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In September I went to Madison, Wisconsin to take the ATA (American Translators Association) certification exam. There were about 20 of us taking it at one of the university facilities. Many language pairs were represented. Spanish and French were the most common. I may have been the only person there doing German-English.

Until recently, ATA exams were purely paper-and-book affairs. This was one of the new computer exams, so we each brought our own laptop and had to write our translation in Wordpad (because it has fewer special features than Word).

Preparation and anxiety levels varied quite a bit among the test takers. One gentleman arrived early and wheeled in a big suitcase filled with every conceivable reference book. These he proceeded to arrange in careful piles before the test. My immediate neighbor, on the other hand, strolled in about 10 minutes before start time with nothing but his laptop and two pocket dictionaries. He sat back looking cool while others were doing pranayama, praying to St. Jerome, making deer-in-headlights faces, etc. I bet he either passed with flying colors or failed miserably.

There were three vigilant proctors. Their job is to meander around the room making sure no one is using unauthorized websites or engaging in any other translation-related mischief.

We received a paper packet with three passages, from which we selected two for translation. My choices were a formal magazine article, a scientific passage, and a chatty, informal magazine article. At first I decided to avoid that last one because the informality seemed to entail a risk of too many judgment calls with which the graders could potentially disagree. But after completing the first passage, I realized I was not in the mood to tackle a highly specific piece with unfamiliar technical terminology. Are they going to call time while I’m noodling around Wikipedia trying to figure out the difference between various kinds of thingamajigs, I thought? So I went for the chatty piece and of course I drove home wondering whether the graders would disagree with my decisions. Too free? Not free enough? My husband took me out for a drink.

Finally, last Saturday a big envelope came from the ATA with my certificate and a letter of congratulations. I am now allowed to style myself “ATA certified from German into English.” In order to maintain the certificate, I have to earn a certain number of continuing education points every few years.

So what’s the point of being a certified translator? Obviously, certification by a professional body indicates to potential clients that you are not a charlatan.

And for some jobs, such as translation of birth/death/marriage certificates for official purposes, the organization requesting the documents will only accept the work of a certified translator. Years ago when I was emigrating to Canada I had to pay a certified German-English translator for an English version of my German police record even though I could have translated it myself. (NB: it was clean. I once got done for jaywalking in Munich but that wasn’t even on there.)

Another consideration is that as machine translation expands and work for human translators contracts, it might be increasingly advantageous to have special credentials.

So, although certification is not necessary for a good career in translation, it’s nice to have. And now I have it! I’m number 520122. Hooray.

Last month I read Madame Bovary for the first time. Afterwards I decided to re-read Effi Briest, having read it about 20 years ago at St. Andrews. I used to think of Effi Briest as “the German Madame Bovary” just because it was a realist novel about an adulterous wife, but really they’re quite different. One could write about the differences (in tone, characterization, focus, moral/social concerns) at great length but since this is just a blog, here’s a fun chart full of spoilers:

Penguin has an excellent English translation of Effi Briest by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers.

With regard to Goethe’s play Götz von Berlichingen, “Lessing, who had just held up his own newly published Emilia Galotti as a model of how a stage-play should be constructed, was bitter; he exclaimed angrily that Goethe had filled sausage skins with sand and sold them as rope.”

A friend took this photo at Karlstein Castle in the Czech Republic. It seems they don’t serve my kind in there.

I do have a cold. I powered through it during Christmas preparations but spent the Feast of Stephen in bed. And that’s where I’d be today, as well, if there weren’t things to do.

Most people have a cold in one of my favorite poems: Weltende, by Jakob van Hoddis. Good old Raymond Furness of St. Andrews read this one to us in a German Expressionism lecture and I thought it was just the most delightful little apocalyptic poem ever. Seriously disturbing in a way, but also darkly comic with its blunt descriptions of catastrophe and its wry juxtaposition of everyday annoyances and huge disasters. The last two lines, which have the exact same meter in the original, are “Most people have a cold. / The railroads are falling from the bridges.” The end!

Here it is in German:

Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,

In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei,

Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei

Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.

Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen

An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.

Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.

Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.

A couple years ago I thought about trying to translate Weltende. But after ruminating on the first line, especially the word “Bürger” (“bourgeois”? “burgher”? something else?), for half an hour with no progress, I got to thinking about what it would be like to write an Onion-style article based on each line of the poem. And I did it. Like most of the funny things I write, it was only slightly funny. Here’s the first one (notice how I tried to make the guy seem as consistently bourgeois as possible):

AREA MAN LOSES HAT
John Burger, a manager at a local store, was surprised when a strong wind carried his hat away last Tuesday as he was heading into Starbuck’s Coffee on Main Street. “It literally just flew off my head,” said Burger, 41. He added, “Maybe my head is too pointy.”

So it went on in that vein, with mixed success.

There are a lot of translations of Weltende into English and I don’t love any of them, except for this one by Rolfe-Peter Wille, which is accompanied by an insightful essay.

Meanwhile, Google Translate sez:

The citizen flies from the pointed head the hat, In all the air it echoes like shouting, Roofers fall off and go in two And on the coasts – one reads – the flood rises. The storm is here, the wild seas pluck On land to crush thick dams. Most people have a cold. The railroads fall from the bridges.