Is Technology a Threat to Culture?
Around 10 million tourists visit Rome every year. I don’t have a figure for how many follow this itinerary, but it is a common one:
There is something strange about starting the day with a 2000-year-old temple and ending up in a McDonald’s, ordering on a touchscreen and dodging ketchup smears as you sit down. But, that’s Rome these days. Strange or not, millions of people pass through some version of the itinerary above every year and they like it. They like how ancient mystique leads lithely through Renaissance charm, dips quickly into the baroque and the romantic, then lands squarely in the modern, convenient, and comfortable.
But that McDonald’s wasn’t always a ventricle in the heart of Rome, taking in tourists and pumping them out to the rest of their day. In the 80s, the plans for that McDonald’s were the source of a serious conflict, kicking off a movement that exists to this day.
The plan to build a McDonald’s at the Piazza di Spagna kicked off the “Slow Food Movement”- A movement dedicated to ensuring access to “good, clean, and fair food.” The slow food movement finds fast-food tedious, oppressive, and culturally poisonous.
I love it. This is an idea that I support. I love quality ingredients, fair sourcing, and spending time cooking a meal with my family. I am not much of a fast-food fan.
But, the slow food movement has an essential issue:
It is elitist and necessarily niche.
I love slow food because I have the wonderful fortune of being able to prepare it with my family and go out to eat it at a restaurant from time to time. However, that love I have for slow food is not the same as me confusing it for a viable alternative to fast-food hegemons. Almost 40 years later, the McDonald’s still stands near the Spanish steps, despite the Slow Food Movement growing by every measure. "Slow Food" has failed as an antidote to fast food culture, even as it has grown into a culture of its own.
The Slow Food Movement is beautiful, but it blissfully ignores the reality of economic incentives. Companies will aim to provide cheap, fast, food, and people will buy it. Even more importantly, the SFM ignores the fact that the “sensual gourmandise pleasures” they propose as a vaccine to the ills of our world are simply out of reach for many people in this moment.
The Slow Food Movement has 1-million members, whereas 69 million people eat at McDonald’s every day, and Mcdonald’s employs 1.7 million people. And, this is pure conjecture, but I imagine that it isn’t because those combined 70 million people simply don’t want to embrace the “avant garde’s riposte” to fast food. I would imagine they love slow food, but that they are lacking the access to it that the SFM frames as a choice to be made.
And, this doesn’t even get into the question of if a “slow food” supply chain could feed the entire world. But, by many calculations, it couldn’t.
People of privilege can choose what to eat, but many others cannot. Many people are not in a position to decide what food is better for their bodies, for their minds, for the planet, or for culture. Most people need food to fit into their lives, whether that means it needs to be fast and cheap all the time or just every now and then.
Slow food is great, but the movement is out of touch.
Recently, the Slow Translation Manifesto has begun to circle around. Like the Slow Food Manifesto, it is a beautiful document with an admirable aim. But like Slow Food, it lacks a viable path to the masses. It doesn’t explain how slow translation can satisfy the global demand for translated content or how it can provide gainful employment to the millions of translators struggling to make ends meet.
Past an abstract mention of avoiding costly errors, it doesn’t mention how slow translation provides value outside of a self-justifying interest in language. I happen to appreciate that self-justifying interest, but many of the buyers I speak with do not. Or, they do, but they cannot let that interest dip into their pockets or distract from their deadlines.
In this way, Slow Translation is exactly like slow food. It is a nice concept, but it can’t sustain the pressures of the real world. The slow translation manifesto doesn’t offer translators the tools to do anything other than turn down jobs, a position that very few are in the place to do. And, it doesn’t answer the fundamental question that is burning in the minds of so many translators:
“How the hell can I make this work?”
Meanwhile, Augmented Translation answers that question. It makes us faster, more accurate, and more empowered to take on jobs and make a living. It combines the ancient practice of translation with modern solutions that make the experience more accessible.
It is kind of like what McDonald's does for Rome.
Imagine the “normal” person in Rome. This could be the average resident or the average tourist. The average resident is caught up in big city bustle, and hardly even notices the history in the streets anymore.
