Phew! My little translation job is taking more out of me than I had imagined. I am really, really glad to have these three weeks on my own, because it’s taking an awful lot of concentration. I don’t think it was really going to be compatible to be actively homeschooling a six-year old and doing this at the same time. Not for me anyhow, but I do tend to be a bit distractible. My bonus for all this work is that I’ve found out a whole bunch of things about Tibetan Buddhism that I didn’t know before. Very interesting.

This is one of the places in the book, Phuktal (or Phugtal) Gompa. Wow!

At the start of the translation process, my colleague and I just read the book to see what was in it. I needed to get a feel for the structure, the ambience and so on. We both felt that the grammatical structure was not very appropriate for English. I’ll leave out the grammatical details, but we decided to shift the whole tense structure and that has quite a lot of repercussions. It’s hard to keep track of when I’m dealing with it, but when I read it through, it seems to work just fine. I hope we are doing the right thing. I really think we are, but it’s right on the edge of what I would consider to be within the scope of a translation.

Anyway, the next step is to translate the French very roughly into English. This is a singe. I wouldn’t say a monkey could do it, but there a plenty of translation machines that can. In this case it’s important that I do it myself because I learn the detail of what the book is saying in the process. It doesn’t really take too long anyway. Just like the stupid machines, if I get to a word I’m stuck on, I leave it in French. At the end of this, I have a monstrosity of a text that is at least mostly in English, and preserves the content of the original. It has the wrong words, the wrong sentence structure, everything is wrong, but it helps me remember what was intended in the original, and above all, it’s no longer in French. It’s important to get away from the original language because it’s amazing the linguistic pull it can have on the mind, tricking me into using turns of phrase or words that I wouldn’t normally consider. Whereas bad English is just bad English and gets fixed.

So now I have the hardest part. I have to make the author’s experience mine and completely redraft his work in English. It bears some resemblance to acting. My rotten draft has become the script and the basis for interpretation. If I can’t understand the script, I refer back to the original briefly. My author’s experiences were pretty intense and he was a very young man when he was living these events. As a good ‘actress’, I have to take all that in my stride, in fact I have to become it to some extent. It would be difficult to immerse myself properly with someone constantly asking me if it’s snack time yet, and can the snack be chocolate? I’m writing about a place where the total nutritional variety consists of about 5 items – and that’s just the cosiest part. Also, it wouldn’t necessarily be accurate to say that I’m enjoying it. I value the experience very much, but it’s quite a difficult one. Some of the events and emotions I have to describe are quite extreme, in all directions, good and bad. I catch myself wanting to put off certain sections, because I don’t really feel like processing all the emotions in them. But I have to do them anyway, because it’s not going to get any easier once these three weeks are up. Some parts are lighter and even funny. Then there are the technical linguistic difficulties, but they are par for the course. I’ve spent quite a bit of time with the thesaurus and haven’t always found the solutions I was hoping for – yet. So, I have to get all this part done before my family get back, or it will go hard with me. On top of all the emotional upheaval, I have this huge sense of responsibility for producing something of good literary quality. In the space of three weeks.

After that, there’s several phases of rereading, spell-and-grammar-checking, making sure nothing got left out, that the content came through unmangled, and that none of the presentation got screwed up, then rereading again to convince myself that I’m as happy with it as I’m going to be. But all that should be less intense.

I hope it will be OK.