My Translator Adventures In Europe and America

Here I will tell you about my experience as a translator and the great changes I have undergone during the past forty years.It is about the future of Europe, too. 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 unbelievable, but the truth is that I have worked on this paper for two decades. 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. Moreover, I had heard them in different languages, as well. But as many young Americans had done, I had adopted the doctrine of Reagan and the underlying ideas. During these years I also saw Europeans and Americans as having similar interests. Primarily, this involved a determination to stop Soviet influence in Europe.

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During the 1970s and 1980s, I worked in a Washington D.C. Translation Services company where I had a superb and privileged vantage-point. There was hardly a day when I did not work with powerful Washington policy institutes and university staff. There I got acquainted with remarkable conservative and more concrete, neo-conservative intellectuals and strategists, whose influence was constantly growing in the Republican Party. Many of these scientific workers were involved in the administration of George W. Bush as well. What seems to be interesting was that some of them had followed the ideas of social democracy. Their international intelligence was impressive.

The unexpected disintegration of the Soviet Union put a sudden end to the cold-war world. The job I was involved in then, required a lot of travel from the U.K. to the USA and back. Since I worked for a Portland Translation agency and had quite rich experience in German Translation, I often visited Europe. That’s how I was present at the fall 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 diminish their dependence on the USA. This dependence was widely discussed by German media, which classified it as unhealthy. Perhaps this tended to the strengthening of the anti-American movement at that time. 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 on a visit to Washington during the 1990s, I recognized a change in attitude. 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 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 noted feature of Europe’s political grandees. But, America’s ‘victory’ in the cold war introduced a new culture. Strong terms like “hegemony” and expressions like “global dominance” by the end of the 90s had come into political vocabulary.