The Invisible Hand of Social Media

 

We've probably all been there by now. The evolution of social media platforms has seen the "rise of the machines", with artificial (non-)intelligence programmed by unintelligent humans monitoring and managing our actions, sometimes with little or no possibilities of pushback on our part or processes that waste inordinate amounts of time to obtain correction. We see this on Facebook, LinkedIn and other media which are too often also a major venue for business communication and technical support for professional tools we use. In the case involved with the screenshots above, my "wicked" comment was made with regard to an economic theory promulgated by the long-dead white Englishman, Adam Smith, and I was given the opportunity to protest to an external board after the fourth-world budget help confirmed that I was indeed a bad person promoting terrorism. I wrote:

There was a discussion about the abuses of capitalism and the flawed thinking of Adam Smith's "invisible hand", which he thought guided markets to do the right thing without control. As we all know, it is necessary for societies to exercise some control to protect health and safety, the environment etc. Blind belief in the invisible hand too often leads to tragedy -- in a sense, this invisible hand concept points the middle finger at us humans too often. So I suggested a metaphorical amputation of a metaphorical middle finger on a metaphorical invisible hand, meaning that we need legislation, etc. to protect against abuses in an unrestricted market. No real violence against any living beings whatsoever was suggested. The AI used by Facebook is functionally idiotic.

Consider also that if the hand is invisible the metaphorical blood must be too, so amputation should shock nobody, as any gore will also be invisible ;-)

Now all that is just a bit of amusement over coffee in the morning. But other cases are more serious, like the automated banning of a Ukrainian software developer for two months on LinkedIn because Putinist trolls objected to him trying to describe the reality of serving his customers while coffee breaks are accompanied by missile strikes and business-as-usual genocide. It seems that a certain volume of complaints can trigger a ban even when no specific violation can be identified. Artificial intelligence indeed.

Entirely too much trust is granted to automation, almost a reflex, even when it obviously contradicts logic and common sense. In the translation sector, I encounter time and again the idea that language services work should be cheaper if it involves text pre-proccessed by machine translation such as DeepL, even when it can be demonstrated that achieving the desired level of quality takes longer than if the text were translated by human effort only. So time isn't money for these people, I guess. The real issue is slavelancing.

Some postulate that most people need to believe in a Higher Power of some sort and take from it the direction and meaning of their lives. I used to dispute that, but seeing now how so many educated people in the business world have replaced Nin-girsu, Shiva, Allah, Nossa Senhora da Fatima and Mighty Cthulu with the new God of MTness, I suspect I may have been wrong.

As with most religions, it's our people and their welfare who are the true victims of this automation religion, while the priests argue that the real problem is that we haven't sacrificed enough to that invisible middle finger the technologists wave in our faces.

But I ask, what's the harm of paying a few more cents if you must if it leads at last to a lot more sense and better understanding for us all?

Fail early and often

A guest post by Kevin Hendzel 

Why playing it safe by trying to avoid mistakes is exactly the wrong instinct in translation

We’re all afraid of failure – it’s deeply hard-wired into our genetic code. If our forebears had not succeeded in avoiding all the predators on the primordial savannah by listening to those trembling fears, none of us would even be here today. 

And then there’s the shame of being told we are wrong. We avoid this at all costs because the downsides are so painful -- loss of approval and respect, and a feeling of personal regret.  We’ve all been there.

Novice translators often instinctively avoid these risks by playing it safe, or engaging in what’s called “risk aversion” – clinging to dictionary definitions they can point to later in self-defense, providing literal renderings of the source text and other approval-seeking behavior. 

This is exactly the wrong thing to do.

I learned this lesson as a young rock climber in the arid mountain climate of Arizona.  At high altitudes, novice climbers instinctively cling to the rock face, pulling their face and upper bodies flush to the rock with their arms.  This is totally understandable.  Fear will do that to you when you’re 400 feet up in the air and there’s nothing below you but more rock.

Unfortunately, this is the wrong instinct.  

While your face and upper body feel safer as they cling to the rock, that position pushes the toes of your feet – on which all your weight rests – ever so slightly outward.  It dramatically increases the likelihood that you will slip and fall.

Experienced climbers hold their upper bodies slightly away from the rock face – this pushes their toes and feet into the rock, and gives them greater stability and mobility.  

Experienced translators do this, too.  A lifetime of climbing all over texts has taught them to cling less desperately to that rock face.

Since novice translators lack this experience, another strategy they use is to defend a translation based on their “feeling” for the text, or their “intuition” on how a text should be rendered.  

This is certainly seductive, because we have all experienced how successful this strategy can be in personal interactions with spoken language in social situations where two people are working together to find common ground.  But those conversations are usually in limited domains, rely heavily on visual cues and body language, and are forgiving of errors.

This strategy utterly fails in written translation when it’s just you and the source text staring you in the face.

That’s because it falls victim to a human cognitive flaw. The psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls it the “WYSIATI Fallacy” (“What You See is All There Is.”)  As Kahneman notes, “It leads a mind to experience high confidence much too easily by ignoring what it does not know.”

Let’s see if I can explain that one a bit better.

Skill in the translation field is a form of wisdom that relies on extended life experience in which we make repeated errors that are then corrected, sculpted and eventually perfected over a period of many years to form the building blocks that we use to convey master-level texts.

This is because translation is not one single skill, but a whole complex chain of specific, precise and in many ways unrelated skills.  These include, among others:

a) The ability to think and navigate in two or more languages simultaneously; 

b) A talent for conveying ideas over complex and often incompatible terrains; 

c) A profound sensitivity to the power and subtleties of different languages; 

d) An artistic flair and ear for composition in your target language;

e) The mastery of exceedingly complex technical, legal, scientific and cultural subjects.

As you can see, “intuition” is a feeble weapon against such a fearsome task.

So try this: Take risks.  Ease away from the rock. Explore different routes and paths. 

In practical terms, when you are first starting out, this means you will fail early and often. But the path to success in translation is paved with an endless cornucopia of errors. We learn and retain more knowledge from the errors we’ve made and learned from than the questions we got right the first time on the test. 

Translation at its best is an essentially collaborative enterprise.  It requires endless learning from each other – mentors, instructors, colleagues and partners – every single day. So take the risk right now of being revised and re-written and corrected.

It’s a lot more fun when we’re all climbing this mountain together.

Trump this!

The Lay of the Politics Waged by Donald

I am the Trump, o hear my cry!
I'll fight for you to love my Lie.
I'll build a Wall to bend you over,
then take my turn with Vlad and Rover.
Injecting Hope in your back end,
I'll screw you green, but I'm your Friend.

I won't pay tax: I'm not a chump,
no plebe like you, I am the Trump!
I make the jobs, you do the work,
you working slobs, and like a jerk,
I'll keep your pay, 'cause it's my perk.

