According to my blog statistics, someone read my post of August 2012 entitled, Now or never: translation of a poem and other things I do not know. I felt bad, because before, you could not see the poem and my draft translation side by side. Well, now you can. Head over there to have a... Continue Reading →
Incidental lyricism
Some poets find poetry in the most surprising places. Translators can also find lyrical bits in dry texts. When I come across them, I sometimes scribble these fragments down. These are gleanings from a few target texts I have produced in the last week, which bear no relation to the general import of the text... Continue Reading →
International Label Day 2013
The Immediate image which sprung to mind was of a cardboard, buff-coloured manilla label with reinforcement rings around the hole through which string may be thread when I saw the words "International Label Day" in rarasaur's blog today. My About Me page says a few things about labels. Today I have labelled myself as follows:... Continue Reading →
Tired old soap operas do it
As I have already indicated, tired old soap operas do it, so I am going to. I am giving you a recap. I am drawing your attention to some bits of my blog you may have missed. I am astounded that my previous post, published in the wee hours three days ago has attracted so... Continue Reading →
New typewriter required
There are not too many translators who readily accept scanned copies of documents for translation. Even translators who were touch typists before the introduction of function keys on computer keyboards (such as I) become lazy. We love our computers. We love our CAT tools which obviate the necessity for (a) typing and (b) formatting. These... Continue Reading →
Five years
It has taken about one month for me realise a few things about our having arrived in Portugal as immigrants five years ago. This led me to thinking that lots of things take five years. For me, anyway. It takes five years to realise that you are still not immune from getting into the passenger... Continue Reading →
Ten minutes
Self-reprimand is often the best form of punishment precisely because it is private. I am going to make my most recent one public, though. It was ten minutes to seven o'clock when I sat down again to work this evening. I thought to myself, "Great, I can check my mail - and the odd forum... Continue Reading →
Stuck in a hole
What you are looking at is Sempre em frente*, the adventurous tortoise we had about eight years ago. He is trying to escape the Inner Sanctum, his designated living space. That hole, at the bottom of the wall served a practical purpose. During the Zimbabwean rainy season, it was the only place for the water... Continue Reading →
A good ‘un
I was checking online whether my translation from Portuguese into English of a Chinese proverb matched the commonly accepted rendition in English. As one does. I should mention that I do not normally take the answers found at wiki.answers.com as Gospel for obvious reasons, but have occasionally found some useful leads there by way of... Continue Reading →
Oh, fadista!
Imagine you have one tape cassette which you play over and over on a portable tape deck. The tape was recorded on this same tape deck while sitting as close to the gramophone as possible as a borrowed long-playing record of Amália Rodrigues singing the fado filled the air. At the end of Side 1,... Continue Reading →
That elusive pair of jeans 