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...making myself stronger!
Dec. 17th, 2000 06:10 pmThe RPE on duty this morning - a youth named Adam - apparently felt badly about not having anything for me to do, so he gave me three so-called "Planning Product Change Requests" (PPCRs, for short) to translate.
Into Russian.
Ye gods.
Being a native English speaker/reader/writer, it is much easier for me to work, naturally, in English. While I can translate into Russian, after a fashion, the effort is slow, tortuous, and frankly, I find that it abrades my soul. But I do it anyway, because that's what the job calls for, and that's what I said I'd do, if I had to. And I had to, apparently, this morning.
There is an upside to all of this, but to explain it, let me take you back to My Very First Real Translation.
A long time ago, I landed a job as a "production editor" for a company that made most of its money selling subscriptions to translated Soviet scientific journals. I just happened upon the job through an employment agency and having a Russian degree from college and some practical experience in the USSR was pure serendipity, as far as the job requirements were concerned. Among the other folks with whom I worked, nobody had any Russian skills at all. Despite that, our wild-eyed group somehow managed to put several journals to bed each week, after having had the translated articles edited by a technical editor, typeset, made up, proofread, corrected, press-checked, and final-checked.
In the course of a couple of years of work, I must have looked at about a million words of text per week (and paid attention to some small part of it, in both Russian and English). In the course of this experience, I developed a familiarity with particular methods of expression and turns of the phrase. When other editors came to me to make sense of sentences that had been omitted from one or another of their translations, I'd provide a translation, at first haltingly, but then more smoothly and more quickly as time went on.
This coincided well with my overall plan, which was to be a writer. I was star-struck with the idea of being a freelance writer, and assiduously followed the accepted canon - as set forth in The Writer's Digest, for example - for submitting articles to various magazines "over the transom," in the hope that some eagle-eyed editor would spot my talent and help start my career. (None of that helped, but that's another story.)
I had no intention of actually doing any translations, until one day, a translation turned up missing in a package returned by a technical editor located uptown, for an issue of one of the journals I was responsible for, the Soviet Journal of Low-Temperature Physics. As efforts to resolve the problem grew hopeless (the editor had left for the weekend, and the original translator could not be contacted), I offered to translate the article at home over the weekend.
It was one of those "they-laughed-when-I-sat-down-at-the-piano" moments.
My boss snorted with disgust at my suggestion and wanted to know what made me think I could do the job. I, after all, was a lowly production editor.
I explained that he wasn't losing anything, since it was nearing 5 pm on Friday, and no new solutions could be tried until Monday morning, anyway. "It's not as if this is rocket science, or anything," I said, trying to sound nonchalant. "Go ahead," said The Boss, and turned his back.
Well, despite the fact that I had edited and examined similar articles for almost two years, I think I must have looked up about every second word in that article as I translated it (and just about all of those words were in a dictionary I borrowed from work). I seem to recall spending just about all of the weekend on the article. In the aftermath, the editor reviewed my work on Monday (with a messenger from our company waiting outside his office), pronounced it better than average, and my career as a translator was born. Don't ask me what I was paid; whatever it was, it was a pittance.
The tie-in to my translating from English to Russian today is this: That first translation just about killed me, spiritually. More than likely, if I hadn't been so intent on somehow making money with a typewriter, I can't imagine ever volunteering to do a second translation. Or a third.
Today, working from English to Russian results in the same kind of pain.
There are two problems to overcome. The first - and probably the one most easily overcome with practice - is spending time making sure the words are spelled right. (In Russian, word endings vary depending on how the word is used grammatically in a sentence.) The second and more important problem is learning how not to sound like an American writing in Russian.
And yet, ultimately, I can overcome both problems - and the pain - the same way I did it before...and that's by hunkering down to do it, sentence by sentence, word by word, letter by letter. Each one you lay down (and that you make sure you lay down correctly) makes it that much easier to lay the next one down.