A plastic wife like mine ain't cheap,
nor my pet dog, Slick Mike the veep,
and Master Vlad, he wants his cut,
I'll keep the cash, he'll take your butt.
Russian winters are so, so cold,
but rampant bears are hot and bold!

In politics I make my luck
by giving Vlad a timely suck
and spread his word so true and pure,
like finest vodka from manure!

I am the Trump! O hear my cry!
I have the codes: prepare to die!

A day in the life....

One of the things I enjoy most about professional translation is the range of activities and subject matters that one can encounter, even as a specialist in a few domains. I can't say the work is never boring, but when it does drift that way, very suddenly it isn't any more. Quite unpredictably.

Yesterday I typed translations. A bit more than expected after two sets of PowerPoint slides - a small one to translate from German and another to edit the rather acceptable English - turned out to have about 8,000 words of highly specialized slide notes about military command and control structures and the technology of fighting forest fires. (Note to self: no matter how busy you are, always import those presentations into memoQ with the options set to extract every kind of text as well as the bitmap graphics if you have to translate those too. Then do a word count! Appearances can be deceiving.)

Yesterday I dictated translations. The job started out as a bunch of text fragments from slides, where context über alles was the rule, lots of terminology required research, and voice recognition offered no particular advantages, then suddenly it became the translation of a rather long lecture using all that new terminology, and the deadline was tighter than thumbscrews operated by an angry ex-girlfriend. Dragon NaturallySpeaking to the rescue. Not only was this necessary to finish the text in a long workday rather than most of a week, but the more natural style of translation by dictation suited the purpose of the translated presentation particularly well. I could imagine myself in the room with equipment vendors, military commanders, firefighting specialists and freight forwarders, talking about the challenges faced and the technology required to avoid the tragedies of an out-of-control firestorm. And the words came out, transcribed from my voice directly into the target text fields of memoQ, exactly as they should be spoken to that audience. And at the end of that long day my hands still had feeling in them, which would not have been the case if I had typed even a third of the text.

Yesterday I made a specialized glossary to share with a presenter who will travel halfway around the world to lecture with the slides I translated for his talk. Long ago I discovered that the way I produce translations has the potential to provide additional benefits for those who will use my work. Sales representatives might need to write letters to their prospects, discussing their products in a language not mastered as a native, and the vocabulary from my work may help them to improve communication and avoid confusion that might result from using incorrect or simply different words to describe the same stuff. Or an attorney might need a quick overview of the language I used to translate the pleading she intends to file, to ensure that it is consistent with previous efforts and will not complicate discussions with her client. The terminology I research and record for each translation can be exported and reformatted quickly to produce glossaries or more complex dictionaries in a variety of formats suited for purpose. Little time and often a lot of benefits for my clients.

Yesterday I translated bitmap graphics and not only had to deal with the editing tools for that but also had to consider the best strategy for transforming the original German graphics into English ones. Would those charts be translated again into other languages? Would the graphics be re-used in other types of documents, so that I should consider ease of portability in my approach to the translation? And how the Hell do I actually use that new bitmap graphics transcription and substitution for Microsoft Office files which was added to memoQ some time ago and sort out the five charts to translate from the fifty to ignore? (Maybe I should blog the solutions some day.)

And yesterday I was asked to write summaries of large, badly scanned articles so that the equipment manufacturer would understand how its latest technology was discussed by German reviewers. As a kid I had a silly fantasy about getting paid to read, and this is just one of the many ways it unexpectedly came true. But before I get that far, these scanned files needed to be reworked so that they could be read and searched on the screen, so as I described in a guest post on another blog some years ago, I converted them to searchable PDF/A with ABBYY FineReader, which in this case also reduced their size by about 75%. The video below also shows how this works. Strangely, when I describe this procedure to other translators, many of them don't get it, and they go on about converting PDF files into editable MS Word files or plain text, or, God help them, something really stupid like importing PDF files directly into a CAT tool for translation, though none of this really relates to my purpose. Conversions often contain errors, and many texts are harder to interpret when the context of an accurate layout is lost. So "text-on-image" PDF files for translation reference to the original source files are often critical, and for files to summarize or consult sporadically for reference (with many pages to look at and essentially nothing to translate), a searchable PDF is the gold standard for efficient work.


In the course of that day I had to work with two computers linked by remote access using four networks at various time, working in German, English and Portuguese (the latter mostly involving questions to the housekeeper on how to do an online pizza delivery order so I could stay in the office and keep working). I used well over a dozen software applications for necessary tasks. These, and the environments in which they operate must be balanced carefully for efficient work. And even after some months in my new office, the balance isn't quite as good as I've had it before, and more attention to ergonomics is required.

Some colleagues are nostalgic for the "good old days" when they received a stack of paper to translate and sent off another stack of paper when the work was done, and they had a filing cabinet or a shelf of notebooks full of old work to use as reference material, and boxes of index cards stuffed full of scribbled notes on terminology next to seldom-dusty specialist dictionaries prepared by presumed experts, often full of marginalia commenting on errors or omissions and stuffed with papers bearing other scribbled notes. Not me. Since the day 30 years ago when I laboriously typed a text file full of file folder numbers and content descriptions for my research work and personal papers I have been a big believer in electronic retrieval of information wherever possible, and I miss retyping botched pages just as little as I miss the lines in the post office or the stress of dealing with delivery services.

I suspect that some feel a loss of control with the advent of new technologies in an old profession, and certainly the changes in the business environment for translation since the days of the typewriter often require a very different mentality to survive and thrive. What that mentality is, exactly, is a matter of healthy debate and often misunderstanding - again, because of the great diversity of the profession and the professions and unprofessionals in it.

The greatest challenges of new technologies that I find are the same as those faced in many other kinds of work and in modern life in general. Filtering the overabundance of input for the few things that are truly of use or interest and maintaining focus and calm amidst omnipresent distractions. Not relying too much on technologies that are far more fallible than most people, even experts, realize or acknowledge. And remembering that a fool with a tool, however many features and failsafes it may offer, remains a fool.

Time enough for words

Ursula,
We lack the words, you say,
to describe the journey
through the dark borderlands
at the end of our time,
as once the want of words
for the ordinary
light which fills half the sky
cast shadows on our lives.
But words were there, waiting,
for untrained ears to hear.
School us now in the sounds
of old life's dialect.

2015: that was the year that was.

Another year's over, my friend,

and once again fools can pretend

that Translations with Borders

of quite simian orders

didn't MpT heads to no end.

The lightning passed.

