Is It Even Possible to Retire Voluntarily When You Are a Translator?

If one defines “retirement” as the period towards the end of life when you no longer have to work because you receive every month a fixed income on which it is possible to live quite well without working, I have been retired for quite some time as I have been fortunate to reach this kind of situation about a year ago.

For the last few months I have been following heart-breaking stories in several languages on Youtube, for instance about poor seniors in Germany who find it impossible to make the ends meet with a pitifully low state pension. If you speak German, go to Youtube and type in the search field for instance “Arme Rentner in Deutschland” (poor pensioners in Germany). You will discover titles such as [my translations]: ‘Waiting in Lines for Old Bread’, ‘Old, Poor, Criminal, Old Pensioners Working Their Whole Lives for Nothing’, ‘Scandal: Rich Germany – Poor Pensioners, Old-Age Poverty – Liselotte (71) has only 3.50 Euros a Day for Eating‘.

It appears that the German politicians dropped the ball when it comes to creating a well-functioning pension system for most people in Germany where many seniors are forced to live in dire poverty, unlike for example the seniors in Austria or Switzerland. What happened to Germany? When I lived there in the early eighties, it was to me a perfect example of a well-designed socialist system, that is to say a social democracy that is based on a capitalist economy and democratic principles. And how is it possible that in other German-speaking countries, most seniors are quite affluent compared to their German counterparts?

The situation of pensioners in France may not be much better, or even worse, which is why the Yellow Vests have been in the streets of Paris and other French cities for many months now.

Because I moved from pricey Virginia to Southern Bohemia where the cost of living is quite a bit lower, and because after paying US taxes for 37 years, I have a generous US Social Security income, corresponding to four average local pensions, topped with a modest but important Czech pension. The Czech pension is important because it automatically pays my health insurance premiums and most healthcare-related expenses for pensioners in this country. And as far as I know, it would continue doing so even if I decided to move to another EU country. Had I decided to stay in Germany four decades ago, I might have serious money problems at this point.

So I don’t really need to work. And yet, I continue working, and probably will continue doing so also in the foreseeable future. I work much less now than I used to, mostly as an agency at this point rather than as a translator, but it looks like I will keep doing my thing for the foreseeable future and if I ever stop working completely, it will be probably for health reasons, when I’m too old to even put together a translation project, let alone translate myself … if I live that long.

So far I have lost only one project since I moved from Virginia to České Budějovice six months ago. It was a nice and lucrative translation project from a client in Western Europe, a patent law firm that sent me two similar projects twice already in the past couple of years. But I did not even put in my bid for the project although I knew that this meant that the client would not come back again with the same kind of thing next year. I was in terrible pain and could not really think about anything else except how to get rid of the pain as I wrote in the Kidney Stones post on this blog.

So the law firm is unfortunately gone for good. But others still continue sending me work. This week I‘ve had four smallish projects so far from two old clients in United States and I now still have one more for next week.

If you have been following the development in the United States when it comes to Democratic presidential hopefuls for the 2020 presidential election, 20 candidates have declared that they are running, including Bernie Sanders, who is well into his seventies, and creepy Joe Biden, who is also long in the tooth (but still likes to smell women’s hair). Along with Tulsi Gabbard, a fearless woman whom I admire immensely, my favorite Democratic candidates include Andrew Young, a young Chinese-American who was born to immigrant parents from Taiwan, and who has a solution for millions of people who are already or will soon be facing the prospect of losing their jobs to globalization and artificial intelligence. This would arguably include also a number of medical occupations, such as anesthesiologists or doctors reading X-ray or ultrasound images to create a diagnosis, some legal professions, or specialized translators such as myself.

Andrew Young wants to help solve the problems caused by globalization and artificial intelligence (which I call robotization) with something that he calls the Freedom Dividend – a universal basic income (UBI) of $1000/month to be paid to every adult American who is not already receiving for example a greater amount in Social Security payment as I am. He calls his concept of the new system, which is similar to the oil dividend that has been distributed for many decades to residents of Alaska and to what was proposed already by the founders of United States more than two centuries ago “Human-Centered Capitalism.”

What he is saying makes a lot of sense to me, I will vote for him if he is on the presidential ticket in 2020, but I doubt it will happen. I think it’s much more likely that creepy Joe Biden will represent the corrupt Democrats, and that the Wall Street and the super-rich will put him in the White House to essentially continue the policies of Obama and Trump.

But it should be an interesting political campaign anyway, at least during the Democratic primaries: Creepy Joe against Fearless Tulsi and Idealistic Andrew – unless the Democratic establishment pulls the carpet from under him and other young people with new ideas, which they are almost certain to do.

But let’s come back to the main theme of my silly post today, namely whether it is possible for me to retire now.

No, I don’t think so, not if I continue still receiving work from my old and also some new clients. Whether I need the money or not is not really the issue here, at least not the main one.

I will not be able to retire any time soon. The curse of a translator is not being able to retire. Not necessarily because you can’t …. but because your brain will not let you.