In human history, whenever productive force (in terms of the ability of changing and protecting nature to meet long-term human needs) changes, the economical relations of human society will change to suit the productive force. Whenever the economical relationship changes, the superstructure changes accordingly. Superstructure, as the name indicates, is the whole social and cultural institution based on economical relationship, or I believe more precisely, the productive force. Even we ignore the economical relationship theory specially held by Marxism, science and technology is the most commonly used measurement to gauge the development of productive force and economy now. In fact, in our current stage of human evolvement, science and technology represents the current productive force.

The implications of technological change on our social and professional world are enormous. Here I will see the possible implications in two scopes, the general scope and the particular scope.

In the general sense, the development of technology has inevitable impact on culture (the total way of life). According to the White equation, E x T = P, when E (energy involved per person in a certain culture) and T (technology in the use of technology) increase, P (all human needs, including material and cultural) increases. This equation implies that, the more advance our society evolves, the more energy will be consumed. White’s equation is based on the fact that the amount of energy (measured in Calorie) in one culture is co-related to the development of technology in that culture; that is, the more advanced the culture becomes, the more energy will be used.

By the general scope, there are three concerns, the first one is material, the second philosophical, and the last phenomenal. The first is obvious, because the source of energy in current form is limited. The fossil fuel on earth will be exhausted in the future not very far from today.

The philosophical concern is that, on the biological level, all human activities involves energy, while E (energy) x T (time) = L (life). The changes of science and technology will affect the way and/or the amount of our utilization of time and energy; hence our life (both quantity and quality) will be affected in some way.

People tend to concern about phenomena in their immediate environment, like social class, social status, education, personal relationship, work, etc. These phenomena are more subjective than objective, that is, more "factual" than "truthful". People tend to see "facts" rather than searching for truth which is behind all facts, begetting and governing all facts. However, the change of science and technology affect all social phenomena. The relationship between landlords and peasants in an agricultural society is vastly different from that between the factory owners and workers in an industrial society. Now we are heading for the information era, what human relationship will we have is hard to say, even Bill Gates admitted he would not know. But one thing is sure: things will change.

I have made good friends on the Internet over the years, but I do not know much about each other, not even genders. The only thing we shared is thought. This would not have happened without Internet. Charisma, a tool used by so many politicians, including Hitler and Mussolini, will not play a part in our communication, for that reason we can be more realistic and objective to each other’s ideas. "No name, no faces, only souls," the phrase sums up it all. Will this be a way for most humans to communicate with each other in the future? I believe that mankind will become closer to each other more than ever before: not only the quality is of a higher (or inner) level, but also the quantity, because we can contact with hundreds of thousands of people by the click of one button.

I will take the use of Internet as a particular example.

The emerging of Internet is the direct result of the development of science and technology. Its feasibility largely depends on two factors, the power of computer and the power of modern communication system.

Because of the advancing of computer/communication science and technology, Internet became available to us. When the majority of us utilizes Internet, which represents the integration of modern science/technology and our society as a whole, our social and professional life, both structural and behavioral, will undergo fundamental changes.

Do we remember how great an impact the invention of paper had made to our development of civilization? One of the main three reasons counted for the diminishing of so many great cultures and civilizations is the difficulty in the recording and distributing of knowledge (the other two being no acceptance by its culture and difficult in learning).

After the paper was widely used, the proper recording and wide distributing of thoughts and knowledge became possible. The change of our world bought upon by the use of paper is immeasurable. By we still have to face the structural barricade, till the electronic form of recording and distributing takes over some roles of the paper. The structural barricade in exchanging thoughts and knowledge by means of paper is that, we have to follow a certain "rules" when trying to convey our information to the public at large or exchanging information across organizational levels.

Take the profession of interpreting and translation for an example. Say I am a translator in an international trading company in China. When a decision maker who speaks only Chinese needs important financial information on Australia export, without the Internet, she will find me the Australian Financial Review (may be hard to find the current issue!), and I will translate the news, print out, and present to her.

Now we see what a hazardous long process had gone through before the information reaches her. I call this process a structure. First the reporter; then the editor (who has the power of censoring); then the printer; then the newsagent; then the overseas transfer (if lucky fax); passing the government control agent (security, censorship, etc); then I read, decode, encode in Chinese, type (for people who can not type Chinese with a computer, they have to write); at last, present to her. It might take hours, if not days.