The difference between the right word
and the almost right word
is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug."
- Mark Twain

RIP Chris Irwin, a friend and example to many

Known by some by his business pseudonym Textklick, Chris Irwin was an extraordinary man in his quiet way. His unexpected death recently has left many shocked and grieving for the loss of a friend and colleague whose wit, kindness and good judgment were usually understated but of a quality seldom surpassed. In over a decade, he enriched my life in ways I will remember to its end.

One of his qualities I appreciated most was his reluctance to take sides in a fight and his consideration that a human being is a complex construct, one we should judge with care. I do not, however, think anyone will decry a lack of care in judging him a good one and an example to follow in many ways, both professionally and personally. The many entries in his Kondolenzbuch attest to just some of the ways in which he will live for a very long time in the memories of those who knew, loved and respected him

In the last week I have thought a lot about how, despite challenges he faced, he never forgot the importance of savoring life's vintage, even the sour notes, and he remained an active part of our professional community with his good wife through all the good times and those which were less so. Life is good. Enjoy it to the last drop. Even the lees.

Another day of gratitude: paying it forward

As I dragged myself through the wet-misted field yesterday morning to fetch more wood for the office furnace, the cacophony of the neighbor's barnyard fowl - chickens, guinea hens, three or four kinds of ducks, some geese and a lot of turkeys - reminded me that today is Thanksgiving. It's been a few years since I served a sacrificed bird to friends unfamiliar with our American rituals, and I don't think I could find it in my hunter's heart to do that with one of the beautiful creatures at the farm next to mine, at least not this week. Not while I have a good head of lettuce, some radishes and a few carrots in my test garden for the survival of which I am grateful after the plague of snails and slugs when the rainy season began.

I had planned to mark today with a smaller ritual, alone or in company, opening a Malbec given to me by a friend from Argentina and baking and breaking some bread with a nice mix of grains and sourdough. But it wasn't to be. When I regained consciousness after too many hours spent sorting out the structure of some new tutorials and too few resting afterward, I found that an agency client I had presumed dead, I'll call them Lazarus GmbH, had come back to life with an interesting SDL cornucopia just as I was planning to do some phony exercises in the new memoQ interface to re-learn the Trados interoperability techniques for exactly those files to prepare for a lesson I need to create this weekend. Then while I was in the midst of preparing a quotation, another Lazarus found the Send button in Outlook and sent a nice little text for immediate turnaround and an inquiry regarding my capacity for the next month. 'Tis the season once again, a bit silly already. One by one I've watched friends and colleagues who have had a little too much quiet time in recent weeks or months get slammed with a translation workload which should mean big bones for their dogs under the Christmas tree this year.

In all the "excitement" I utterly forgot that it was Thanksgiving until after dark, when the heavy rain increased and made me wonder if I should Google plans for an ark.

It was about then that a young colleague, a friend whom I introduced to translation a little over a year ago, sent me a message describing her progress with a workload which would make me take a deep breath, but which is especially challenging for someone starting out. And her projects involved some sophisticated preparation and CAT tool skills which many very experienced colleagues could not handle without significant help. All executed perfectly. And even ahead of schedule. Each bit of news caused my smile to grow bigger. Fortunately, nobody but the dogs could see this grinning idiot.

In all the decades of my various careers there are few things I have enjoyed more than the privilege of watching, and sometimes contributing a little to the success of others, particularly those who are finding their way in what is for them a new area of knowledge and activity. I just love to watch the lights come on, love to see those others overcome their doubts, launch themselves into the uncertain air and soar.

In the first essay for the days of gratitude, I wrote about some of the many teachers who have given me more than I could ever pay back, who continue to inspire me through memory after more than four decades in some cases. Many are dead now, some are failing, and a surprising number are approaching their centenary, or have failed not far short of it. These ones were among the most inspiring for me, and I wonder sometimes if there is a connection with that and those long lives.

I can never pay any of them back, and I rather doubt any of them would have wanted that. Thinking back now to a conversation with one favorite professor, a great chemist who changed the way the Second Law of Thermodynamics is taught in the US today, I remember how shortly before I moved to Germany, he tried to convince me that I should become an elementary school teacher. That wasn't practical at the time, but I missed the point. The debt I owe to him and many others cannot be paid back. It should not be paid back. It must be paid forward.

And I am very, very grateful for the privilege to attempt just that. Happy Thanksgiving.

Seven days of gratitude, day seven: free will

The choice of subject for the last post reflecting on things for which I am grateful was delayed by what my German friends sometimes call die Qual der Wahl, the agony of choice. As I grumble my way through the daily routine, feel the sore muscles from last Saturday's hunt with the dogs in the mountainous terrain of an enormous Eucalyptus forest plantation and the mild indigestion burn from one too many spicy calzones for lunch I am not particularly conscious of gratitude. What I do notice, however, is a relaxed optimism about a very unknown future in a country and a culture that will take me several decades at least to understand in the depth I wish to. There are days when the decision to leave Germany might seem as daft as some of my German friends considered it, particularly on days when I have to have anything to do with monolingual medical office personnel in Évora, who do not understand that faster repetition of what I did not understand the first time will not lead to quicker understanding. There are more than a few things missing in my present life, which I used to take for granted; sometimes hot water for washing and fire for cooking are among them when I fail to understand the trick for connecting a new tank of butane to supply my water heater and stove. But although friends in the UK and elsewhere have often expressed great admiration for the quality of public utilities, water pressure and bathroom fixtures in Germany, I find less satisfaction in these than in the feeling that I am among reasonable people of good will who treat others with good, basic respect. If the state of household technology is sometimes not much above that of a primitive campsite, at least I am camping with people I would be pleased to call friends.

Coming to Portugal was a choice. A good one I think; many of the choices in my life have certainly been less good or at least less satisfying, but they were mine to make, and I am grateful for the control over my own life which enables me to make a very wide range of choices and act on them. One of the greatest difficulties I have with German, Germany and German cultures comes down to a single word: muß. Or "muss" after the not-so-new spelling reform. Must. Some days it seems to be part of every spoken sentence in that language. When I used to hear that word too much, sometimes I would reply acidly that to live I must breathe, eat and drink, and some day I must die. Everything else is optional. Until they go abroad for a while or make the acquaintance of many people from other cultures, a great number of Germans seemed to feel that there was really only one way to do anything. Former neighbors of mine in rural Brandenburg certainly felt that way about feeding chickens, a task which must occur on a regular schedule at specific times of the day and always include boiled potatoes. Without those potatoes the best quality poultry feed will fail to meet a chicken's fundamental nutritional requirements.

I think it's a sad life for those who feel their choices are determined by others. Made with the finest cloth and decorated with masterful embroidery, a straightjacket is still an article of clothing of no good use to one wearing it with a healthy mind. The sick, crazy ones may indeed derive benefits from the straightjacket of social or political convention, but I prefer to let my own free will make the final decision after evaluating the consequences of action by my own standards.

