As a translator I can be proud of being a part of the process of the expansion of our human knowledge and the exchange between different cultures around the world.

The Internet continues to make the distance between people in different countries shorter and shorter. People, regardless of where they come from, are constantly interacting with one another. As we all know, not everyone speaks the same language. The English language is spoken by less than a third of Internet total users, in other words, out of 1.596 million Internet users; only 463 million use this language online, (followed by 321 million that use Chinese online). Less than 10% of the world’s most populated regions speak English: Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As a translator I am a witness of  the beginning of a new era that encourages expansion and contact between people of different cultures and languages. To this moment cultures were isolated by geographical, ideological and linguistic distances.

According to the theory of the six degrees of separation, only six chains separate any of us from another person in the world.

Online people are joined by their common preferences, interests and objectives.This opens the way for people to know each other because they share preferences in spite of having no prior relations in the past.They can exchange information, that depending on their personal interests, may be about scientific investigation, humanitarian or human rights, friendship, studies, etc. My task as a translator is to make the exchange possible.

This opens the way to an unexplored multiplication of the human knowledge, since the information in general, shall be nurtured by different cultural views and ideologies.

An important point to bare in mind, is that the exchange in between cultures, languages and ideologies is created in the users own language. This aspect is of fundamental importance, since contrary to the usual concept of globalization, which implicates the loss of identity, the online exchange is based on a totally new perspective, where users can still express themselves in their own language.

As a translator I belong to those who believe in the importance of cultural exchange and that a better world is possible thanks to worldwide cooperation, tolerance and respect of differences.

My point here is as far as there are human translators any obstacle in communication between people of different cultures and backgrounds can be solved in the name of better understanding and cooperation. Today I translate love letters of those two who want to be happy together and tomorrow I start a big project: translating documents which will allow two companies work together in the same direction. For me both things are of the same value.

Living in the 21st century means to follow the tendencies of the time. As a translator I realize that I have to apply new attributes of translation to make it more accessible.

They say that readers today have developed a text message way of seeing, meaning that their eyes grasp one entire section of text as an image and then go on to the next. For this reason, the sections cannot be too long: ideally, no longer than would fit on the screen of a cell phone or in a single manga picture.

The secret of this new translation may be that an unusually large number of paragraph breaks added to the novel. Text message readers can read the novel by passing from paragraph to paragraph as if from one manga image to the next. They are no less intelligent than their grandparents, but they have a different organ of vision, or a different cable connecting their retinas to their brains.

Each phrase used in the book has to be easily accessible and have a good rhythm. The odors and dust of a foreign society are suppressed.

I can imagine a modern translation of Brothers Karamasov where images alternate artfully with the dialogue.

Perhaps this is part of a global process in which visual thinking is taking on a more central role. And as a translator I accept the new rules.

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