Stray thoughts, tamed.
I heard the Earth rumbling: it was the hearts of millions of fairies turning to stone and thudding on the ground like persistent, regular blows from a hammer. They were dying in their successive droves as daylight reached one time zone after another around the Planet.
There, you see, nothing was lost in the process of real translation.
Incarnadine was not the word, but it was the word from which we wrung the bloody red that we needed in the words that thrust the end of the novel into the universe with all that which preceded it. It is a pity my Macbeth faltered just when it would have been nice to toss... Continue Reading →
If you have not yet tried the yellow-blob method of textual revision, I urge you to do so at your earliest convenience. I do it all the time.
I have been working hard on my miniature biography. It has taken me thirty years (thirty-one, actually) to produce this.
Jost Zetzsche, aka @jeromobot, has just published a book, without a co-author this time, entitled Translation Matters, available on Amazon. My TwitFeed told me this last night, which necessitated my putting the record straight immediately: I had to do this more to keep my name clean than anything else. TranslatorLand is such a big place... Continue Reading →
There was an article recently which added to the weight of photographic and other evidence that translators are physically active despite the stereotype of a nerdy weakling staring at a computer screen or poring over huge, dusty dictionaries somewhere that seems to persist. Like many other translators, I have been active all my life. I... Continue Reading →
I chatted with a translator colleague my age via the Facebook chat box earlier this week, and was most amused to read our previous conversation about three months prior. For among incredibly witty, self-deprecating remarks about the dubious delights of menopause, there were a couple of remarks about translation. I was wondering why a lot... Continue Reading →
What you also really need is... a bucket for all those unwanted commas, a sense of humour and a sense of the serious.
At least stars are feminine in Portuguese and, I rather fancy, come out in the evening. It was at eventide that I took some fat oil pastel sticks and made this bad drawing of the house opposite. I made it much brighter than it actually is because that is how it looks with foreign eyes... Continue Reading →
That elusive pair of jeans 