Marcel Winatschek

Killing English

Readers hitting scrambled prose so mangled it looped back to being almost beautiful—that’s how I knew the Google Translate thing was a disaster. But I’m getting ahead.

Started in the eighties when I thought every word I wrote deserved an English translation. Someone actually volunteered. I paid them in shoes, lunches, and sex I didn’t think much about.

Worked fine until the financial crisis. Suddenly I was in a basement writing dozens of articles a week—twenty-eight on the worst days. Translating all of that into English while barely sleeping made me sick, so I stopped. Just fed everything through Google Translate and published it.

Some institute released a study claiming I caused four out of five brain tumors in the Western Hemisphere. Obviously bullshit, but it had a certain logic to it.

I killed the English site. Pulled it all down. German-only now. Better that way. Can’t pretend to be global when I’m just one person barely keeping up with one language. The Russian, Swedish, Japanese plans are dead too.