Somehow the fall semester has flown by and I’m halfway through my proseminar. It’s been rather interesting and, at times, unnerving. What was all fun and games at first gave me a bit of fright in the beginning of November.

I spent the first two of months of the course familiarizing myself with 19th century exploration and a satire set in the 1990s, thinking it’d be the book I would choose for my topic until I realized the project would be too vast for a BA and I had to abandon it. After that I drifted aimlessly for a while and had to set up a meeting with my teacher to talk about what I wanted to do. Apparently my three to five hazy ideas called for some action and I have to agree. I suppose my problem was having too much on my plate from the very beginning. Lesson learned: getting a little lost on this journey of discovery is not the end of the world. Accepting that I may not always be fully in control of everything hasn’t been easy.

So on the morning of the day when I was to have my one-on-one with my teacher, I grasped at the clearest, most reasonable topic in my head and settled with it. It’s subject to change its focus somewhat, but I’ve settled with it. I’ll be getting to grips with the Scottish Janet Schaw and her Journal in my attempt to analyze her letters cum travelogue to see what kind of overtones this text from the 1770s contains. After writing two research proposals, the picture is becoming clearer to me. By the end of March, I should have a 20-page draft ready.

The course itself has provided interesting insight into the genre of travel writing and its theories. The overview of the history of travel and writing about traveling has certainly piqued my interest. The other students’ topics are varied which will make for a diverse spring semester. It’s a shame there isn’t more time to get to know as much as possible about the numerous fascinating sources. I have a very good collection of intriguing titles if one day I find myself wondering about what to read next, just for fun.

But for now Christmas brings me a much needed break and I won’t be touching my project for a while. The other day I was typing the name “Jane Austen” and instead wrote “Janet Austen”. Ms. Schaw is taking over my brain and spelling. I expect her to show up in my dreams accusing me of who knows what. So yes, I need to cut myself some slack and stuff my face with gingerbread cookies because in January I will create a rather important Word file (and a few dozen pack-ups).

More than anything it was curiosity that drew me to the Old Student Building on October 19.  I wasn’t invited to the event, but everyone was welcome.  I arrived at the building slightly after 9 o’clock.  The windows had mysterious purple lighting which immediately suggested it wasn’t just any ordinary weekday night.

Earlier that evening the voting in the Student Union’s (HYY) Representative Council Elections had ended and when I arrived at the party, the counting of the votes was well on its way.  The current standings of the vote were projected onto a screen and two hosts informed the crowd of the results at regular intervals.  Tables were arranged at the edges of the hall leaving space for people to mingle.

A ripple of excitement spread through the crowd every time one of the two hosts spoke, neither of which I recognized.  A whoop here and there.  People standing in small groups, greeting their friends and rivals as they walked by.  A glass of bubbly wine passing from someone to another.  It was clear most (if not all) of the people there were either candidates or otherwise engaged in the election proceedings.

Even though I was somewhat interested in the election (or more interested than average), I felt I was looking from the outside to the inside of student politics even while I am not a total outsider.  After all I did vote and familiarized myself with the opinions of some of the candidates. Looking around, I wasn’t sure what the party reminded me of at first, but then it hit me: it was like a glimpse into parliamentary election coverage on TV.  I wondered how many of the people present would be attending those parties some day in the future.  Should I go and shake some hands to make a good impression? Just in case? It felt strange to think I was probably in the presence of some of the country’s future politicians.  Or maybe I’m getting an overly official, distant impression.  I’m not sure how I feel about the presence of political parties within HYY either.

I left the party after I’d had enough of the acoustics of the place and, walking to the bus stop, I pondered whether I’d become more or less tempted to try to understand the workings of the Student Union or student politics.  I didn’t find an answer then and some weeks later as I write this, I still don’t know.  Despite my indecisiveness, it was a good idea to go see the climax of weeks of campaigning because it made me ask a lot of questions from myself and others.  Mostly if others had seen the election night in a similar way and at least one candidate had found it slightly odd as well. I found myself talking about what I’d seen.

