The Teeth of Sorrow

This photo is to remind me of happier days. Today was not one of our high points. As Wendy put it, "teething ruined everything." Poor guy; he is so miserable. Hopefully that means this particular bout is almost at an end.... Maybe he will have seven or eight teeth by the time GrandRobyn and GrandDan get here. They didn't get to see much of him in their video chat today, because he had a teething freakout and could not still to talk to them.

I edited an article translated from German today. It's interesting how different the process is when you don't know the original language. There is, obviously, a lot less focus on the original text and a lot less focus on the best of several possible shades of meaning for a particular word. There's a lot more comparing the translator's translation with some online resources where the translation doesn't make sense, and then writing your own sentence that combines the several renditions in a logical manner and hoping that it still accurately reflects the original. In a way, it's easier, because it's not as possible to get wrapped up in linguistic detail, but when you do get stuck there's little to no recourse. Also, it's very hard to look up German words in cross-language dictionaries, because of the crazy combined words. And picking out phrasal verbs in a language you don't read? And getting those phrasal verbs into their infinitive forms to look them up? Not a chance. In the end, I came up with a solid English article; to what extent it's a literal translation and to what extent it's a loose adaptation is more of an open question.

It is informative to learn how often reporters in other countries misrepresent our governmental structure. I was surprised to read that our cabinet was organized into "ministries," for instance. I haven't yet seen Obama referred to as a Prime Minister, but I have read articles that carefully avoid titles and specifics in a way that makes me suspicious of the authors' grasps on US government & civics. It makes me wonder most of all what wretched indignities of inaccuracy our press subjects other governments to in describing their parts and functions.