Barbecued Declensions
Somebody is printing CD-Labels on my precious transparency stock. So many laserprinters, so many manual feed trays. It's hard to sort it all out. I can be a decent person sometimes. So I yanked out the transparencies, hunted down some CD labels and dropped them in. Now the CD labels are jamming. For whatever reason, the stock is rotated 180ยก every few sheets. Our little 9-year-old printer doesn't like surprises. It's like a game show, man. "Surprise Jam Round Mr. Perez!" "Come on! Big Prints! No Jammies!"
I was here until 10:30 last night trying to change "material" to "membrane" in 12 languages, in 30 places per language. I had other translated booklets to work with. And I've made simple trademark deletions/additions in the languages before. But you know what I learned? I can't do this, that's what I learned. The Finnish people, bless their hearts, conjugate their nouns. In a mysterious jumble of ways. Oh, it's not so clear as subject, object, indirect object. No sir. That noun will change endings depending on whether the sentence indicates that particular item has the potential to be tickled by fingers or feathers or painted with tempura egg paste. I have no idea. Ukrainian does that too. Oh and "material" is masculine while "membrane" is feminine in about 7 of those languages. I was this close to hammering out the Greek articles and adjectives to match, but I finally had to go outside and break cinder blocks with my bare head to clear my mind. By the time I got to Spanish, I felt like I was reading English. But it was too late. All I could do at that point was mark up all the crap that the TRANSLATION COMPANY is going to have to fix. Ahh, sweet failure. But sheesh: eets no my yob, maing!
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