I don’t mean to make the whole thing sound completely alien as I’m sure it’s not.  It’s more than possible that if I would make an effort to get to know how exactly HYY and the Representative Council works, it’d become demystified quickly.  But I think I prefer observing from the outside.

After my Swedish lecture, I rush to the 6th floor of Metsätalo to my next class.  It’s hardly just another course among many this fall.  It’s the one I’ve been dreading for almost two years, ever since I understood what it was and how much work it was going to be. I’ve watched older students stress over their papers and then celebrate when the finished work is a warm pile of papers fresh out of the printer.  Some students are brave enough to take up the challenge during their second year, even as early as the fall, but I believe third year’s the charm.

The course outline paper says Proseminar: Travel literature.  Fall 2011 + Spring 2012. Two lists for the basic requirements, one for each semester.

The main requirement of the course is to say clever things for 20 pages and hand them in for grading.  Along the way I’m supposed to write other papers to give the teacher an idea of how well I am on my way.  Or not.  It’s the first true test of what I’ve learned in university so far.  Nothing compared to the big G which will become a reality in a few years time, but still the proseminar is a milestone in any university student’s life. The first few lectures so far have been all fun and games. Listening and digesting. Looking at bibliographies, thinking maybe that one, definitely not that one.

If I had a stack of papers on my desk representing the amount of reading I am going to do for my proseminar, I’d probably lie down next to it and assume the fetal position.  So maybe not knowing, not having the perspective to reflect on how much work it’s going to be is beneficial at this stage.  I kind of know what I’m getting into but I know little enough to feel more excitement than sheer dread.  I’ll get back to my thoughts on this in the spring at the latest by which time this theoretical pile will have tumbled down on my poor head.

But I imagine that the most challenging bit will be thinking of a clear thesis and then backing it up systematically and thoroughly.  As my proseminar teacher says, the beginning will be confusing and messy as I won’t yet be set on a project I’ll take to the end.  Personally, I hate not knowing or having a plan but I trust something concrete will have begun to take shape in my head by the time we reach the exam rush before Christmas.  It better have.  My research proposal is due in December.

Leaving my second proseminar lecture, I begin to have an inkling of what I might want to do with my essay. It’s just a word on its own but in a book it’s a theme that can possibly be explored. Whether I’ll end up snatching this idea and bending it to my will or whether it will be nothing more than a red herring remains to be seen.

The article is first in a series of three, reporting on the proseminar progress of yours truly.

About four years in to my studies, I entered the “Dear God, What Was I Thinking” stage of my Arts degree. The constant flood of news articles about the soaring unemployment rate of university degree holders, the flat sounding “ohs” I kept hearing at job fairs when told people I was an English student without a pedagogical bone in her body, my sister’s MBA and subsequent enormous house all had me doubting my future abilities to find employment and stay out of the gutter. Overly dramatic and desperate, I moaned to my friends, my mom and a career psychologist, before plunging headfirst in to the dark abyss I had sworn I’d never enter. That’s right, The Helsinki School of Economics.

Now, bear with me, dear fellow humanists. This didn’t mean I was selling out or conforming to what the man. I swore I’d only use any possible powers I might gain on the other side for good. The plan was to just slightly expand artsy degree into a more employable direction, gain the trust of the moneymen who run this country, learn their language and use what I had learned to promote the arts, thus making the world a better place. See, I’m still the same herbal-tea-drinking, poetry-reading, Belle-and-Sebastian-listening bleeding heart I ever was.

Now, what did I learn?

Some things were just as bad as I thought they would be. Twentysomethings rocking through the best years of their lives in suits, ties and Hermès scarves is just as awesome as it sounds. People were career-minded, competitive and really excited about all things business. As well they should be – we were in a business school after all. They had the business part down, but sometimes I found myself wondering where the school would step in.