Even in risk-averse cultures like that found in Germany, there is some acknowledgement that success often has many failures as its prerequisite, and many failures - or success - require many choices.

I am also grateful to have lived my life in political environments where the consequence of my choices are generally less critical than they might be more repressive, less stable parts of the world. But in these places the ones who often sacrifice themselves for things that I and my readers take for granted probably have a deeper understanding of why the exercise and defense of their rights of free choice are so important, perhaps more important than their lives.

As a freelance translator I have opportunities to exercise my free will with great scope in business, market my services or not and pursue my own visions of service and quality. And when the nattering nabobs of false positivism tell me I should be grateful for the chance to use Vaseline in my business relations with Linguistic Sausage Producers (LSPs), I gratefully exercise my free will and ignore this stupid advice and choose to associate myself with other service providers instead. You can choose to do the same, and I hope you do.

This is the last day of my written reflections of gratitude for the many blessings in a sometimes subjectively difficult life. I am grateful to my friend Teresa, a young veterinary behaviorist and fellow dog trainer, for the challenge to take the time to think in a more structured way about what constitutes the real wealth in my life. In the time I have lived in Portugal, becoming ever less a stranger in a strange land and more one discovering a heart's home, she and other friends have provided many occasions for such reflection. And in a poor region of the country, in an economically distressed city where I have often seen people dumpster diving for food or making complex life compromises to survive, much less thrive, I am often comforted by observing how Portuguese people respect their rights of choice and choose to live.

So on this seventh and last day of gratitude I choose to express mine for free will. Because I can.



*******
Day One – Teachers Day Two – Storytellers Day Three – This Old Frying Pan Day Four – Dogs Day Five – Dissidents Day Six – Hands

Seven days of gratitude, day six: hands

Aboriginal hand stencils in Red Hands Cave, Australia

The sixth day post in this series was delayed by a day as my attention was absorbed by medical tests of the nerve responses in my hands. Many translators have chronic issues with strain injuries in their hands; although I complain a lot about mine, they do not even approach the misery of experience for some colleagues I know. I also cannot say that my hand troubles are due to my work as a translator, because they predate my current choice of profession by many years.

I take too many things for granted, things that seem small, not so important, until something goes wrong with them. I never gave my left thumb much thought until I cut it off one day when a donkey nudged my shoulder to remind me that she wanted some of the zucchini I was free-hand slicing for my sheep. After it was sewn back on I remember needing assistance buttoning my shirt and performing other minor tasks, but as the nerves slowly regrew in the years after and the numb sensation subsided into something approaching normality I forgot the experience.

My health classes in school covered a lot of subjects, among them the need for exercise, good nutrition (the definition of which keeps changing, but an experiment with rats in the sixth grade showed me clearly that man should not live by cornflakes alone), how metabolism works and how not to get syphilis, but I don't remember any discussion of occupational health and the need to protect our bodies from the consequences of work. Later safety instruction in the laboratories where I studied and worked emphasized short-term protection against accidents, such as chemical spills, sprays and gas releases, but ergonomics were never really a topic. I hope that has changed now.

As readers of this blog know, I have many disagreements with the promoters of machine pseudo-translation and especially with those pushing HAMPsTr processes. Aside from the fact that I cannot abide profiteering liars who overpromise and underdeliver with a technology that will never live up to its sales pitch except on the broken backs of the disposable human labor assigned to cover up the inadequacy of six- or seven-figure engineering investments, I am mostly concerned with the physical and psychological consequences of disastrous work ergonomics in the post-editing of machine pseudo-translation. Time and again I have presented data to show how dictation processes routinely far exceed the best productivity currently claimed for trained post-editors on optimized machine pseudo-translation systems. Some MpT researchers like John Moran are aware of these productivity issues and helpfully point out that there are ways in which these different technologies can be usefully brought together (by the use of speech recognition to reduce strain injuries for keyboard-using post-editors, for example), but so far I see little willingness on the part of capital investors to invest in human health protection as long as custom and the law allow cheap laboring humans to be tossed like coal and wood scrap into the furnaces that fire their profit engines.

I feel a little sick sometimes when I read discussions of speech recognition for translation which emphasize possibly greater speed of production. I've started a few of these, and my little video demos on YouTube which show some rather impressive translating throughput in three-minute tests certainly promote that topic of discussion. But the best value in this alternative or complementary technology to the keyboard is the potential for improved digital health... the "digital" in this case referring to the digits on one's hands.

When that digital health is degraded to the point that holding a small dictaphone up to catch some important words from a conference speaker becomes unbearably painful after a few minutes, it is easy to focus on the disability and the disadvantages of it. These can be fixed or not, by therapy, surgery or perhaps even time. But what I cannot forget is how lucky I am to have these numbed hands, and while they do not always do my bidding, they do enough. I have met people who have lost their hands or parts of them in accidents or have been born without them, and while I would of course adjust to the loss of mine, I am grateful that this is not my present need.

When I was 15 I had an experience that I remember often when facing some incapacity. I lost my sight. For a week I was blinded after an accident with a hot nitrating mixture in the lab ate my face and sealed my eyes in the swelling of burns. I accepted quickly that my sight was lost, there was nothing to be done about it after the 3:1 concentrated sulfuric and nitric acid mix did its work. I sat in bed for most of the Easter holiday, listening to the television and wondering how I would go about learning to read Braille. Somewhat uncharacteristically, I wasn't thinking all that much about what had been lost, but when, after a week, the seal on one eye dissolved, fluid ran down my face and I saw light - just a little and nothing in focus, I felt a gratitude that I will never forget for that gift of limited sight.

And so, whether they serve me well or with difficulty, I am grateful for my hands, which serve me well enough and which I hope will always have enough strength and dexterity to serve others in some useful way.


*******
Day One – Teachers Day Two – Storytellers Day Three – This Old Frying Pan Day Four – Dogs Day Five – Dissidents Day Seven – Free Will

Seven days of gratitude, day five: dissidents

The recording of Glenn Greenwald's TED talk is about one of the most important issues of our day: privacy. That some fail to acknowledge this as a problem in today's society is an indication of how much the assault on privacy and the erosion of social norms has made the abnormal state of things seem acceptable to many, though as Glenn points out, the actions of privacy deniers stand in stark contrast to their words. Many people, translators among them, have been victims of identity theft (I have been myself at least twice that I am aware of), and this problem, too, is intimately linked to modern problems of privacy.

