Through time, folklore turned the Free Range Translator into a mythological being: according to the sources accurately presented by Johanna Endresson (Friversättarsaga: The Free Range Translator in Nordic Folklore), the Free Range never sleeps, can edit while sleeping, can be tamed by feeding it fridge-cold meatballs, can smell double spaces, can open Transit pfx files with Logoport interface and load on it an IBM TM. In Brittany, the écrivain rouge, owing its name to the thick reddish fur, is invoked by translators with children who refuse to go to bed.
In the Middle Ages, PMs hunted down Free Range translators as they were accused to spread the Catalyst heresy, whilst of course these harmless creatures had nothing to do with it. Behind these religious accusations there were underlying political reasons: Free Range translators often ran away from their Project Masters, as they were called in those times, and could hardly bear the volumes of work which used to be assigned in those times (just picture revising a 2000 words Benedectine scroll over the week-end).
Even though according to popular tradition Free Ranges were thought to possess benign magical powers, Project Masters lived in fear of them: it was believed that you can have a PM fired if you express such wish as you pluck a hair from the Free Range's back; alternatively, by storing beneath the keyboard a tooth of this wondrous creature, you can prevent payment delays. Finally, the Free Range is portrayed in a XIV century Triptych of Curriculum's Vitae, while it quietly sits at Saint Thesaurus's feet, whose worship was believed could cure excel settings. Persecutions ceased only in the late XIV century, after Saint Thesaurus founded the Order of the Tabula Puteulana (Protestants created a twin order, the Blue Board, under Henry VIII). Saint Thesaurus was himself a Free Range translator, who performed such miracles as to induce religious authorities to make him saint, scared as they were of a peasant translator revolution should they refuse to acknowledge the man's piety.
Nevertheless, today many PMs have not yet wholly dismissed certain superstitions: according to a survey involving 230 PMs, carried out in 1999, 34% of Western PMs believe the a hired Free Range translator only needs to sleep 4 hours a night, and 54% that, as it barely needs any nourishment but lager and pizza, it can survive any assignment as long as it is paid 0,02 euro/word. Additionally, the stereotype according to which if you write politely to a Free Range it will turn against you and curse your project, causes PMs to write as bluntly as they can. This stereotype is so rooted among PMs that, under Nazi Germany, Reich's scientists tried unsuccessfully to create a cross-breed of Free Range translators and dobermanns in order to obtain a übertranslator characterized by extreme aggressiveness and genetic hatred for PMs.
Another fairly spread belief is that you do not actually need to reply to a Free Range if his or her application has not been accepted: again, the fear of the Free Range’s cursing powers is such, as to not dare to refuse explicitly a job, but to rather let time pass by. Free Ranges in fact spend a good part of the day grooming each other in front of a screen, refreshing every few minutes their emails, as they wait for a reply to their application. Generally, a young Free Range tends to accept side-assignments during the wake for reply, thus ending up with overloads as they all get accepted: this, in turn, causes the average quality to decrease and the Free Range to become more and more hostile to PMs. On the other hand, adult Free Range know better, and refuse side-assignments during the wake for reply, thus ending up with no work, as the reply never comes, which causes the Free Range to become more and more hostile to PMs.
As far as reality is concerned, the few specimens left of the Guinea Free Range Translator show amazing pecularities indeed: unconcerned by the hardships of a non-necessarily industrial localization diet, these animals can endure prelonged fasting and several overnights in a row of joblist browsing to find their selected preys. In fact, Guinea Free Ranges can survive only if the environment provides them with sufficient Rata Persatisfactionis, a rare species of ant which is present only on the twisted branches of the Crea Tee Vine, a type of ivy that used to grow over the islands of the region but which became progressively rarer as it was taken over by the more aggressive American species.
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