I’ve been reading Chris Cardell’s latest issue of Business Breakthroughs, from which I’ve learned that it’s harder to start something than to improve it. That is something I agree with… well, maybe not always. I’ve become used to pursuing my work for improvements even if I just about never would have guessed that any improvements were necessary to begin with.
But speaking as an entrepreneur, even if my business marketing has gone up in recent months, I would say that I wouldn’t know whether to agree with that or not. It’s not that I can’t present myself without confidence – even if there are certain errors I commit which someone like Chris would be quick to point out – but mastering the Internet is certainly anything but straightforward. Here’s how I see it: me tailoring my business marketing packages and using them the truly best way I can given my situation, is me trying to improve something someone else has done, not me; and that’s the real test of my patience and resolve. It all reminds of Chris suggesting that entrepreneurs should redefine their identity: call themselves “marketers” rather than stating ad nauseum what they do. In other words, me saying “I’m a translator” too much would work against me after a while.
Here’s one thing I think: when you’ve done as much translation as I have – and I do it for a living – you start to relate the concept of imagination (including your own personal imagination) to translating work – certainly if you’re serious about doing a good (and not merely passable) translation job.
I am aware that some people grow up speaking more than one language as their native tongue. I’m not one of those people myself, but I am also aware that it is said that your imagination is most active when you are very young; of course, when you are very young is also when you are at your most naïve and least socially competent etc. And while I have to admit that I am no psychologist, surely I can’t be the only person who has ever established a link between “imagination” and “human nature”.
Having said that, when I think of “human nature”, I think of cultural rebels, who are usually eager to paint a picture of themselves as self-appointed “revolutionaries” as far as culture is concerned. In my personal experience, these are the kind of people who are full of scorn for MTV or who are anything but prone to hiding the woe and / or disappointment they feel whenever someone reveals an infatuation for Big Brother. They act all proud because they spit in the face of conditioned attitudes, whether or not they would define it in that way or a similar way. But what I reject no less readily is conditioned imagination (try relating that to the concept of attitudes of habit – I have already suggested in earlier comments that too much of that can be detrimental to productivity and satisfaction in the workplace). I look at how far I’ve come since I started this job back in 2008 and I claim that, in my pursuit of quality in my translation work and my virulent desire to avoid making mistakes in it, I have “escaped the curse of conditioned imagination”.
Paramore have a song “The Only Exception”. What is supposed to be meant by, “I’m on my way to believing”? Admittedly, maybe I’ll never know – if that makes me “ignorant”… well, you can call it sad if you want. But I like Paramore and their music; I much relish their style as being passionately expedient yet evidently with heart, as I would put it. I think that, back when I was a teenager, I would definitely have listened to Paramore music repeatedly if they were around back then and I came across them, in which case I would probably have ended up rigidly thinking of “The Only Exception” as a “typical” or “classic” (“unmistakeably”) Paramore song. How many people who call themselves Paramore fans would agree with me on that one, or just “understand” me, so to speak? How about the band themselves?
But look, I don’t want to babble on too much about an over-generalised topic like some group and their music, where, for all the enthusiastic consensus one frequently encounters in connection with that sort of thing, everybody’s right and everybody’s wrong and none of it really matters unless you want it to. No, I’d rather talk about RAC, by which I mean “Relief Addiction Cure”. I used to think that this was a term of affection that it was obscene to use casually. And it is easy to point out that it speaks for itself: it is not enough to mention that it is a term of affection that it is obscene to use casually; it is an A PRIORI term of affection that it is obscene to use casually! But I want to defy all that and claim that it could pass for a term of reverence! Does that make sense? Either way, if you’re still reading: as I see it, you are now in the perfect position to fathom its meaning to the full; hence, logic would suggest that you will never use it…
You can think what you want about all this. Just know that the reason I write these comments is for the sake of promoting myself as a professional translator; think of it as blog material. The point of this particular one is that, when I do translation work, I aim to transcend scenarios in which I feel like I’m too bricks short of a loaf.
That was a deliberate faux pas. Who could refute that?