Sarah O'Connor

speaker

261 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Jul

Sarah O'Connor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · LIVE: We Are Not Machines - with Sarah O'Connor · 3 Jul 2026 podcast

But as well as that, I think there is a governance thing.

I don't know how much everyone knows about Sweden, but they have a very distinctive kind of labor market whereby trade unions are very powerful.

And there is a rule that any new technology has to be bargained collectively about before it happens.

And so before they introduced this new technology, they had to sit down with the workers and they had to talk about it and how it would go and what the workers' concerns were and what the company wanted to get out of it.

And, you know, more broadly in Scandinavian countries, what you find is that when people answer surveys about how they feel about technology, people are, like, much more positive than they are in the UK or in the US.

And I think that's because they have a sense that they will have a seat at the table when those decisions get made.

Yeah, so I interviewed some translators for my book.

One of them is a guy called Peter.

He lives in the Czech Republic and he translates subtitles for TV shows, which is a great job.

I mean, he told me lots of things about why it's more difficult than you might imagine to do that.

So for example, you know, in English, we just have one way of saying you, but in lots of languages, including Czech, there's like a formal tense of you and an informal tense of you.

And so when you're writing the translation,

translated subtitles, you have to think like, how well do these characters know each other?

Like what tense would they be speaking in?

And that might change, you know, through the course of an episode or through the course of a series.

And so there were lots of kind of interesting judgment calls that you have to make.

And then, you know, translating jokes is another thing that's incredibly difficult because so many jokes are like culture specific or they're like plays on language.

Yeah, they're the perfect example, right?

So Obelix's dog in the original French is called Idefix, which means obsession.

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