Shapelle Corby and the Bali 9

I haven't the faintest idea whether anyone else in the world who lives outside of Bali or Australia, but this Shapelle Corby woman and the Bali 9 is all you hear about on the news these days.

Bali is the last place on earth I'd want to be sent to jail in for trafficking drugs. If you attempt to traffic drugs into Bali and get caught you face death or life in prison. These people in Bali are ruthless! I'm sure crime is much more controlled there.

"Shapelle Corby, 27, faces possible death by firing squad after being caught with 4.1 kilograms (nine pounds) of cannabis in her unlocked bodyboard bag at Bali's airport last October. The Gold Coast beauty therapist has denied placing the drugs in her luggage. Her legal team has produced a witness claiming Corby was unwittingly used as a courier by drug traffickers working with baggage handlers at airports in her home town of Gold Coast and Sydney." (courtesy of Yahoo! News Australia & New Zealand:http://au.news.yahoo.com/050408/19/tvd3.html)

For some reason I just don't feel moved by this case...but of course I don't want her to go to jail. If in fact, she was used as a mule without her knowledge, well whoever is behind it has a lot on their conscience. Good luck to them. I hope guilt eats their insides up.

Loss in Translation

One of the really difficult things that a translator can encounter is when you're faced with the task of having to translate terms or concepts in the source language that don't exactly exist in the language you're tranaslating into. There is a really interesting case about a language in the remote corners of Venezuela called Guaica. Apparently its really easy to find equivalent words for murder, stealing, lying, etc in English but the words good, bad, ugly and beautiful mean something completely different.

This is a list of things that are options for translating the concepts/terms of good, bad and violating tabbo:

GOOD: desirable food, killing enemies, chewing dope in moderation (chewing tabacco or coca leaves???), putting fire to one's wife to teach her to obey (what?), and stealing from anyone not belonging to the same band (tribe, ethnic group, etc).

BAD: rotten fruit, any object with a blemish or imperfection, murdering a person of the same band, stealing from a member of the extended family and lying to anyone

Violating Taboo: incest, being to close to one's mother-in-law, a married woman's eating tapir ( an animal that resembles a pig or anteater but belongs to the same family as horses and rinocerous) before the birth of the first child and a child's eating rodents

This is prime material for President Bush's compilation of items that fall within and outside his "axis of evil".

NOTE: I thought this chart in my course reader for translation studies 1 was some sort of silly fabrication to illustrate the point of loss and gain in translation, but I guess not.

Homophobia, The Silver Ring Thing and Public Transport

So I picked up a copy of the student magazine on campus called Lot's Wife. I've never read it before, I always just glance at it, but today I decided to actually read it. It was all about sex and sex-related articles. Being queer (yeah, its acceptable to say that here), sexism, sex offenders, aphrodisiacs, lusty cocktail recipes and abstinence. I was reading this magazine on the train ride from the uni, its about a 42 minute ride. It gave me time to digest the infomation...

Which brings me to the topic of abstinance. I have no problem with people who choose to wait until their married to have sex. Its clearly a personal choice. I do however have a problem with how they are promoting and campaigning it like its some sort of cult. This one particular article I read about talked about two organisations in general: True Love Waits and and The Silver Ring Thing.

True Love Waits' advice to teens is only good in a world of absolutes. Your choices are either stay pure or have sex; lose your boyfriend/girlfriend, dignity and end up as damaged goods. Purity? Can you be damaged goods and have a pure heart? This organisation tells these kids to pray before dating, never to be alone with your partner and to go on group dates WITH OTHERS FROM THE SAME ORGANISATION. That's how you stray from temptation apparently.

The Silver Ring Thing is a european organisation with the same premises basically except you confirm your abstinence by buying a silver ring and have an "accountability partner" with whom you discuss any temptations. So in other words, if you have the irresistable urge to get laid you're supposed to discuss this with another person who probably feels the same way. I don't see how any good can come out of that. Ha!

According to several sources, these organisations have evil side...they basically scare people into joining by telling kids that half the heterosexual teenage population is HIV positive, that touching someones "genitals" can result in pregnancy, that you can get HIV though sweat and tears and that oral sex can cause cancer. Anyone who believes this filth is obviously not very educated about sex. Apparently some of this stuff was metioned in a congressional analysis and the Bush administration declared that the STATEMENTS WERE TAKEN OUT OF CONTEXT. Yeah, right.

