A friend who also still works for a living though beyond the normal retirement age, called into the shop today in some distress. She qualified a year or two ago as a Dutch-English translator, a process that took training, a deep knowledge of the two languages, sensitivity, aptitude, and commitment. It's often thankless. The most recent author to use her was loud with praises for my friends' work - until the deadline when she suddenly sent back all the work of two long intensive weeks with a load of alterations which she felt more appropriate to her own style. My poor friend can hardly recognise her work in the midst of the Americanisms and clumsy re-phrasing and is faced with refusing to allow her work to be used because of the professional repercussions and her future standing as a translator, which will mean an unpleasant confrontation over payment for the time she has spent, or a long stressful weekend of negotiations over every altered descriptive word, simile and metaphor before starting back on her normal work again on Monday. She already looks exhausted. Nightmare.
Better translate only works by dead authors in future.
I had a nice affair back in the 70's with an English - Greek translator who ived in a squat, smoked pot and earned a bit to pay for it now and then as a supply teacher. He took my fancy when he came to the school where I worked (also as a supply teacher) wearing a tweed jacket (bought from a charity shop that morning as I later discovered) over canary yellow jeans with a bite out of the bum. He'd made himself a niche translating the work of a living greek poet of some repute. I thought it sounded rather a romantic thing to do but he claimed he was only a dogsbody and it was soul-destroying.
How one thought leads to another. He's one of the people I'd love to be able to trace through Friends Reunited or Facebook but so far never have. Maybe he's dead. Oh dear.
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