What i have in common with John Bird

THE THINGS I HAVE IN COMMON WITH JOHN BIRD, PLUS OTHER REASONS WHY I’M SO SELF-ASSURED IN THIS JOB

John Bird is the founder of the Big Issue, the well-known street newspaper which I have repeatedly seen homeless people selling in my local area. I don’t read it myself but I know enough that I am aware that it was founded in 1991, a time when the British economy was doing badly. Indeed, in his book “The 10 Keys To Success”http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Keys-Success-John-Bird… , John says that “it was not a good time to start anything, let alone something charity-based.” And yet it is now published in four continents and has a circulation of more than 100,000, according to Wikipedia. John Bird has definitely been a successful entrepreneur – like me, since I’ve been a self-employed translator for seven years and I too have clients all over the world.

But what really motivated me to write this comment was not so much the existence and legacy of the Big Issue as that of “The 10 Keys To Success”, mentioned above. Apparently, as a child, John was homeless at five and he committed several crimes, having had several prison sentences by the time he was in his late twenties. I’ve made mistakes in my life too, but it never got close to anything that bad. Needless to say, he’s come a long way since those days, and I guess that it was his life that encouraged him to write this motivational book. And I have read that.

One book-selling website says that his style is “inimitable as well as no-nonsense”. What is his book about? Basically, it says that if you want success, you can’t wait for it; you just have to grit your teeth and make it happen. But how he outlines it all, the lessons he teaches in this book… it’s just all completely true. The Evening Standard describes him as “a hero of our time”, and I’m not going to argue with that.

So yes, I agree that his style is inimitable as well as no-nonsense. What would people think my style is like, I wonder? Do you think that, when he decided to get himself out of his rut through his plan to become a printer and, eventually, produce the Big Issue, he ever imagined that it would develop into the success that it is today? I wonder how he would have imagined being ready for something like that? Was he content to “let the chips fall where they may” and respond in kind? Or did he knowingly dare to pursue more than that at some point? Whatever the truth of the matter is, I observe that he was only able to write this book at all because part of all the hard work and determination that the Big Issue required was that he really did do whatever was necessary to come to terms with the truth so that he could put it into his own words – something I do all the time in translation.

Yes, translation is what I do. Even today I go on and on about the intricacies of language as well as work with it. I believe that’s very evident in my past blogs, but I’ve got a couple of new things to say here as well:

I indeed understand that culture determines language. I can still remember how, as a teenager, I gave the word “fatal” an alternative meaning in that if something’s fatal, that means it’s a thousand times better than being cool, and has proven itself capable of changing someone’s life forever in a very big, definitely good way. I am aware that people use the word “epic” in pretty much exactly the same way in Youtube video comments and whatnot, but I invented this new meaning for the word “fatal” long before I first found that out. But, if you’re a woman and “fatal”, I wonder how the French would respond to that, considering what a “femme fatale” is?

When I do translation work, it’s all I can do to understand what might seem all but illogical or irrational to some people when I’m reading the source material. I recently imagined that it’s possible for someone to develop an irrational fear of magicians when they see a magician do illusion tricks which rely on deception of the audience to work (like Darcy Oake – he’s good), and then, on a subconscious level, they decide that such people would probably use such deception skills to take advantage of them and in that way abuse them. What do you think of that?