Gabi's Narnia

Vocabulary boosting

I am learning new things every day, like a good toddler. Check out the latest source of humour and speech enhancer, here. There is at least one new word I'd love to put in practice!

Indulging in beauty and a mindset

While jostling with time slots in order to manage a smooth flow for connecting with people over the weekend, I am downtrodden with the burden of a different mindset. It was pretty much 7-8 years ago when I last properly functioned in Italian, being Italian on the inside and having the full ability of mastering the language.
It was a long time ago. Now the words lay exposed, fully naked before my very eyes and brain and it is my job to clothe them in Hungarian. I don't find the proper skirts and tights, all my attention is eaten up by staring at their startling natural beauty. What if I started reading Dante's Inferno in Italian again?!? (Since self-consumed Mr. Nádasdy just spit out a contemporary drama version of it, I feel compelled to restart the "parallel" reading I used to do.) But this is only a couple of articles about a company's history and some product descriptions!

Lost in translation a la me

Why do I always play? Why can't I just sit down, go through the whole thing, focused and determined and finish? OK, it has happened once or twice before... but it is so easy to read status updates on facebook instead. It's far easier to read Judapest and enjoy the argumentative comments. It is far easier to read emails and pretend not to be having time to answer, because I AM WORKING. Come on, translation job is the test of self-discipline, nothing else really.
OK, it might give justice to admit that I am totally fed up with ethanol, global warming and the volatile crude oil prices and I am partly happy that this job is soon going to be over. Of course I made fatal mistakes at times, but overall it wasn't too hard. As my good friend put it, Gabi is good at texts written by the bullsajt generator. And texts which are short. Now, let's get back to the last brush strokes and hope to get some sleep for health reasons.

Golden hair

There was a man. He had a son. The man was very poor. He took his son to the woods and left him there. When the boy got up, he didn't find his father. The boy was very worried. He met with an old lady and the lady gave him three magic things of gold, silver and bronze. The boy went to the palace and became the gardener of the king. The boy saw the princess, the king's daughter, and fell in love, but the king wasn't happy. The king wanted his daughter to marry a rich prince. But his daughter loved the gardener. The king had to go to war and lost. Then the gardener went with the bronze army and won and suddenly disappeared. The king went back home. Some time later the king went to war again and lost again. The gardener went there with the silver army and won. This happened the third time as well and his hair became gold. The king went back home. One day the king called the gardener because he was angry, he hit the boy. His hat fell off and the king saw his golden hair. He became very happy and let them marry. They lived happily ever after.

I told him that it was going to end up on my blog, he still "dictated" the English version of the last tale he had read to his two sons a few days prior. We have met 23 times and he hardly remembered anything from his previous studies. Well done!

Concentrate, baby!

Those of you who have already had the weird privilege of being profoundly abhorred by the sheer sight of my day timer know that I am not usually bored. For that matter, I can recall two instances, maybe around the age of 10 when the issue was that I couldn't decide which afternoon activity to pursue of my self-proposed two options, instead of not knowing what to do with myself at all.
This is a prologue to simply tell myself to crave for more and want more... Yes, I have decided some time ago to learn to master Hebrew and finally decapitate my favourite beauty-dragon, the German language. Most people think I am nuts for being this enthusiastic about the der-die-das horror, but I find my thinking extremely challenged and remarkably developing by acquiring a new language and a complex matrix of thinking, which no one would ever dare to doubt, German truly is. Hebrew is like an afternoon pie, sweet and pleasant and also want to get deeper into the understanding of the culture (like no present tense or what) and detach myself a little bit more from the Greek mentality by reading originals in Hebrew. In 5 years' time I calculate.
At the same time I continue to teach English, which is a pleasant social activity, the most enjoyable and personally-tailored job I could wish for, for the time being. Oh, yeah. And thank God, I am also slightly pressed by these two girls who picked up Italian after half a year of a break. So right now I am functioning in more or less 5 languages. And of course Russian always pends above my neck as the sword of Damocles. Double virtually and not only virtually. You see, too much Greek/European influence... :)

Lost in Translation

This is creepy. I have all these great ideas to post about and simply don't have the time. Yesterday, for fun, to have a 60min break I started reading some more up on the eerie Hungarian mythological bird, the turul, which I meant to post about. Halfway through the post Mozilla decided to become my enemy and everything was lost. Now, I don't have neither the determination, but most importantly the time to type it up again.
Trust me, life is fun, tremendous things are happening on a personal, spiritual and human level as well and I'm sooo thankful to have this much (translation) work though. And there is a deadline, which means I'll be able to breathe after Wednesday. Matyi's baby quilt is ready... you remember,  Tündi got married last summer. This weekend I'm visiting them in Debrecen and hopefully the little guy is going to throw an in-belly show so finally I can see a tummy moving all over the place :)

Check, check, one-two, one-two

You know the end is near when you're translating a text and just to make sure you are using the correct equivalent in Hungarian, you do a Google search and a previous translation (yes, one that I had translated before) pops and there is the expression you are so eager to find and to get it from a reliable source. Oh well, it is true that you can trust only in yourself, after all! :)

Linguistic delicacies

Every now and then I get to laugh at the crazy stuff my students happen to say.
This week a gentle, quiet and peaceful guy had to speak about previous lessons' lab test and in his summary on panic attacks he mentioned high blood pleasure... Following which his goose feet (for flat or splay foot) were listed as the only health problem he is struggling with. It's high-time I started jotting these down...

Why I loathe spelling mistakes!!!

I hate it, I abhor it, I despise it, it disgusts me and simply fúúúúúúúúúúúúúúúúúúújjjj! If you write acquintance instead of acquaintance, you write forth instead of fourth, you write effected instead of affected, you want to write fullness instead of fulness and so on... you start wondering whether you master this language?!?
At least right now I can hide behind the second-language shelter, if I blogged in Hungarian there would be no excuses... I simply hate when things don't come out the way they should. I have nightmares about spelling mistakes and will remember them for months!!! Are words your friends? Do they dance according to your heart's pulse? Somehow it feels like being trapped. They betray you through the incorrect spelling, but mostly by not conveying the depth, the riches, the inside texture. It's highly convenient to use someone else's ponderings. The blame shifts. I'm suffocating in the inadequacy. Yeah, for sure - you might think. Bear with me, this issue has accompanied me since early high school years when the literature teacher would eagerly expect the pearls and mere stuttering came. Everyone in the class knew I had something to share that I couldn't unpack. It doesn't matter how much I read, practised, still - the sense of failure lingers to this day. Maybe the only problem is that one person cannot be clothed in words, rather you cannot give your full self through words.

Cheers needed!

Out of blue a job offer pops up - would you translate tomorrow!!! from Italian to English during a negotiation at a garment producer firm?
It pays well, Júlia agreed to postpone our meeting, so before having our get together with Unreached People Groups Ted Olsen I'm going to indulge in the remnants of the Italian still left in my gray matter.
If you couldn't read in between the lines, this is an earnest cry for prayer for mercy and favour with men. Thank you!!!

UPDATE: It went amazingly well. The problem was of a different nature, could be solved by merely sharing certain information and the allegedly non-speaker ended up giving technical specifications in English. Was there, did it (what exactly???) and enjoyed meeting new people, as usual. Wish life was always this simple!