I really should be sleeping...job interview tomorrow and all.

[kja]

When I started my first teaching job, part of it involved translating things from Russian into English and editing English translations. Translating took awhile, but editing was much more of a colossal pain-in-the-ass. Ten times out of ten, the "professional" translation I'd usually be given was so bad that I had to essentially re-write it. This wasn't as easy as it sounds. Since I had no raw text from which to go by, I couldn't take whatever liberties with the text I wanted. I had to dig up the author's desired message buried under tons of excess verbage (diarrhea of the mouth ain't nothing until you meet translators who want to show off their vocabulary in terms of how many words they know) and re-tool it so English-speakers could comprehend it, all the while preserving the author's voice as much as possible. Since I didn't usually have a copy of original, Russian text, sometimes I had to translate whatever was hopelessly FUBAR back into Russian so I'd have somewhat of an inkling as to how to re-translate again into English. English that would be understood by a native speaker and not just by some dumbass "professional notary/translator" with a rubber stamp and babelfish.

For an idea as to what my world used to be like, read this Kommersant article. If you want to know what inspired me to go off on this tirade, read this Presidential press conference. I ask you, which one hurts your brain more?

While I could get the cut of the Kommersant writer's jib and finish his article, I was unable to finish reading the press conference transcript. It was absolutely incomprehensible, made no sense whatsoever and the brainlock pain scale was similar to having a huge monkey wrench stuck in my right eye socket for a good hour.

The sad thing is that it all came from a native English speaker. Maybe if I translated whatever Bush says into Russian...