🎶Je vous aime mais je pars.🎶

I love you but I'm leaving.

It's fitting. I mean the original song is about a young adult leaving his parents but I think it fits here too - I love you but I'm leaving. 

Sort of like Gotta Go My Own Way too (though I was trying to be a bit more highbrow with the French and everything and not quote High School Musical).

Polyglot Problems #6

I think sometimes I forget that Italian is my third language and that I've only been learning it for 4 and half years. I think, sometimes I expect a little bit too much of my Italian language abilities for only 4 and half years of pretty half-assed education (4 hours a week is certainly not enough time in which to acquire a language).

So while I berate myself for not knowing simple words like "rather" or "instead of" or "overall" off the top of my head or knowing how to conjugate verbs in the present or past tense without thinking or which words are masculine or feminine (I'm pretty sure it makes even less sense in Italian than it does in French), I think I forget that this is language number 3 for me, that in 22 years of life I've attempted to acquire three different languages (despite their apparent similarities) and that Italian is still about 3 years behind the rest of the pack.

So while I get frustrated that it doesn't slip off the tongue the way French did, or that my friend in Italian seems to do so much better than me sometimes, I still have years to go (and some time spent in-country) before I can really expect my Italian to be at the same level as my French.

That still doesn't stop the frustrations now that I'm just not there yet.

Google, you're my hero!

If Google ain't the best thing since sliced bread!

First of all, Google docs can spell-check in multiple languages (automatically) in the one document, which is a God send for someone like me - sure solved my red squiggly line problem!

Secondly, I can upload photos directly from my iPhone to Google Drive and I have 15gb of free Google Drive space - thus solving my "what do I do with all the photos I take on my iPhone while I'm in Europe?" problem. 

Wowee Google, what can't you do? 

Interpreting and Translation troubles

What I've learnt so far about interpreting and translating is that it's really subjective. It depends on the context, the source text, the target audience and target culture, the relationship between the source culture/language and the target culture/language, what the client/publisher wants, the position of the moon and whether you're wearing pink underwear or green underwear that day (okay, I'm kidding about those last two).

So far what I've learnt about interpreting and translating is that "you'll just know" and I get it I really do, but I hate it. I hate subjectiveness, I hate not having one right answer and that whole thing about there not being a wrong answer in that case? there totally is, it's like all there is, is wrong answers. 

"I can't tell you what's right but I can tell you what's wrong."

With the subjects I've chosen to study throughout my life you'd think it'd be super into this subjective stuff (language, history, lit, crim, psych), otherwise I should've just done a Bachelor of Science and then I'd either be wrong or right (and probably a uni drop out tbh because science is too much for my brain to handle).