For years, part of my professional life depended on other people’s footnotes. Academics would send me dense Catalan or Spanish manuscripts on urban wetlands, social pedagogy or post-Franco identity politics, and my job was to escort them carefully into English. It was less about swapping words than about negotiating meaning. A phrase that worked perfectly well in Girona might not make the grade in Oxford or Cambridge. I would smooth, adjust, re-balance. It wasn’t glamorous, but it helped pay the bills.

Recently, however, something has shifted. The emails still arrive, but less frequently. The tone has changed too. Instead of “Could you translate this for publication?”, it’s “I’ve run it through a tool already, but could you just revise it?” A “quick revision” often involves untangling........

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