The average tourist is on a once-a-year or once-a-lifetime style trip, and they are in a city where there is too much to see and even more to be paid for.
Both of these archetypes lack the fundamental resources to eat slow food. The resident would love to buy fine ingredients and cook with loved ones, and the visitor would love to eat at the finest locally sourced restaurant. But, they are both caught up in the chaos of modern life.
So, they end up at McDonald’s. Maybe once, maybe every day, but they end up there. The assertion that walking into that fast food joint was their choice, while true, is a cruel reduction of the life they are living.
And, something interesting happens as your average person walks into the McDonald’s at Piazza di Spagna. They enter after having walked passed an ancient temple, a baroque fountain, the old home of an English romantic lyricist, and the seat of the Spanish embassy to the Holy See. They walk through thousands of years of history, through countless cultures and conflicts, and they end up in the latest iteration.
The average person walking through Rome doesn’t experience history as a frozen ideal to look back on. They experience a record of consistent change all the way from BC to burger patties. And, fascinatingly, the average person can hold the old and new together. They can enjoy the ancient construction and then enjoy the air conditioning; the fountain architecture and then the fountain soda.
So why can’t we?
Slow Food and Slow Translation miss two important things as they try to stop change.
First, they can’t. Everything is always changing, for better or for worse. The record is there in the streets of Rome, and in the history of localization industry changes. New things come, and they stay. We have to move on.
Second, these movements don’t speak for the average person. Slow food doesn’t speak for those with a tight budget or a tight timeline, and neither does slow translation. They are both beautiful concepts that are completely ill-fitted for the modern world. If you think we can bend the modern world to fit those concepts, you are more of an idealist than me.
I don’t think we can do that, but I also don’t think we have to. I believe we can continue adding beautiful pieces to our history, just as each piece of Rome was once new and probably unwelcome. McDonald’s may still be tacky, but it may not be in 200 years. It might be quaint and charming, just as the English tea room in Piazza di Spagna is. I imagine that upon its construction in 1893, there were some Italians who were not so happy about that tea room. But now, it is an essential part of the plaza.
I don’t bring up those points in defense of McDonald’s or in defense of the forces that are driving the craft of translation to be faster and cheaper. I am not a corporate inertia apologist, but I am a corporate power acknowledgist. These things happen, and they will continue to happen. In the face of all that, I am a translation optimist.
Just as the magic and beauty of Rome weren’t extinguished by corporate invasion, the beauty of translation will not be destroyed by technological interruption. Like Rome, translation has gone through its phases: Ancient, classical, post-industrial, and now technological. And just like the resilient residents and tourists, we will be able to navigate between all of those phases in the course of a normal day.
But, we need to acknowledge that we are moving into the next phase. Some will say “If only we all ate slow food and made slow translations, we could slow down or stop this change! We can turn what is now an elite luxury into the norm!”
To this, I respond, “Ah yes, if only.”
That idea is whimsical, even grand, but in the end, it is futile. No change can be halted in its tracks, and to believe that it can be is to believe in permanence, in an immortality of sorts. The history of Rome shows us that no era is permanent, and nothing is immortal. There is infinite wisdom in Rome, and the history can even help us understand the feeling of wishing that things could remain the same.
A mere 10 months before his death near the Piazza di Spagna, John Keats wrote “I wish to believe in immortality, I wish to live with you forever” as he felt his life slip away. In the outcries about McDonald’s, AI, or our changing industry, are we not saying the same thing to a time we feel is slipping away?
I believe we are.
It is sad, poetic, and gruesome. It is all the things that the history of Rome shows us are inevitable. But Rome also shows us that the past never truly leaves us, and that it can play nicely with the present and future if we only let it. And, by letting it, we give it a piece of the permanence that we always wanted it to have.
We may have McDonald’s and AI, but we still have the pantheon, the Fontana di Trevi, the Piazza di Spagna. We still have Keats, slow food, and slow translation.
We will always have our legacy of language, no matter what changes in the technology. Nothing truly fades away, it only folds into the fabric of who we are. In that sense, Keats was wrong.
Nothing, not even his name, is writ in water.