Apparently this sort of abstinence pledging delays secual activity for about 18 months. After that, everyone goes on a rampage. Who knows whether these programs are actually reducing unplanned pregnancies and STDs or just creating a new generation of sexually ignorant, mentally immature and dysfunctional adults. These groups can sometimes promote homophobic attitudes, which brings me to my next point....HOMOPHOBIA.

This is something I just don't understand. Its clearly an irrational fear. Thinking that your gay neighbour wants to get with you just because he prefers men and you just happend to be a man is rediculous. People need to stop flattering themselves!. Its like saying just because I'm heterosexual and like guys, my lab partner automatically will want to sleep with me. Does anyone else see something wrong with this??????

(And by the way, on trains here, no one waits for you to get off before they start getting on. It annoys the hell out of me)

Sic 'em Rex

There is this rather cheeky commercial on right now which is an advertisement for Antz Pantz girl's underwear. Everytime I see it I don't know whether I should laugh or be speechless. When you think of a commercial for girl's underwear, angel wings and curvy, racy models from Victoria's Secret probably come into mind, right? Not for this one. Imagine a girl, casually laying on a bed in a room with barely any furniture and very dimmly lit. She is her underwear of course, and she says, "Rex, come to me...". There is a cut to a creature similar to a porcipine, called an echidna wobbling down the hallway and entering this girls room. There is a cut back to the girl and she says, "Sic 'em Rex". There is a close up of ants proceeding to crawl up her leg, then a close up of the echidna approaching her leg with that slithery tongue that anteaters use to slurp up their ants. There is yet another close up of the girls face, she squeaks with delight. Apparently she finds having ants slurped off her leg a pleasurable experience. In the distance you can hear other women beckoning Mr. Rex with, "Come to me Rex!". He goes, he slurps and they all squeak in delight.

The Antz Pantz range has something for everyone!

Watch the advertisment at http://www.holeproof.com.au/Our-Products/Antz-Pantz.asp

Ambivalence: The New Adrenaline

One time in band camp...just kidding. (my band camp wasn't THAT fun).

I remember how I felt when I recieved my acceptance letter to Saint Louis in Madrid. I had spent all of my senior year in Costa Rica desperately wanting to get away from my miserable life there. I was nervous, but excited. Full of courage, yet I was scared. I hated being at home, but I loved my family so much. There is something about moving on to something new that is so exciting. The uncertainty of my future. The feeling of being lost, not knowing where you are. The thought of that that streets you just spent an hour wandering through will someday become as familiar as the lines on the palms of your hands. Pulling that strange level that flushes the toilet will not seem strange. In the beginning, everything is a challenge. Your mission is Life.

I enjoy getting lost. I like feeling like a foreigner. I like spending 10 minutes trying to find out how to let myself into my building. I spent my first week being unable to find my friend's residence hall, even though it ended up being just one street over and on the way to school! There is somthing about that new glowing feeling you get when you're in a new place that's addicting. We have to keep in mind that, as much as I've moved around, I've never spent a considerable amount of time in a country that I didn't speak the language. So, I've been lucky that way. I did however spend a month in Belgium visiting my friend Yumiko and had a really tough time ordering a donut and a fast food restaurant. There is something really appealing about not knowing where you will be next year. Or knowing where you will be but not what you'll be doing. Or knowing both of those but having no idea what to expect.

It took about a year from start to finish to plan this move to Ausralia. Nothing really has really gone according to plan, but it has ben great nonetheless. The older I get and the more responisble I think I need to be, the more I find out that you can plan everything. Plans always end up working in strange ways. Next year I could be teaching ESL in rural Bolivia. Going to the corner shop in a small town in northern Bulgaria to buy fresh cheese. Spending some of my nights watching the millions of stars under the Uzbekistan sky. Anywhere, but a stuffy office trying eavesdropping on the the coversation going on in the cubicle next to mine about the OC. I also won't be eating any bugs.

There's nothing better than having a partner in crime that dabbles in ambivalence. I've got all the structure I need and it eats strawberry granola and crumpets for breakfast.

"But I need that $350 juicer to make fresh apple juice in the morning..."

When I lived in Costa Rica there was this little rickety bridge that you had to drive over to get to my town, Escazú. The locals called the bridge something that translates roughly into 'the bridge of lovers' or 'the suicide bridge'. Mainly because people had a tendancy to jump off of this bridge to commit suicide for one reason or another. The thing about this bridge is that right below it was a dirty river lined with clusters of shacks that people lived in. Escazú was the place where the dirt-poor parents sent their kids to beg for money or for clothes, where people owned restaurants and where there was always someone with a house bigger than yours or higher up on the mountain than yours. It was a nice place to live in most senses. It was a different story for the people who lived under that bridge however. Everytime I went over that bridge, I was always so amazed at how small the physical gap between the rich and the poor was, but it was just that I got to look at things through a magnifined glass and realize how large the gap actually was. There was nothing in between: you either had everything or nothing plus dirty drinking water.