I did a minor in Marketing. This was a module consisting of 30 credits of intermediate level courses. My sister the MBA holder had given me an approving nod on my choice, saying it was easy enough and might look good on a resume. And it was. And I hope it will. From what I gather, Marketing is considered to be somewhat of a soft option in the world of the Business School. Tough guys do Finance, the geeks go for Economics. But nevertheless, I was still a bit dumbfounded at the lack of anything, well, academic, that might suggest we were at an actual university. The PhDs lecturing at the head of the hall who evidently had studied at this school and gained degrees, but as we approached the end of Intermediate Studies, science was yet to rear its head.

The class work was mostly structured around varied case assignments that were based on ones used by the Harvard Business School. In Harvard, they’re used as a basis for open class discussions, but over at HSE, we wrote 20 page reports on them. Working on one with my group I had the most profound culture shock of my brief business school stint: naively, I asked my group what was the required number of sources for a paper of this length in these parts. In response I got incredulous looks. My group told me to stop over thinking things, turn on my bullshit generator and get writing. And so I did. Eventually I completed my minor studies at what had meanwhile become the Aalto University with a good overall grade.

But what had I learned? That somewhere, between the ‘hard’ sciences and the humanities there is a third way, which isn’t a science at all. I don’t mean to knock the School of Economics, there’s science in there somewhere, I’m sure. But for a majority of its students it isn’t the main point at all. For them the point of studying there is to get acculturated into the business world. They learn to talk the talk, make neat PowerPoint presentations and go on to be successful. And maybe that’s the moral of the story: people will hear what you have to say better when you know to present it. Spicing up my Arts degree with 30 credits worth mean PowerPoint and presentation skills with a few snazzy buzzwords thrown in might just be the perfect marriage of style and substance.

I’m writing this as an English Philology major, with a minor in Translation Theory* and a few years’ experience with freelance language work, and one day I wish hope mean to make my living by relying on the skills, the perseverance and the backbone that my language and translation studies have alloted me. A pretty meager and wildly optimistic place to be, I’m sure you’ll agree, but also one that I believe deserves my trust, and a measure of vindication. If you find yourself in a situation similar to mine — working your guts & your wits out for a future you love but that you’ve been given every reason to mistrust — then I’ll be glad to be writing to a sympathizing counterpart.

Some Suggested Tenets
I’ve been thinking a lot about ways of gradually overcoming this said mistrust, which is really an avatar of the reasonably healthy fear of the Yet-to-Occur. One thing I’ve come to realize is that the future does not occur at all: it is influenced by and constructed in the present. As we change as individuals over time, we can only intimate a certain degree of foresight that we attain by planning, hoping, growing and readying ourselves as best we can for new situations and challenges — sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Thankfully, working life (here as distinct from life proper..!) is more structured than the recesses of human parapsychosociology, and what “makes it tick” is a question with a bearably understated existential subtext.

It helps to consider how readily available the tools and building blocks of professional confidence actually are. The skills mentioned earlier are taught to us by teachers, professors and other veterans of the industry; we discover the perseverance in ourselves when we keep our chins up and realize how close “so close and yet so far” really is; but I feel confident that the backbone itself is something that comes from a combination of these things and from an uncompromizing sense of self-respect that we each need in order to function individually and, some might say more relevantly still, professionally. Once we realize that what we do is valuable, and that we all deserve respect for doing it as best we can, it’s really only a matter of balancing between the emotions of constructive pride and desensitizing hubris.

Profess!

We can’t all be kings or queens of the world, but we can sure as hell be professional. I like the word “profession”, and the word “professional” even more, and I’ll try to illustrate why. When someone writes a confession, they say “I confess!”, and this strikes me as just a touch melodramatic in-context. But when someone has a profession, they can say “This is what I profess, what I avow and acknowledge!” Also not exactly pathosless, I grant you, but acknowledging something is a positive, potentially productive action, especially when it concerns something that you (a) love and (b) make money by doing. And the way I figure it, if you don’t love what you do you have no business doing it in the first place; then again if what you’re doing is very certainly your thing but it earns you no income, then you’re being too romantic a martyr and will eventually starve while kicking yourself.

