The Destruction of Russian and Translator Recollections
Here, I would like to tell you about my story as a translator and about the global changes I have lived through for forty years.It is also about Europe’s future. But, as my life on both sides of the Atlantic has taught me, any paper about translation services as they relate to Europe must also be about America. It may sound difficult to believe, but this paper has been developed for over twenty years. Being a young man from Texas, who was living and working in a London translation agency during the cold-war years of the 1970′s and 1980′s, I thought I knew the answers to any Europe’s problem. And I had heard them more than once and in more than one single language, too. But as many young Americans had done, I had adopted the doctrine of Reagan and the underlying ideas. At that time I also found similarity in the interests of America and Europe. Above all, this involved the strong intention to restrain the Soviet Union from exercising control over Europe.
While I worked for a Washington D.C. Translator company in the 70s and the 80s of the 20th century, I had the chance to see and hear the things myself. There was hardly a day when I did not work with powerful Washington policy institutes and university staff. There I had the chance to meet a number of scientists and strategists who were promoting conservative and more particularly, neo-conservative ideas and who were getting more and more influential in the Republican Party. Many of these same thinkers were present in the George W. Bush administration. Interestingly, some of these people were once social democrats. They exhibited superb international intelligence.
The unforeseen dissolution of the Soviet Union put an abrupt end to the cold war. Back then my work required to travel frequently from the U.K. to the States and back to the U.K. Since I was employed by a Portland Translator agency and I was good at German Translation, I often visited Europe. As a result, I watched the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Many Europeans reckon this act marked a new step in world history. That’s because the fall of the wall laid the beginnings of not only the new European future , but also marked a considerable change in the Atlantic world. For after the collapse of the Soviet Union Europe felt less endangered by its might and less dependent on the support of the USA. Now Europe had the chance to restrict the influence of the USA. This dependence was widely discussed by German media, which classified it as unhealthy. Perhaps this tended to the strengthening of the anti-American movement at that time. Regardless, Europeans now perceived their opportunity to be relatively independent, to become one of the superpowers.
But when it happened to visit Washington in 1990s I realized the attitude was not as it had been before. I could perceive it among conservative policy institutes and neo-conservatives, people who advised both Bush father and son, even among some Democrats around Clinton. Even in Seattle Translator company where I worked I could feel this change. To illustrate, one of the pleasing features of Americans in the years of cold war was that they exhibited humbleness in both attitude and behavior. By contrast, this feature was not typical of most European politicians. However, the ‘victory” of America in the cold war brought in a change. Strong terms like “hegemony” and expressions like “global dominance” by the end of the 90s had come into political vocabulary.
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