When the availability of information becomes as easy as described above, it is not hard to imagine the whole social world will be changed. In what way (better or worse) the changes will be is for the coming generations to judge.

If the decision-maker can do without me in this case, the professional implications of science and technological change are obvious.

I am not implying that I am going to lose my job. But on the contrary, I have more jobs to do. Realizing the potential of Internet and requires me to translation all relevant financial news written in English. Or I might sign up with many of the globe translation companies on the Internet. Or I can concentrate on literary translation. I can still be a translator.

My possibility of doing more translation is brought on directly by the development of computer science and technology. Because of the analytic and "one word one syllable" nature of the Chinese language, machine translation and verbal input has reached a practical phase. The translation done by my DOS based system (3 years old) I currently have can convey the literal meaning of the source text though it falls short of the ability of carrying the literature beauty of poems and novels.

When Internet become part of every one’s daily life, people will be amazed by the unlimited amount of information on their screen. They will find all sorts of opportunities to make life better, easier. There must be many people who are interested in written materials other than pure basic information. They may need poems, novels and other form of artistic writing or highly technical materials, which would never be accessible to them without Internet and can not be properly translated by machine, translated. This will generate works for the professional translators.

The use of Internet also causes changes to our language, which will concern the translation and interpreting professionals. For example, the introduce of new words like "IMHO" (in my own humble opinion). The traditional text style is also changed, for people net suffers who value their time often do not have time to care for the use of upper case like "I" and the first letter in a sentence; instead, they will use the lower case or upper case all the way through out the text, because it takes less effort (using one figure rather than two).

Another possible change might occur in the research field. I will demonstrate this by including Web pages in the reference list. The faction of referencing is to direct the reader to the source. However, when Internet is available, we should be able to direct the reader to ALL relevant writings. For example, I can make the key word, such as "voice typing" as a reference to a topic on verbal input. The reader then can search for that key word on line. In fact, after I type an Internet address started with "www", Microsoft Word 97 automatically makes it a hypertext. The readers online only need a click on it to go to the site.

The verbal input/output is a landmark in our communication history. Verbal meaning is the most convenient form in communicating. Our speed of speaking greatly surpasses the speed of typing. But the distribution of information relying on sound (verbal message) is limited by geographical factor and time factor. Sound can not be carried far without special devices and will not last long enough for listeners to keep without devices; while the distribution of information relying on light (written, printed message) does not have the same short comings. The limitation for written information is the consuming of energy and time, (Remember T x E = L) because it has to utilize the hands of other muscles. There is a clear gap between written and spoken information (the mouth-eyes gap). Normally, we can not read with our eyes what is being said, on the other hand we can not hear with our ears what has been written. Now thanks to the nature of the Chinese language, with the help of computer, the gap is disappearing (at least with the use of Chinese). I often use my DOS based software (also 3 years old) to read out E-mail, news and magazine articles that I have downloaded from the Internet written in Chinese. The beauty of voice input is, what is said can be printed out without the need to write, so the message can reach far and many.

Currently the Voice Typing software has a 95% accuracy, and can select words like "two", "too" and "to" according to context.

Because there is difference in terms of form between the spoken language and written text, professional interpreters and translators have the new task of compromising the forms. It is not the topic covered by this essay, but I believe there is something should be done.

The science and technological changes certainly will change all professions, including the cultural mediators’ profession. People might feel like being met by a challenge. But when we care to look back in our history, we will find such changes have occurred many times before, and we will soon realized the change is not much of a challenge, but a need for us to progress to a higher level of evolution.

When translators and interpreters are in concern, I believe that the professionals are not in a passive position of "accepting the change;" rather, they might lead the change in some way. The translation and interpreting professions will have important tasks to undertake, for example, to make an effort to change our language in some way, like grammatical change and/or style change. Languages are forever changing, and people are stubborn in keeping their habit. It is a fact that the Chinese language is becoming more and more synthetic and English more analytic (Community Translation tutorial by Lin Wei Hong). While machine translation is a practice waiting to prevail at least in China, we might be wise not to ignore the fact that the grammatical structure of the machine translation result might not match with what we have get used to. The idea here is, we have to work with machines; if we can not change them, we change ourselves. We make the machines anyway.