Some specimens of Guinea Free Range have adapted to urban habitat and presently live in suburban areas of Western cities, where they have mated with local translators, causing several cross-breeds to appear: such recent phenomenon raised the interest of several scholars, among which John Trados, who began studying them in 2005. Urban Free Ranges are omnivore and possess higher resistance to industrial handbooks and go as far as feeding on legal and medical texts.
Trados went as far as adopting one stray cub, who was named F4, in the attempt to train it to a normal translator's circadian rhythm: after six months, F4 would spontaneously wake up at 7 am and work until lunch. Then John would take him for a short walk around the block and then put it back to work until 7 pm. After three months, though, the cub began to show symptoms of depression, so John thought of feeding F4 a few words-of-the-day from Urbandictionary in order to provide him with the creative vitamins these creatures can't do without. The idea was successful, and apart for sporadic times when John would catch F4 not working but composing puns on a secret word document, his behaviour was perfectly compliant to the work standards which would be required from a domestic translator.
All seemed to go for the best and the cub recovered quickly after being fed small doses of creative contents, until something unexpected happen: F4 was assigned a large work from a client who would send new batches at 7 pm, as there was a 6+ timezone gap between them. After months of training the Free Range to work in the morning, the cub found itself having to work at night, as it is instinctive for its race.
F4 worked for a months translating dutifully 3000 words a day and revising another 2000 in addition every other day, when one night it suddenly snapped at the PM. The fit of aggressiveness was justified: the evil PM had shown no appreciation of the work done so far, although the quality of it was good enough to make of f4 the coordinator and proofreader for Italian. The PM proved to be unconcerned of the long period of previously unmentioned overnights and overall dedication, and what's more, kept on sending hysterical, bossy and blunt emails at poor F4, who generally read them right before to go to sleep and thus developing insomnia, bruxism and personality disorder.
After composing 5 different hilarious mails to the client, where he ironically complained about the PM, none of which he actually sent, F4 suffered a terrible breakdown: quality of work decreased, and John found out that he had been outsourcing proofreading to a 15-years-old student next door for the last two weeks. F4 never reverted to morning time work and now refuses to check emails at the end of the day and keeps on raising his euro/word rate in fear of other timezone-affected assignments might have him exploited again.
John did some research on the PM, to find out that she was a lonely Argentinian Anal Shepherd, who had been adopted by a Canadian lady, an agency owner, as a guard-PM: it had been trained to attack whoever tried to contact directly the owner, to deny any raise under any circumstance, and to actually expect that it is justified to send a 2500 words excel file of subtitles at 01.00 am and expect it to be ready by 09.00 am in the morning for 0.03/word. The sapphic and deranged dedication of the Anal Shepherd to their master is a well-known characteristic of its species and makes them very timely and fatigue-enduring translator shepherds. Unfortunately, F4 showed to be not sufficiently domestic to undergo the rough treatment to which flocks of out-sourced translators have been educated to.
John has had F4 mating with an Irish Adaptation Hound, and is currently studying the off-springs. His goal is to create a balanced cross-breed, capable of facing many years of technical translation without loosing creative skills.
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