maxiewawa

跟华人去吃饭的时候经常发生很尴尬的事 － 结帐。在我们这里的话，最常见的是AA制，就是说把总计除以人数，每个人付的是一样，公平多吧。可是华人习惯一个人请客。最近我跟三个人一起吃饭，一共四个人，可不是AA制，反而是一个人付我们四个人的费。 我其实觉得是太过分，我跟爱香愿意付一半，可是没办法。而且他上次也请了我一次课。这个人请了我一次，我今天还想今天请他。可他不听！ 我今天说了：下次我请你。可是我相信，下次还会老样子。我真的想请他，但他怎么总不愿意？我不付的话，是对我有一点耻辱

I’ve been telling everyone I know in real life, and you might have got the impression yourself, that I was doing a course in interpreting at TAFE this year. Unfortunately that’s not the case.

I don’t know why I assumed that I’d get in without actually knowing, but I got to TAFE today to have a look at the results, and my name wasn’t there. I was gutted (Australian for ‘very disappointed’). I guess it’s my own fault for just assuming that I was in.

So what now? Well there’s another course in interpreting at a place in the city. It’s a bit more expensive, and might not be available part time, but I think places are easier to get.

So I hope to enrol in that other place. That’s what I hope to do next. That and practice. My mandarin was probably where I came unstuck in the first place, so I’d better get it up to scratch.

On the up side, I got into the translator’s course. (If you didn’t know, translating is written where interpreting is spoken.) I’m not so interested in doing it though. The subject matter of the tests seem to be easy enough that I think I could pass the NAATI accreditation test without taking a course.

I’m much more keen on interpreting than translating. I see it as a way to travel around the world, while doing something that I am really interested in. It’s hard to get knocked back like I was but I can’t just sit and whinge about it.

EDIT I made a video about it.

Technology is a wonderful thing.

Imagine I told you that you had to remember that the bone at the base of your spine, part of your pelvis, was called the sacrum. On top of that, imagine that I had to tell you that the Chinese word for it was 骶骨.

Hard right? Well when I get tricky stuff like that that I have to remember, I just consult Wikipedia.

Type in 骶骨 to Chinese Wikipedia, and you get some helpful info. The 骶骨 is triangular, and there are some pictures of it.

As a native English speaker, I always click on the link on the left that says “English” though.

I then read through the article, getting little bits of info on sacrums. At the end comes something particularly helpful.

The name is derived from the Latin sacer, “sacred“, a translation of the Greek hieron (osteon), meaning sacred or strong bone.^[1] Since the sacrum is the seat of the organs of procreation, animal sacrums were offered in sacrifices. In Slavic languages and in German this bone is called the “cross bone”.^[2]

That’s useful! It helps me remember that it’s cross shaped, and even helps me remember the name.

I have to come up with some kind of mneumonic that can help me remember 骶骨 though. In case you didn’t know, a mneumonic is a way of remembering some kind of rule.

The first syllable of 骶骨 sounds like “low”…. it even has part of the character for “low” in there…

Hmmm… I come up with a picture of a Satanic rite in ancient Germany, where some chieftan is covered in blood. He’s just extracted the SACRUM/骶骨 of some poor unsuspecting animal. He takes this cross-shaped bone and laws it on the ground, BELOW a huge bonfire that is raging in front of him. Other pagans are jumping around dancing and singing.

我刚刚注册了一个QQ账号。我希望通过它，能够提高自己中文水平。

哇，最近有一个网有留了言，让我在此blog用更多的中文。可惜的是，不知道该写什么。

大家可能早就发现了，除了关于语言，翻译，我可没什么话讲。真的是sorry。下次希望可以写更精彩的内容给大家看。

有QQ账号的读者请加我！maxiewawa!

Mood: hungry.

I’ve made another post at ChinaGeeks.

I always thought that the Chinese internet was quite free. Just like the Soviets could show their displeasure at Reagan at the Kremlin, we can not only do the same at the Foreign Ministry…

It was really hard. There were lots of strange cultural references (like the one above) but it was a bit of a rant, so he’d start sentences only to branch off in other directions without finishing his original thought!

My Mood: Lobotomic. I’ve been working at the area that I struggled the most in the interpreter test, the sight translation, by just reading the paper, and saying aloud my translation of it. Hard. Why an interpreter would ever be asked to translate a newspaper article into another language I’m not exactly sure, but it came up in my exam, so I’m working on it. In any case, it’s been doing my head in, hence I feel like I’ve been lobotomised.

Also working on my shorthand. Have put Gregg to one side, giving Teeline a go (I hear it’s easier).