I Hate Labels.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In their bios on blogging platforms like Medium or Quora, people tend to put things like Writer, Mother, Business Owner. Technically, I am all of those things, but I don’t feel comfortable sticking those labels on myself.

The only label I’ve ever felt happy to acknowledge is Translator. When I became entitled to that badge in 1993, I’d spent the previous two years telling the people who asked me what I did, “Well, at the moment I’m working in a shop,” or “Well, at the moment I’m on the dole,” or “Well, at the moment I’m doing some data entry”.

I was living in Oxford, and the people asking were mostly postgraduate students. I watched their eyes glaze over as their expectations of having an interesting conversation evaporated. I understood their disappointment because I felt it myself. They were smug arseholes and snobs, and I was too.

Anyway, the day came when I had my diploma and I was able to say “I’m a translator!” with a slightly surprised, slightly self-satisfied upward tilt at the end of the sentence. Not only was I a member of a profession, I was earning money doing it, and everyone would know I was clever and had cool skills.

The label I liked was one I felt I had earned, and one I was proud to claim because it said good things about me.

A couple of decades, a machine learning revolution and a pandemic later, I still tell people I’m a translator. But I’m not earning a living at it any more. I’ve been deskilled, automated out of my livelihood. Machine translation engines like Google Translate and DeepL do a pretty good job these days — good enough that my financially squeezed clients are prepared to take the quality hit if it will enable them to stay in business.

I am still far better than Google at converting sentences written in French into understandable English that flows well and is a pleasure to read. But in the current climate, many of my clients have decided I’m a luxury they can’t afford, or can afford only occasionally. In the long run I think that will prove to be a mistake, but honestly who knows anything any more.

So back to the labels I don’t want to own: writer, mother, business owner. They may all be things to be proud of, but either they’re not things I’m particularly proud of, or I don’t feel I’ve fully earned them.