I am going to nail my flag to the mast this year of 2024: more important than achieving overly ambitious 6 digit turnover figures is to make sure that humankind a) survives and b) doesn’t slide back into a class structure where the ever smaller super-rich minority suppresses an increasingly larger majority even worse than is the case now, reversing a decades-long trend of lifting people out of complete poverty to a level of comparative prosperity that enabled more self-determination.

The most important point to make in this year of European Parliament and many other elections in my opinion is to educate people that it is not a good idea to use one’s democratic right to vote to do away with democratic rights, like the right to vote. (I know, it’s so simple that it can seem confusing.) Dismantling the state is a strategy of populists currently or formerly in power designed to turn civil liberties back into the privileges of the mighty, like restricting powers of ‘unelected’ judges (how else can you have an independent judiciary, though?) or maligning journalists (but how will you find out what’s going on in the world without taking the usually paywall-free clickbait of someone with a hidden agenda?) or election losers calling for uprisings against the institutions of government that they used to run until they got voted out democratically.

I am in the fortunate position that most of my clients think the same way, so I will hopefully be able to contribute to this in my capacity as an interpreter. But while this is a useful contribution, it is passive to a degree, especially as sometimes I find myself working (just as professionally and meticulously) for people with very different opinions, so expect me to post in my own capacity every once in a while on why safeguarding democracy is a good thing in my opinion. Or tune out. The choice is yours, fortunately. At least for now.

There is so much to do. The environment (just one example here), the increasing number of military conflicts, corporate greed using AI to reduce human labour costs (like trying to get rid of interpreters and translators) and geopolitical shifts with unpredictable consequences are other seriously burning issues. Let’s start dealing with them for real, not just pay lip service.

Happy 2024! Let’s make this one matter.