Okay, you know I’m not the kind of person to invent anything. In fact, I can’t even invent a cool character name or a cool setting for my stories. So for this I am not going to invent a word off the top of my head. Instead, I am going to tell a story about work that really annoys me (at times).

As some of you know, I am a translator. I do translation work for this contracting company that has been hired by another company. Now some of you may know about Canvas. From school? I know most of the colleges and universities use that. Anyway, each month, after the English version of the guide has been update, I would go in and update the Chinese version.

I like this job even though I might complain about it sometimes. The coolest thing is that I get to control my own work schedule since I work at home.

One of the many things about this job that drive me absolutely crazy is the translation. I know, it’s my job and all that but still. In order to translate a sentence, one needs to first understand what it means and at times, I would stare at a sentence for 30 minutes and still don’t know what it means.

Who wrote this? I often wonder and I often wonder whether it was my comprehension skills or it was the grammar structure of the sentence.

Oh and let’s not forget to mention the non-existing words. When I have to translate a word or two, I have to copy it into Microsoft Word and let it count the words for me. The second those words land on the screen, word would flag me of all the words that were either misspelled (unlikely in technical writing) or does not exist in its dictionary. One of such words is “unpublish”. Even Google flags me.

This word, to my knowledge, have two definitions. One used as an adjective and the other verb. When used as an adjective, it means that something is not yet published. When used as a verb, it means that something is already published and wants to reverse that state. It’s sort of like read and unread email. You can make read emails become unread again.

This drives me nuts because sometimes in the heading, it just reads “Unpublish Post” and then in the paragraph below, it wouldn’t mention anything about it. How am I supposed to accurately translate it? You see my point?

Anyway, sorry about that huge rant. It rained last night and it is very gloomy and dark here today. There’s no sun, only clouds and it’s making me sad and when I am sad, not only does it take away my inspiration but it’s not giving me any motivation to work either.

I am supposed to finish four case briefs today. I don’t know if I can even do it and I am definitely dreading next month’s work. I am not sure if I can even stay sane with this workload. Ugh, I really wish this semester would end like now.