I came back from my holiday in Portugal the day before yesterday. I enjoyed it, even if the sun made things a bit bright for me sometimes. And I don’t speak Portuguese – all I know is “faz favore” (please) and “obrigado” (thank you). No longer do I have to worry about trying to make myself understood in pidgen talk; saying things that MIGHT be half-Portuguese. Or half-Spanish, or half-Italian.

But all anecdotes aside, I now focus on getting back to work. Now with four years of being a self-employed translator under my belt, I hardly need anyone to remind me that faith in my linguistic talent alone – however wide and accomplished it may be – is very unwise in this line of work. Just like when you go to visit another country and accept the need to grasp the local culture, when doing translation (especially for a living) there’s a chance failure to identify and put aside your pre-conceptions will be embarrassing at best, and perilous at worst.

How to discuss this? I hope that there are parallels evident in the examples that follow. At one point during my holiday, when I was having dinner with the rest of my family one night, my mum posed this riddle: “If a couple have two children and one is a boy, what is the chance of the other being a boy?” I initially said 50% – what has the gender of the first child got to do with it, anyway? Well, not necessarily, apparently. Take the fact that the “first” child is indicated as a boy while the gender of the “second” child is unknown. I eventually saw that one is supposed to understand that to point out that one of them is indeed a boy is not necessarily to refer the gender of the “first” child. With this, if the one that is stated is a boy in the question is actually the “second” one, then it follows that the answer to the question is actually 100%. Given that I have always hated being “fooled” like that, maybe I WAS born to be a professional translator.

The other thing is that when I went out to buy something yesterday, I drove up to Farnborough; the road was clear my side, but there was traffic accumulating on the other side of the road, and I just thought to myself, “That’s the rush hour for you.” Really? I say that because many people have nine-to-five jobs, but the clock on my car said “16:33”; nearly half an hour before 5pm. Even if this wasn’t the rush hour as such, then it was quite likely to be a result of many people trying to go home early in an effort to avoid it – even if, in this case, so many were trying to do it that it ended in this cruel irony. Rush hour ramifications, if you will. (Many will agree that that sort of thing happens all the time.) But part of my imagination made me think of me saying that more or less out loud to myself without thinking about it, with some kid next to me (probably myself when I was much younger) overhearing it and remaining silent, while never the knowing the difference and ending up confused about what is meant by the “rush hour” simply because I never thought of explaining it. And that’s only because the kid remained silent.

When I got to the shop in Farnborough that I was heading to (Maplin), I went in and stated what I was looking for: a USB cable with two male ends. When they showed me that they still had a double male end bit for £7.99, I couldn’t help but thinking, “Lucky me”, as there was only one left. Now, being perhaps a little too kind in nature, it wasn’t long after I bought it that I wondered if I really should be defining the whole thing as “lucky”. If someone else came in later asking for what I did, they would be “unlucky”, but only because I was “lucky”. When I was very young – naive and ignorant, but otherwise a “good boy” to hear my mother put it – my definition of “lucky” would surely have been something like, “When you have something that is better than you expected.” Whether or not people reading this agree that I am calling for a redefinition of the word “lucky”, I would suggest, at the risk of self-aggrandizement, that attitudes like this are worth encouraging as far as the pursuit of entrepreneurial success is concerned.

Parappa the Rapper may have taught me to be believe in myself, but I don’t think anyone has encouraged me to question my own personal convictions readily to the extent that Chris Cardell has. I can already hear readers of this thinking, “This guy learned from the best.”