The trick seems to be to make what you love feel like real work, and at the same time to make hard work feel like something you love and enjoy. This attitude will feel paradoxical at times, and no matter how good you are at something or how much you enjoy it, you will occasionally hate it. If you find yourself never, ever hating what you love, something is wrong and you need to start embracing the paradox instead. Developing a backbone is instrumental to embracing this idea of embracing.

The Code
Now, as I see it, what this all really comes down to is this: if you feel like a professional and act like a professional, then for all intents and purposes, you are a professional. It isn’t a trait that we gain like some sort of prize once we have enough study points or notches on our CV or framed pieces of paper on our walls — just like the future isn’t something that simply happens to us, but something that happens because of us, and springs from decisions and attitudes. Feeling like a professional is a matter of internal significance and the labyrinth of self-worth, and is strengthened by passive, positive reinforcement (e.g. by being right and being told so). Acting like a professional (e.g. standing up for your rights and then being treated accordingly) is an external mandate, a code that can be taught and must be upheld in the face of every kind of nightmarish scenario imaginable; a sort of worker’s chivalry. If you break the code, you may do an injustice to yourself, your employer and your entire profession.

Parts of this code basically amount to common sense embodied as action, e.g. “always speak respectfully to people who want to transfer sums of money to your bank account” and the like. Other parts don’t come to us quite as naturally. Now I’ve been mentioning money a lot, and there is a very specific, very simple reason for that. (For those of you who were thinking “tl;dr” several paragraphs ago, this is the meat of the issue that I want to impart):

As translators, we provide a specialist service. We are language specialists who deal in cross-linguistic localization in innumerable different industries and situations. Our abilities are sought out because we provide what others cannot, and all kinds of different employers — companies, entrepeneurs, individuals, institutions, events — need us for what we are able to do, for what we work ourselves raw to be able to do as effectively and efficiently as possible. We do not provide this valuable service for free or for peanuts, the same way that a mechanic does not fix a car without a charge to match. The difference, in these terms, between a mechanic and a translator is that the worth of a mechanic is a given; nobody would dream of getting away with tuppence for having a licensed mechanic fix their car’s hydraulics, whereas all too often translators (and by extension proofreaders) are seen as “people who speak a bit of [your second language(s) here]“. If that is the way you see yourself, then get smart or get out of the way. If, however, you think that being envisioned as little more than a language hobbyist is a gross, disrespectful understatement, it’s time to take affront — and to act professional about it.

Also, we don’t need or deserve to be reminded that we are still students. We are made aware of that fact on a daily basis by the very nature of student life and all the challenges, limitations and duties it calls upon us to surmount. And while experience and schooling have an enormous impact on what we can accomplish and how well we understand the methods of our industry, we also don’t need to be authorized translators in order to have highly developed and specialized skills or to have a sense of self-respect about the work we do. Professionalism is, first and foremost, an attitude.

Quell the Rumour
The last time I got riled up about this issue was when a young woman approached the student readership of SUB’s mailing list in September 2010 with a job offer that made me do a mental spittake: the offer was an 80-page English-language proofreading job, in 2 days, for 80€. As I commented at the time, both the timeframe and the payment indicated in the offer were inutterably ridiculous. A great rule-of-thumb resource that I’ve been using for years is SUB ry’s own “Guidelines for students and employers on job assignments” (see Links at the end). They are, as indicated, guidelines not rules, and I have on many occasions made fee demands (which have been accepted by employers) that surpass those mentioned in the article many times over. But just to illustrate how miniscule the fee this young woman was gunning for in September really was, here’s some basic math based on quotes from the Guidelines:

[NB: For the purposes of official, ballpark timekeeping] if you just read through a text you could expect to read up to 5 pages per hour. On the other hand, if you’re required to make a lot of corrections, proof-reading might turn out to be as slow as translating.

