NTZ: a tool for the rejuvenation field

 The challenge of developing rejuvenation therapies, which will save the lives of about 40 million people a year, is perhaps the greatest endeavor humanity has ever undertaken. And it is urgent, because 110,000 people die from age-related diseases every day. The ability to undo aging would be an important step in our species’ fight for life, which dates back to the first use of fire, the development of hunting techniques and spoken language, followed by the development of agriculture, writing, medicine, democracy, vaccines, antibiotics, and so many other technologies that help us to stay alive. And all these technologies, which have brought us this far, were not developed by a single culture, nor by a single population who spoke a certain language. Humanity has only come this far by sharing the inventions and capabilities that different cultures have developed. And that's why we need a wide collaboration of as many people as possible in order to quickly take this new step towards rejuvenation therapies.

In order to optimize a worldwide collaboration to accelerate the arrival of rejuvenation therapies, it would be important for the world to have a global language to allow everyone to communicate properly with each other. Unfortunately, we are not there yet. However, it is important to realize that the process of global linguistic integration has advanced to a considerable point, as today, with just 12 languages (Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, French, Arabic, Russian, Portuguese, Indonesian, German, Japanese and Turkish) it is possible to reach about 75% of the world's population.

Historically, the most influential cultures in a given region have ended up having their language used for basic communication between people who speak different languages, due to this human communicational difficulty caused by the linguistic division. For example, for many centuries, in Europe, Latin was a very important language for intercultural communication. Later, with the intensification of world integration, the languages of the major colonial powers, such as English and French, competed for the status of most international language, and during the last century, English clearly reached the position of most international language. However, despite being a fundamental tool for global integration today, English is far from being a global language.

This is the case because, in general, in non-English speaking countries, only a tiny minority of the population masters this language to the point of being able to use it fully to speak in depth about a subject, to understand a lecture, to read a book or to write an article. It is true that, besides these people, some others — not many, in relative terms — may have a basic knowledge of English that allows them to travel abroad on tourist trips, ask for information in hotels or buy souvenirs. Others may also have a basic knowledge of English that allows them to read or speak whatever is strictly necessary for their work or education. However, a fluent mastery of the English language is generally only achieved by a very small percentage of the non-native population.

At this point, many people reading this text may be thinking that the people who can really help to speed up the arrival of rejuvenation therapies, even in countries where English isn’t a native language, already master this language. However, in general, this is not the case. Even among the most educated, influential and wealthy sectors, the vast majority of people in these countries do not have sufficient mastery of English to understand a live scientist's lecture on the science of rejuvenation or read a book like Aubrey de Grey's Ending Aging, for example. Moreover, so that these countries can optimize their regulatory and economic structures in order to help the endeavor to undo aging, the country's population needs to understand at least a bit of the matter, and for that, it is essential to have content in the native language.

Therefore, when in 2016, we, the authors of this article, discovered through the work of Aubrey de Grey how relatively close to undoing aging science is today, we decided to redirect our professional activity to use our experience as translators to help to linguistically internationalize the rejuvenation field. First, we translated into Portuguese and published Aubrey de Grey's Ending Aging through our publishing and translation company NTZ in 2019. Then, we translated from Spanish into Portuguese the book La muerte de la muerte ("The Death of Death"), by José Cordeiro and David Wood, and in April of 2020, we published in Portuguese through NTZ the book The Abolition of Aging, by David Wood, which we translated from English.

We also realized that the worldwide effort for rejuvenation needs everyone; how many German entrepreneurs, Russian scientists, Indian doctors, Chinese investors, Spanish communicators, Brazilian filmmakers, South Korean economists, South African journalists, French psychologists, Turkish historians, among many others, are there with whom we don’t interact in the rejuvenation field because they don’t speak English well enough? With the help of all of them, how much can we accelerate the arrival of rejuvenation therapies? Moreover, even though we worked with these three books in the rejuvenation field, we realized that the kind of content which needed to be translated wasn’t restricted to books, nor to the languages that we personally can translate.

Therefore, in 2020, we launched an initiative to focus NTZ’s efforts on the rejuvenation field, and to establish a worldwide network of translators of the field in order to turn NTZ into a tool for the whole field in the area of translation. This means that if a person or an entity in the rejuvenation field needs a translation which requires a translator familiar with the topic, with sufficient technical knowledge and reliability in any language pair, they only need to contact NTZ. Translators specialized in the science of rejuvenation know the technical terms, the main theories of aging, the most influential scientists, the key organizations, the most promising companies and the most active investors in the field. They are also aware of the importance of the rejuvenation field and are part of the worldwide effort to end an immense source of suffering in the world: aging and death caused by the inability to undo it.

Thus, on NTZ’s website ( https://ntzpublicacoes.com/ ), the authors of the three books we translated — Aubrey de Grey, David Wood and José Cordeiro — left a testimonial about our work and NTZ's initiative to linguistically integrate the area of rejuvenation. In addition, we are making a public call to all translators of the rejuvenation area to contact NTZ so that we can expand the reach of this growing network of translators as much as possible, both in terms of the number of language pairs, and in terms of the breadth of language services, including translation, interpretation, transcription, subtitling, dubbing and book production. In April of 2020, we explained in detail this initiative in an interview to Brent Nally in his YouTube channel, one of the most important interviewers in the rejuvenation field.

We, as a species, have gone through many difficulties over the millennia — the threat of being preyed upon by other animals, succumbing to hunger and being exterminated by disease and self-destruction in wars, for example — and we have always had in integration, coordination and organization an essential tool to survive these dangers. And the language, both spoken and written, is an absolutely vital component for this integration, coordination and organization. So, now that we are facing as a species another huge challenge — to go beyond what evolution has given us in terms of self-repair in order to avoid individual deaths — we need, perhaps more than ever, the ability to understand each other, and for this, NTZ is another tool that the rejuvenation field has.

Interview to Brent Nally:

Nicolas Chernavsky is a translator specialized in the rejuvenation field and co-founder of NTZ, with 16 years of experience in the area of translation. He has a degree in journalism from the University of São Paulo (USP/Brazil), has Argentinean parents, grandparents from Eastern Europe, relatives all over the world and his country is planet Earth.

Nina Torres Zanvettor is a translator specialized in the rejuvenation field and co-founder of NTZ. She has a degree in chemistry from the University of Campinas (Unicamp/Brazil), a master's degree in medicinal chemistry from the same university and studied for one year at the University of Southampton (UK). She has been working with technical, academic and scientific translations for 6 years.