Cookies for the Portuguese

It all began with cookies, of course. Snickerdoodles more precisely. Then things became a soft jumble,

and chocolate chip followed with all its kinky variations.

The language lessons that began baking these cookies acquired a greater dimension, and about four days later I could converse ungrammatically but well enough with my neighbors. After a week, as she would respond to her friends who directed a stream of Portuguese at me like a firehose I kept my feet as the language soaked in and I responded in kind to her sometime surprise.

I woke and saw that the language lesson planned to greet the dawn that morning would be late. I walked carefully down the stairs, alert for cockroaches underfoot, and went to the freezer where I kept the latest batch for learning. Then a walk with the dogs and return, the door was slightly ajar and they got out again.

I searched quickly for my shoes, but then I saw that Ajax and Jambor had come back from a quick tour. No harm done.

Then I noticed the two kittens from my Portuguese tutor's litter. They had slipped in behind my dogs to visit the youngest, Jambor.

"Gostaria muito de um cigarro!"

Ajax, the cat killer, noticed then and prepared to attack.

Não!!! I screamed. Bei Fuß!
And reluctantly he came to heel as the kittens danced on the carpet with the other dog. I held the trained hunter, whose breeder and Serbian criminal who had added his Feinschliff in training had used cats to motivate Ajax to learn and obtain the coveted German Härtenachweis. I was suddenly overcome with great weariness. I fought against it, but like a castle's  great, heavy portcullis, they slammed down as I saw the kittens scamper ever closer to the waiting jaws of doom. I held desperately to the leash, but my stress-strained fingers grew numb and I fought harder to hold on, to remain conscious and in control, prevent the tragedy of the CRUNCH I heard in my sleep-dampened ears and the shake of the kill I felt in my numbing arm which held the leash.

Não!!I tried to scream again but if sound escaped my lips I could not hear it and the horror, the horror of the kill gripped like Grendel's claws on my dying heart as it was torn from my chest and I too must die no way to go back undo what was done. (The Dream)

(The Real Kill) I said good night to Sandra or rather bom dia, ate ja as she slipped out the door to fetch meds and return for another intensive Portuguese lesson. I turn at the door and saw the mother of her kittens in my living room behind me I screamed
Não!!! as Ajax noticed Jámbor dancing toward her to play, though an enemy to her always hopeful Jámbor that the cats he loves would come to play more than the occasional game of chase.
Bei Fuß!
I called and Ajax came quickly to heel bom cão and watched with interest as the queen escaped. Out the back. Out of sight. And over the back wall. Into the waiting jaws of three killers who tore her apart.

So as you try these recipes, remember that the cookies have blood on them. I am forgiven, I suppose, because after another week of lessons on a walk with the dogs at the end of a difficult day, my worse day in translation, so bad that I lost it completely, screamed out of control at the client, threw away the month's rent and food, then cut off the call, I thought the day must end otherwise so I asked her to marry she said Yes though I could not understand that single word.

Snickerdoodles (bolos de canela e açúcar)

2 3/4 cups [350 g] all-purpose flour (farinha de trigo)

1 1/2 cups [300 g] sugar (açúcar)

1 cup [250 g] butter, softened (manteiga)

2 eggs (ovos)

2 teaspoons cream of tartar (creme de tártaro / bitartarato de potássio)

1 teaspoon baking soda (bicarbonato de sódio)

1 teaspoon vanilla (baunilha)

1/4 teaspoon salt (sal)

Sugar/Cinnamon Mixture

4 parts granulated sugar one part ground cinnamon (about 5 tablespoons total)

Directions

Heat oven to 400 °F [205 °C]. Combine all cookie ingredients in large bowl. Beat at low speed, scraping bowl often, until well mixed.

Stir together about 4 tablespoons sugar and 1 tablespoon cinnamon in small bowl.

Shape dough into small balls (1"/2.5 cm); roll in sugar mixture. Place 2 inches (5 cm) apart onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake 8-10 minutes or until edges are lightly browned.

Soft Jumbles
A simple drop batter; the finished cookie has a bit of a sponge cake consistency.

