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Anything you can do I can do better!

Writer's picture: Reed JamesReed James


...I can do anything better than you! I remember Popeye and Bluto singing that song while each one outdid the other chopping down trees and other manly feats. Sometimes, I have come across this swagger in marketing: TV commercials and the like. I want to tell you why I personally don't like it when a brand tears down another to build it up. Let me find out if Sorbete Letelier is so awful I have to drink Coke. I want to decide what I like, and I very well may disagree with the advertising.

  • It's boastful. It's part of marketing to emphasize the qualities of a brand, but another thing is to beat one's chest and proclaim that the competing brand is bad because of certain features. It could backfire.

  • What goes around comes around. When one brand goes at the other's throat, who is to say that Sorbete Letelier won't go up against that very same brand that was tearing it down.

  • I find it makes me wonder why Brand X is denigrating Brand Y? Is it really that good? Are they hiding something? And so I begin to scrutinize what I may not have noticed, and may even have been eager to take from the shelf and toss it in my shopping cart. Although, if the fizzy bottle of Sorbete Letelier is tossed, it might spray my groceries, and I wouldn't want that.

With agencies, I have seen this before, that they are professional, and they don't do all these unprofessional things that may befall the unwary buyer, for which the buyer should be thankful and hire this agency's services post haste.


With freelance bloggers, they say the same, but with a personal bent. As they are immersed in translation process on a daily basis, they might say that machine translation is rubbish, and not everyone can be a translator and that you're only supposed to translate into your native language. (The topic of what a native language is is a never-ending topic on ProZ, and no one can reach a consensus).


Forum posters proclaim these same subjects and can be quite vehement about it. This illustrates my example. If translator X says that machine translation is rubbish and that they never use it, I begin to think that this person either doesn't know what they are talking about or they are trying to discredit and belittle new translators. It's gotten to the point that when I read the beginning of this kind of post, I immediately skip to a nicer poster, or better yet, I take a sip of my glass of Sorbete Letelier!

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