Illegal Translating, Interpreting to Death, and Enough being Enough - Monday Grab-bag

Gosh, I love the blogosphere! Remember Of Rice and Men, comedic treatment of a not-quite-prepared-enough interpreter in Vietnam? I blogged about it last week. Well, author Richard Galli, already picked up on it and shared a few passages from the book (go see, it’s right here).

Another reason to love the this-here-sphere: lower-case susan is right back in it. I’ve been reading her (and writing to her) since the mid-nineties, mostly on Lantra (and profuse instant messaging conversations into the night). Now the rest of the world can enjoy. Go give her a hug from me, willya?

And yet another: it makes daydreams come true! Last week I was kidding around about waving a pen translator at signs to find the rest rooms in a foreign country. Alex Waibel to the rescue! 3,000 Chinese characters are stored in a device that integrates a camera and some translation memory. Idioms will still pose hurdles, though...

In a more ambitious project, the U.S. military has put DARPA on the tail of truly automatic translation. Allow me some skepticism – is that mountain pictured in the report the tower of Babel? Or Sisyphus’ office space?

Over in Iran, we hear a blow for the first amendment: poetry by Parvin Etesami will be translated from Farsi into English by Iranian poet Mehdi Afshar . What with this activity being illegal in the U.S., Mehdi’s work is doubly welcome. It is a sad day in the U.S. when translating poetry is considered seditious. That’s not the saddest thing around (that would involve all the children killed directly by U.S. policies) or even the second saddest, but it’s a good thing to pay attention to before other activities go illegal on us.

At least in the U.S. the wages of our work couldn’t get much worse than a half-million dollar fine and ten years in prison. Our colleagues in Iraq are being routinely shot dead. Interpreting for the American forces, NGOs, and journalists would seem to be a very bad career move for those of us who want to make it to our next birthdays.

But it’s not just shooting that gets at us. Much of what Kurt Williams points out about developers in start-ups is true for self-employed translators. We tend to borrow from Peter’s hours to give Paul’s project some extra minutes, and the person who’s short-changed is the one at the keyboard. My solution for this involves long walks, a bit of yoga (I should really do more) and forcing myself to avoid night work despite the temptation. This has turned out to be a healthy practice both for my body and my business, as it has led to the realization of what is, in fact, enough work – and what is way too much.
Now’s a good time to work, though. Over and out (until I’m paged for a walk with HikerDude!)