Two months ago, a Dutchman contacted me by e-mail to ask me whether I’d be interested in working with him on the lyrics of a song he’d written for an obscure Dutch female singer.
He’d learnt French at school, some 40 years ago, by reading Balzac and Zola; now he was trying to write a love song for her to sing. I told him it would be my pleasure to have a look at the texts for him. After all, it would make a very pleasant change from the documents on EU legislation I was translating at the time.
I spent about two hours correcting the texts (mostly grammatical mistakes, due to his rather rusty French) and suggesting a few stylistic improvements here and there. After I’d sent the text back to him, we had a very interesting e-mail discussion on the limits of grammatical correctness in lyrics and poetry in general, which truly helped to broaden my horizons. A very enjoyable experience!
But the European legislation was waiting. So back down to earth I came…
Could you share the story of your most original translation job with us here?
Filed under: The part-time translator | Tagged: Translation
