bktheirregular

If anyone hears inarticulate screaming coming from the eastern Mediterranean in the next few days, don't worry. It's (probably) not another riot, just your friendly correspondent venting frustration with translating a book's worth of agreements so poorly written as to border on the incoherent.

Case in point: "200,000 in share capital." 200,000 what? The thing was written pre-euro, so it would naturally seem to be drachma, but since the drachma was worth less than one red cent when this agreement was written (and that's being generous with the exchange rates), you're talking less than two thousand bucks in share capital for the whole limited-liability company. Which goes back to one of the core tenets of law school: if something sounds wrong, something's probably wrong, and you just need to figure out what it is.

It's one of those days where my needs boil down to a Halligan tool and an appropriate kneecap to thwack with it.

Dear document drafters:

I know that in the Greek language, sometimes people put the surname first, sometimes the given name first. Is it too much to ask for people to pick one order and stick with it? As opposed to switching back and forth in the same document?

And especially when you're transcribing English names, when there is a definite rule about how it has to be done? Especially, especially, when dealing with someone with a surname that can be mistaken for a given name?

*headdesk*

The assignment yesterday was to put together a summary of a memo of about eight pages. Didn't need to be a full translation, just a summary of the important points.

Unfortunately, in order to summarize, I needed to do the full translation. My reading comprehension isn't up to it, otherwise. So, being told that the summary should take less time than a full translation? Doesn't quite work out like expected.

It's quite frustrating at times. My reading comprehension in English is a little odd - I don't hear the words as my eye passes over them, but rather, I sort of absorb chunks of text at a time. Sort of like pattern recognition, which works rather quickly. That doesn't work in Greek at all.

Ah, well. Translation done, summary done. On to the next task.

Been late on answering requests on that words meme thingy. Things have been busy; sorry.

So, tried to make a purchase the other day, using my debit card - one of those cases where I didn't have the cash in my wallet, but had plenty in my account to cover the purchase. As is customary here, I handed over my Greek ID card with the bank card; generally they ask for it, so I developed the habit of just handing it over anyway.

If only the name on the ID card matched the name on the bank card. I've probably griped about this before, but they kind of mangled my name on the ID card. My last name doesn't translate properly - or more to the point, it doesn't transliterate well at all. Six letters, half of them silent, so my last name on the card begins with an "N", not a "K". OK, I said, but the Greek ID card also has space for spelling out my name in Latin characters, right? So they can just spell it right in that space. No, the National Police official said as he put my information into the computer, they convert it letter-by-letter from the Greek. That's the procedure, and they can't deviate from it.

So my Greek ID card was no good for identifying me as the proper holder of my bank card, which was set up before I'd gotten the national card, and more or less had my proper name on it, spelled with all the proper characters. I still carry my New York driver's license, so that should be a match, right?

Well, that "more or less" above includes one additional quirk: in place of a middle name, Greeks use a patronym. Since my father shares my first name, my middle initial was rendered on my bank card as "B". Which isn't so much of a problem until you look at my driver's license and see that my middle initial is actually "K". And complicating things, my middle name is rendered in Greek on my national ID card as an extension of my first name, and the cashier saw that and thought that what he was seeing on the bank card was actually my first name, my father's first initial, and my middle name - he thought the bank card belonged to someone whose last name was in fact my middle name, and was thinking he was seeing some convoluted sort of identity fraud.

I explained to him that the problem was that my last name had all those silent letters, which the police refused to carry over in the back-translation of my name (it's a variant of the joke of the auto-translator; punch up Google and feed in "the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten", and you'll see what I mean). I showed him my New York driver's license. Both of them had mug shots of me on them, by the way.

Finally, two cashiers got their heads together, hashed out a rough translation, and decided that either I was telling the truth or I was an absolutely hopeless fraudster. So they finally ran the card through, and I made my purchase.

Spent some of the next day thinking that I shouldn't gripe too much, considering how many times you run across silent letters in English. Then it occurred to me that a language with six different ways of writing a short "i", indistinguishable by pronunciation, has got problems of its own. Add to that the problems of a bureaucracy that can't conceive of someone being given a name in a Latin alphabet that doesn't correspond letter-to-letter with a Greek equivalent, and...

...joy. Latest document to translate not only does the annoying back-and-forth flipping of first and last names (pick one method and STICK WITH IT, why don't you?!?), but it seems to be making up words out of whole cloth for converting currency into euros. Anyone know where I can get a large-type hardcover edition of Strunk and White? And when I say hardcover, I would prefer an edition bound in lead or steel.

Dear Greek document writers:

When you're writing out a name, I can't tell whether it's supposed to be written with the given name first or with the surname first. And it doesn't help when you write out a list of names and apparently waffle back and forth in the same list in the same document. I can handle it either way, but it'd be a real help if you could pick one pattern and friggin' STICK TO IT, mmmkay?

Yours in frustration,

Bruce

Me: "I've checked every dictionary I could get my hands on, and I can't find this word [προέβημεν] in any of them. You got any ideas?"
Colleague: "Oh, yeah. That's archaic Greek. Means 'we proceeded with'."

Maybe once I'm done with this translation, I should feed it into an English-to-pirate-English converter. Or pepper it with bits of "Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe".

OK, maybe I'm a narrow-minded foreigner in this place, but Greek can handle subject-verb-object construction. Or even object-verbed-by-subject. Instead, I keep running into sentences in legal documents which are verb-subject-object, or verb-object-subject, and after five read-throughs, I still can't tell the subject from the object, and that sort of thing is kind of important in a legal document, you know what I mean?

If I'd handed in documents as poorly constructed as the ones I'm trying to translate, I'd have been failed out of whatever class I was taking. And it's not just a mediocre understanding of a foreign language; I've given some of these documents to native speakers who were baffled as to what the writers were trying to say.

One thing I miss in Athens: micro-coated aspirins. You can get aspirin, but only in blister packs, and they're the sort that taste like chalk when you try to swallow them...

And in other news, now that my presence in Greece is relatively safe and solid, I can now take the time to take classes to improve my language skills in the native tongue. The only problem is, I don't know which level of course to take - if I take a level that's too low, it's a waste of time and money for being taught stuff I already know, while if I take a level that's too high, I end up spending time and money to be completely confuzzled.

I *think* I'm at an intermediate level; I can sort of survive in casual conversation, but my vocabulary's got more holes in it than a block of Swiss cheese.

("I don't like Swiss cheese. All those holes in it mean you get less for your money." - Max, Sam and Max: Culture Shock)

Ah, well. Maybe the best solution is to walk in the door and ask.