Bad Day at the Office

If I actually had an office, yesterday would have been a bad day.  As it happens I work at my computer sitting at the dining room table or at the bench on a moooo stool, so all I ended up feeling was highly embarrassed, frustrated and then quite angry. At least in the privacy of my own home a ‘bad day at the office’ means I can cry into my pillow without upsetting the harmonious ‘wa’ of my Japanese colleages.

To be honest I’ve never really had a bad day at work before – I’ve had days where I’ve been upset about something personal and getting through the day was hard, or the day I had to run round preparing for a guest speaker and then had to stand for hours in a hot auditorium to field student questions, and during which I actually had to sit down as nearly fainted – which resulted in first miscarriage. OK, so there was no hard evidence that one busy day did it but the time frame fit and I needed something to blame.

What I mean are days where you are told your work is not up to par.

This happened once, on a much much lesser scale, way back when I was like 25 and really just starting out on the road of translating while employed in the Careers Office at ‘the’ university. I was asked to translate a letter from Japanese to English. I made the mistake  of translating the first line. Something along the lines of “As the spring weather turns to the warmer days of summer the leaves change and the rice paddies abound in luscious hues of green.”

Or similar. My wine soaked memory eludes me.

The Vice President of the University, himself, came down to the office, sat me down and bollocked me. Did we say that kind of ridiculous shit about the changing of seasons in the first line of English letters? Of bloody course not, so what the hell was I doing putting it in. It needed to sound natural.

amateur, amateur mistake on my part.

I changed it to ‘I hope this letter finds you in good health’ or something equally as unrelated to weather.

And then came yesterday…

A couple of weeks ago I got asked to do a translation through the ‘central translation office’ at ‘the’ university. It is actually a separate company but located on campus and as of April, they are now responsible for all university translations that need to be outsourced. They are the middle man. They are also the editors and checkers, to the best of my knowledge, although as far as I know they just have Japanese staff with really good English and no native speakers.

It was a questionnaire for students asking them to say, on a scale of 1-5, whether they identified with the following statements. Statements such as ‘Demonstrate initiative and take the lead in reaching team goals’ – or similar.  I finished it two days before the deadline and submitted it.

On the morning of the deadline I got an email saying the faculty or staff member who requested the translation wasn’t happy with it because it was too ‘wakarinikui’ and that non-native English speakers would be reading it too and therefore using words like ‘demonstrate’ and ‘persevere’ were shithouse and it needed to be changed. It was too much of a direct translation.

You should have seen the Japanese. Very direct and not non-Japanese native friendly by any means. The only instructions I got at the time I was asked to do it were ‘can you take this translation on please’. ‘Yes’. ‘thank you’.

So I read the ‘supervisor’s’ comments, took on board his suggestions to change things to ‘Am aware of’ instead and reworded the questions he just didn’t personally like.

I heard nothing back for TWO fuckin days so yesterday I sent a friendly email to my project manager at the central translation office – saying, hey, hi there, lovely whether, changing seasons and all that, have a free weekend up ahead and just wondered if you had any work on the horizon.

I do not have a free weekend (have girlfriends coming with children whom we are going to make all play nicely together while we drink wine), but had feeling something wasn’t right.

She replied with something along the lines of ‘the supervisor is not satisfied with your translation and is therefore commissioning another translator to re-do it. We do not budget for translations to be done twice so you will not be getting paid. We hope you understand, yaddah yaddah, changing seasons, green rice paddies.’

My first thought was shock – shock that I had done something so shit that they thought it needed to be entirely re-done. Twas highly embarrassing and I sat crying into my coffee (and then my pillow) for a good hour. I’m not used to being told I’m shithouse. I really just need to toughen the fuck up.

Hub got home, could see I had had too much wine, and still proceeded to say that perhaps I just needed to be more careful next time. Which set me off again cause who the fuck needs a husband that doesn’t get on the ‘bitch about the workplace’ train with you? He then asked to read my contract, and read it he did. Nowhere does it say if your translation is ‘unsatisfactory’ will you be paid nothing  – in this case about two days of work and 600 dollars. Also says translators will be given ‘ample’ time for changes and any requested editing – I wasn’t given a deadline for the changes so automatically thought it all still needed to be in by the actual translation deadline – which was like three hours away.

Today I asked one of the other translators (friend from working at the university days) directly if he got ‘the’ translation re-do. He said yes but couldn’t see why it had to be redone as it wasn’t incorrect it was just not in the style the supervisor wanted. A style I had no idea about when I got asked to do it. SOOO, he got sent MY translation (ya know, that one I’m not getting paid for), and a detailed fuckin description of the audience – i.e., it needed to be in monkey speak like ‘I try hard’, ‘I am a leader’ etc.

Anyhooooo, the office has agreed to send me the finished ‘good’ translation and I intend on comparing the fuckers and unless that thing isn’t 100% different I will be getting hub to pen a mean ‘give me my money’ you twats.

Or I won’t.

Don’t really want to rock the boat and become known as that difficult freelancer who likes to get too involved.

Meh, got another translation in today (short $60 job) so perhaps should just drop it.

What would you do?

In other news, it was hub’s birthday yesterday and we had the perfect family meal sitting around the dining room table and talking about our days. We should do this more often!

SDGH&QL