Tumor-Free, Painful Translation Work and Painful Wrist

This morning, I underwent gastroscopy and colonoscopy at the specialist medical center at Lucky Plaza. As my Upper Thomson doctor said, under GA, I didn’t feel a thing during the entire procedure. Before working on me, the gastro doctor told me that it would be a good sign if I didn’t see him when I woke up. I didn’t. My esophagus, stomach and large intestine are free of tumor, benign or malignant. He took gastric tissues back for biopsy for “rapid urease test.” Today, it cost more than S$2,500. I will bring the report to my U.T. doc for a review.

On 10th (during the Lunar New Year holiday), I delivered a translation job. When the work came, I was told that it was a quarterly-recurring job though this was my first time to see the document. Because it is recurring, I was given the previous work, which I hoped would help me with the terminology, style, etc. It found it a lousy job. I had to ignore most parts of it.

When you’re someone who earns any money from translation work, you MUST be capable of writing at least readable sentences without compromising what the original means to say. In the one I was given, I found a few phrases which are obviously wrongly translated and looking at the whole, I can say that it was a job by a  translator, “so-called, quasi, amateur or whatever,” who doesn’t know how a decent translator should write English, to say the least. It seems he, or more likely she, looked at the J-E dictionary to find “corresponding” words and connect them in some grammatical way. Totally unreadable. With almost all of the sentences/phrases, my eyes stopped moving after a word or two. Very clearly, the person does not deserve to be paid.

After translating the whole document without obvious mistranslation, the next thing that any translator should do is to go through it again considering as if treating the target language (translation) as the original one to make words/phrases/sentences flow as naturally as possible. Or this is what I believe. There is no point to create bumpy, jerky or outright wrong translation.

Since the start of 2016, I’ve read “Catch-22” twice (I wonder how this work could be translated into Japanese given many jokes and gags which are alive because they are in English) and now am finishing “Sophie’s Choice” for the second time after years.

And today, my left wrist is giving me much pain again, maybe because I was stretching the part (as I saw on YouTube last night) on my way to the center. It’s as painful as reading through the translation work above. I bought a “FUTURO” wrist guard or strap for fixing the joint at Watsons. Garbage.

Alcohol intake record:

Feb. 10 (Mon.) – Feb. 16 (Tue.): none