As someone who is intent on continuing to make money as a freelancer, I have to consider those assignments this morning as nothing other than an opportunity to improve my professional skills. That may sound like corn, but it's true. For sure, it takes the edge off of having had to translate them!
Cheers...
Into Russian.
Ye gods.
Being a native English speaker/reader/writer, it is much easier for me to work, naturally, in English. While I can translate into Russian, after a fashion, the effort is slow, tortuous, and frankly, I find that it abrades my soul. But I do it anyway, because that's what the job calls for, and that's what I said I'd do, if I had to. And I had to, apparently, this morning.
There is an upside to all of this, but to explain it, let me take you back to My Very First Real Translation.
A long time ago, I landed a job as a "production editor" for a company that made most of its money selling subscriptions to translated Soviet scientific journals. I just happened upon the job through an employment agency and having a Russian degree from college and some practical experience in the USSR was pure serendipity, as far as the job requirements were concerned. Among the other folks with whom I worked, nobody had any Russian skills at all. Despite that, our wild-eyed group somehow managed to put several journals to bed each week, after having had the translated articles edited by a technical editor, typeset, made up, proofread, corrected, press-checked, and final-checked.
In the course of a couple of years of work, I must have looked at about a million words of text per week (and paid attention to some small part of it, in both Russian and English). In the course of this experience, I developed a familiarity with particular methods of expression and turns of the phrase. When other editors came to me to make sense of sentences that had been omitted from one or another of their translations, I'd provide a translation, at first haltingly, but then more smoothly and more quickly as time went on.
This coincided well with my overall plan, which was to be a writer. I was star-struck with the idea of being a freelance writer, and assiduously followed the accepted canon - as set forth in The Writer's Digest, for example - for submitting articles to various magazines "over the transom," in the hope that some eagle-eyed editor would spot my talent and help start my career. (None of that helped, but that's another story.)
I had no intention of actually doing any translations, until one day, a translation turned up missing in a package returned by a technical editor located uptown, for an issue of one of the journals I was responsible for, the Soviet Journal of Low-Temperature Physics. As efforts to resolve the problem grew hopeless (the editor had left for the weekend, and the original translator could not be contacted), I offered to translate the article at home over the weekend.
It was one of those "they-laughed-when-I-sat-down-at-the-piano" moments.
My boss snorted with disgust at my suggestion and wanted to know what made me think I could do the job. I, after all, was a lowly production editor.
I explained that he wasn't losing anything, since it was nearing 5 pm on Friday, and no new solutions could be tried until Monday morning, anyway. "It's not as if this is rocket science, or anything," I said, trying to sound nonchalant. "Go ahead," said The Boss, and turned his back.
Well, despite the fact that I had edited and examined similar articles for almost two years, I think I must have looked up about every second word in that article as I translated it (and just about all of those words were in a dictionary I borrowed from work). I seem to recall spending just about all of the weekend on the article. In the aftermath, the editor reviewed my work on Monday (with a messenger from our company waiting outside his office), pronounced it better than average, and my career as a translator was born. Don't ask me what I was paid; whatever it was, it was a pittance.
The tie-in to my translating from English to Russian today is this: That first translation just about killed me, spiritually. More than likely, if I hadn't been so intent on somehow making money with a typewriter, I can't imagine ever volunteering to do a second translation. Or a third.
Today, working from English to Russian results in the same kind of pain.
There are two problems to overcome. The first - and probably the one most easily overcome with practice - is spending time making sure the words are spelled right. (In Russian, word endings vary depending on how the word is used grammatically in a sentence.) The second and more important problem is learning how not to sound like an American writing in Russian.
And yet, ultimately, I can overcome both problems - and the pain - the same way I did it before...and that's by hunkering down to do it, sentence by sentence, word by word, letter by letter. Each one you lay down (and that you make sure you lay down correctly) makes it that much easier to lay the next one down.
As someone who is intent on continuing to make money as a freelancer, I have to consider those assignments this morning as nothing other than an opportunity to improve my professional skills. That may sound like corn, but it's true. For sure, it takes the edge off of having had to translate them!
Cheers...
