Driving Myself Crazy

I have a theory that alongside the drive for sex, recognition and companionship, everyone has a built-in, plug ‘'n play linguistic drive. I know I do. The only problem is that my linguistic drive seems to have two gears: intake and output. Right now, I'm absorbing a book on telecommunications. My brain is so focused on Media Access Control addresses and synchronous payload envelopes that it’'s uninterested in producing anything creative.

Don'’t laugh -– I'’m serious. My wife thinks I'’m nuts for actually enjoying this stuff, but what can I say? The moment I stop learning at my job is the moment I'’ll give it up and drive a cab for a living.

Just so you get an idea of what I mean by absorb, here's a book page before I mark it up:


In all its naked glory

And here's one after I mark it up:


Pretty, ain't it?

Why I Love This Job

Yesterday's topics: pens, pizza and mascara

Today's topics: money laundering

Not one second of boredom here! Well, maybe one second. Or two. But no more than two seconds of boredom!

My Reward For A Graveyard Shift

In my inbox this morning:

"Dear Mr. Warrior,

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

What would I do without you?

I'm off to XYZ now with my 'perfect' text."

What more could you ask for?

The Conversation Pit

Today's topic:
If language were a cell, what organelle would the translator be?

Talk amongst yourselves.


Want some protoplasm with that?

It's 3 AM. Do You Know Where Your Translator Is?

It's 11 at night, and I'm still not done. I'm not a night owl. But in a week when clients are jamming jobs down my gullet faster than I can chew, I'm lucky to get home at all. What kills me is that they're all important. New clients, potential clients, big accounts, big deals. I can safely turn down piss-ant press releases from huge multinationals. They're so big, they never even read what they write themselves, let alone what I write. Let someone else do them.

No, it's the small businesses calling this week. And they're the apples of my eye. When they call, I burn the midnight oil, stock up on dictionaries and agonize, agonize, agonize over my translations.

Of course, none of this makes any financial sense. With the big companies, I make more money. But they don't need me. And what's the point of doing this job if you don't feel needed? Fame?

Why I Love My Agency Clients

A little while ago, a client "fixed" a press release I had translated. Call me a frustrated poet, but the changes squelched any aspirations that text ever had.

So what did I do? I complained to the agency and got an immediate response. They told me to ignore the changes - they would talk to the client for me.

Who, me bitch about agencies? Never!

My Final Exam

From the tangle of voices in the interpreter's booth, one thought tightened into a clear, hard knot: “Fuck this! No way in hell!”

I gently raised one hand, splayed out on the formica tabletop, and pressed it against my knee to stop the shaking. A moist, dirty palm print remained next to my homemade notepad and the five pens I had arranged carefully in a row before the speech began.

I leaned in to the microphone, like a biker rising up on his pedals, as if that small motion would get me through the text faster. I wanted nothing more desperately than to escape, to disappear. But where to?

In this cube-shaped booth, one entire side was made of glass. Looking through this window into the audience, I saw thirty headphoned heads nodding in unison after every sentence I finished. On one side of the room, my teachers were writing furiously in their notepads, variously frowning and smiling.

I was trapped.

Leaning forward even more, I closed my eyes and battered through the text, sentence by sentence. Suddenly, my headphones went silent, made a slight click, and then piped in a gentle voice: “That’s it. You can get up now.”

My legs trembled as I stumbled out of the booth. The door swung shut and I took in one shuddering breath after another. “Three more days,” I thought. “Three more days, two more exams, and then I never have to interpret again.” Behind a larger door ten feet distant sat thirty people, waiting to pat me on the back and tell me that in a few short days, I, too, would be a fully certified conference interpreter.

Only an hour previously, I would have smiled and agreed. To be an interpreter! The fame! The glory! And here I was, ready to give it up.

I squared my shoulders, and walked through the door.

New Translation Portal

Among translation portals, the new kid on the block is BabelPort.

Unlike the other portals, it offers translation industry news. Hmmm. Maybe it will be a real competitor for ProZ.

Their opening page is refreshingly casual:

Why babelport.com and what's the deal with this ugly logo?

I agree. Their logo is absolutely hideous.

Their explanation is slightly surreal:

We saw was the Monument of the Battle of Nations, the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, commemorating the Battle between Napoleonic Troops and the Prussian and Russian Allies of 1813. So we figured: “This thing is huge, monstrous, old, and it still stands!“.

That's as good a reason as any, I guess.

