September 3, 2010
My Translator Memories in Seattle
Here, I would like to tell you about my story as a translator and about the global changes I have lived through for forty years.It is also about Europe’s future. But, as my life on both sides of the Atlantic has taught me, any paper about translation services as they relate to Europe must also be about America. It may sound difficult to believe, but this paper has been developed for over twenty years. I was young, I was from Texas and was living and working in a translation agency in London during the years of the cold war, and I thought I knew how to solve each and every Europe's problem. In fact, I had probably heard them all in every language too. But like many American citizens I was a follower of Reagan's policy and the beliefs it was based on. These were also the years when I considered that Europe and America had similar interests. First and foremost, this was expressed in a perseverance to stop Soviet power over Europe.
Since I worked for a Washington D.C. Translator agency during the 70s and the 80s, I had the chance to see the things first0hand. Most of my work was related to communication with major Washington political organizations and people from the academic circles. There I met a number of remarkable conservative, or rather neo-conservative research workers and strategists, whose ideas were getting popularity in the Republican Party. Many of these scientific workers were involved in the administration of George W. Bush as well. Interesting enough is the fact that they used to be social democrats. They exhibited superb international intelligence.
The unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union put a sudden end to the cold-war world. Back then my work required to travel frequently from the U.K. to the States and back to the U.K. Since I was employed by a Portland Translator agency and I was good at German Translation, I often visited Europe. So I had the chance to watch the destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989. For many Europeans, this moment was a turning point in history. That’s because the fall of the wall laid the beginnings of not only the new European future , but also marked a considerable change in the Atlantic world. For after the collapse of the Soviet Union Europe felt less endangered by its might and less dependent on the support of the USA. Europeans could now bring to an end their dependence on the USA. German media discussed this dependence extensively, calling it "unhealthy dependence". Maybe this added to the building up of the anti-American public feeling. In any case, Europeans now perceived their future as an independent member of any union or federation, their chance to become a world power.
But when it happened to visit Washington in 1990s I realized the attitude was not as it had been before. I could feel it when communicating with conservative political workers and neo-conservatives, people from the administration of both Bush senior and junior, even with some moderate Democrats. I even witnessed this in the Seattle Translation Services company where I worked. For example, one of the features that made Americans appealing was that during the cold war they were humble in their behavior and attitude. This was not a pronounced feature of the great powers in Europe. But, America’s ‘victory’ in the cold war had changed everything. By the late 1990s, harsh terms like ‘hegemony’ and phrases like ‘global dominance’ were being bandied around.