Let’s end the year on a sweet note...

... I thought. So for tonight’s dinner I made profiteroles. I prepared two fillings: a chocolate and mascarpone cream and a zabaione one, both topped with chocolate icing (which unfortunately wasn't enough to coat all the puffs in the tray. I hope the taste will make up for it.

My second experiment was with bread. And here’s my freshly baked wholewheat loaf with raisins and dried figs. Not too sweet, though, as it’s not intended as a dessert...

Voilà voilà. My idea of a New Year’s Eve being nothing noisy or chaotic, but rather good food and good wine to share with friends, I think I’m going to enjoy my understated celebrations. :-)

A woman and her (electric) cat

252 WATTS Body Battery Calculator - Find Out How Much Electricity Your Body is Producing -

Hmmm... must be the reason why a) I often get an electric shock when I stroke my cat and b) his fur bristles. But probably I should check his level of electricity, too... :-D

The speciality of the house

I am often suspicious when I read restaurant signs declaring that such and such is the speciality of the house. My lack of trust probably stems from the fact that I have seen so many cheap eating places boasting fish as their speciality, not considering that fish isn’t an easy food to prepare and that if you want it the way it should be you have to meet some specific standards. The mere fact of having (frozen) fish in your refrigerator doesn’t turn it into your restaurant’s speciality. The problem, I think, lies in the abuse of the word speciality. Everything can become a speciality, if you decide it should; and if what you cook eventually doesn’t really turn out to be special, well, it doesn’t matter, it’s a marginal question. Few people will notice, bewitched as we are by the word “speciality”. Last week I noticed for the first time that the ice-cream shop next to my fitness centre displays one such sign: “speciality: nougat”. Sure, the shop makes good ice cream (it used to be one of the best years ago, but not so much now, though it’s still good), and probably their nougat is good too, but... speciality??? I think it takes more than a sign and an arbitrary decision to turn a food into a real speciality. Words retain some sort of “life force”, as many spiritual traditions show, yet I wonder whether by overworking a word eventually we end up losing this force – its meaning – and we are left with a deflated signifier.

Oh, why did I do it?

Today’s lesson: don’t buy your groceries on the 24^th December. Never. :-6

Hard work, perseverance and entrepreneurship

(says Samuel Smiles)

(Note: a reminder for myself, whenever I feel discouraged.)

I sometimes hear quite superficial comments on my job. One of these is more or less the idea that, in order to translate books (fiction, non-fiction, popular works, etc.), all you need is a book in the source language commissioned by a publisher, a bilingual dictionary (the notion of monolingual probably not being internalised yet, let alone the use of other sources) and a word processor. Easy? Hmmm... let’s see. Leaving aside the amount of information you need and you don’t get from dictionaries, which implies not only constantly "sharpening" your search skills, but also and above all an adequate knowledge of the source culture/language and an equally adequate knowledge* of the target culture/language, one probably tends to forget that books don’t fall from the sky and that in a competitive market you need to become your own entrepreneur, not only keeping up with expectations (accuracy, reliability), but also offering what other colleagues don’t offer (languages, specific sectors, etc.), which actually sums up as trying to acquire visibility not so much as a translator, but as an entrepreneur, exactly.

*I prefer to talk about “knowledge”, as I feel that being a native speaker of X doesn’t always go hand in hand with knowing that language.

Oil can...

Mornings are covered with a frosty cloak and getting started takes more time, as if cold and inertia froze you right there, like Dorothy’s Tin Man.
Today, after more than 6 months spent translating from French, I finally started again with English. And dear me, I felt rusty, terribly rusty!

A cup of translated hot chocolate

After sunset it’s cold, biting cold. And it’s also the best moment for a delicious cup of home-made hot chocolate. (Photo: since I like it particularly dark, I use cocoa meant for baking, which has a more intense flavour.)

Hot chocolate – cioccolata calda – is a pleasantly widespread winter habit in Italy. Served in almost any café, this drink is a thickish concoction of milk, sugar, cocoa powder and flour (or other thickeners, e.g. potato starch or maizena). Not much flour, though; it should not get as thick as a pudding. Just enough for it to acquire a creamy texture while at the same time remaining fluid.

But once the cup is empty, I’ve got a translation dilemma: to what extent is cioccolata calda equivalent to hot chocolate? And also, how is hot chocolate prepared in other countries and can it be still defined “hot chocolate” or is “hot chocolate” a specific product?

Addendum:
I know I’m repeating something widely acknowledged by now, but translating food terms is a tricky task. Susan Bassnett’s famous example of the cultural elements differentiating the English butter from the Italian burro is but one of the numerous arguments supporting the underlying difficulty of translating even common foods: “So there is a distinction both between the objects signified by butter and burro and between the function and value of those objects in their cultural context” (Susan Bassnett, Translation Studies. Revised Edition, London: Routledge 1991, p. 19; emphasis as in original).