So when an individual stands up to the surveillance state and lays bare its lies about the extreme degree top which the modern infrastructure of our networked society has destroyed our privacy, requiring from us what some would consider extreme measures to hold any part of it out of the jaws of ravenous government "curiosity" and commercial advertising greed, one might think that some would be grateful for that individual's actions, which might involve no little personal risk. Some call Snowden a hero, as I do; some are less generous in their assessment. But I am grateful that he took a stand and upended his life in dissent against a government gone far out of control, reaching far, far beyond its legal powers simply because it can.

This morning I read about students missing in protests in Mexico; apparently their bodies were not in mass graves which were discovered. This time. But this reminded me of students and other people butchered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and others shot years before at Kent State University in Ohio in the USA and others in so many other places. What would our world be like if nobody had the courage to take a stand and risk everything for something of which the majority might even disapprove?

As a child, I listened to a neighbor describe the wars (the best word I can think of for the conflicts) which accompanied the unionization of coal mines in the part of the US Midwest where he had spent his youth. And when I asked my grandfather about the crazy tale of the Bonus Army I heard on the radio one evening, taking it for some sort of fiction because I had never heard of the protest and the massacre in my history courses in school or college, he confirmed that it was all real and related his experience in the army of that time and the contempt he had for MacArthur and Eisenhower for their part in suppressing the protesting families.

Confrontation between Bonus Army protesters and police in Washington D.C.

History is full of examples of individuals and groups who have expressed their dissent in many ways, sometimes with success, sometimes ending in disaster, with few sure predictors of the outcome being clear in the early days. I cannot call all forms of dissent good and I struggle to find legitimacy in any form which advocates violence. I am particularly grateful for the many examples of courage under duress by those who choose non-violent forms of dissent. These are, in my opinion, one of the bet health checks on the political system of any country which aspires to just or even democratic rule.

In the language services professions we also have opportunities which call for dissent from the wisdom offered by certain commercial interests. This dissent does not, of course, entail the great risks of many political or economic dissents in the world, but given the carefully coordinated way in which those who profit from abusive practices sometimes direct their campaigns against those who oppose them, with largely transparent divide and conquer tactics which sow fear, uncertainty and doubt and turn one colleague against another, following a script which was written in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, standing up for good sense, good work hygiene and normal, respectful business relations in language services is not entirely without risk.

I am not really sure if "dissident" is the right word to use, when really what I mean are those who will take a principled, non-violent stand against something perceived as wrong and, being aware of the possible cost of opposition, choose to do what they feel to be right. There is a wide spectrum of courage, and I think that many, once they find themselves somewhere on that spectrum, may find greater courage as and when it is called for. There is a line which has stayed with me for many years in a song by East German dissident songwriter Bettina Wegner: “Grade, klare Menschen wären ein schönes Ziel, Leute ohne Rückrat ham wir schon zuviel”. Be the one who stands straight, with backbone and a clear mind.



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Day One – Teachers Day Two – Storytellers Day Three – This Old Frying Pan Day Four – Dogs Day Six – Hands Day Seven – Free Will

Seven days of gratitude, day two: the storytellers

My ex-wife used to react with fury when I listened to tapes of interviews with mythologist Joseph Campbell. "That old man just likes to hear himself talk!" she exclaimed in disgust. Well, I like to hear him talk too. As many others could say during and after his life. His analyses of the role that narrative has played in the course of human culture reflects some of the deepest universal truths of the human mind and heart and offers these insights in clearer language than most of us can achieve on our own.

Yesterday I expressed my gratitude for teachers, giving a few examples of the many who have helped me achieved a better understand and mastery of the world and its complexity. These teachers often conveyed this understanding in stories, even in subjects of science and math, which some who do not understand those disciplines might think were rather far from a good story line. But tales like that of Kekulé, dreaming of twisting snakes in the fire to discover the structure of benzene, prepared me for the intuition and dreams which most often guided my own creative activity as a programmer and scientist and taught me to trust my instincts and cope more effectively with the ambiguity that accompanies the best science.

The stories that have shaped me have come from many places and people: readings from my parents or stories of their experience; tales from far-back generations transmitted through a great aunt who, together with her father, my great grandfather, recognized my interest in the past and composed a written and photographic record of genealogy and transcripts of family writing from the past which occupy me to this day researching the stories and lessons these contain. Sometimes they are shared casually by friends, who do not realize the value of the gift shared. Sometimes from books or historical reports and interviews heard by chance on the radio. These storytellers use every medium: the spoken and written word, song, poetry in every form and images. Each shapes the story in unique ways and often reveals messages not or not easily apparent in other media.

I am grateful for the storytelling translators, colleagues like Susan Bernofsky, who revitalize old tales from German literature, infusing them with new life in my language in ways that surprise and delight me. So many translators whose names I do not know have carried the world's literature on many long and difficult journeys, sometimes at deadly risk, to share tales which inspire them. We cannot thrive by contract and patent translation alone but need those sparks from far places to light our minds and hearts and burn away the misunderstandings which bind our spirits.

Reflect if you will on the stories which have influenced your thoughts, feelings and choices throughout your life and how you have shared or can share these to enrich the lives of others or achieve a better understanding with them or can do so still. The gift increases in the giving.

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Day One – Teachers Day Three – This Old Frying Pan Day Four – Dogs Day Five – Dissidents Day Six – Hands Day Seven – Free Will

A ride in the sun, rough roads and

"So what happened after he climbed up the tower and rescued her? She rescued him right back."

Mobility again at last! With power assistance for cobblestoned hills from Hell.

Got up after an hour and a half sleep, more or less, thought about work and decided instead to explore the bairros a bit before the morning's physical therapy. A sweet ride in the morning sun, past the aqueduct, the hay-harvested fields and ruins to an ATM, where I picked up cash and decided to enjoy pasteis nata and galão at Café Ebora before gymnastics, soothing fingers and hot packs on the knotted web of my back.

Alas, my Portuguese failed me for a simple order of coffee and pastry, where it worked so well for many hours of language private tuition, long chats to end the day and greet the morning sun, bake cookies, drink sangria, whiskey, learn the secrets of sopa de beldroegas and the right brew of bachalhau and spinach in my only pot, discussing facas, tendeiros and their murderous habits, the quality of local schools, the revolution to be finished, coca, heroin, speedballs and methadone, primos, sobrinhas, filhos, putas, baratas, children buying time for their mother to jump out the second story window and escape another beating, and when a knife in the leg can teach a husband to behave before he needs his throat cut. Still, as I sipped coffee (once the misunderstanding was resolved), I reflected on how, after nearly 15 years of living in cold places with too many cold people, Portugal, its bairros and people, their ability to get on with life and live it, their persistent search for another vein in which to inject some hope after all the blood has been drawn by German banks, have restored my will to live.

