Not so many years ago, before problems were reinvented as issues, services as solutions, and jobs as roles, people who had something to say would sometimes write those things.
These days, people increasingly identify as “content creators,” but some of this trendy content creation strikes me as aiming to obviate the need to have something to say. Just create “content” instead; it’ll make you “stand out.” And some of the people identifying as content creators don’t seem to have much to say, or to write, or to “create.”
The American Translators Association a short while ago promoted a webinar aimed at helping translators write translation content. Well, at least their choice of the verb write is refreshing. For members, it was just USD 45 for the hour-long webinar.
The webinar was billed as helping translators find what topics to write about. Don’t they know? Is that really necessary? We are often told to write about what we know. Does that mean…?
Perhaps it is aimed at translators who have so much to say they cannot decide what to write about, or perhaps it’s for those who have nothing to say. I’ll let you guess which.
This “translation content” is described as giving you visibility and as being good for marketing. Perhaps, but it sounds like participants are going to be told things they should have been able to figure out on their own. Perhaps more importantly, just who is the “translation content” intended for?
It was only USD 45 for the hour-long webinar, but with no indicated limit on the number of participants, if you get my drift. Perhaps ATA should run a webinar for USD 45 to teach participants how to run webinars for USD 45. That might be a better strategy than creating…uh, writing content.