Thirty years ago, there was only one translation house in town. Then came a big fight. The staff split into two factions, smashed each other’s desks, tore up each other’s manuscripts. It ended badly. One faction stayed put. The other moved across the street and opened a new shop. One on East Street, one on West Street. They never spoke again.
At first, the two houses translated things more or less the same way. After all, they’d shared the same dictionary. But time passed and new things kept arriving. Every new concept needed a name, and each house had to come up with its own.
One day, a new invention arrived from outside the city. East Street translated it first: “lightbox.” Clean, vivid, elegant. Even West Street’s staff admitted it was good.
The next morning, West Street’s manager called an all-hands meeting. “East Street is calling it a lightbox.”
The staff nodded. “Yeah, it’s a good translation.”
The manager slammed the table. “Which is exactly why we can’t use it.”
The staff froze. “Why not? It’s good, so let’s use it.”
The manager sneered. “Good or bad isn’t the point. The point is we can’t be the same as them. From today, we call it an ‘image case.’”
The staff exchanged looks. Image case didn’t roll off the tongue like lightbox, but no one dared object.
A few years later, another thing arrived. This time West Street translated first: “quickpen.”
East Street’s manager found out that afternoon and sent an internal memo: “West Street is calling it a quickpen. We will not follow. Ours is ‘swiftscribe.’”
One employee muttered, “Quickpen sounds better.”
The manager glared. “Are you a spy from West Street?”
Over time, a strange pattern emerged. Whatever East Street called A, West Street would call B. Who translated first didn’t matter. Who translated better didn’t matter. What mattered was being different. Being the same meant losing.
So the two translation houses spent most of their time not figuring out how to translate better, but how to translate more differently.
An old employee on East Street used a word in a report. The word had been in common use before the split. It was all over the archives from their grandfather’s era. But in recent years, West Street had used it more, so East Street quietly added it to a “West Street vocabulary” blacklist.
The old employee didn’t know. He used it like he always had. A young manager rushed over. “That’s a West Street word! How could you use it?”
The old employee pulled out files from thirty years ago. “Look. We were using this before the split.”
The manager didn’t even glance at them. “Before is before. They use it now, so it’s theirs. We can’t touch it.”
The old employee asked, “But who used it first?”
The manager thought for a moment. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is who uses it now. They use it more, so it’s their word.”
West Street was the same. A word that their old employees had used since childhood turned up in East Street’s vocabulary, and West Street’s manager immediately announced: “This word has been contaminated by East Street. Use something else from now on.”
An employee asked, “But we’ve been using this word since we were kids.”
The manager waved his hand. “The past doesn’t count. They’re using it now, so it’s wrong.”
Each translation house cultivated a group of loyal customers. These customers didn’t just insist on using the “correct” words. They had a mission.
An East Street customer heard a friend use a West Street term and interrupted immediately. “Wait. Did you just say ‘quickpen’? That’s what West Street says. Over here, we say swiftscribe.”
The friend blinked. “But everyone says it that way.”
The East Street customer shook his head. “Everyone being wrong doesn’t mean you should be too.”
A West Street customer overheard someone say “lightbox” on the street and immediately pulled out an article titled Ten Words You Think Are Fine but Are Actually East Street Vocabulary.
Someone said, “But lightbox really is easier to understand.” They were immediately surrounded. “Habit doesn’t mean correct.” “You’ve been assimilated.” “Wake up.”
Both sides believed they were doing something righteous. Correcting a friend, sharing an article, writing an angry rant. All in defense of something important. What exactly they were defending, they couldn’t quite articulate. But they knew the other side was wrong.
Late at night, though, East Street’s customers would secretly read novels translated by West Street, because their prose sometimes had more life. West Street’s customers would secretly read poetry collections from East Street, because their selections sometimes had more depth. When they finished, they’d hide the books in the back of a drawer and go out the next day to correct their friends again. They fought the other side the hardest and read the other side the most. Without them, they wouldn’t even know what to be angry about today.
Occasionally someone in town would say, “East Street translated this word well, and West Street got that one right. Can’t we just use both?”
That person would be pounced on by both sides. East Street’s customers called them “pro-West.” West Street’s customers called them “East-pandering.” The two factions couldn’t agree on anything, but against this person, they were suddenly united, labeling them a fence-sitter with no principles and no sense of identity.
The person usually stopped talking after that. Not because they were convinced. Because they knew that speaking up would only make the attacks worse.
Some people found a workaround. When a word was contested, they stopped translating altogether. They’d just use the original foreign term, dropped into the middle of their sentences. Not lightbox, not image case. Just lightbox. Not quickpen, not swiftscribe. Just quickpen.
The foreign words felt unfamiliar, but at least they were safe. East Street couldn’t complain. West Street couldn’t complain. It wasn’t “their people’s word,” so there was nothing to fight over.
And so the town’s speech developed a strange rhythm. Every few words, a hop into a foreign language, dodging one landmine after another.
One evening, the managers of East Street and West Street sat in their offices, each writing an internal memo.
East Street’s title: On the Purity of Translation: Why We Must Not Be Assimilated by West Street.
West Street’s title: On the Purity of Translation: Why We Must Not Be Contaminated by East Street.
The two memos totaled six thousand words.
Neither manager noticed that over ninety percent of the words they used were the same.
Neither noticed that those words had been invented together thirty years ago.
