Hello!

On the news front, Amplitudes is a top-ten finalist in the Anthology category of the Locus Awards! So now Aiki’s story (A Step into Emptiness/Ein Schritt ins Leere) has been nominated for awards in two languages. Yay!

I will be at Metropolcon here in Berlin the first weekend of July! Except for Saturday, probably, because I have a roller derby game that day. If you’re there, say hello!

Translation

I’m currently neck deep in the translation project. This is the longest thing I’ve ever translated, and I’m about two-thirds done a first pass. My goal right now is to put the words into English, even if the structure is weird. Sometimes I fix something right away because the syntax really doesn’t work like that in English (though it’s fine in German), but other times I leave it because it’s unusual but not wrongbad. I’m also making extensive use of the comment function in Word when I know something is weird but need more distance from it to have perspective. 

I’m also leaving notes when I am forced to pick a word in English but there are too many options and one of them might be a better choice. For example, from today’s section, the original German has something heftig pulsierend, which I currently have as intensely pulsing, with a note on intensely, because heftig can also mean violently, fiercely, severely, vigorously, strenuously, and an entire browser screen of other options. So it’s a note for me to come back to later.

I’m also keeping a running list of invented words and other terminology and how I translated that so I use the same thing. As a gift for future me who will have to make it consistent. And the poor future copyeditor as well. (Now that I’m getting paid occasionally for professional copyedits, I’m trying to make my peers’ lives easier.)

After I finish this draft, I’m going to go back to the start and make it English and possibly deal with some of my potentially questionable word choices. There will probably be a third round where I have the German open beside my translation and read the English while comparing it to the German. The final version is due by the end of the year, so I have time.

Vibes-based vocabulary

One thing that this project is making clear to me is how much German vocabulary I learned from context so their meanings are based on vibes, as well as how much I rely on breaking words down into their component parts to understand the meaning.

For example, in once scene, a character sackt zusammen, and I reached that phrase, performed the action mentally, and said, “What’s this called in English when you just, like, [makes a motion like a sack collapsing on itself]? Argh.” So I went to my preferred online bilingual dictionary, put in zusammensacken, and received slump.

This might also be an effect of my brain being in the German track and not being able to switch to the English track very quickly when it encounters a less common word or one that is excessively polysemous (like heftig).

The importance of knowing how to use a dictionary

If you just pick the first word in the list, you might be wrong. Going back to heftig again, the first word is fierce, then severe, then hefty. I might accept pulsing severely, but fiercely and heftily don’t sound right.

Sometimes I don’t like any of the options, so I drop the phrase into my search engine and see what comes up and if there are other contexts it appears in.

A few times, I’ve had to go to a German-German dictionary to see if I can figure out which of the word’s senses I need, and that’s definitely a mental challenge.

That’s all I’ve got

I apologize for the short and somewhat disorganized letter this month! Translating is fun, but it’s a very different type of mentally tiring than writing or copyediting, so my capacity is … lower than usual. Which means it’s a good thing I took 2 months off my usual editing job, because I would be less than useless for them.

Until next time!