Imagining the library

Nearly three decades ago, Tabbing Thomas was employed in a print shop, aligning four-color separations for glossy magazines and living a proletariat life at far remove from the world of ideas in which he truly dwelt. 1984 arrived, setting in motion changes to Thomas' world that made phototypesetting, tabbing and so much else the technologies and practice of hazy memory that they are today.

In his rather cloistered life of the time, Thomas imagined a world of information and ideas freely shared, connected in new ways which a few dreamers had conceived before but which Bill Atkinson's HyperCard made accessible to the masses. He created what I believe to be the first public hyperbook from the English text of De Imitatione Christi by Thomas à Kempis; this later grew into a virtual monastery library with diverse volumes from Thoreau and others as well as original art essays and windows on history such as The White Rose and paranoid speculations on the Kennedy assassination. If Monks Had Macs was a project of breathtaking originality and scope in the late 1980s; I was one of many captivated by it, contributing technical skills to support the creative vision of Brian Thomas, the project's architect. The project is now available free on the Rivertext website. Looking at its many odds and ends, one might ask questions like Why an e-book reader? There are so many of those! Ah, but not twenty years ago; this was one of the first, long before the rise of Amazon and the commercial wave.

HyperCard and the Monks project have largely passed into digital history now. And sadly, in the quarter century of the virtual library's existence, the physical libraries that older translators grew up with have suffered great declines in very many cases. A recent New York Times essay cluster asked whether we still need libraries and what their roles should be today. My reflex is to shout Of course we do! and call for continued support of these institutions as I knew them and as most have ceased to exist. Does this really make sense? Card catalogues? When was the last time you used one?

I think the last time I found myself in an institutional library was eight years ago at the Bodleian in Oxford. A scary thought. This is not entirely by choice, but over the years I found it increasingly difficult to use community libraries which were mostly shuttered and open but a few hours in the week. When the doors were not barred I could still lose myself in the stacks for most of a day, but now I do that in the poor substitute of commercial bookstores which are usually clever enough to provide plenty of comfy chairs and a coffee bar. I've spent many weeks of my life thus at Powell's in Portland and Alexandra in Budapest. Some capitalist souls cry out for the abolition of libraries altogether for the damaging influence they exert on bookshops, video stores and Internet cafés. No kidding. Read some of the insane comments for those New York Times articles.

When I consider the economic and intellectual misery of the village where I currently live in Brandenburg, Germany, I cannot help but remember how libraries have helped individuals without other access to education and ideas to reach for better. My naive imagining of the library is an educational institution of equal stature with schools and universities. And in many places I am sure it plays such a role in often unique and creative ways. But not often enough.

How will we see libraries a decade from now? In fifty years? I cannot extrapolate the current trends of virtualization and see structures which offer substitutes for some of the very tangible things libraries once offered me and still can. But in an age when words of Alexandrian scope or greater fit on a thumb drive, how can we persuade budget-strapped public administrations and their tax-allergic subjects that libraries are a relevant common enterprise worthy of investment? Imagine.

Clients get the translators they deserve

A guest post by Valerij Tomarenko 

How can a client benefit from a translator’s advice? How can s/he achieve best results when working with translators? 

Since I studied music and was educated as a musician (apart from graduating from another Russian university as a philologist/translator/foreign language teacher), a music analogy came to my mind: a relationship between composer and performer. They say Bach’s last works were meant neither for instruments nor voices, they were intended to be studied rather than heard. A “normal” composer, however, creates music for a specific instrument/voice or a group of instruments or voices in mind. By studying orchestration, a composer gets to know various instruments and learns how to best use them to produce the desired results. That goes hand in hand with, generally, making life easier for the performer. A composition should be playable, an instrument player fretting over ridiculously complicated fingering is not a good ally. The comparison might be somewhat new, but what I am driving at isn’t: it is common advice for authors of technical or corporate documentation to keep in mind that, for eventual translation, they’d better produce translatable text. Without getting into details of writing conventions or localisation guidelines, I would urge caution on too much corporate lingo or, on the other hand, too heavy, even if seemingly natural, idioms. To translate the German “0815” is not a problem, but please bear in mind that a German “Punkt in Flensburg” would hardly sound that short in any target language (my spellchecker just tried to make a “Punk” out of “Punkt”, but anyway, the most commonplace examples to this effect are not German, but American, e.g. baseball idioms in American everyday language.

I will not discuss the technicalities of preparing documents for translation, since I expect others will do so. But again, another thing which came to my mind has to do with relationships. Kevin’s request to share some ideas and advice coincided with my leafing through the pages of “Ogilvy on Advertising”. The book, first published 30 years ago, still holds true not only for the advertising industry. After all, advertising is about convincing (or call it persuasion) and so is, to a large extent, our translation business (think writing skills). Chapter 6 of Ogilvy’s book is called “Open letter to a client in search of an agency”. Much of his advice is applicable to translators. (I don’t mean translation agencies, rather freelance translators.)

One piece of advice I’d rather quote verbatim:

“Don’t keep a dog and bark yourself. Any fool can write a good advertisement, but it takes a genius to keep his hands off a good one. I had just finished showing a new campaign to Charlie Kelstadt, the Chairman of Sears Roebuck, when his Comptroller came into the room, started to read my copy – and took a fountain-pen out of his pocket. ‘Put that pen back into your pocket’, snapped Kelstadt.” 

Ogilvy’s situation, I am afraid, rings familiar bells for many fellow translators. Whereas you outsource a translation job to a freelancer (or an agency, for that matter), your company may have native speakers of the respective language. (Or your CEO’s family has an au pair from this or that country, of all things.) Sometimes it is a good idea to ask their opinion, but more often than not I, in such a situation, had to correct the correction again and, embarrassing for both sides, explain mistakes. More often than not, there was no need for internal correction or censorship altogether. Trust your translator, if you care about motivation.

“Even the best copywriters are preternaturally thin-skinned”, Ogilvy says. It is true of many translators. So, when explaining things, don’t be overwhelmingly paternalistic. As a rule, experienced freelance translators are both knowledgeable and also capable of thinking out of the box (that is to say they are probably less susceptible to corporate tunnel vision than some of your staff).

As regards motivation, Ogilvy suggests insisting (!) on paying more that what the agency normally charges. “The extra percent won’t kill you... and you will get better service.” I think it also enhances trust and confidence on both sides. Translation is not a commodity. For a serious translator, it is important to feel that the client is well aware of this fact. Very often, when the first (and only) question from a potential client is about my “per unit“ price (words, lines or pages), I’m inclined to ask whether this potential client also considers price to be the most important (or only) reason for his/her own products or services.

And, last but not least, I think that building a longtime relationship with the translator (your very special, not easily replaceable translator) really pays off as s/he is gaining ever more experience and knowledge of your company. In the end it all boils down to the ancient advice about treating your translator as you wish to be treated yourself. It is in the Bible and, as the rabbis say, the rest is commentary.

