Plaza Hotel

My life is all humbling moments. I suppose that’s what George would say. You know. George. In Seinfeld.

So I’m given this great opportunity to translate a documentary on NASA into French. That was last week. Deadline is this Friday and it’s done already. It wasn’t easy though. And not for the reasons that would first come to mind. The reason was that the English version was so badly written.

The evening I show the script to Sara, is the night she is going to meet her friend B. at the Plaza Hotel. So we meet on the place in front of the Plaza and walk to the Park and sit down on a bench and I show her the script and she bursts out laughing reading the first pages. She pulls out a pen from a pocket of her coat and starts editing the text, still laughing. So I say, “So what do you think? It’s not good, right?”

She laughs, she edits. I am looking at the sky, looking at the stone bridge. There are 20-odd pages. After the first 5 I have to take the manuscript from her hands. I ask again, “So what? You don’t have to edit it, you know. It’s bad English but I understand what the writer means. I just need to know how much I can rely on the text.”

Sara says, “He/she must be German. It’s very German.”

That was last week. Two days after I got the job and the script. What I am thinking then is I should tell the boss that the English version needs to be edited by an American. After all, my name is going to be associated to the project. The boss is of European origins. Maybe she did not notice. So I write a long email to explain my doubts about the English text. How the voice-over cannot possibly be done in English with this version. I also say that I found out some technical inconsistencies and that I have to fact-check all the info in the documentary before I can even start translating.

I say, “I took the liberty to show the text to a friend of mine who is a professional editor. She found a lot of mistakes and things that you just don’t say in English. She said the writer was probably German.”

I’m thinking, my name is going to be on the credits. I’m thinking, you shouldn’t send this email.

I show the first pages of the script to some American friends. They all confirm what Sara said. So I send the email. And then I go to sleep.

The next morning I have an email waiting for me from the boss. She thanks me for mentioning this. I feel relieved. Then I read the next sentence.

The next sentence is, “I will mention this to our native American writer.”

The first expression that came to mind was, “worst case scenario.” The documentary was written by an analphabet. But an American one. Goodbye credibility. This was your first and last translation for them, dumbass.

I think about Sara in the park, editing. The red sky and the dirigible that kept flying silently around the Plaza Hotel like a fly around… well… you know… How I told Sara that the day I am rich and successful I’ll pay to have the dirigible display absurd slogans in red letters and all. Or maybe “The world is yours.” A rat runs from the pond to the bushes. Like a hardboiled parody of the 2 extra cute squirrels we saw on our way to the bench and that were posing in front of my cameras like old pros.

Finally, I got in touch with the writer. She explained that she knows the text sucks. She tells me that she had been given an impossible deadline.

I don’t usually rat on people. But really, you should read the sentences I had to translate. Translating a badly written text is as much difficult as translating something written by a genius. Except it implies more work. You fix/translate a sentence, and then the next one that was almost ok in the original version is no longer good now that you have edited the one that precedes so you have to fix that one too as you translate it but then it’s the whole paragraph that needs to be rewritten. Next thing you know you have rewritten the whole text.

And when you find mistakes about facts the documentary is about then you know you have a problem, Houston.

Reading this text almost convinced me that I should be more careful with my entries here. I know they are a breeding tank for typos and grammatical monsters.

I walked into the Plaza of course. Wouldn’t you? I liked the inside. High ceiling, columns and marble. Nobody wearing flipflops there -- looks like heaven.
It was the people inside I didn’t like. There must have been some party going on, because there were those dudes in tux that kept coming in. Half the stones that were around the necks of the old biddies accompanying them, they would have represented enough money to buy the whole block your living on. They were not all old though. I remember that beautiful girl with long dark hair in a long, silver, tight evening dress. The lad at her arm — young clean, Norman Bates-like — he looked like his morning he had invented a cure against cancer, AIDS and myopathy while he was putting gomina in his hair in the bathroom.

I had to get out. That was enough. The shiny silverware. The red carpet. The crystal chandeliers. The evening dresses. The hostess with her black dress that left her back naked, and only partially covered her breast so that, really, the only thought of wearing a bra was ridiculous. She was standing there. Greeting those guys. Her dress, I thought they were only wearing them on TV shows like the Oscars Ceremony. Because, when you see them in real life, up close, they don’t really cover anything, those two wide stripes of fabric falling from the neck to cover a nipple each. While trying not too look like I was looking at her breast I wondered in what kind of places she was living in. Was she doing that full time? What would be the peak of her professional hopes? Greeting Paris Hilton? She was beautiful. She was cute. Was she doing that to pay off her loan for med school? Or was she hunting Sugar Daddies on the side? She had a dress and black high heel shoes that had turned me into a replica of one of the big columns of the main hall. If on top of that, she was returning her dress to a rental shop after her shift and took the subway to go back to her dump in some shitty neighborhood, then my heart was hers.

I pushed the revolving doors. Outside, the limousines were waiting in the night.