Clarissa's Blog

Stop peeing, you folks. Hold it all in for the benefit of humanity. Science says so.

Exactly. Remember Abu Ghraib? There was enormous, widespread outrage in the US over the torture of Iraqi prisoners. But in Russia people sincerely don’t understand why it’s not cute and funny to watch videos of Russian soldiers castrating Ukrainian POWs.

Remember a few years ago when Russians fed a polar bear who had just had cubs some explosives, filmed the animal’s gruesome death and gleefully posted it online? Yes, a human being is not an animal but this gives you a good indication as to where a culture is heading. What we see today is a natural result of the direction of Russian progress.

Ukrainians have been sending the bodies of the dead Russian soldiers back home. There was a hope that once parents saw their dead boys, they’d oppose the war. But the opposite happened. The grieving parents are swapping the bodies for cash rewards and old cars that the government gives them and eagerly sending more of their sons to war in hope of another payout if another son is killed. They post joyful videos of driving these old clunkers they get as a reward. It’s really weird to watch but it’s not surprising because I’ve seen how N’s mother treats him, and she’d totally not mind getting this kind of reward.

I’ve been saying for years that not all cultures are the same. People aren’t widgets. There are cultures with a completely different understanding of life and family. We make a huge mistake when we assume that everybody feels as we do.

Of course, when I say these things, somebody immediately points out that murderers, serial killers, and bad parents exist everywhere. They do but that’s not what I’m talking about here. There either is a widespread societal approval of these behaviors or there isn’t. And once there is, things get really scary.

While other nations win wars and stun the world with bravery and resilience, Americans are snowflaking the day away:

The Burns brought the suit after seeing a viral video of another incident of alleged discrimination that happened to a family from New York. That video showed a performer dressed as the character Rosita seemingly ignoring two young Black girls while then reaching toward another girl – who the family’s lawyer said was white – and giving her a hug.

The lawyer for that family, B’Ivory LaMarr, called the incident a “racist act.” The girls’ mother and aunt has demanded the performer be fired, but she has said that she would rather avoid a lawsuit. LaMarr said Sesame Place should be made to cover any expenses related to the mental health of the girls, who he said are now dealing with “severe emotional distress. . . Burns, the plaintiff from Maryland, said he was “hurt” and “devastated” by the alleged treatment of his daughter.

Curiously, the only kind of translation for which I have used Google Translate so far is the literary translation. There are descriptions of military operations in the novel that are boring, do I just put them in GT.

For medical, I haven’t used it because the client has a glossary of the terms they use and they need complete compliance with the glossary. For the Ukrainian videos, I didn’t need it because there’s nothing people say in Ukrainian that I can’t say in English. For a both company, they give me .pdfs where parts of the document are handwritten in Ukrainian. All of the translations I do are Ukrainian or Russian into English. And GT sucks ass with Ukrainian anyway.

Russians massacred Ukrainian POWs. Tortured them in horrific ways, filmed the torture, and proudly sent the videos to their relatives. In one of the videos, a Russian soldier castrates a Ukrainian POW with a penknife. It’s clear from his stupid, greasy face that he has never heard the word “NATO” but is very happy to be able to mutilate live human beings.

There’s money in translation, folks. This month I made a thousand dollars (in 4 different currencies), and I don’t have much time to dedicate to translation. I have a very research-heavy workload, I travel, people came to stay with me, I chair my department, prepare for the Fall semester, read. So it’s not like I can work on translation all day. Or every day.

Also, all the blather about the dangers of automation to translation is bunkum. The kind of stuff I have been translated will never be automated. It would be way too expensive and probably not even work.

My translator persona is part of my grieving process. When my friend died, I colored my hair in her color. When my father died, I started doing the work he had done for his clients. He didn’t have much hair, so I had to do this instead. For some reason, this is what helps me grieve. I kind of become the person who passed on. It might be weird but it works for me. Plus, I will now teach my translation course more effectively because I’m actually doing it and learning how translation changed since I last did it.

The most rewarding translation project I’ve done was subtitling in English video testimonials of Ukrainian refugees in Poland. It was emotionally grueling, plus I had to learn to make .srt files. But the translation is very easy. It’s conversational Ukrainian or Russian, which I can do in my sleep. And I feel like I’m helping to get these stories out.

I have found myself in an unexpected and somewhat weird position of working as a translator for 3 large companies. One is medical, one is tech, and one a religiously affiliated multinational charitable concern.

And let me tell you, my friends. As part of this work, I’ve been in correspondence with many people. In the medical company, in particular, every translation goes through many rounds of review. This puts me in touch with many employees in different positions. I have noticed that the frequency of people listing their pronouns in the email signature in all 3 companies is an order of magnitude higher than in academia.

In academia, secretaries and members of low-level administrative staff list pronouns. Maybe a few early-career academics with no publications. Serious people list their recent books and corresponding links but very VERY rarely pronouns. Yesterday, for instance, I had to get in touch with 5 academics I don’t personally know for a colleague’s tenure review. Zero pronouns. On the same day, I coresponded with 4 people in the corporate world. All had pronouns.

The main source of wokeness is no longer academia. It’s still a major source of it but there’s now a much more powerful and wealthy one. That is the world of transnational business.

https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1547650791137165314?t=CyR4ud22sDjBazBfAdHiSQ&s=19

This is the cost of the decades of coddling of Russia. And the same people who did the coddling now have the gall to criticize Zelensky for doing everything he can, including some pretty humiliating things, to make this stop. I want everyone who has been snarking that “maybe the war in Ukraine isn’t that bad” to look at these pictures and try to recover a shred of dignity.

The new chief administrator told that we have to “centralize department budgets.” Nobody knows what it means and how it’s supposed to be done.

Fortunately, people are learning to adapt to these Soviet practices. Today I’ve had a meeting with the accounting department. They told us how we’ll centralize. Two lines in the budget will swap places. And the spreadsheets will be uploaded to a different folder. The meeting lasted exactly 3,5 minutes, which shows that we are finally learning to take the piss at the moronic mandates of our dear Soviet leaders our administrators.

It always bugs me to see “All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply, including minorities, women, persons with disabilities, and protected veterans.” It’s 2022. Nobody has excluded women from applying for jobs or awards in a century.

I’d also remove ‘minorities’ because nobody knows who’s a minority anymore. I’m a Ukrainian but I’m never a minority when a Hispanic person, who belongs to a gigantically more numerous group in the US, sometimes is. But not always. And nobody knows exactly when or why.

This becomes particularly funny when an Argentinean of Ukrainian-Jewish descent counts as a minority and I, also of Ukrainian-Jewish descent, do not. I’m always reminded of the novels by Faulkner where people are tortured by the knowledge that an ancestor lived in Jamaica and hence they might have “a drop of non-white blood.” The Argentinean is assumed to have lived somewhere in the approximate vicinity of “people of color” and automatically becomes “not fully white.” Of course, everybody should be free to choose their sex but nobody is ever allowed to name their own ethnicity because Americans can’t tolerate any infringement on their one-drop rules.