One Sorry Blog News Service
Buenos Aires – After just nine months on the job, first-year translator Paul Rivas is quitting to pursue nobler pursuits. His decision comes at the exact halfway point between the six months that Rivas’s friend Martín Balzamo, an experienced corporate stooge, predicted he would last in his first foray into working for a for-profit organization, and the one year Rivas told the company he would work as the in-house Spanish-English translator.
“Ni modo,” said Rivas.
When asked to explain the Mexican expression of which he is so fond, which means something between “whatever” and “tough shit”, for English-speaking readers, Rivas just shrugged, shook his head and said, “No, I don’t know how to translate it.”
When asked if translating such things wasn’t actually the job he’d been performing since September, Rivas was quick to point out that it wasn’t that sort of translation.
“Birth certificates, marriage certificates, divorce proceedings, leases, contracts, court rulings, medical records, lawsuits, financial articles and promotional materials,” said Rivas. “Stuff that’s so boring it make your eyes bleed just to read it, let along translate it.”
Rivas estimated that he had worked on 4.5 legitimately fun projects, or one every two months, and had spent the rest of the time convincing himself that translating résumés for friends of the owner of the company who claimed in those very résumés to be fluent English speakers was worth the money. The highlight of the almost 500,000 words Rivas translated in his nine months as a full-time translator was the closing in a letter a Spanish-speaking woman wrote to a man with whom she used to live, in which she called him an ‘HIJO DE RE-MIL PUTAS’, or, ‘SON OF A REALLY THOUSAND WHORES’.”
Medical translations are apparently the most challenging, due to the unfamiliarity of the vocabulary, which can require the translator to spend up to ten minutes looking up a single three-letter abbreviation. They also come with the most responsibility, with the translator knowing that if he doesn’t do his job correctly, some patient might get the wrong organ transplanted, or worse. However, due to their complexity, medical translations are also the most satisfying when finished.
Lease agreements, on the other hand, are easy money, even at the Latin American wages Rivas has been earning. Never having actually read any of the leases he’d signed as a tenant, Rivas now gets a visible hop in his step when assigned a lease translation.
“I never would have imagined when I started, but a 3000-word lease really only takes three hours, and that’s with a tea break,” Rivas said. “If I was making the 10 cents a word people get paid to do this in the U.S., I’d be laughin’.”
Yet the translator’s life is not all leases, and Rivas had a hard time squaring his time in Dick Flacks’s social movements classes at UCSB with translating contracts for Lockheed Martin to sell a bunch of GPS units to the Peruvian Air Force.
“At the end of the day,” said Rivas, “I often felt like I was working for lawyers who were working for people with whom I would never associate. Not that I associate with lawyers.”
Nevertheless, Rivas is leaving his translation job with a smile, adhering to his employment philosophy to always go out on top. He will remember the most enjoyable part of his job as being explaining phrases like “lock-down defense” and “having a deep bench helps us stay fresh at crunch time” to the woman who sits next to him at work, his esteemed colleague the English-Spanish translator Ana Paula Bonifacino, who translates game stories for the Houston Rockets website.
“Ana Paula’s a real, certified translator, and if it hadn’t been for all her help I probably would have been fired long ago,” mused Rivas, “but at least she knows what ‘posterized’ means now.”
