Back in mid-1980s, I was contacted by a manufacturer here in Japan to translate a product manual from Japanese to English.
I quoted the job as a total amount on the basis of the volume I could see from the source text I had been given. The client replied, asking me if there was some way I could lower the fee. He asked if I would be willing to grant a discount if he would accept a handwritten translation. I needed to tell him—and so I did tell him—that there would be an extra charge if he wanted a handwritten translation.
People who are surprised at this need to think of the cultural and technological context. At the time, Japan was just getting to where it could produce printed matter without using a complex mechanical Japanese typewriter. Traditionally, the typewriter, and even the much simpler typewriter for production of English documents, was seen as a foreign element in the business environment, a hurdle to get over and more troublesome than just handwriting things. The lingering popularity of the fax machine is in some sense a testament to the lingering popularity of handwritten things and the view of keyboarding something as troublesome.
The client ultimately agreed to a “normal” translation, produced neatly as an output from my computer.