According to this estimate of close reading, it would take sixteen hours just to read through the 80 pages! Taking that 16h as our absolute minimum time for proofreading this text, and using the Guideline’s 15-30€/h fee, a person doing this proofreading job should be paid 240-480€ to do the task (assuming that this theoretical superhuman person could manage to work on the same text diligently for 16 hours in two short days and still do a good job).

These are the figures I informed the aforementioned young woman of after she had made her offer, and her reaction was one of genuine surprise. She had intended no disrespect, she was just completely oblivious of the basic guidelines of professional proofreading; and what’s most alarming, she had heard and believed a rumour that language students are the way to go for the cheapest proofread/translation in town. The only way that rumours like this can ever be quelled is by reinforcing the opposite impression and making it a reality. Either get paid every cent your hard work and expertise entitles you to, or don’t do the job at all. Believe me, I know that turning down job offers seems like an unrealistic luxury to a student living none too seldom on the brink of poverty, but it is precisely for the sake of avoiding future misery and unemployment that we have to start exemplifying true, at times seemingly self-sacrificing professionalism now. I know that when I’ve graduated I’m not going to let uninformed and desperate students do my work for a tenth of the actual going rate! Besides, what employers tend to respect the most is a confident attitude of expertise (as well as actual quality of work), and I’ve never needed to turn down a single job offer over a fee disagreement except the outrageous one examined above.

Looking-Glass
This all needs to be put into perspective though. Every individual translation/proofreading/&c. job is a separate case, and the fairness of the estimated fee will rely on many fluctuating elements. These include length (measured in “translator’s pages” (Fin. liuska or kääntäjän sivu) = 1560 characters, hours, words, or characters with or without spaces), difficulty (terminological, syntactical, stylistic, technical, &c.), timeframe (think rush job vs. open deadline), as well as personal experience and accolades such as academic schooling and linguistic background. There are no ready-made rules, partly because gigs can vary wildly from one another in all the above traits, and others. It is up to each of us to feel out the vibe of the work and the tone of the industry, to attune ourselves to the ethics and philosophy of what it is we do and how we do it. I hope this essay, albeit probably a little rambling and still no more than a general overview, will help you toward making sense of where you figure in the rich and occasionally puzzling tug-of-war of professional translation, or other profession of your choice.

LINKS
Here are some (mostly Finnish-English-Finnish) translation-related sites that I’ve come across or that have been strongly recommended to me, and which I strongly recommend that everyone takes a good look at. We need to know the world we are entering, and thankfully the internet is full of little wormholes and windows into that world. I make especially frequent use of the various internet dictionaries, not because they’re exhaustive or perfect but because they’re free and convenient, and they help trigger my own translation processes. No tool is too lowly or too embarrassing if it helps the process (except, you know, plagiarism). And remember to turn to specialists if you are translating something in a field that is unknown to you.

Have fun, and stay classy!

Helpful & Interesting Sites
SUB ry’s Guidelines for students and employers on job assignments

SKTL’s (Suomen kääntäjien ja tulkkien liitto) surveys of the prices charged by professional translators

Av-kääntäjät, the semi-official website and forum for Finnish audio-visual translators and dubbers

Corinne McKay’s Thoughts on Translation blog

The Finnish Ulysses, a blog updated by writer, publisher and translator extraordinaire Leevi Lehto, which follows his retranslation of James Joyce’s Ulysses into Finnish, the first since Pentti Saarikoski’s 1964 translation.

Online Dictionaries
Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com
Käännös.com (multilingual)
EUDict, European dictionary

*I only mention my specific major & minor subjects because they are what I know (and they say that’s what you ought to write, after all). Many of the observations I’m making apply to just about any occupation I can think of, and certainly any occupation that is widely misunderstood, but I am a translator not only by future profession but also by nature, in that I search for equivalents, mirror images and echos in everything, so approaching these principles from that point of view is most natural for me.

