“la parole exportée”

I hate to brag, but I like encouragement like everyone else, and this selection of quotes from e-mails that arrived in my inbox last week, really made my day…

‘…So anyway, thank you so much for all your very hard work. I thought you did a wonderful job altogether. It was a pleasure to work with you and I will be sure to keep your contact details for the next time. I’ll also pass on your details to anyone who may need help in Paris with interpreting needs.’

‘…Par ailleurs, je tiens à vous remercier de nous avoir rejoint ce 17 juin, votre prestation a été bien appréciée par nos collaborateurs anglophones.’

‘…All that stuff about translators isn’t really for you. We have been very happy with your work over the years.’

For many years now, I’ve got into the habit of keeping congratulatory comments in a corner of my office. All clients (including me) often forget to thank their service providers. These sweet messages are my insurance against rainy days, when everything seems to go badly, and a little encouragement like this is much better (even for your health) than a cocktail!

photo credit: debaird

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I shouldn’t read other people’s posts. Seriously. I end up reading lots of stuff that is not directly relevant to anything I do.

Yet I find all those blogs fascinating, because they refer to things that are sometimes very different to what I can do/should do, and thus get me to think outside the box.

Like this one:

Joanna Young’s post took me to Wordle, and I started playing with it using a selection of words from my tag cloud. (It helped that I had completed all my urgent jobs!!!)

First experiment got me this:

A little bit of tweaking colors, layout, etc. and I came up with this one (strictly identical in terms of colors, font, background colors).

Mmmmm…

I’m left wondering why I find the bottom one more “acceptable,” when the top one “appeals” to me as being untidy, yet more creative?

Apparently simple things like that tell you more about yourself than all the manuals you could read on the subject. Translating is a mental and cognitive activity that requires order and method. But it also needs some creativity. Maybe that’s the explanation?

A better explanation, anyone?

This is just a transitional post, to acknowledge the fact that I’m moving from extremely busy to plain busy…

I have a puzzle for you faithful readers.

It’s my birthday, and my age today matches my year of birth.

Leave a comment if you think you have guessed.

Many years ago, I was lucky enough to work for a couple of French publishers, translating books on various ‘real-life’ subjects. Gardening was one such topic and I translated a few on tree-pruning, flower-planting, vegetables… One I particularly liked was on how to use colorful plants in your garden. I had just moved to a house with a garden, so I was happy to test some of the advice too!

Philadelphus, or mock orange, or seringa (the last being its French name too), was one of the easiest plant names to translate, if you overlook the fact that it has two spellings, namely ’seringa’ or ’seringat’ in French. But I remember a book on medicinal plants that was more of a challenge.

As ever, when translation is concerned, your own knowledge of the general background is invaluable, and it helped me that my parents had a passion for Botany and had exposed me to all sorts of plants and plant names from a very young age. Not a total country bumpkin, I do have links with Nature! Nowadays I run across urban people who have no idea what a lime tree (Tilia, tilleul) is. Some of them have encountered it in the herbal tea section of their supermarket, but my neighbor has been the source of nightmares around my lime tree, that no herbal tea could cure!

Challenges are said to help you grow. Probably true, at least in the case of the translation of plant names. Faced with a mass of unknown names and species and varieties, I quickly had to find a way around the problem. In the days of real dictionaries and books, no Internet available, I decided that the way to go was to find the plant’s Latin name, and search its accepted French name, bearing in mind that people in different regions may use different names, so it was necessary to sift and choose the most widespread ones. The Internet now makes this task much easier.

My Philadelphus above didn’t have the honor of being planted by me, but it’s been offering a mass of white blossom year after year. Today it’s just having a shower and I wanted to capture this moment. But most of all I wanted to give it recognition for sending a sea of deep, rich fragrance into my office.