As I was trawling through the Internet looking for odd and interesting t-shirts (a bit of a hobby of mine, don’t ask!) I stumbled across the Cafepress.com website and, having gotten tired of browsing through the thousands of designs, I started throwing random words into the search box. Don’t ask me why but somehow the word “translator” made an appearance. Lo and behold it actually turned up 4160 results. Insane, I thought. Madness, even! There is no way you can put translation on a t-shirt and make it even remotely cool. I was kinda right, lots of them are only tenuously linked to languages while some of them are buttock-clenchingly cheesy and twee with silliness like “Super Translator” or “Translator with Attitude” or even worse “My Mommy is a Translator” but then I found this one…

Translator - The "Will Work for Beer" Tour 2009 (Cafepress.com)

I really like this, a lot! OK, in the scheme of things it’s not the funniest t-shirt in the world and you certainly won’t have swarms of adoring and morally questionable groupies basking in your reflected multilingual, rockstar-like glow if you wear it, but it’s nice to see that at least someone thinks translators could have a sense of humour, and dagnammit, a liking for beer… could this be the coolest thing ever to happen to translation? Probably.