Routines and Responses

Gosh, y’guyz! It’s so much fun to get them from you!

I’ve gotten responses to this blog by email, phone, and through the comments facility, and

In particular, lower-case susan pointed me to the new URL for the Lantra gallery , where Daniel’s on-line, on-list proposal to me won us a well-deserved reputation as hopeless romantics. Susan’s own web-page is still pertinent to translators, not only ones working in her own Swedish-to-English specialty. And of course, I remember her own blog, Translators’ Site Du Jour, with great fondness. I don’t have to remember Susan herself with fondness because no memory’s involved – I get to experience fondness with no memory required, because she’s a regular part of my day thanks to IMing, which is probably worth blogging about some weekend.

And there’s always Alexander Mann, German/Hebrew/English translator and IM-buddy, who asked about the language I dream in. Well, there’s no question about that – I dream in English and always have. Hebrew only infiltrated my dreams once, when I woke up singing a song I had started to sing in the dream, with a choir of angels. The angels went away when I woke up, dang it!

Now, about those routines: when faced with a pile of paper requiring translation – and in my language combination, paper seems to be the order of the year in the U.S. (what ever happened to electronic documents, d’ya think?) – it is difficult, nearly impossible, to launch straight out of breakfast and into work.

Skipping breakfast doesn’t help.

There is something about translation that requires me, and probably all of my colleagues, to brace our minds, so to speak, and focus our thoughts, before being able to harness those minds to the task at hand, which is being a channel for someone else’s well-put words on a good day, or insurance forms and bank statements, on a bad one.

The process, my getting-into-translation-mode routine, is crucial for my work. If I skip it, my work is distracted, seems careless (although I do take care), and often needs a whole lot more editing and review. If I am faithful to it, my work looks like – well – what we all want my work to look like. A light review makes it shine.

So, what is this magic routine? What takes me from the realm of the not-quite-ok to that of professional-and-looks-like-it-too? I can only describe it as a process of disengaging my mind, like gears in a car going into neutral. Not just having a quiet mind, more like giving it something with no emotional content to worry about and leaving the translation to be done by some other layer of my mental organization. When this is accomplished (and yes, I’ll explain how I do it in a moment), the translation simply flows through me, like so much water through a pipe. The technical input (reading) and output (typing) channels are not bottlenecked by something inside.

Interestingly enough, “flow” is the word used for this state of enjoyable productivity. Its third component appears in the Wikipedia as “A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness”, which is what I was trying to get at in my description, above. I attach that feeling to translation, dishwashing (talk about instant gratification! Take a sink full o’ muck, plunge your hands into warm water, end up with sparkly-clean dishes!) and ironing, although I’ve rather given up that hobby since becoming a mother. (Aside: the younger of my children is now nearly eight, and I’ve gone out to buy some clothes that do not need to double as towels. Dressing up for work may mean I’ll take up ironing again.)

Here’s an article from Psychology Today by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who coined the term. He seems to draw his inspiration from the spiritual traditions of the world, which have been concerned with maximizing the efficacy of our all-too-short sojourn on this planet. It is heartening to see that this has become a piece of mainstream psychology. As M. Scott Peck, who wrote the marvelous The Road Less Traveled, pointed out: the closer we get to understanding ourselves, the closer we get to understanding the creative impulse in the universe.

So, what is it that I do to achieve this lofty goal? I start my day by checking email and clearing my desk. A clear(er) physical surface - or at least neater piles of paper – help anti-distract my distractable mind. I look at my low-tech tasks sheet (recorded on paper) and do the things I intend to do before translation, then prioritize my translation projects.

And then I disengage my ego by playing three or four rounds of sudoku. I used to play solitaire of various kinds, but it got to the point where it wasn’t engaging my mind anymore, so I stopped. Sudoku is still new enough to do so; when it ceases to be, I’ll probably get back to translating poetry, which has the same effect. (More on that another day).

And when that is accomplished, I can get into flow for translation or writing.

Over the years I’ve wondered why it is that solitaire is such a soothing game for me. I’ve gone way back into the past and remembered why I got involved with it in the first place: I was about eight, and winning in Vegas seemed to be the only way I would ever make enough money to move back home. But by the time I was working as a translator, in my twenties, I knew how to earn money in more effective ways. And by the time I did find my way home I was still into solitaire. So what’s the deal?

Playing sudoku has given me a clue about this: I think it has to do with my urge to struggle against entropy. Solitaire, like sudoku, takes a heap of messy items (cards, numbers) and puts them into a neat pattern. And once my world (board?) is in order, my mind can be free to translate.

If the Spirit moves you, do share what your routines are. I’m curious! Either email me or enter a comment; both methods hit my inbox, the latter also has the potential of opening a discussion thread. And discussions are some of the neatest things about blogs.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a translators-in-the-news roundup. Tot ziens!