How Gabriel's Father Became a Translator at 80

At LocWorld56 Vancouver we sponsored the opening keynote, and our CEO, Gabriel Fairman, had a few minutes on stage to introduce the speaker. He used them to tell the story of his father, a man who said he was too old to learn a new tool and who, at 80, translates every day.

Here is the whole talk, from the podium to the applause.

A Metal Trader Who Dictated His Emails

Gabriel's father was a metal trader, "but not one of those who would sit behind a Bloomberg monitor." One week he wore a tuxedo to a London Metal Exchange gala. The next he was deep in the jungles of what was then Zaire, negotiating mineral rights to cobalt and copper mines.

He ran his house like military quarters. "Dinner was at 8.30, not 8.31." To his son, he felt unstoppable.

In 2003, back in Brazil after college, Gabriel found him dictating his emails to his lifelong assistant, who typed them out. "I just felt this was just wrong, archaic, so inefficient," he said. So he put his father on a computer for the first time in his career and became his tech support, "yes, for eternity."

The Man Who Negotiated With Warlords Met His Match

His father typed with two fingers "at a speed that would make snails feel anxious," and lost drafts he had worked on for two hours. Gabriel remembers thinking, "What have I done? Why couldn't I just have left that alone?"

They worked together for a few years, from bauxite mines in the Amazon to Chinese delegations visiting rare earth deposits in Minas Gerais. "Always trying to get people to find common ground, build trust, and close deals." His father called himself just a middleman, in a trade he thought modern communication had made obsolete, and he pushed his son to carve out his own path. That path became wxrks.

"Dad, Why Don't You Use Our Platform?"

The trade never became obsolete. But as his father aged, his rigidity stopped working in his favor, and people looked for alternatives. He still had the fire to keep going, so he began helping Gabriel's mother with her sworn translations, the certified translations that courts and government offices ask for.

Gabriel suggested the platform he had built. "He said he was too old to learn a new tool. I said, nonsense, Dad." Within a week, his father was using it to help Gabriel's mother work faster.

What won him over was the speed. Instead of typing every word, he reviewed the platform's suggestions, which ended his two-finger typing and, in Gabriel's words, "turned him into a reviewer."

The Best Beta Tester in History

Then the tech support came back, this time for the whole team. "He couldn't find the projects he created. He misplaced his files and thought the platform gobbled them up. He created glossaries with the wrong language pairs."

Gabriel calls him one of the best beta testers in history, "able to come up with the most unimaginable user behavior."

"As the years went by, we learned to make it a bit more intuitive," Gabriel said. "And my father learned to trust his ability to navigate it." We're still at it. Last month we reorganized every setting in wxrks so each one lives where you'd expect to find it.

A Language Engineer at 80

Today his father is a language engineer, "or so he says." The Argentine alpha macho is now his wife's assistant, and he gets fascinated translating anything from a death certificate from Peru to a divorce settlement from Germany.

"He's 80, and he doesn't feel as old as he did a few years ago. He feels relevant and closer to my mother than ever. He's not any calmer, but he's more at peace."

Back in 2003, Gabriel wondered why he couldn't have left it alone. "I'm glad I never did. But change is inevitable. And even if it makes us unrecognizable, that might not be all that bad."

What a Team Can Take From It

Every team has someone who says they are too old, too senior, or too busy for a new tool. Gabriel's father had every reason to say it. What changed his mind was a first week where the tool saved him real time, and people around him who fixed what confused him until he trusted himself with it.

That is worth remembering the next time a rollout stalls. We wrote about why change management is so tough and how to handle it better, and we talked about the same kind of change with Sean Hopwood in embracing change and humanity in localization. The day after Gabriel's talk, Elitza Dublewa-Servatius told the room the Coca-Cola Europacific Partners story, about making translation easy enough that her colleagues chose it.

Gabriel closed by introducing Dr. Mark DeVolder, who has coached NASA rocket scientists to reinvent themselves and wrote Perpetual Pivot, on how leaders adapt to exponential change. His last line was for everyone in the room. "If my father could do it at 80, there's hope for all of us."

Watch the talk above, and if you want to try the platform his father learned in a week, start a free wxrks account.