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Comment by throwayedidqo | Hacker News Reader

Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

You're not going to get paid well for a job that close to 15% of the population can do with no training

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First, this is the sort of shallow dismissal we need less of on HN.

Second, please don't routinely create throwaway accounts to post with here. It's fine if there's some specific purpose, e.g. something personally sensitive, but we ban users who do it routinely. Hacker News is a community. Anonymity is fine, but users should have some consistent identity that other users can relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be an entirely different forum.

To be fair, community can and does develop without usernames at all, it's just that people aren't on a personal basis with one another. To be honest, I recognise or even look at most usernames and I doubt many others do. It's similar to reddit, in which someone's username will only be noticed if they are extremely popular (very rare) or have a novelty username.

The effect is lessened here because the prominence of one's posts is not tied to how many points they have (like on old forums) because a person's points are not immediately visible. But anonymous messaging with optional usernames works just fine as seen on 2channel, 4chan, 8chan and the 'old chans' (now defunct).

I don't think community is at all dependent on usernames being used or not.

No, I have to insist on this. Some people want the kind of forum where there are no usernames, and that's just fine. But HN is not that kind of forum. Users who want that are welcome to find (or create) such a place, just not to turn HN into it.

It's important to draw clear lines around what HN is and isn't, and this is one of those lines.

I agree totally that HN is not that kind of forum, I was more picking up on the point that community does not require names to exist. Sorry if you weren't trying to make that point!

Ah I get it now. Yes, that's a valid distinction.

Translating literature is not a trivial task. You could Google translate most books and be able to understand what's going on, but it won't make for good reading.

It actually requires a degree of creativity and literary skill on the behalf of the translator to make a good version in another language. Arguably it's a different work of art to the version in the original language.

>Turns out knowing more than one language isn't a rare or sought after skill. In Europe maybe 40% of the population knows multiple languages fluently. Perhaps a third of these write well enough to translate.

Depending on the combination of languages - it is an extremely rare skill! Just being multilingual is not enough, you need to be multilingual in the correct combination of two languages! Although a majority of translations are English->Target language, that is not always the case.

How many people know both Japanese and Arabic well enough to translate? How about Mandarin Chinese and German? Portuguese and Danish? French and Tagalog? Hokkien and Russian?

Your second point "sought after" is the important part. How much demand for Russian books are there for Hokkien speakers? No demand - no money.

Along with that, you also have to know how to translate into a format that people actually want to read. You can translate a work into a different language, but you may lose the spirit of the work in the process by writing words that are technically a "correct" translation, but end up being very dry or boring to read, compared to the original work.

Translation isn't "translation". It's rewriting a work or source in another language. Very few people can write in their native language, even, so finding a good translator is difficult.

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