Martina's Book

It’s weird to be considered an “expert” in English when I’m used to being surrounded entirely by English speaking people. In my architecture class on Thursday, the professor (Martina) asked me if I could come back to her office and help her out with a project; She is an innovative, accomplished young architect and one of her firm’s projects was being published into a book. Unfortunately, the translator that was hired did a “less than professional” job. Martina is proficient enough in English to recognize that it did not sound correct, but didn’t have the ability to change what needed to be fixed. She was so upset that the years of effort, that went into the project itself and then also into the publication, were going to be wasted by an embarrassing subpar translation. She later told me that she was sitting in class completely frazzled by it, when she heard me presenting my architecture project so articulately and knew that I was the person to “save her project” (her words, not mine). I felt so bad for her; on the drive to the office I could tell that she was really upset about it all. Understandably so, for when I read through the text it was an obvious direct translation from Italian, meaning sentence structures, ordering of words, punctuation and even word meaning were done incorrectly. It was helpful that I have a background in architecture so I was able to understand the ideas she wanted to communicate in the book. In some cases it was an easy fix and in others Martina would wordily explain to me the idea she was trying to express in order to help me choose the right words, adjectives, and phrasing. It was actually a really cool experience to work with her and to understand her project in such depth. They are also going to add my name to the “special thanks to…”-page in the publication. Isn’t that cool?! Martina said she would bring me a copy to class (done by the middle of April). And it was rewarding to see what a big change we made in the quality of the work, although they had to submit it for printing THAT night, so we couldn’t spend the time to make it absolutely perfect. (There was also the problem offending the publisher who had suggested the translator. We didn’t want to completely change around the wording if it could be avoided since the decision to bring me in on the project was Martina’s and not discussed by the publishing manager). I worked at her office from 2pm until we finished at 9:30, but the time flew by. Martina told me that she was just going to have me look at a few of the big things but then when she saw what a difference we were making she asked me look at everything! It was a good experience and I’m glad I could help her out… she was so appreciative and as I was leaving she kept telling me that I had “saved the book”.