maxiewawa

I’ve been emailing translation agencies all over Asia looking for work. One of them replied [only one, boo-hoo] and sent me a test. They gave me a week to complete four short translations. I’ve just checked over two of them, and am about to tackle the third.

I’ve enjoyed it! It’s not easy though. You read the paper every day and think that you understand/read Chinese pretty well, but then someone throws an academic paper about some obscure topic at you; when you get your head around that they give you a blurb that’s going in a brochure that they are handing out at an art gallery; once you do that they hand you a press release for a computer program that manages BPM… you don’t even know what BPM is so you have to ask Wikipedia…

Anyway, it’s great fun so I just had to let everyone know about it. I feel like a ninja ［忍者］ from Japan’s past. – In case you didn’t know, ninjas weren’t soldiers in the true sense of the word, they were trained to fight not on a battlefield but in more improvised surroundings. A ninja had to be ready to fight anywhere against anyone. That’s how I feel about translating; your brain has to be really agile. A strange comparison I’m sure, but it’s the best I can come up with right now.