Repugnance and market design in translation: video and transcript (en español, en argentina)

 I recently was interviewed by Jorge Fontevecchia via Zoom in Argentina. Among other things, we spoke (in English) about how both markets and bans on markets need social support to work well. You can listen to the interview as it was broadcast on Argentine tv, in Spanish translation, with voice-over (i.e. you can only hear me vaguely in the background, and a Spanish speaking lady's voice conveys my answers...).

A  Spanish transcript is here:

Alvin Roth: “La repugnancia afecta a mercados, y la prohibición de algunos de ellos sigue siendo muy controvertida”

When I look at the result in Google Translate, the back-translation produces some unexpected results (as well as the expected result that "repugnance" comes back as "disgust."  Here's an example of a funny Q&A involving the dual meanings of the Spanish word "tiempo":

How does the passage of time affect the markets?

“Weather affects markets in many ways..."

But here's a Q&A that back-translated well enough to get the gist (modulo some pronouns):

Do you think that whenever there is a transaction involving money, what is being exchanged automatically becomes an object or thing because there is money involved?

“I don't agree with that at all. He's probably getting paid to do this interview that he's doing, but his employer is paying him because he's an expert journalist and interviewer. And sadly, I'm not getting paid for this interview, but you and I are no less human. There is nothing about the transaction that you are not doing as part of your job, and I do it just for fun. Nothing in that transaction makes one of us more or less human. When I think of merchandise [commodities], I think of things that are not different from each other. If I were a baker and I wanted to buy wheat I could buy it at a commodity market, it has all sorts of descriptive terms, we make bread with number two hard red winter wheat, that's a complete description. I don't have to care which farmer you buy it from because it has been well described. But when you want to hire a baker in your bakery, you don't just hire a baker because they are not commodities. You have to find a particular person that you want to hire and you don't make an offer to the general market saying, I want 5 thousand bushels of wheat, but to a particular person saying, I want to hire you. That doesn't depersonalize the market at all."

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Update:

Here's a Portugese translation, on which Google translate also works reasonably well:

Alvin Roth: “Um dos problemas mais difíceis que estamos vendo no mundo agora tem a ver com o reassentamento de refugiados”

*Por Jorge Fontevecchia – Cofundador da Editoria Perfil – CEO da Perfil Network.