No-style, no contemplation

From the Article Alley, a Chinese (I assume) translator has a few words of wisdom with which I strongly agree:

"The prevalence of online free translation benefit countless communicators who may be professional translators or merely foreign web page browsers whose English is not good enough to access the relative information. However, depending on the online translation too heavily sometimes leads you to the opposite direction.

Of course we can not fully deny that the translation software can do nothing with the translation process. To me the Trodos is quite helpful. Here I do not mean to discuss or compare the advantage and the disadvantage that Trodos and Google own respectively. What I want to say is that any software however powerful it may be is only assistance in essence. However, the internet has changed translators’ mental habit when they work on a translation project. The contemplation that used to come naturally is become a struggle. I am worrying that the style of translating that promoted by the internet, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading and translation. In this money-worshipping world, academic excellence seems to have been relegated to a role of secondary importance. The translator, a kind of intellectual, tends to become “mere decoders of information”, instead of weighing our words when we translate. And the hustling and bustling to routine life makes deep-reading and intensive study a kind of luxury.

As a translator with a decade of experience I ever never surrender myself to any machinery servant but to boost its utilization to the utmost."

Amen, amen!