Kiddo, you have a God-given gift (or: Chant down Babylon – what the Vatican doesn’t want you to know)

 

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech (Genesis 11: 1)

So either you already know the story or not, but Babylon was a city back in ancient Mesopotamia days. It was at one point the biggest city in the world, and it’s a city that also appears in the Bible, somewhere in the beginning.  And as the city was growing all the people there got together, started firing up some mud bricks, and got around to making a massive tower. So they just wanted to hang out and not scatter about and do something, or whatever. They were bored maybe. There was no Candy Crush back then. Anyway, God wasn’t having any of that, so he divided all the kids by confusing their languages, etc. They stopped building and just roamed about.  You know the story.

In the Bible, the story kind of just ends there, how they just scattered about. And then it continues on saying who begat who, etc. But, what was left out of the original text was that some of those who were scattered upon the face of all the earth (Genesis 11:8) inevitably became interpreters and translators. Business is business. And, because God kind of got angry that one time, business was most probably booming.  And what I put forth to you, the reader, is that this part about translators in the Bible was left out either because of being lost in translation (because maybe there wasn’t a word for that profession yet?), or maybe it was erased on purpose (that part about translators being in there), because the Vatican doesn’t want you to know that you, the translator, have a profession kind of almost literally invented by, and because of, God.

Now go forth, my children, and preacheth the word/s, and yea, ye shalt later translate it and edit it and proofread it and QA it into a million different languages. Just think, if those kooky Babylonians didn’t make that tower, you’d be out of a job. Maybe.