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Valerij Tomarenko is an established colleague for Russian, German and English translation and interpreting based in Hamburg, Germany. His blog, Anmerkungen des Übersetzers, is often a source of useful insight in both German and English as well as of his delightful photography.

As part of a small article I was researching, I asked several colleagues whose professional experience in language services extends far longer and usually deeper than my own if they could summarize their best advice for translation buyers in 50 words or less. My intent was to see what different points these experts chose to emphasize, what they had in common and where they differ. The responses so far are quite interesting and will be shared in various ways in the future. Few have managed to stick to the 50 word brief, and my friend Valerij has been a particularly egregious violator of that concept. But as is so often the case in my exchanges with him, I can't find a word to cut which would not detract from the quality of a message worth sharing, so with his kind permission I have adapted this private correspondence for the blog, because I feel these points are really worth contemplation.

-- Kevin Lossner

The Buck Stops Where?

When I was asked last summer to speak at TM-Europe 2012 in Warsaw, I discussed possible topics with the organizers, Peter Reynolds and Monika Popiolek. There are so many challenges facing us in the future of translation, not all of them having to do with machine translation. These include:

• ever shorter project cycles
• rising cost pressure in many segments
• a greater than ever need for business savvy to survive
• increasing use of technology in many areas: it's not enough to be a good translator; one must often be an IT expert or have access to such expertise
• radical "scoping" policies, i.e. discounts based on match scales

Solutions to these and other issues may be technical; often they are matters of policy.

It is hard – impossible, really – to look ahead and see with any certainty the technical shape of the future. But I believe that the most important elements of the future are known and knowable.

The title of my talk is taken from a well-known saying of former US president Harry Truman: the buck stops here. What does that mean? It's about responsibility.

But responsibilities in many areas of our profession are often not clear, or the lines are becoming blurred.

More and more, stakeholders – I hate that word – in translation processes try to pass that buck, making others, such as individual translators, responsible for technical preparations which lie outside their areas of expertise.

Really, this is not a technical problem. It is a human issue.

I said that the key elements of the future of translation are known or knowable. I believe that these are the elements of our human nature. How we choose to work with others. How we decide to train the next generation. How we share responsibility.

In our drive to optimize our processes we must, if we are to recognize the solutions for the complex challenges of our future, allow a certain inefficiency in which our subconscious minds are given scope to process these challenges and find solutions. Often, we need to sleep on it.

You know the old saying: work smarter, not harder. Not like a hamster on a wheel. But this requires space. And quiet. Time to talk, and negotiate, and understand our partners and customers and help them understand us.

The buck stops where??? Who is responsible? We have to think about this, talk and decide.

An example of a critical decision for the future came out in a discussion with Doug Strock and others as we prepared for the panel on MT and its role or lack thereof in the future. When I mentioned to Doug how few specialists there were in my areas, how difficult it is to find a research chemist with an understanding of patent law and high-level translation skills, he commented that this is why we need machine translation. I'm sure he was joking. He said that we are the last generation of real subject matter experts translating in such areas. After we die out, there will be no choice but to rely on machines to understand the texts we translate today. Bollocks.

Let's forget the question of quality and the impossibility of achieving the necessary accuracy of translation with machines and post-editors ignorant of the subject matter. Why can't we simply develop the human resources we need instead? We did it after the launch of Sputnik. The United States and other countries transformed their education systems.

I have a lot of personal ideas for how to solve specific challenges facing us now and in the future of translation.

For a long time, I have been an advocate of including formatting – such as tags – in piece rate translation quotation.

With regard to the technical qualifications and competencies for using technology in translation, I have been carrying on a private campaign to persuade tool vendors, professional associations, translation agencies and others to develop outcome-based testing and certification of basic problem-solving skills for translation using technology, to determine, for example, whether a translator truly understands how to work with embedded objects in a compound document or translate tagged formats such as HTML or an XML for which the tags containing translatable content must be specified.

But it's not my ideas that are important and offer the best solutions for our common future. Nor are they yours most likely. It is the ideas and solutions that we develop together in discussion and negotiation, with as little "noise" as possible.

Therefore I would like to close this rant and send you all off to the coffee break early to talk and decide for yourselves how to share responsibility in a sustainable way, to decide where the buck should stop – now and in the future. 

Photo by colleague Valerij Tomarenko: TM-Europe 2012 in Warsaw, Poland

Walled gardens

Ashgrove walled garden, roadside view. Kilwinning, North Ayrshire, Scotland (from Roger Griffith)

In the beginning, online networks and platforms were largely separate, walled off from one another. In the California state university computing system that I remember from my youth in the 1970s, it was a big deal that the diverse campuses were linked and that certain operations were possible between the systems - truly useful stuff like directory searches for new versions of text-based Star Trek programs. When the first chat application was introduced and became popular, it was banned at the Los Angeles campus because it used too much bandwidth.

Later platforms like CompuServe, AOL and others I have long since forgotten - as well as many old corporate systems - had their own walled-off e-mail systems. Connections to the Internet eventually killed off most of these.

Today's business networking platforms such as LinkedIn and XING and social media such as Facebook also have private messaging systems that do not co-exist well with the wider world of Internet communication. Even with notifications set, forwarded messages are often difficult to recognize as important in the flood of spam these platforms typically generate. As a result, over the years a number of potentially interesting business prospects have slipped by because I didn't notice the private request for a quotation on XING. Or some colleague or other person feels insulted because months go by without a response to mail on the platform or to a "connection request" of some sort.

I don't worry about the lost business; my usual contact information is easy to find, and it is typically on those sites as well. Not everyone camps out on LinkedIn or Facebook 24/7; many have other commitments and ongoing business that make it impractical to "check in" with great frequency. I do see value in these platforms and use them to communicate with some friends and former coworkers, but I never do so expecting a quick response. If I want that I use real e-mail or pick up the phone.

The phone? Yes, indeed. Years ago I recall being attacked on a public portal by some troglodyte translator who was offended by my suggestion that the telephone system still has a role to play in business. But e-mail is not the reliable medium many believe it is, and after some of my old addresses (one in use for nearly 20 years) were used by impersonating spammers, my e-mail messages often landed in spam folders or disappeared into The Void. Despite its reach and apparent openness, the Internet is in many ways just another sort of walled garden, one rather neglected in parts and full of traps and hazards, and to get where we want or need to go, we must often engage with the wider world, the real world.

The quick and the dead

Steve Jobs was in the new again today. As many have expected for years, the Resurrection Man has come to the point where his failing strength and perhaps other priorities have led him to cede control at Apple. It's been a good ride. I made a lot of money over the years buying Apple stock when the doomsayers at the Wall Street Journal predicted the company's imminent demise and the world watched as it soared again.

