I’ll Become a Steak Please

Around midnight I installed an English translation plugin, declared the job done, and went to bed drunk with a Lindsay Lohan inflatable doll. The plugin was in beta, which in practice meant I had manually translated two pages and then stopped trying. It wasn’t the most rigorous launch in the history of publishing, but the underlying ambition was real.

The ambition being: world domination. Not in a serious way—in the way that everyone running a blog in 2010 briefly believed the internet had actually leveled something. That the distance between you and Barack Obama or Muhammad Ali or whoever was essentially zero, that all you had to do was translate your output into English and suddenly the whole planet was in range. A friend had been saying it for months: total world domination. It sounded right.

The machine translations, when they came through, were producing sentences like "I’ll become a steak please." Useful errors. They reminded me that language isn’t just code to be processed—it carries context, rhythm, accumulated weight that no plugin was going to capture in 2010. You can feed a machine the words. You cannot feed it what the sentence is doing.

Hello to anyone who found this through a search engine. Welcome. Sorry about the steak.