Spice biscuits

The reason was that I wanted to see how good my ex-coffee grinder was at grinding other foods. I wasn’t happy with the way it grinds coffee, as it is meant more for filter coffee than for home espresso. So I recycled this little machine for other uses. Well, it grinds seeds and nuts quite alright. But today I dared more. I decided to grind spices for biscuits. So, after stirring 100-150 g of raw cane sugar into 100 g of butter (softened) and 1 egg, I added 150 g of flour, 1 teaspoonful of baking powder and a pinch of salt. Then I ground my spices: cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cardamom. I sprinkled my perfectly (!) ground spices on the flour mix, added some grated nutmeg and kneaded. The dough was left a few hours in the fridge and then rolled out. I regretted non having any pastry cutter, so in the end my biscuits ended up having all the same shape – round. But while baking (180°C, 10 minutes) they smelled good and this after all was more than enough for me. Oh, and btw, they tasted good as well! :-)

The DNA of words

To my knowledge, in the very recent history of Italy two languages have been by and large influencing Italian language production: French and English (with German playing some role in Northern Italian vernaculars). Through visual and auditory media channels, these languages have given origin to a variety of calques sometimes frowned upon but mostly just ignored or accepted, and now widespread. When this contact between languages remains visible in translation, one talks of “translationese”, meaning a language that is neither fish nor foul, no more the source language (SL), not yet the target language (TL) in all its shades, fluency and idioms. However, if it is true that what does not kill you makes you stronger, such a contact may bear unexpected fruits that contribute, once established as new TL items, to make that language richer and more colourful. True, there is a risk of corruption, both in vocabulary and – alas! – syntax, as it is the case with translationese. Yet I believe that if on the one hand we should keep frowning upon translationese as a consequence of mental indolence, on the other a discriminating attitude is necessary in order to evaluate the contextual and pragmatic use of each calque. It may also be, after all, that hybrid words do carry indeed a more adaptable DNA.

A perfect world

This evening on the bus I witnessed a silly incident that made me think about how uncomfortable we feel at the idea of making mistakes. An old man was cycling on the wrong side of the road, in a rather dangerous corner, and only the prompt reflexes of the bus driver avoided dramatic consequences. The old man was in the wrong, no doubt about that, yet he blamed it on the driver. He didn’t sound drunk or deranged. Just an ordinary guy trying to prove he was right. Finally, he cycled away, still shouting against the bus driver. Why was it so difficult for him to say “I’m sorry, it was my fault”? For fear of losing face? Sometimes I get the impression that we are expected to be perfect at all costs and the pressure this causes is such that we unable to accept that, as human beings, we all make mistakes. But what leaves me even more aghast is the fact that we seem to have internalised this, denying ourselves our fallible nature in a sort of preventive censorship through which we desperately try to avoid being blamed condemned for our mistakes. So perhaps that old man’s anger, vented on the bus driver, was actually concealing his guilt, his inability to accept he had made a mistake. In that moment he had proven vulnerable, imperfect, human, and this is something less and less easy to tolerate. But it is really regrettable that in this constant struggle for perfection we are losing our precious ability to be perfectible.

Translators never get a second chance to make a first impression - or do they?

A few days ago, while I was driving to work, I thought about the differences between in-house or office work and freelance work, specifically (of course!) translating. Well, one obvious difference is that of working in a team as opposed to working alone – independently, to use a positive language. However, a not-so-obvious corollary is that when you work in a team your working skills are appraised and possibly appreciated within the framework of your human essence. In other words, the fact of being Jack, Joe or Jill and of interacting with your colleagues in this or that way has an impact on how your work is evaluated. You may make mistakes, as any other human being, and still be considered a good employee. The you-person interacts with the you-employee and produces a hybrid result where your skills also depend on your social abilities. In freelance work, your business card is your output, without any other superimposition. And because of this, your job is assessed according to much stricter parameters. In translation, this usually means that as soon as you make a mistake/typo/calque, etc., your job is labelled as a bad translation. As I mentioned in another post, I don’t think evaluating translation in a vacuum is a productive approach. Time, payments, constraints, external interventions are all factors that intervene in the final outcome. Yet, when a translation is labelled “bad”, one gets the impression that this negative feedback extends to the translator as well, who becomes a “bad” translator by virtue of his/her flawed product. It may be that the translation industry is more and more oriented towards a notion of “Kleenex” translators, i.e. translators can be used and chucked without too much worrying about. But in any case, it seems to me that translators pay for their mistakes a higher price than they ought to.

Salvation risotto

What a disappointment when I realised that nice big pumpkin was not up to the usual standards. Actually, this is an understatement; the pumpkin was absolutely tasteless. Pure yellow pulp, no flavour. No good for baking, no good for pies, no good for cakes either. But disappointment doesn’t take you very far. So instead of throwing it, which would have been indeed a bit of a waste, I diced it and cooked it in butter, adding some chopped shallots for taste. When the pumpkin was cooked to a sort of yellow purée, I sprinkled some ground nutmeg, then I added risotto rice, stirred vigorously and poured some wine. I chose new wine, partly because it has just come on the market and it’s the right season for it, and partly because I felt a pumpkin risotto would require a mild red wine, rather than a white one. When the sauce thickened, I added some warm water (stock is alright, of course, but I don’t like the taste), a pinch of salt and kept stirring, adding water as necessary. And here’s the secret to turn a tasteless pumpkin into a yummy risotto: halfway through cooking, I added a generous portion of mature gorgonzola cheese (diced; Stilton is good as well). I let it melt and cooked the rice until al dente. In the end, I congratulated on myself for chasing away my initial disappointment and recycling my almost-in-the-rubbish pumpkin. It was a downright rescue operation!