Catherine V. Howard
1. We admitted we were powerless over well-written stories in our source language and that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our lives and our will to do human translations (HT) of stories into our target language over to the care of machine translation (MT), even if we misunderstood its results.
4. Made a searching and fearless inventory of our dictionaries and grammar books.
5. Admitted to Google Translate (GT), to ourselves, and to another translator the exact nature of our addiction to not letting well-written stories remain in their source language.
6. Were entirely ready to have GT remove all the dictionaries and grammar books from our homes.
7. Humbly asked GT to replace all our dictionaries and grammar books.
8. Made a list of all writers and readers we had harmed with our HT and became willing to make amends by putting the original stories through GT.
9. Made direct amends to such writers and readers wherever possible, except when to do so would confuse them or others.
10. Continued to take an inventory of all the dictionaries and grammar books still hidden at home and, when we started to mess with an untranslated story, promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through patience and meditation to improve our conscious contact with MT, even if we couldn't understand its results, praying only for knowledge of its commercial power compared to our desire to do a HT of a well-written story still in its source language.
12. Having had a technological awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other addicted translators and to practice MT in all our volunteer activities.
Catherine V. Howard
is a Portuguese-to-English translator in the fields of environmental issues, social research, and sustainable development. She has a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago based on her fieldwork among the Waiwai Indians of the Brazilian Amazon, becoming fluent in both Portuguese and Waiwai after spending seven years in Brazil.