Hiring a person to do a person's job

Automation is great. Yay for technology and everything else that makes life easier! But there are some things that technology will never improve on: cutting hair (sorry, Flowbee), pedicures, translating, and indexing to name just a few. For these actions, it is far better to forget the lazy and/or cheap way out and just hire a person to do the job. We don't repeat the adage "You get what you pay for" because it's a load of garbage. It's true. Cheap out on your translation or your index or your bikini wax, and you'll be regretting it sooner or later. (I'd guess you'd be regretting the automated bikini wax sooner rather than later.)

In my former life as a groundhog, living in an expansive prairie of cubicles, I was a translation coordinator. Knowing that I can string a few French words together, people would often bring me a short translation and ask me to "make sure it was all right" or "give it a quick look" before they emailed it out. I can honestly say that each and every time I got one of these translations I would read it for about two seconds (maximum), look up, and ask the person to please send me the English text so I could have it properly translated for them using our team of utterly awesome English-to-French translators. "I don't understand," they would say, "I ran it through Babelfish" (or some equally insufficient online translator). "Online translators aren't good enough for what we need," I would have to nicely explain, once again. Not that I'm badmouthing Babelfish. If you need to get the gist of a sentence in a language you don't understand, it might help you. But if you're looking to portray a positive, professional image with a large amount of copy, online translators aren't even close to adequate.

If you speak a second language even somewhat fluently you know that context is everything. Translation software probably isn't going to know that ma blonde means my girlfriend in French, for example. So you'll get a translation back saying something about "my blond-haired girl," which will leave you visibly surprised when you see the girl in question is indeed a brunette. Online translators aren't able to decipher the context accurately enough, so they might give you the wrong translation or a couple of wrong translations to choose from, framed beautifully in parentheses, like, "My blond-haired girl (girlfriend) is coming to dinner with me." In that case, you can probably figure out yourself what is really meant. But what happens if both of the offered translations are wrong? Laugh, but I've seen it more than once. The more specialized the source text is, the greater the chance for error.

Indexing is the same. Unless you have ridiculously simple text, automating the index isn't going to work. Yeah, you can get a macro to pull out and assign a page number to every instance of Abraham Lincoln. But what happens when he pops up twenty times? Is the macro going to know that page 10 is talking about his assassination and page 122 is the Gettysburg Address? Nope. You're going to have to go through each and every entry yourself anyway and assign it a subheading. Boooring.

So why not just skip all the macro mess and Babelfish hullabaloo and find somebody who knows what they're doing? I mean, why try to do something yourself when there's somebody who's already an expert at it? After all, you probably wouldn't bother trying to mess with your house's electric system or conduct your own colonoscopy. No, some things, like translating and indexing, are best left to the translators and indexers. And I happen to know a great indexer. Ahem.