I just saw The Corporation the thing that the most emotive effect on me was water privatization and cheap labor. Everyone knows about cheap labor, just as everyone is aware of all of the really sick things people do to animals so that we can eat their flesh and use their bodies. But we just don't think about it because its really depressing I think. People seem to think that the earth was created so that we could do whatever we wish with it and to it. I didn't think there was one part of the world left that we weren't profiting from. I never thought that a collective group would try and say they owned drinking water and therefor would charge everyone to drink it. Its kind of like being forced to drink bottled water for the rest of your life. Someone owns that water and you have to pay them so that you can have water to drink, cook, shower and stay alive. According to an article I read at the Center for Public Integrity, "France could be described as the birthplace Suez now controls water services in 130 countries on five continents and has about 115 million customers. Vivendi Environnement has 110 million customers in more than 100 countries. Number three Thames Water of the U.K., owned by German conglomerate RWE, has 70 million customers." Vivendi Entertainment also owns Canal Plus, the major tv cable company in Spain. So media companies can own water now????

Apparently in Nicaragua's case, they are running out of options on how to repay their country's debt so the IMF and World Development Bank have been pushing them to privatize their water....

Isn't there some sort of higher law somewhere in the world that its inhumane to privatize one of the building blocks essential to life? How can any one collection of people decide that they are going to say they own water and if you don't pay for it, you can't have any?

Thursdays of Goodness

Random Thing No. 1
Today started out as an ordinary day. I had class today at 1pm as usual. On the train ride to school I was having a chat to this girl Joana who is in my Appliations of Theory unit. We rode the train back into the city yesterday, but we didn't speak to each because I wasn't sure if I knew her from class or not. So we're talking about about being international students in Australia and whether we like the Translation Studies Program or not. She invites me to her housewarming party on saturday and she also tells me that The Business of Translation (an internship unit I'm really excited about taking next semester) is crap. Apparently, the uni doesn't supply you with a steady flow of translation assignments, like I thought.

Random Thing No. 2
Before class I'm talking to Samantha, my published writer friend in the same class, about this Businisess of Translation trying to dig up some more dirt. Apparently, its impossible to get an inhouse translation job in Australia so everyone just freelances. Plus, in order to provide luxuries for youself such as a roof over your head, food, clothing, etc, you need to be proficient in at least two languages because there just isn't that much work for translators apparently. So, yeah, she can understand why Joanna said that unit is crap.

Random Thing No.3
After class I had to go to my tutorial and today my first marked traslation assignment was due. The really long one about dinosaurs I was supposed to have worked on during Easter Break. I turned that in and we began to go over our assignment for today which was to translate a few paragraphs of the first chapter of 1984. Isabel, the nice and scatterbrained peruvian, in my tutorial suggested that we each give copies of our work to the others so that we could keep track better of what others were reading. There are only 3 of us in tutorial, so that was ok. But, I had to keep flipping through papers and I kept losing myself in the paragraphs and I kept making myself dizzy. Plus my stomach was growling and attracting attention.

Random Thing No.4
On the train ride back home, I was reading this book called Volunteers in Developement. I took the train all the way to Flinders Station. Usually the train stops at this station, every one gets off and the train either goes in reverse and heads towards the uni again or it continues to the next stop. Yesterday it kept on going and today it went in reverse and by the time I realized that it wasn't going to keep going to the next stop, it was too late. So I had to get off at the next stop, Richmond. At Richmond, I wait for the next train, get on and realized it is going to Flinders Station and going in reverse again.

Random Thing No. 4
Before dinner, William and I went to the supermarket to pick up some stuff for dinner (we had stir-fry and egg rolls, which I made in the oven but didn't come out crunchy enough) and go to the pharmacy because I think I'm getting a cold. At the pharmacy, we walk around the aisles looking for cold medicine and find none. All of the cold medicine is kept behind a counter, that's why its called over the counter medicines. Well, I tell a woman behind the counter I need something for chest congestion and a sore throat. She begins to ask me a series of questions about what sort of chest congestion it is. I tell her it kind of stings. So then she calls over another person and he goes over my "symptoms" and concludes that I either have acute asthma or heart problems. I'm sure I have neither. He ended up refusing to give me just regular cold medicine because "it has heaps of other medications and we don't need to over medicate here." So apparently I'm just supposed "to see how I go" and go see a doctor if the problem persists and get a lung exam. A pharmacist refused to sell me over the counter cold medicine. Crazy.