Helsinki. The white, wintry city of unwelcoming service and terraces that close tooearly. I have started my plunge towards the seedy underbelly of paleonthology early thismorning. Waking up at 8:30, I downed two fish oil pills, a thousand milligrams of calcium and twenty micrograms of vitamin D. Now, after a pint of mild, dark beer and way too much vanilla-fudge flavored coffee, I feel ready to do what my fancy booted, skin tight jeaned son-of-a-gun of an Editor expects me to: write an article for Better Than Sliced Bread. This time, its all about science.

My recent research indicates that the world of paleonthology, the study of thunder lizards, – or to use a more accurate academic term: dinosaurs – is going through a proverbial uproar, started by recent developments in the study of two most beloved members of the dinosaur clan.

First of all, the Triceratops in not a distinct dinosaur species. The mere thought makes me shudder and it still is difficult for me to grasp the full extent of this fact. There’s no escaping the truth, ladies, gentlemen and those-in-between. Scientists, namely John Scannella and Jack Horner from Montana State University, have discovered that those dinosaurs that have been considered to belong to the Triceratops species are actually juvenile Torosaurus.

On what grounds, you ask? According to 4.9/5 rated news story (available at http://www.physorg.com/news198306111.html), “Scannella and Horner measured the length, width and thickness of the skulls [of the dinosaurs]. They examined the microstructure, surface textures and shape changes of the frills. Microscope studies revealed that the tissues of Torosaurus specimens are more heavily remodeled than those of even the largest Triceratops, strongly suggesting that Torosaurus specimens are in fact adult Triceratops, Scannella said. Even in Triceratops that were previously considered to be adults, the skull was still undergoing dramatic changes.” Seems awfully convincing doesn’t it?

Luckily, there is a silver lining to this cloud of utmost, unnamable blackness. As the first discovered Triceratops fossil specimen predates that of the Torosaurus, the name of the species will henceforth be Triceratops. Still, over a hundred years of scientific understanding is overruled by pesky scientists that even tried to falsify their own
findings for three years, before accepting their dramatic conclusions.

In other dinosaur news, and approaching the sinister and macabre, another breakthrough in paleonthology reveals that Tyrannosaurus were hell bent on cannibalism! Again, the culprits to bring us this Promethean discovery are no other than Dr. Horner et al. You can read all about it on http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0013419, but I’ll chew through the juicy bits here.

What Horner and his fellow scientists found was that four specimen of Tyrannosaurus from museum collections around the US bore bite marks that could only have been made by a large carnivorous dinosaur of the Late Maastrichtian era. Imagine them spitting out coffee and donut crumbs when they realized that Tyrannosaurus rex was the only carnivorous dinosaur large enough at that time to have made bite marks so large.

Yes, I can hear some of you (my girlfriend included) exclaiming that that’s not solid proof of cannibalism at all. What if the marks were made by carrion insects or T. Rexes during combat for supremacy for the Late Maastrichtian ‘hood?

Well, no, this does not seem to have been the case. No species of insects, lizards or mammals have been found that could have effected the toothmarks on the four Tyrannosaurus corpses. Further, teeth gnawing all the way to the bone are highly unlikely to occur during a mere turf war between two Tyrannosaurus – head wounds would be more likely in such a situation and those were not found by the avant gardists of stuffy fossils.

The evidence suggests that small Tyrannosaurus Rexes did feed on the their larger cousins, scavenging their toes, feet and arms ruthlessly. However, as Horner et al., oh so poetically, write: “It does seem improbable that Tyrannosaurus routinely hunted full-grown members of its own species; however, it is possible that intraspecific combat led to casualties, with the dead becoming a convenient source of food for the victors. “

I rest my case and remain assured of your utter dumbfoundedness.

Esko Suoranta, close to midnight, out.