1.5 cups sugar (white, granulated)
3.5 cups white flour (low gluten)
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup sour cream
3 eggs
8 tbsp sunflower oil
Flavoring:
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 heaping tsp lemon zest
Beat the eggs, oil, sour cream and flavoring with the sugar, then sift in the flour, baking soda and salt. Mix by hand or on low power. Drop with two spoons on a cookie sheet, sprinkle with a bit of sugar or perhaps a sugar/cinnamon mix or top with a nut or raisin and bake.
In a convection oven these will take about 8 minutes at 300 °F, in a radiant oven 10 to 12 minutes at 325 °F (about 160 °C).
The flavor of the cookies develops best after they have cooled; they really don't taste like much when they are hot.

Chocolate chip cookies
(or in this case, “chipped chocolate cookies”)

100 g brown sugar (açúcar mascavado)
125 g unsalted butter (manteiga sem sal)
1 egg (um ovo)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (2 colher de chá de extracto de baunilha)
½ teaspoon salt (½ colher de chá de sal)
½ teaspoon baking soda (½ colher de chá de bicarbonato de sódio)
225 g self-rising flour (farinha de trigo com fermento)
200 g chocolate

Cream the sugar and butter together, then add the vanilla and egg.
Sift in the salt, baking soda and flour, mixing at low power.
Chop the chocolate into small pieces, then mix in by hand or with the mixer at low power.

Using two spoons, drop the dough in small clumps onto the baking sheet, pressing the dough down slightly (if it is stiff) to ensure that it will spread and bake properly.

Pre-heat the oven to 350-400 °F (175-200 °C) and bake 7-10 minutes more or less. Watch the first few sheets of cookies carefully, and adjust the temperature and time for the conditions of your oven, avoid burning the bottoms of the cookies.
The cookies taste best when cool and freeze nicely for a long time.

“Double chocolate chip cookies” can be made by replacing 50 g of the flour by 75 g of chocolate powder. The procedure is otherwise the same.

A funny thing happened on the way to learning Portuguese....

When I first moved to Portugal, I stayed in one of the better parts of town, a suburb with some rather good fields and hills to walk my dogs and a lot of nice people with whom I have some things in common. I had been greatly worried by the dire warnings of German friends about what a tick-infested, dangerous place the Med countries are for pets, and how there is naught to be done. The first part is true of almost any country these days, but usually the local vets have a good understanding of how to prevent and treat local pet diseases, and just one day after my arrival I was fortunate to meet a vet in the park across from my house who gave me exactly the advice I needed and took me on a whirlwind tour of the local Neolithic archaeology sites. Can't imagine a better start for me in a new place, really.

But the house there was only available for a month, and the back yard was not well suited to containing my Deutsch Drahthaar, a hunting companion who is a sweetheart with people who likes to jump over 2 meter fences, go on tour and bring back cats as souvenirs. So I went on to another place closer to the university in the historic center of Évora. The back yard was as dog-tight as a maximum security kennel could be with walls and fences at least 5 meters high. But a black cat still managed to drop by as an impromptu snack. His bad luck in this case. The cactus which decorated the edges of the yard also meant a few difficult sessions extracting spines from the bodies of two robust dogs who like to knock each other around rather hard in play. And after the Drahthaar went sailing out a second story window to express his love to the serenading tomcat below and landed a bit hard on the cobblestones I figured it was time to move on.

One of the other problems with the first two addresses was that the neighborhoods presented too many opportunities to speak English or, occasionally, German. If the majority of people I encountered every day were not university educated with a reasonable command of one of the languages I mastered there was usually someone nearby who could serve as social methadone for someone with a lazy addiction to using the wrong language in the right place.

So I moved to the part of town where the other form of methadone is more commonly found. A place where for the first two months the only ones I met with much command of English at all were the local drug dealer and a housekeeper I knew from my favorite hotel, who is also the neighborhood's bootlegger. Aguardente caseira was quickly added to my vocabulary and kitchen shelf. German is not an option here; when the local crime lord introduced himself at the neighborhood's revolution party (celebrating the ouster of Salazar in 1974 and the political reforms which remain incomplete) he was so amused by the fact that I claimed to know the language that he called up one of the addicts who buy from him (an orderly at the local hospital if I understood correctly and a German refugee) and asked me to talk to him and confirm that I really could speak the language.

