Popping translation cherries
Welcome to my second post, prospective readers and, hopefully, enthusiastic subscribers! Let me properly introduce myself with a small piece I wrote a couple of years ago.
Many years ago (1986), in a land more or less far away (Italy), a young'un was minding her own business, when her teacher of Russian, an experienced translator herself, shook her from her daydreaming, and handed her a document issued by an ophthalmic clinic in Moscow.
‘I've spotted some potential in that frizzy head of yours, so go and translate this note, then have it sworn at the tribunal.’
‘Wait, what?’
‘You heard me. Off you go!’
And so off I went and translated the document. It was a certificate attesting that some guy had had surgery on his eyes in the Soviet Union. The translated document was required by the Italian NHS in order to pay the guy his expenses back.
Just like a modern amanuensis monk, I wrote using pen and paper, but – unlike any ancient or modern amanuensis monk – I'm dyspraxic, so I had to rewrite at least 3 copies of my translation to achieve a more or less readable text. Moreover, there was a term I couldn't translate. Google was yet to become our friend, and I had to search my Russian>Italian dictionary for the term белочная оболочка (beločnaya oboločka), pithily entered as 'white part of the eye'.
I reached out to our medical encyclopædia, only to find out, to my utter dismay, that that flipping white part was the only term missing from an otherwise long list of medical big words, related to the eye.
I went out in search of the Truth, and landed just outside the big National Library building. Apparently, Truth and Wisdom couldn't be found there after 12:00 p.m. I was exceedingly annoyed by then and at my wits' end, when I decided to try my last resource and headed out to my optician shop. The polite opticians were keen to help me, and finally gave me the long-sought answer: the white part of the eye is called sclera, a Greek term used not only in Italian and English, but also in Russian, as I discovered much later.
The final part of that job – having the translated document sworn – was a Kafkaesque experience – with me at the tribunal, lost in a maze of narrow corridors haunted by the shadows of other wretched souls, trying to find the elusive Ufficio Asseverazioni – the existence of which nobody there seemed to believe in – but, in the end, all went well: my teacher checked my translation, praised it, and made sure I was paid straightaway, and for all the time wasted during my misadventures. Surprisingly, the client received his money back quite quickly too, so he called in to thank me, thinking I had some sort of magical touch, working miracles with Italian bureaucracy.
Those weren't the days for me: I'm not nostalgic at all for pen and paper, least of all for convoluted research. I'm so grateful for computers, and you'll have to pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands. And Google is my friend, with a big fat pinch of salt. Dictionaries are still useful and a source of delightful findings.
As for AI, ChatGPT, and all the other techno-paraphernalia which are going to either:
Help us out in our everyday work as translators, removing the dull parts,
Take our jobs and livelihoods away, making us obsolete and wiping translation as a profession out of the face of the Earth, or
Exterminate us all, so what's the point anyway … the jury’s still out.
I can't make my mind up yet, since my skills do not include foretelling the future. Besides, it's not what I'd like to do on here, which is carving myself a bit of space, in order to interact with interesting interlocutors.
And what about you, readers? What do you reminisce abour your first jobs? Let me know in the comments!
Don't remember what was first. Walking around town with a snow shovel after a storm looking for driveways and walks to clear, a paper route via bicycle, picking tobacco (cigar wrappers ).
Thanks for all your likes on my site. The precious yellow wall is still going around in my head. And now sclera. Keep up the good work, and nice to meet you on Substack.
My first full-time job was as a shop assistant for a clothing company called Baleno (for those of you who are not familiar with this Hong Kong brand, think of H&M, only cheaper). The year was 2002 and I was 17. The most memorable bit about this job is the disparity between the wages and the labour, in both physical and mental senses. I was paid 6 yuan, which is less than 1 euro, per hour, and unpaid overtime hours happened almost every day. For this money, the work itself was no breeze. There was a lot of heavy lifting (I dreaded it whenever the brand released a new denim series), and rude customers were a commonplace. They didn’t talk to you but talked down to you. Some would relentlessly haggle with you, and some would unstoppably smoke in the shop. One decided a fitting room should be multi-purpose and did a number two there.
Dear customers in the world, please be kind to the staff in any shop: no one should be a punch bag.