Tradukado

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Ed is a freelance translator (DE/ES/FR-EN), editor and writer, working primarily for international organisations. In previous lives, he has been a care assistant, a barman, a tour guide and a call centre agent. When he is not at his desk, he likes to travel and strike up conversations with strangers. Leaving aside questions of human relationality, his mind and opinions are his own.

  • The art of balance

    I have never been one for New Year’s resolutions. They have always struck me as mechanical and contrived, doomed to failure. Far better to adopt a general guideline for life, a path from which you will inevitably err but to which you can later return. In fact, deviation is arguably essential, in so far as it allows you to evaluate your guideline from another perspective – to learn by doing, rather than merely observing, whence the proverb once bitten, twice shy (in German ein gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer – “the burned child distrusts the fire”). Or perhaps we all just need to let our hair down once in a while, as neatly encapsulated in Oscar Wilde’s riff on Socrates’ maxim: “everything in moderation, including moderation.” Now there is an idea I can get on board with.

    The author left his desk to devour half a white baguette slathered with gooey Camembert.

    The author returned to his desk.

    Ahem. The question of moderation occupied the minds of other Greek philosophers: Aristotle argued that excellence lay midway between excess and deficiency. It is also deeply rooted in religion: as any good Christian will tell you, strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leads to life, and broad is the way that leads to perdition (Matthew, 7:13-14); while for Buddhists, the path to enlightenment is the middle way between ascetism and indulgence. No wonder, then, that our language is peppered with phrases to do with balance: astronomers are busy scouring the known universe for other Goldilocks planets, where conditions are ‘just right’ to support life; and the honest and decent among us are trying to keep on the straight and narrow (a misquotation of Matthew, 7:13, mentioned above, but now widely accepted as standard spelling).

    Anyway, to my great irritation, Socrates’ words resonate with me. All things in moderation, sure, but Ancient Athenians never faced such titans as HBO box sets and dark chocolate Hobnobs, did they? (Incidentally, to hobnob comes from 18th century English “to hob or nob”, meaning to drink to one another, and ultimately from Old English habban – “to have” – and nabban – “not to have”.) When I inevitably succumb to those modern vices, I feel great for a couple of hours, or a whole day if I’m lucky, but then sloth and torpor set in, and I feel drawn back to the middle way.

    And herein, after much waffle (mmm, waffles…), lies my point: whatever your guideline for life, it must come from within, not from without. So scrap your New Year’s resolutions. Break your shackles. Err from your path and then feel the pull back towards it. Not because you ‘should’, but because (brace yourselves, fans of The Mandalorian…) this is the way. Or, as French viewers would have it, telle est la voie.

  • The UK-EU reset: friends with benefits?

    Ah, Brexit. Makes one proud to be British, what-what? That shining example of direct democracy, that ice-cold cleaver of communities, that stupendous act of self-sabotage. You remember where you were, don’t you, for that bombshell, for that proverbial punch in the gut? Ears ringing, mind racing. Almost a decade on, and the hatchet has yet to be buried. In a storyline befitting of the Great British soap opera, Remainers and Leavers find themselves enmeshed in the most dysfunctional of marriages, divided in unity. On one side of the fault line, rage and indignance have given way to smouldering resentment; on the other, arrogance and scorn to indifference.

    But let us change the channel. If you have ever seen a Disney film, then you will know that the evil sorcerer must be on the cusp of plunging the world into eternal darkness before the hero can swoop in and save the day. Dramatic tension and all that. So, if this marriage is to be saved at the eleventh hour, if there is to be hope beyond hope, then what we need is a knight in shining armour. Enter Bravely Bold Sir Keir. His perilous quest? The UK-EU reset. Don’t worry: we are not about to deep-dive into legal and policy frameworks. First, this is not that kind of blog, and second, I am far too lazy to do that much research. But I would like to focus on one element of the reset that has made the news this week.

    A great many strands were lost in the tissue of lies that was the Leave Campaign and then in the complex web that was the Brexit divorce bill. One of them was, and still is, close to my heart: Erasmus, the EU’s student exchange programme, from which the UK sadly withdrew as part of its settlement with the Union, and in which I was fortunate enough to participate for the 2005/6 academic year, attending the universities of Heidelberg, in southwest Germany, and Caen, in northern France.

    I will be the first to admit that I did not spend all those 10 months with my head buried in books. In fact, for much of the time, I remember feeling quite adrift. That was partly because I was grieving for my father, who had died suddenly some months before, but also because I lacked the familiarity and structure of my life in the UK. In addition, for most of my spell in Caen, the university was occupied and barricaded by students as part of a major protest against proposed changes to employment law that would have adversely affected young people. (Striking and protesting are, of course, French institutions, so one might say that what I forwent in formal education I gained in cultural enlightenment.)

    Feelings of limbo notwithstanding, I had a lot of fun that year: going to concerts and parties; belting out britpop hits on stage with my compatriots at weekly karaoke nights (although it might be hard to imagine this now, back then it was pretty cool to be British); playing football with locals on the banks of the River Neckar. But the most enriching part of the exchange was simply mixing with people from other countries. My newfound friends hailed from France and Germany, naturally, but also from Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland and the United States. I am still in touch with a couple of them, despite withdrawing completely from social media. The point I am trying to make is that Erasmus is above all a cultural exchange. And in an age of funding cuts for any programme that does not have clearly quantifiable economic benefits, it is comforting to know that Erasmus is still going strong.

    When the UK left the EU, I was devastated on a personal level, partly because I had spent around half of my adult life living and working on the continent, so I absolutely did not want to lose freedom of movement, but chiefly because I felt – and still feel – European. However, I was also devastated on behalf of all the young people in the UK who could not have the culturally enriching experience that I had had. Imagine how delighted I was, then, to learn this week that the UK will soon be rejoining the Erasmus programme as part of the aforementioned reset. So well done, Bravely Bold Sir Keir, for not gallantly chickening out. At least not from this particular fight.

  • A translator’s best friends

    It was 2009, and the dust from the latest global financial crisis was still settling: not the best time for a fresh graduate to be job-hunting. Fortunately, thanks in part to my university’s extensive alumni network, I managed to land a role at a small, quality-focused translation agency in Brussels. It was an excellent place to cut my linguistic teeth. If I had questions, I could fire them at either of the two senior translators with whom I shared an office, and, in those first six or so months, I received detailed feedback on virtually every piece of work I produced. I quickly learned that a translator’s best friends were not his dictionary and thesaurus, but Humility and Paranoia. My manager’s favourite refrain – “you are only as good as your last job” – still rings in my ears from time to time. On the face of it, H&P were not the best company. After all, what kind of friends would continually prompt you to second-guess yourself? But, as I discovered, on the rare occasion that I forgot to bring them to the office with me, they quietly protected me from that training yard bully Mortal Embarrassment (a.k.a. Big Bad Barry). It must be said that Barry was a very effective teacher, but, as he knew and employed no other learning model than positive punishment, he was to be avoided at all costs. I will probably never forget the time that, under immense time pressure, I ran a short German article through a machine translator, post-edited the garbled results and submitted them to my manager for review, only to be called into his office for a dressing-down. You see, in my haste, I had failed to notice that the machine had dutifully translated the author’s surname, “Mantel”, into its English equivalent “coat”. “Why on Earth did you do that?”, my manager asked. I had no answer. I just stood there, dumbfounded and beetroot red. Needless to say, ever since then, I have kept a couple of metaphorical pews at my desk for my old friends, H&P.