On several occasions I have had the the opportunity to use the phrase não sou alemão!!! to sooth social tensions which persist here despite the best attempts of German banks to drain the country's sometimes too-hot blood. And using the phrase with my private Portuguese tutor's mother last week transformed me in short order from persona non grata and an object of some dark speculation on a street populated by siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles to a likeable eccentric and for all I know possibly a candidate for legal induction into the family. (My Portuguese isn't quite up to the level of understanding this point, and sometimes it's better not to try.)

The recent brainstorm which resulted in The Great American Cookie Project, sharing the theory and practice of snickerdoodles, soft jumbles and every kinky kind of chocolate chip cookie one might imagine, took my crappy command of the local Alentejo dialect from nearly zero - unable to form a sentence most of the time if it involved more than "I'll have a coffee" or "Six eggs, please" - to conversing in pidgin Portuguese for more than 8 hours on many recent days and has done wonders for my physical condition and blood sugar levels. It's also given me a rapidly improving command of the techniques to cook like my local friends do. Cold cut sandwiches with too much cheese, good bye.

Moving to the sort of place my respectable, educated friends warned me to avoid has been a great experience and also shown that the place is far better than its reputation among my peers, knife-wielding tendeiros who want to break bottles over my head for not having cigarettes for them notwithstanding. A quick smile and a question about how much bigger the puny faca was than the fellow's caralho usually suffices to sooth the tensions.

As temperatures rise, tempers can get short as last night's unplanned visit to a local pub to watch the soccer game (Germany versus Portugal at the World Cup in Brazil) proved. It's been ages since I had to practice disarms, and usually that was with sticks or knives. A beer bottle is a new experience for me, as well as the creative variations of puta I learned which were expressed to my patient tutor for keeping company with the German. How many times do I have to that explain to people here that eu não sou alemão? I think there is a rematch of the discussion planned for Thursday, though to be honest I'm not fluent enough to have caught all the details. Maybe I'll be able to explain them on Friday. Let's hope.

Be Strong. Buy SDL Trados Studio today!

I've been testing the new memoQ 2014, thinking of all the great features I can and probably should describe, even promised to describe when Kilgray kindly gave me and other bloggers early access to a pre-release version. But, alas, I have a soft heart and cannot help but think of the despair SDL stockholders and employees must feel, the anguish of Studio users when the reality of their plight sinks in and they read the latest news about that apostate tool, memoQ, which just works most of the time instead of making you work for it.

The quote above from a long-suffering member of the SDL Trados beta test team is indicative of the emotions and experience of many veteran Trados users, and that colleague and so many others are fleeing to higher ground, hoping to find a place on Kilgray's software ark before the floods of Big, Dirty Data wash over the land and drown the #sdlinnovators as they desperately tease performance from their "vertical MT". And shocking revelations of translation practices in Maidenhead, UK, as reported by a neighbor and reformed SDL employee with a direct view of the SDL parking lot there, have led many to fear the Days of Revelation for memoQ 2014.

And I think of the SDL consultants and translation IT consultants in Germany who were only following orders when they helped their customers implement Across, and the despair they must feel at the thought of the many memoQ trials now being conducted in their country.

I think of all the things I could show and tell about the new project templates and automation in memoQ 2014, and all the hearts and minds that will break at the realization, the weeping and gnashing of teeth over wasted hours, years... and lives in the shadowed margins of struggling existence, gnawing on classic Wordfast crusts.

Workflow interoperability and general ease of use from Kilgray are threatening diversity in translation technology as the flocks of sheeple move to greener software pastures and eat their fill of easier language service provision and take a greater share of profits better devoted to those kinder, gentler providers of linguistic sausage.

So please, gentle people, do your part, show mercy and invest in endangered translation tools, which seek only to take us down that primrose path, paved with good intentions, to relieve the undue burdens of buyers who sacrifice far too much of their capital on the altar of survival for undeserving freelance translators. Support the Smartling crusade, offer your Maidenhead to SDL, keep your head in the XTM cloud as you practice your Fluency for languages, enjoy that nagging sense of Dejà Vu, source your memory and surf the storm-TAUS'd Big Wave and Google in awe at automatic translation on the active commodity market.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: "Was dich nicht umbringt macht dich nur stärker" ("what does not kill you only makes you stronger"). Be strong. Don't take the easy way out of Translation Tribulations with memoQ 2014. Get your SDL Trados Studio license here instead.