Google AdNonsense

People say the internet has revolutionized translation. Bullshit. Google has revolutionized translation. Now, if you can’t find a word on Google, it doesn’t exist.

So many of us have become Google drones that we advertise in droves with Google’s AdSense program. Enter “translation agency” in Google and you’ll pull up a bewildering array of AdSense ads and hits, all basically the same.

I, too, rode the AdSense bandwagon. At first, I hovered near the phone with sweaty palms and a dry throat, expecting a deluge of clients. In a four-month period, I had two destitute Ph.D. students ask me to translate their 600-page dissertations. (One of them even requested a per-word rate “because I’ll be revising it later.”) There was one inquiry from an electronics firm who answered neither my calls nor my e-mails. And, mysteriously, six inquiries for English into Dutch.

The vast majority of inquiries, however, went something like this:

From: PrettyGirl16
To: Trench Warrior
Sent: Monday, March 21, 2002 3:35 PM
Subject: PLS PLS PLS HELP!!!!

Cn u translaet this!!! I need it real bd!!! THX SO MUCH!!!!!!! ;-) ;-)

Ill chx 4 it 2morrow!!! THX THX!!!!!!

Attached was a ten-page term paper downloaded from a cheat site.

Suffice to say, I cancelled the service pretty quickly.

Agony of Advertising: Part 2

Irony of ironies - a copywriting course came in the mail today.

In my first post, I make my view abundantly clear that translation is a subset of writing. Sure, translation bridges languages and cultures, but the finished product is still black-on-white verbiage. And if you do it right, no one will know it’s a translation.

If you're an ivory-tower type, you can probably reel off a list of exceptions to my hard-and-fast rule. I’m the first to agree that word-for-word translations of the Yanomami language are anthropologically useful. But they don’t pay my bills.

What pays my bills is my ability to write (no catcalls, please!). This is a point novice translators miss. They figure that if it sounds authentic, then no one can quibble with it. Problem is, authentic English is often crap. You need to write excellent English. Hence my desire to polish my writing skills.

I picked this particular course because it offers ten graded assignments. So I’m forced to write ten texts, and someone has to critique them? Beautiful. Mainly because then I have no excuse for not writing.

Agony of Advertising

An entire German ad campaign was slung onto my virtual doorstep today. The catch: the one-hour turnaround.

I've never pulled my hair or gnashed my teeth like an Edgar Allen Poe character, but I came damn close today. The copywriter had crafted a miniature masterpiece: tight copy that felt loose. The ads allegedly sported quotes from real people, but someone had obviously sweated over those lines for hours until they were just so.

The bastard. I knew, I just knew he was only being that good to piss me off.

The Greatest Gift

In some ways, agencies are the greatest gift to translators. They keep clients off of our backs so we can work. They tell clients “no” and why. They take all the shit for us, and let the texts filter down through to us. They’re like having a great secretary, in a way. Except they get paid more than your average secretary. Much more.

Wait a second here…

Translation in Two Hours

I was wondering what would happen if - for whatever reason - someone gave me a classroom full of bilingual teenagers and told me I had two hours to turn them into translators. Maybe half-assed translators, but still translators.

Perhaps I’m just distracted today, but for some reason the idea intrigues me. I certainly wouldn’t expound on lots and lots of theories. I have pretty much wall-to-wall books here, some of which are on translation theory. I even have one on *whether* you even need translation theory. But the only good it’s really done me is showing me that, yes, there are theories about why we do what we do. I haven’t needed much of it so far, but it’s nice to know that I can pontificate on the semiotic functionalism of my translational approach to translingual localization, and no one will know what I really mean.

I think the truth is much simpler. Most bad translations that I end up throwing in the trash and redoing for clients are just poorly told stories. I know, this doesn't apply to contracts or tax returns (although Derrida, if he were still alive, would probably disagree), but it does apply to press releases, annual reports, product descriptions and lots of texts that I get to translate. So basically, I would give them a text and tell them to break it down into a story. Then, I would ask them to tell me the story in their other language.

Not convinced? Well, I was doing some research for a translation and found wonderful descriptions of PeopleSoft software. They’re called “process briefs”, but are basically stories with protagonists who save the day using PeopleSoft products. It sounds corny, but it works. I can visualize how PeopleSoft products can help businesses, which could give them the edge over other products, at least if I were in the market for logistics software.

So what could I use logistics software for? Well, I have to move a lot of papers from one side of my desk to the other….