My professional work in translation had nothing to do with my academic background. It didn't have much to do with my knowledge, either.

I certainly did not know enough about Judaism to translate and edit Judaica – but I did it anyhow.

I started by translating in my own field. In my first job in Israel I edited a Hebrew journal on educational research. That's right - in Hebrew!

After a while, I was asked to translate research summaries in other social sciences. My fields of "expertise" expanded. I became more proficent in each field after translating the relevant material.

Soon, I was asked to translate material in Law. That field joined the others as my "expertise." I then went on to Jewish Family Purity, and then gynecology.

Actually, I did know more than many others about these additional fields. I didn't study them in a formal manner, but I did have a great opportunity to learn on the job. Each new translation project offered me a deeper and more intensive knowledge of a very specific aspect of the field. The more I translated, the more I knew. I was being paid to become an expert.

I didn't think I'd be able to handle any of those new fields. However, the documents were submitted to respected journals, and they were published in books. Perhaps I was more surprised about it than anybody else.

Now that I proved to myself that I can translate arcane topics, people ask my advice about publishing and editing as well. By now I've done dozens of doctorates.

No, I don't have a doctorate myself.

I have no justifiable reason to get one. If more than thirty other people can get their doctorates because of my efforts, then what would I prove by getting one of my own?

Those doctoral candidates are some of my best customers. Some of them told me that they didn't have the time to be bothered by their dissertation. After completing the research, they just wanted the publication to be completed.

They sometimes even uttered my favorite line: Just do it for me and get it off my hands. I'll pay anything. I just can't be bothered.

Wonderful. They were talking my language. The guy will pay anything? That's my kind of customer.

There isn't really that much to learn with doctoral theses.

Perhaps a basic skill is to keep all of those pages together.

Each doctoral candidate (or perhaps his advisors) tries to outdo his predecessor. As a result, some of those theses could be between one and two inches thick.

I measured the staples in my stapler.

They could go through maybe ten or twenty pages.

I thought shoemakers would be able to sew together larger groups of pages, but they specialize in nothing thicker than sandals.

Train of thought... sandals

They call the local version Sandaley Tanach - Biblical sandals.

Some people probably believe that these sandals were similar to those that the Israelites used when they traveled through the desert. You don't believe it, huh?

Well, do you have a better idea what kind of sandals they wore?

Oh, where was I?

So, if the shoemakers couldn't sew up my theses, I started looking for other options. One day, I met a fellow who worked in a printers' office. I pumped him for information, so that I would sound intelligent when I went into a printers' office myself.

I found out that bookbinders applied a certain glue over the spine of the book, and then clamped it for a day. After it dries, the book is bound.

That was all I needed. Now I was prepared to speak intelligently to a bookbinder and to handle the last stage in preparing dissertation theses.