Last December, a man I know was supposed to die. He was crazy as a loon, still is, a brilliant researcher who sometimes couldn't tell his daughters from his deceased mother or his ex-wife, but he has an unshakeable core of sanity that once led him to cheerfully announce that the doctors who told him and his wife that their newborn daughter would die shortly were daft. Twenty-seven years later the verdict of the medical experts has yet to be enforced. Last December, with Death's doors wide open, he began to plan a trip for the spring. I forgot to ask if he took it, but this week he is expected to die again, and his daughter tells me he's planning another trip. Crazy indeed.

We tie ourselves in knots with worry or plans, predictions of The Coming of TM, The End of the Economy and whatnot, and things usually turn out quite differently on the longer journey. The plan is the hand on the tiller, but to navigate the currents safely, the hand must move with subtlety and good timing. And still in depths sounded well there may be rocks close to the surface.

Mr. Jobs had a good run, because he had clear vision that saw risk as the fertile soil from which real bounty can grow. In my farming days I saw years where the water rose and ruined my neighbor's fields; once I was cut off for ten days at the end of a cul-de-sac when the road washed out. And yet Mr. Jobs continued to plant his seeds and my former neighbors and others around the world still do, and the rain or the drought comes as it may.

There are a few certainties. Children grow until they do not. Friends, family, pets live until they do not. Will the customer accept your well-planned offer at a fair price? The outcome is perhaps more certain one way or another than next week's weather, and if you do not ask for what you need, it is nearly certain that you will get what you have asked for: nothing. The people of my host country, Germany, have insurance for everything, but for little that really matters, as all the myriad payments have no dividend of courage.

Palimpsest

Codex Guelferbytanus B, 026, folio 194 verso

I've had a fascination with this word since I first encountered it twenty years ago in a translation of Umberto Eco's Il nome della rose. As a calligrapher specialized in a few European medieval and Renaissance scripts, I appreciated the link to a history in which resources such as parchment were all too scarce, especially as I had little money at the time and had to do most of my work on paper rather than vellum. I imagined scraping away the heretical pagan scribblings of some earlier scribe to reuse the valuable page for the important task of recording in livid, illuminated knotty-beastie color God's Holy Word... and shuddered.

A recent article in the New York Times reminded me of palimpsest once again. Literary translation isn't my world; working in this area would be too toxic for me, I fear, even if I had the mind for it. My belletristic encounters tend to lead to legal actions, stalking and stressful affairs, and a host of other things best avoided, but I will occasionally indulge in some good reading, and when the text is translated from a language I cannot read, I wonder wistfully about the original. Occasionally, I'll read two translations of a novel transmitted from a third language I do not know: Der Name der Rose / The Name of the Rose was one such case. I was appalled at the apparent omissions in the English translation, and I could not help but try to reconstruct in my mind the original from the evidence of similarities and divergence seen in its translations. There are so many philosophies of translation and fidelity to the original, and all are wrong - or right - depending on the purpose or context. Yet even the most careful rendering of a source text seldom captures the full spirit and purpose of the original; sometimes fidelity to the Mistress of Meaning requires that one betray her words. This is one of the things that fascinates me most about translation, and even with a rather pedestrian commercial text, there are often revealing moments of linguistic intimacy that touch a very satisfying harmonic chord.

Errors in a translation also often reveal the original text to the trained eye. One of the reasons that I refuse to do monolingual revisions of texts in English is that I expend too much effort trying to discern the original meaning. In the case of an English text by a German or Korean author, for example, that meaning is locked away in another person's head, and the palimpsest I am given conceals as much as it reveals.

When we overwrite the original text on the screen, replacing it with our own words that pretend to be original, how often do we really succeed? And is this a good thing? Is the spirit of the original expressed full in the flavor of our words, or is there a bitter afternote which tells the reader that there is more to the story?

Post scriptum: I was informed via Twitter of the term 'palimptext' from one Michael Davidson. Being a strict avoider of the postmodernist bullshit plague, I was previously unaware of this word, which applies very well to the matter presented here. Those who read Italian might enjoy this post.

The final passage

One of many books on hunting
traditions translated by Oskar.

Yesterday I learned that my friend Oskar Kasperl had died last Sunday. He was a great translator and a very unique man. When I sat in his living room and looked at the rows of books he translated, including many of the most important teaching texts in the GDR for agriculture, veterinary science, dog training, hunting and other subjects I love, the thought in my mind was that if I could manage 20% of that in my remaining years I could look back on a very successful life as a translator.

I first got to know him as the stubborn old man who walked with two crutches but kept his gardens immaculate, by himself, through sheer force of will. He reminded me of a favorite uncle who died over 20 years ago who, when crippled by arthritis so he could no longer bend over to tend his garden, brought his garden to his great height with boxed beds raised on high tables. Oskar was not one to let small matters like age, infirmity and pain beat him.

When I got to know his daughter, who was trained as a translator and interpreter of English and Bengali, I had no idea the two were related. She and her husband sat with us often and told about "Oskar" and his wild life as a translator and hunter. He worked in a team with his wife, dictating as she typed at high speed. His output was enormous. His contributions to education and knowledge sharing did not go unappreciated at the highest level. Erich Honecker once gave him a wish to honor this contribution on a milestone birthday. The wish was to own a drilling, a traditional three-barreled hunting rifle. At the time, private possession of such weapons was virtually impossible except to the SED's most faithful - of which he was not one. The wish was granted. When he gave up his hunting license at age 88, the drilling passed to me somewhat to the amazement of the local police, who had granted special permission for him to keep that gun until the end of his life after he had given up the rest of his arms collection acquired after the German reunification. The gun itself is 30 years old; the scope on it is probably 15 years older than that. I have other, technically better rifles and scopes, but this one somehow shoots better than all the others as I have found time and again on the range and in the field. When I carry it, I feel a special connection to a friend and the traditions he cared so much about.

Oskar made a difference in this world as a translator and a person. He was certainly no saint, and home life was often not peaceful. But his abiding love for his children was never in doubt, and this was obvious whenever his daughters spoke of him. I visited one tonight, and we sat for many hours in the kitchen eating Russian pancakes and garlic soup and drinking coffee, talking about him and his life and its many crazy tales. Perhaps some of these will be written down; perhaps the writings will be translated. I know just the illustrator for the tales. Her work reminds me of the best illustrations of Roald Dahl's stories, and Oskar's are often just as strange. When I was leaving, his daughter told me about a cache of old photographs she had discovered, which she had never seen before. She saw herself as a tiny baby held in the arms of a father radiant with pride and love. I know that feeling, and I know that light will never dim.