A DIFFICULT PROJECT AND WHAT IT REALLY MEANT TO ME
Last week I finally finished a project that was not only really big (more than 20,000 words), it was also pretty challenging. Well, it was a legal document on a waste management case, and that’s just about where my ability to describe its content stops. Don’t get me wrong: I was actually confident that my work in it was accurate and well-written to the point of being of “more or less professional quality” (as opposed to just “good enough”); it’s just that I couldn’t stop obsessing about how what I put for at least some of the most difficult bits was maybe, just maybe, unnatural and it read like a translation, but a good translation, if I do say so myself.
The original material in this project was in German, and with material written in German as sophisticated as a legal document I wasn’t all that surprised to come across several sentences which extended to about one fifth of a whole page. In any case, besides the weight of the topic, when you consider the factor of legal terms/language, German is full of nouns which are permutations of verbs made up of a preposition followed by a common, very vague verb, such as “go” or “give” or “put”/”place”; these words all too often have multiple meanings and are essentially used idiomatically in several ways (e.g. Angabe from angeben i.e. an + geben, Auflage from auflegen i.e. auf + legen, Einsatz from einsetzen i.e. ein + setzen). It is a very fertile breeding ground for frustration and confusion among those whose mother tongue is not German, even for someone like me. Trixi would understand – this isn’t the first time I have included a link to one of her videos in my business marketing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-VYp_3oWKQ She’s brilliant. Yet I defend my claim that I made my English versions of these coherent (if not with as much conviction as I wished).
It is human nature to communicate and even to simply express oneself – but it’s important to be able to judge whether a particular situation indicates one or the other! I can see, now, that my communication and self-expression habits are encouraged mainly by my own independent reasoning, whether I’m right or not. Sound familiar? There’s what you write, then there’s what you end up writing (however much thought you have put into it), and I in particular seem more prone to obsession over what I have written than anyone I know, but I guess that’s only to be expected when words and translation are, quite literally, my life, my source of income. To say nothing of the fact that I write so much for people who are not exactly relatives or close friends.
Because it’s human nature to communicate and even to simply express oneself, you should be able to understand that it’s but a stone’s throw away from the topic of living life, much as that as far too broad a subject for discussing in an article like this. Can you remember the last time you didn’t really feel like you were really you? Maybe, just maybe, it had something to do with you yourself putting words in your mouth that you never said, as the saying goes – while never realising it. I won’t do it to you if you don’t do it to me.
I’m done.