My client had the decency to put “pharmerging” in inverted commas and to speak about “so-called” pharmerging. A little research on Google soon tells me that the word is known, and is precisely relevant to my client’s field, so I am not blaming them. I almost don’t blame the twisted brain that thought up the idea. But I do blame the people who have had the bad taste to adopt it as a buzzword, presumably in the belief that it makes them look as if they have esoteric marketing knowledge.

I’m not actually sure when it first came into circulation, so it may not really be this year’s word, but this is the first time I have come across it. I’m willing to bet that I won’t come across anything else with such low linguistic sensitivity this year, so there you have it: my vote in 2010 goes to “pharmerging” as the ugliest word of the year.

Fritz D. had written a letter, and ordered a translation from Angela E.; when the translation was supplied, Fritz noticed that “danke schön” had been translated as “thank you”. He told Angela that he was not happy about paying, and asked her which word corresponded to “danke” and which word to ”schön”; the translation must be mistaken, he told Angela, as there was no “beautiful” to match the “schön”.

Yes, this is apocryphal, but similar things happen in real life.

The company that offers its help in this process (a company not of “consultants”, one may note, but of “resultants”) will be useful to you, because they will shorten the time needed to get to the “go-live”. 

I reasearching this I also found the noun “hire” being used in the sense of an employee. New hires have to be onboarded, it would appear.

Spit, foam and stab is all that I can say.

It’s local vs national that makes the difference. A local business can get its leads by networking locally. But a national business benefits from the extra reach and randomness that online working gives you.

The comment I send back was that “In many cases, no doubt. But in my case, it’s hard to be more international, yet I am entirely supply-limited. Once I’m booked, I’m booked, and outsourcing would be extremely unprofessional”, to which Alan replied (tongue in cheek, I assume) that I am therefore officially a “gifted amateur”.

By implication, freelance translators in general are “gifted amateurs”, a label that we might not all be happy with. (Yes, yes, I could say “a label with which we might not all be happy”. But I won’t.)

It struck me that this kind of misjudgement happens most easily when we try to analyze a field by sheer conceptual juggling, rather than referring to the phenomena that are out there. As the word “phenomenological” crossed my mind, I was further struck by the parallel with the shift from “comparative religion” to “phenomenology of religion”. Those of you who are not familiar with the field may think that “comparative religion” is an innocuous enough term. It might suggest an earnest, open-minded seeker with a clipboard and a checklist (with the results stored, no doubt, in an Excel file), noting that the Woobalists believe in Blongtarraby, while the breakaway Darishnymites assert that Blongtarraby should really be called Longbartnabing. Interesting stuff, eh? The fact is, however, that “comparative religion” got a bad name as it came to be associated with the almost Victorian notion that one could begin with a preconceived hierarchy, into which discoveries could be fitted as they were made. And yes, the top of the pyramid was monotheism, even “triune monotheism” – wouldn’t you just know it! The “phenomenology of religion” was intended to counter this thinking by putting the central focus on religious phenomena, whatever they may be, and only on that basis proceeding to look for underlying patterns or structures.

Well, academics have to make their living out of this, so the whole field is of course complex and subtle, but I am asking Alan to comment on my suggestion that the problem with his chart is a result of working from preconceived notions rather than from business phenomena.