A lot of the evangelicalism about language technology is marred by intellectual laziness. Whether you’re discussing Lady Gaga or red-shifting galaxies, whether you are an engineer or a computer designer or a poet, you should have the basic courtesy of using words with care. Some very aggressive discussions about the future of the translation industry appear to be undertaken by people who have never written a sentence in their life.

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That sort of minute attention to aesthetic detail can only come from a profound appreciation of early printing and the artisans who produced incunabula. It is an eloquent example of how humanistic culture should inform technology. The debate is visibly monopolized by people who are not translators and remind you of the Burt Lancaster character in Elmer Gantry. Or when it is former translators, it is people long on salesy pizzazz and not much in the old noggin. Or people who think translation is a commodity. These people probably don’t read a lot of literature and think any sentence is equivalent to any other. Well, they’re not. Different sentences are not equivalent because of a little thing called style. And if you can’t perceive it, you probably never will.

Adam Smith’s simple yet profound analytical insight was the identification of the division of labor as the secret to higher levels of production. The division of labor has indeed been the key to the great multiplication of humanity’s wealth during the past centuries. However, during the 250 years that separate us from Smith, the process of translation never profited from the division of labor. And don’t tell me that the technology wasn’t there. Because, despite the tsunami of corporate agitprop to which we are constantly subjected, translation remains a low-tech endeavor.

What could have kept a clever industrialist in eighteenth-century Britain from taking a heap of bilinguals, shutting them up in a big warehouse and having each of them translate a paragraph from Hume’s Essays? Absolutely nothing. Why, that way you could translate an 800-page brick in a single day!

What indeed would have kept our industrious entrepreneur from doing that? Oh, I know! Common sense. What was stupid in 1776 remains just as stupid in 2011.