Thank goodness its thursday.

SAILing in the Sudan

I've promised myself never to slack off so much again. Some degree of slacking off is permissable, but not for a week per sae. I almost had a meltdown today I think. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to think of dinosaurs in the same way ever again. So in the midst of my temporary misery today, I figured i should back in the game of ESL tutoring. ESL teaching will probably be the job I'll have on the side until I become a really famous translator or TRSS (Translator Rock Star Status).

I found this really cool non-for-profit centre called SAIL, which is the Sudanese Australian Integrated Learning Program out in Footscray. Apparently this centre serves the largest population of Sudanese refugees in all of Australia. Its a program that was developed by request of other institutions requesting further resources for Sudanese refugee children outside of school hours.

Each Saturday from 10:30am-11:15, there is a weekend program for the sudanese kids to learn english, play games and all of that other good stuff kids like to do. So two Saturdays from now I will start volunteering a few saturdays a month as an ESL tutor.

When I was in 6th grade I did a report on the Sudan. I remember looking up the country in our 1993 set encyclopedia brittanica and tracing the flag. I bet the kids will be thrilled by that story!

A day in the life of an entry-level translator

A day in the life of an entry-level translator
Posted by: dirtyflamingo.

Easter Break is officially over and my plans for translating x amount of words per day just didn't work out. I did however manage to find a day when I was wearing a red shirt all day and then decided to put on my pijama pants and red slippers, and remember to take a picture. Surprisingly enough, I don't own any red socks.

I'm currently working on a translation about dinosaur bone discoveries in Argentina, which is a real snooze fest by the way. As a translator, one is supposed to have a wealth of resources either at hand or at one's fingertips. Thesaurus. Bilingual dictionary. Internet. For a freelancer, working at home many times means you won't have to leave your bed, change out of your pijamas, comb your hair or have contact with the outside world, unless you need to meet with a client or go to a library. I've already done each one of those things several times and it kills all motivation for getting dressed an actually going outside. My only client right now is my professor who assigns like 50 million pages of readings and 2 translations per week. I have a giant library right in front of my apartment building with every single resource I can imagine about dinosaurs. But I also have the internet which can tell me more than everything about dinosaurs and have google.es tell me whether a certain word order choice is commonly used.

With all of the time I save from not having to leave my apartment for anything besides raspberry biscuits or frog-shaped white chocolates, I can squeeze in other leisurely activities such as enjoying my fabulous red pleather couches.

Mmmmm...an Idea

Last night William had a few people over to discuss some ideas for an association he's trying to get started. I love having people over because that means I get to make food and make others eat it. I made mini wholemeal empanadas and Spanish Patatas Olioli (basically potatoes covered in a delicious garlic flavoured mayonaise). I've never made either of those things before. I sometimes decide to experiment with new dishes at inappropriate moments, such as right before your guests are due to arrive. I don't have much experience making dough. The first time I made dough for a spinach pie I wanted to make the dough refused to stick together and it was just crumbly. Anyhow, the dough for the empanadas from scratch and it came out fantastic.

A concept I've never understood was cooking from scratch. When I moved to the states two years ago, there was all this talk of cooking from scratch. I asked exactly what that was and it turns out that its cooking without preprepared things. Making something from nothing. People seemed so surprised when something was really good and "made from scratch". Like its a superpower or somthing. Is there any other way to cook? Cooking has unfortunately become a lost art in many American families today. Its crazy how many different types of tv dinners and dinners in a bag or box you can find in supermarkets these days. People just don't have time. Somewhere along the line mothers stopped teaching their daughters how to cook. These daughters grow up, get married and then feed their husbands and families charred crap. Yes, I know the demands of having a career, raising a family and taking your kids to a million after school activities just doesn't leave much time or energy to spend an hour or more in the kitchen. So cooking "from scratch" just isn't a realistic option for many people.

Even so, when I had a stinky fulltime office job, I really looked forwards to going home and spending time preparing dinner together with Williaml, cooking solo or having a great meal on the table and ready to eat when William comes home. But that's just me. The day I have to feed my family anything that has come out of a box or a packet, the world will have come to an end.

Has anyone tasted instant rice or mashed potatos???? The stuff is vile.