Language saved me. I almost let the teachers convince me I was hopeless, dull-witted, too spaced out and forgetful ever to be more than a C- student. Then came German class. Then Spanish. Berlitz Teach Yourself Portuguese records borrowed from the library. By the end of university, foreign language success had bolstered my confidence enough that I allowed myself to find my competence in other areas, such as physics and astronomy, trig. Had the money kept coming, I could have hidden in that safe world of academia forever, as some I know have managed to do by becoming profs after grad school.
So languages are my friend, old and dear friends. When I exhausted the day-time language curriculum at my alma mater, I took to joining the old folks in the continuing ed classes at night. That’s where I did Italian for business and travel, one term of Demotic Greek, Latin I and Latin II. Two decades later, I again turned to my old friend foreign language study to get me through the year of separation between marriage to and divorce from my second husband. Farsi came to my rescue.
My first real job after immigrating to Canada was at a smallish company that administers travel insurance claims for the large underwriters in town. It is a competitor of the company that employs me now. One thing that came immediately to my attention at that company was the fact that they were sending foreign bills off site for translation. Not only were they paying ridiculous fees for these simple translations, but they had to put a claim on hold for three to five business days waiting for the translation to come back.
“You know, I could translate that for you in a minute,” I said one day to one of the claims examiners. (I was not a claims examiner, but worked in Recovery, where we sent paid claims to the government health programs to recoup a portion of what we’d paid out.) The examiner took me up on it, so I grabbed a pencil and wrote lightly next to the terms on the bill: emergency visit, physician’s fee, supplies, medicine.
Soon I had brought my collection of dictionaries to work and lined them up on the shelf overhead: Langenscheidt’s German, University of Chicago Spanish, Collins Portuguese with its bright orange cover. Soon I was turning over the translations in under two minutes, as the terms were always the same and stayed in my memory. It was always cast, blood work, x-ray, date of admission, date of discharge, diagnosis. The same words over and over they had been paying to have translated again and again.
It was satisfying to be able to help, to see money saved, to speed up the claims, to watch the examiners who hovered over me or chatted with my team leader while I scribbled walk away happy with translated bill in hand. Being able to use my long-useless languages was fulfilling and made my job more enjoyable.
Then one day my team leader’s manager came to me and asked me to stop. It wasn’t in my job description and I was not authorized to do it.
That was one straw landing on the camel’s back. There were other straws at that place. I don’t need to relive any of that now.
At my new job, I let it be known from day one that I speak and can translate Spanish. Although we don’t pay much for translations where I work (we send them to a local non-profit that helps immigrants adapt to life in Windsor and find jobs), it can take weeks for the organization to find someone who speaks the language we need translated. We have no Plan B in place, no professional translation company to handle the ones that non-profit cannot do for us.
So it wasn’t long before I was being handed the Cuban and Mexican bills.
Then one day someone asked if I could by chance read French. Yes, I suppose I can.
Then one day someone asked if I could by chance read German. It’s rusty, I told H, but I suppose I can muddle my way through with a dictionary.
So I have easily become the gap-filler in that previously less than efficient system. From my three fellow examiners, I probably get an average of one translation per day. Some days none, some days two or three. Again my little collection of dictionaries are lined up on the shelf over my computer. Only THIS TIME if anyone dare try to take this away from me, I will growl like a dog with a bone. Getting a translation is the highlight of my day.
On Thursday the youngest member of my team came to my desk and handed me a client’s folder. “Sorry, another translation for you,” she said.
I took the file from her, assuming it was Spanish again. When I opened it, I saw a page covered with squiggles. It was Greek.
“Sorry, N,” I said. “I can’t translate this. It’s Greek.”
She looked at me with the large brown eyes that probably have gotten her most of what she’s ever asked for in life.
Silence.
“I mean I took a night class in modern Greek years ago, but…”
She just kept staring with those big eyes–as if the truth were self-evident and I was simply refusing to acknowledge it: if you can turn any mysterious page of squiggles into English, then you can turn them all into English.
“And I have a Greek dictionary,” I conceded, glancing at the shelf over my desk. “But…”
Silence.
Big brown eyes and silence.
I took the file back from her with a sigh. “OKAY, I’ll give it a TRY,” I said.
She smiled and walked away.
Last night while Sylvain watched The Bourne Ultimatum with his dad, I bluffed my way through the Greek document. Never mind that I couldn’t look anything up in my dictionary until I remembered the order of letters in that alphabet. “alfa veeta yamma delta epsilon…” I started and stalled. “Zeeta eeta theeta…” ???
First I tried transcribing the bill into Word after downloading a Greek font so I could paste it into Babelfish. Ha. After an hour of transcribing, my paste job turned into “???? ?? ?????? ???? ????? ? ?? ????? ??? ?????” in the translation window. Sigh. It came down to looking up each word in the dictionary, a painful process which finally rendered something that–to my surprise–made sense.
