The Continuing Importance of Words

It seems to us that words and their application are no less important today than at any time in the past. In fact the significance of words and language seems to be increasing.

Take a quick glance at headline news in a given week and there’s a good chance we’ll see instances of:

• A well known person being cancelled for words that are deemed unacceptable.
• Statements attributed to senior people in well known organizations that have the effect of disadvantaging their brands.
• Multimillion dollar legal judgments rendered as a remedy for injurious words that are determined to be unjustified. And many more examples.

And so the importance of words is hypersensitized in the modern world where they can be instantly and irretrievably disseminated online. And then there’s the translation of words whose significance is already inflated.

So there are seldom really any routine, unimportant translation requirements.