turktrans blog

It is snowing in Ankara. The season’s first snow. The city is putting its white clothes on slowly, calmly. Children rushing here and there in the snow. Well, it is not enough to build snowman or ride sleds. But it is falling, and snow on the trees and children in the snow is enough to compose a beatiful picture and lead to flashbacks.

This lovely view takes me to my blissful childhood in a deserted (more deserted during winters) village in a northern east region of Turkey that can be properly called a snowland. We used to play from early morning till sunset rolling down the hills, building snowman, or riding sleds, our ears, noses, hands and feet turning to purple.

Now, as a grown up, I have deadlines to keep, and a website to launch.

“I wish I were a child again playing in the snow!” I thought.
“I wish I were a snowflake,” said my 7 yr son. “Then I can fly everywhere I like!” he continued.

“This must be life!” I thought. “Everyone dreams the impossibilities of the moment.”

Strict confidentiality in translation business is a requirement that some fellow translators do not seem to be fully aware of as evidenced by a recent post somewhere else.

A colleague asking for help in translating some English terms into Turkish posted a whole commercial letter attached to his question without omitting a word:

Dear X

Main body of the letter

Sincerely yours,
Mr Y.

It was a letter from the top manager of a European company to the top manager of a Turkish company discussing some business strategies and areas of possible cooperation in shipping services.

As you would guess, shipping is a highly competitive business, and having a B2B private letter posted at an international support forum means publishing it online and delivering it to an indeterminate number of recipients including competitors and therefore exposing someone else’s business to unforeseeable risks. Confidentiality was indeed compromised!

I warned the colleague to delete his post and post only the terms for which he is seeking help in Turkish translation, or if context is required, edit the letter so as to render it unrecognizable. Before getting a response from the colleague, the forum moderator, a responsive and educated translator herself, squashed the question deleting the post altogether. And she mentioned “confidentiality” as one of the reasons for squashing the question. Thanks to her, the confidentiality of the letter in question was saved within minutes!

Today, I modified my index page adding some paragraphs as an excuse for this long delay in official launch of my homepage for Turkish language translation services, Turktrans, and stated that I need to allow myself a little more time for thinking over some new possibilities. I can be called “obsessive” with respect to my attention to details, or more correctly, my obsession to learn and analyze in minute details any topic that happens to attract my attention for the time being.

Almost one and a half year since the first crawl of Turktrans, and I am yet to launch it! Of course, I was really busy with translation projects during this period. But whenever I found an opportunity, I delved into the endless possibilities of Internet in search of a “nice” design layout for my website, of documents explaining this or that aspect of online business, of PHP scripts, code snippets, web images, specialized dictionaries, glossaries, etc. And since a great bulk of new materials is added to the information mass of Internet each day, it seems that this search would never end.

Is it practical? Absolutely not! It distracts me, takes all my spare time, and yields almost nothing practical. It is something like a novel that is continuously rewritten and finishes at infinitum. Each day, the novelist adds some new episodes, deletes some others, modifies this or that scene, and simply cannot manage to put an “end” to his novel.

Of course, someone can call it “a search for perfection.” Yes, this is true in a sense. Perfection is the ultimate goal that we all should strive for. Nevertheless, it is not something that we achieve for once and all. Like learning, it is a gradual process, an endless succession of little accomplishments. But the necessities of life requires practical imperfection. By “practical imperfection,” I mean a level of imperfection that would be acceptable and allow day-to-day functioning. Otherwise, waiting, or more correctly, postponing till an absolute perfection is achieved may turn out to be a waiting forever.

Usually, people start with whatever they have at hand for the time being, and try to improve afterwards through the process. I admire this in others as a virtue, since I often find it difficult to start away anything with only just available means, and instead find myself driven into an endless search for “a better one.”

At this point, I remember one of my all-time favorite books by Gail Sheehy: Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. In my opinion, she is one of the most influential writers of our time. Mentored by Margaret Mead (an eminent anthropologist), she casts vivid insight into the turmoil of inherent crises in human life like going to school, changing careers, getting married, being a parent, etc.

There is a comic in the book depicting the “I am not ready” attitude of a man at different stages of life.

When it comes to going to school, he cries: “But I am not ready!”

After school, he starts working, and cries: “But I am not ready!”

When he is summoned to military service, he cries: “But I am not ready!”

Then he gets married, again crying: “But I am not ready!”

Becomes a father himself and cries louder: “But I am not ready!”

At last, he becomes a grandfather, runs away from home, finds himself a dark hideout, and cries out:
“I am not ready, and will not come out until I am ready!”

I wish I had translated the Passages into Turkish. It should already be translated into Turkish. I remember offering it to some publishers during 90s. But unfortunately I failed to find a publisher to publish its Turkish translation.

Anyway, and not infrequently, the “not ready” attitude is in fact an inner resistance against the thing that the person says or thinks that s/he is not ready. For whatever reasons. And now, I am becoming more and more aware of my inner resistance against launching Turktrans fully, and hiding this resistance behind the veil of a strive for perfection. And I have to work over it to overcome this resistance.

By the way, any productive work is possible only against resistance which is the cause of procrastination that impoverishes both the quality and quantity of any work be it writing a novel, starting a new job, or doing day-to-day translation assignments. I will try to elaborate later on resistance and procrastination from the perspective of a freelance translator. For now, I should focus on trying to overcome my own resistance, and launch Turktrans with whatever I have at hand with all the practical imperfections.

If you found this page while searching a translator, please visit my Turkish translation homepage.