The Christmas party went well. My thanks to the ladies of the Washington Korean Women's Society for having invited me to emcee for them. I was happy to hear that people were entertained, and was doubly glad that we had great speeches from everyone. Special props to the Consul General of the Korean Embassy, who deftly riffed off my Konglish jokes to hilarious effect.
Now I'm home, and I've got until 3AM to proof a 9-page, single-spaced document that arrived while the party was going on (oh, yes: I turned on the BlackBerry during a lull in the proceedings... CrackBerry, indeed). Nine pages in three hours? Who're we kidding? No way that's gonna happen. I've already emailed my BK contact to say that I'll work as fast as I can, but I won't make a 5PM (Seoul time) deadline.
So-- back to the grind! Gotta do as much as I can.
UPDATE: It's 3AM, and this is just insane. The 9-page document is riddled with errors. I'm crawling through it, and after three hours, I'm barely halfway through page 2. I'm also getting cross-eyed and am calling it a night; I've informed my Seoul contact of this. If this gets me fired, so be it. It's ridiculous to expect a person to work through the night after having spent six hours emceeing. You'd need guru-like stamina and powers of concentration. Not this tar baby.
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Marathon
12 years ago
2 comments:
Gawd, I tried editing and translating (korean to english) for money and it was a friggin nightmare. It's one of those things that I found really interesting to do as a hobby but downright repulsive as a job. Mental labor doesn't even begin to describe it. And what's even worse is that after doing it long-term, your natural English starts coming out all friggin weird because you're always trying to equate the two very different languages during translation and you get into that Konglish vibe.
JW,
I know how you feel about the Konglish vibe. If you hang around mutants long enough, you start to think the mutants are the normal folks. Same goes with twisted English-- deal with it long enough, and pretty soon you start to forget which way is up.
Kevin
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