Things I Like This Week (Or: My Brain Is Fried and This Is the Best I Can Do Tonight)

• The aforementioned brioche and Nutella. Our local bakery makes the best brioche, and we don't get it often, but when we do it's a huge treat. P keeps trying to convince me to do weird stuff like turn it into French toast, but I maintain that the only way to eat it is with Nutella. End of story.

• The Radiolab episode about the War of the Worlds radio program seventy years ago. I had some general idea about what the whole thing was about, but I found it so fascinating that I'm listening to it again. I had absolutely no idea that someone thought it would be fun to try it years later in Quito, Ecuador. People died. Crazy.

• Listening to Pandora while I'm translating and spending a couple of bucks a day on new music.

• The prosecco you can get at Costco for $10. I have no idea what it's called. But if you like sparking wine, try it.

• Eric Herman's The Elephant Song. The boys have been obsessed with it lately, and I can't get it out of my head. "Gotta like frogs, running through a maze for some cheese."

Good night.

ABCs

It started when Primo was about eighteen months old. I remember because my brother and sister-in-law were here for a visit, and she and I noticed that Primo was downright engrossed in a book about numbers. We started to point at them and name him for him. Then, for fun, we asked him, “Where’s the eight?”

A pause. Then he slowly pointed to the eight.

“Where’s the zero?”

Another deliberate pause, and he pointed to the zero.

From there, it was on to letters and the sounds they made. All before he was two. Then we started on syllables. I found an old Spanish first-grade reading primer at a book sale and he was as engrossed in that as he had been in the number book a year earlier. Mi mamá me mima has become one of his favorite phrases.

He loves to type on the computer, using this awesome program for Macs I’ve mentioned before. A couple of months ago, my mom and I were sitting with him, egging him on. Mama, he spelled. Daddy. Nana. Words he knew. Words we knew he knew. “Qué inteligente.” my mom praised him. And then as a joke, she added, “Spell inteligente.”

ENTELIGNTE, he tapped out, rendering us speechless.

He’s just taken off from there. “Spell calabaza,” I urged the other day. C-A-L-A, he typed. Then he looked at me and asked, “¿Con B o con V?”

“Con B,” I told him, completely floored, and added, for good measure, “y con Z.” Pleased, he turned back to the computer and typed, CALABAZA.

He spells words out phonetically, in Spanish, even when they’re English words Island becomes AILENT. Nancy becomes NANSI. IKEA becomes AEKIA. Recently he threw a major fit before bedtime because he wanted me to spell words for him on the Magna Doodle. I finally gave in, and after we wrote a few words together, he settled right down and went to sleep. He often greets our friends by spelling their names. His preschool teachers told me that he refused to go to the playground the other day until he spelled EXIT with wooden letters. He spelled CAT, one of them told me, starting with the T. He didn’t spell it backwards, he just started with the T and worked his way back. He’s reading complete sentences as quickly as I can write them on the Magna Doodle, an activity that makes him giggle delightedly.

When he first started to show an interest in letters and reading, I promised myself I would only encourage him, never push him. But he's insatiable, and as much as I give him, he's always ready for more. And now he’s taken the next step by himself—I noticed a shaky PR on the Magna Doodle the other day when I came back from work. Later, I watched him write it several times.

I don’t mean for this to be an obnoxious bragging post. It’s just that I’m truly fascinated by the whole thing. And to be honest, when I’m in a bad place, I’m slightly worried about it. If we’d never had that intervention with his teachers, I think I would feel nothing but pride, I’d be thinking my son is brilliant, it never would have occurred to me that anything might even be wrong. I wish I were utterly oblivious. But he does echo language a lot. I have a hard time getting him to answer questions. The letters are bordering on an obsession. P and I used to joke that Primo showed more of the “classic” signs of autism than Secondo. When he was younger he had this need to line up toys, straws, silverware. I completely disregarded the best advice I received—and followed—early on with Secondo, which was, “No obsessive Googling, it will just freak you out," and found out about hyperlexia, which--you guessed it--freaked me out.

I told Secondo’s new doctor, Dr. B, about Primo. “Trust your instincts,” he tells me. “They’ve been great so far.” The thing is, I don’t know anymore. My instincts do tell me that Primo is just fine. That he’s smart as a whip, a brainy boy, a boy who likes taking books to the playground, nothing more. And then I hate myself for doubting that, because I'm insanely proud of him and amazed by how smart he is. But his teachers planted that seed of doubt in my mind. And then I think of P's friends, whose son was diagonosed with PDD-NOS. They didn't catch it until he was older. He was reading, his mother tells me. We just thought he was smart. And if it weren’t for Secondo, I think I would find it really easy to laugh it all off, call his teachers crazy. But there is Secondo. So I’m heeding the advice I give other people, which is, It can’t hurt. Even if you're wrong, at least you’ll know.

Tomorrow

I have a long translation due on Thursday, and after being sick for a while and having a house guest, I started to freak out about finishing it. Today, thankfully, it started looking like meeting the deadline would at least be humanly possible--I wasn't so sure about that earlier. So I'm sneaking in five minutes to blog.

The translation includes autopsy reports, and my background research has been interesting. I found out that the three top hits and the most easily available autopsy reports are those of Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet Ramsay and Terri Schiavo. I also needed information on fingerprinting corpses and found many graphic images I wish I hadn't seen--and I say this as someone who doesn't bat an eyelash when interpreting for a medical examiner. I was, however, incredibly excited to have the original reports in Spanish, because it cleared up a lot of outstanding questions I had about the terminology I already knew in English.

Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be cold, and I heard flurries mentioned on the news. I will be happily holed up in my office translating, in my fleece pajamas and slippers, sipping a latte and eating brioche and Nutella. And even though I'll be working very, very hard, I'm looking forward to that.

Another Midnight Post

So I missed another day. I'm not making excuses, just stating the following facts: An old friend is in town, we've eaten delicious Ethiopian food for several meals in a row now, and drunk good wine. Plenty of it. We've hung out and she's also looked after the boys for me, because I've been working doggedly on a translation that's due on Thursday.

Also, we've been googling old articles from the Onion that we remember from way back. So I'll leave you with this one. Even though I'm opposed to the mere mention of Christmas before Thanksgiving, this one cracks me up every time. And considering it's the Onion, it's surprisingly G-rated, too.

Goals

Our meeting with Miss C today was wonderful. I was glad I'd skimmed Secondo's IEP. His progress was evaluated using a series of codes that I can't remember. But he did get a couple of Ms for Mastery of a skill, a few of his skills were considered Emerging Skills, and he should be on track to meet those goals by the end of the year. I'm not so interested in the goals, exactly. What matters to me is that he seems like a different boy than he was when he started school, he's much more engaged, there's less echoing and his language is so much more purposeful than it used to be. Miss C is a new teacher, and I sing her praises to anyone who will listen.

We also met with his speech therapist for the first time. I had no idea that she speaks Spanish fluently, and she told us she often uses it with Secondo during their sessions. I could have wept, I was so excited.

[Anyone notice how I often get my November posts in right under the wire, before midnight? I think this one will still count for my Thursday post, even though it's now Friday.]

Preparation

I will be working at a conference tomorrow morning. The timing was perfect--the place where I was originally supposed to work tomorrow canceled on me, and I'm busy in the afternoon, so a few hours of work will fill my morning nicely. The only information I have is the name of the organization where I will be working, a link to their website and the name of my colleague. I like knowing details so I can read up on the subject and prepare a glossary, but tonight I've been wading through pages and pages on their website and I have no idea what information is relevant.

Tomorrow afternoon we have a parent-teacher conference with Miss C, where we will discuss Secondo's progress in meeting the goals set forth in his IEP. I've heard a million horror stories about IEP meetings, but ours went swimmingly. I do realize, though, that that's because it was our very first meeting and we were not evaluating his progress, we were setting goals, goals that sounded good to me so throughout the meeting I nodded enthusiastically and occasionally chimed in. Goals that I no longer remember. So tonight I dug out Secondo's IEP and reread it in preparation for tomorrow. I was reminded that his progress will by measured using the very specific, numerical criteria established several months ago, even though it's obvious to me that he's progressed by leaps and bounds.

When Interpreters Dream

I spend a lot of my time looking up words.

When I translate, I have plenty of time to research terminology. I’ve gotten good at Google searches, I have several specialized go-to dictionaries, and in a pinch, I can e-mail or call colleagues from a particular country and ask for their opinion. Sometimes, even when I think I’ve researched something thoroughly, the perfect word will come to me when I’m editing my work, after I’ve set the translation aside for a little while.

Interpreting is different that way—you do it on the fly. If I’m working by myself, I can look things up as I go, or weave words in later or correct myself if I need to. If I’m lucky enough to have a colleague who’s got my back, he or she will jot down words for me and help me out as I go along.

And sometimes, picking someone’s brain is really the best solution. No matter how many dictionaries you own or how many search results you find online, the results can be unsatisfying. There’s nothing like asking your audience. Your clients are, after all, experts in their field, and they can often clear things up for you in an instant.

A difficult word came up recently, one I’d had to interpret many times before. I’d found acceptable—and correct—solutions, but I still wasn’t happy. The conference was on sexual violence and the word was “advocate.” When it’s a noun, you can use the words defensor, partidario, or you can turn the word into a phrase, which can be clumsy, not to mention difficult to fit in your interpretation. When it’s a noun, you can use the word abogar. The problem is, those words can be confusing if the context is legal, because a defensor can be a defense attorney and an abogado is an attorney, whereas the word advocate has a different connotation. I’ve searched message boards and there are long threads devoted to the word, but no one has the perfect answer.

After the role of an advocate (in the context of rape and sexual violence) had been described at the conference, I went up to the women who were my clients. “See that woman over there?” I asked, pointing at one of the advocates. “In your field, what would you call someone who does her job?”

One of them then proceeded to give me the perfect word, a word that had never turned up in all my searching. It was such an elegant solution, so smack-yourself-on-the-forehead obvious, a word that was a complete revelation. I immediately jotted it down in my steno pad and thanked the woman profusely. It came up many, many more times that day, and I loved having the perfect word to use.

And then I forgot it.

I have absolutely no idea what it is. I know from experience I won’t find it online, though I’ve looked, hoping I missed something the first time. I look at the stack of dozens of steno pads in my office and am daunted by the prospect of looking through all of them, and I curse the fact that I didn’t label the pad, that my system is so haphazard. I’m always hopeful that someday the word might just come to me again, or that it will reveal itself to me in a dream. Seriously.

Lesson learned. Ever since, I’ve recorded those notes on my iPod Touch when I’m on the go, so I won't forget them again. But I still mourn the loss of that perfect, perfect word.