Wetranslatethiscouldwork ~upd~ Jun 2026

: Start by listing your main ideas or drawing them out. Don't worry about flow initially—just get the "crux" of the content down.

First, consider the compound verb-object: In the twenty-first century, translation is no longer the sole domain of polyglots and scholars. It has been democratized (and industrialized) by algorithms. Services like Google Translate and DeepL have turned Babel into a manageable dataset. The “We” is significant; it is not the royal “We” of authority, but the collective “We” of the crowd, the user base, the network. It implies a collaborative, real-time effort to process foreign text. However, by running the word into the next phrase without pause, the writer exposes the anxiety behind the tool. Translation is never instant. It requires latency—a pause for thought, a breath for meaning. By removing the space, the writer physically enacts the pressure to communicate faster than language allows. wetranslatethiscouldwork

This is the ultimate historical "this could work" story. Before 1799, Egyptian hieroglyphs were a total mystery—a lost language that no one could read for 1,500 years. The Moment : Start by listing your main ideas or drawing them out

that mirrors the spirit of that phrase, here are two real-world examples of "it could work" moments in literary history: 1. The "impossible" translation of The Three-Body Problem It has been democratized (and industrialized) by algorithms