’s dreams, childhood nightmares, and unfulfilled aspirations. The main difference is that we can share our experience with hundreds or thousands of followers, which I am sure must have a deeply therapeutic value by itself. Plus, of course, we don’t have to pay for it by the hour. More.

See: Patent translator

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