Blacksmiths . So, in a certain time period, blacksmiths were seen kind of like magicians.
The blacksmith would take a hunk of iron-- usually, it's still rod, and he'd put it in the fire.
But what does a blacksmith do after he pulls it out of the fire?
My father was a blacksmith with nine children to support.
You are no blacksmith .
So Arthur asked the blacksmith , and who makes your tools?
And the blacksmith said, Sire, I make my own tools.
someone is like the blacksmith at the reenactment of the Battle of 1066 once a year but that's not exactly contemporary art, you know?
These were all blacksmiths .
It's like working for a blacksmith .
And this is a working blacksmith .
"And the kindly King moved the humble blacksmith to the head of his table, as he had made all the tools for all the
It would be almost like blacksmithing or learning how to weave or working with tapestries, in which you learn certain skills, minutiae, attention to detail,
And there were also a lot of blacksmiths that went on to invent great things using their skills and their knowledge, like Studebaker, John Deere, Henry Ford.
I think when you compare them to blacksmiths , you can ask people to use identical nails, you can standardize things like railroad ties.
Let me tell you about steel working-- like the old blacksmith steel working.
And there was an acre or two set aside for the blacksmith , there was an acre or two set aside for the schoolmarm,
So I spent a day in a traditional 16th century blacksmith , an iron forge.
And this is a day spent in a 1700s blacksmith , working by a coke-fired hearth with bellows pumping away,
So, blacksmiths played a very important role.
But the question that you're probably asking is-- because blacksmiths kind of faded away-- does that mean translators are also going to fade away?
I'm just going to call his last name what he does and painter and blacksmith and et cetera and goldsmith.
So, this is an image of a blacksmith that I took just a couple of years ago, in a very small town in rural Illinois,
And each one of them said, the blacksmith .
You can become a blacksmith just from YouTube.
You’re going to learn a lot faster if you find a blacksmith to show you.
And I learned how to carve a wooden spoon and learned how to do some blacksmithing .
I was surprised to learn that there are still about 11,000 working blacksmiths in the United States today, similar to the number of professional translators that are members
Now, not all of them are full-time blacksmiths that are paid to do that work.
As I mentioned, many of the blacksmiths -- this field evolved, the profession evolved, just like the profession of translation is evolving.
So, are translators the new blacksmiths ?
Well, I believe that much like blacksmiths pushed us into the industrial age, into the Industrial Revolution, translation is pushing us past the information age and we are
It goes back to the ancient Greeks: The Greeks had myths about the blacksmiths to the gods who could create life from metal creatures.
And when you think about it, the kind of craft of the blacksmith is really simple.
He would give promising samples to companies that said, we'll try using coal in our blacksmith shop, for example.
So it was a reasonable thing for a literate working man, a blacksmith or a weaver, to buy.
actually, because he would spend 12 hours a day working as a blacksmith and then spend another eight hours every day studying.
Even if you live in the city, you can now become a blacksmith on your back porch.
still entails custom forging, if we want to use the blacksmith metaphor.
As needs became more complex, so did the skills that were needed by blacksmiths .
So, I want to talk-- I'm gonna come back to the idea of blacksmiths and translators and what they have in common.
Well, here's where I think there's a difference between what blacksmiths did and what translators are doing.
So, do translators really have anything in common with blacksmiths ?
Speaking of kings, I was looking for stories and information about blacksmiths , and I came across this story about King Arthur.
I mean, you go back to the late 19th century here, the early Industrial Revolution, if an Irish blacksmith could
They didn't have pitons until mid late 50s, and Chouinard from Patagonia was making these things as a blacksmith in his backyard, and people were buying out
getting bits of metal to be red hot, and then hammering the life out of them on an anvil with a big blacksmith 's hammer.
I mean, if you want to be the blacksmith at Pioneer Village or reenact the Civil War, that's awesome.