May Your Neurons Never Get Tired of Your Challenges

by Steve Vlasta Vitek

The mystery does not get clearer by repeating the question,
nor is it bought with going to amazing places.

Until you’ve kept your eyes and your wanting still for fifty years,
you don’t begin to cross over from confusion.

(The Persian poet Rumi, born in 1207, in a translation by Coleman Barks)

I have a theory that some people are born to be translators. These

fortunate people are born with a natural and unsatiable curiosity
about foreign languages and later become translators or language
teachers, just as other people who are curious about numbers or
animals become later mathematicians or veterinarians. I remember
that I was very curious about my first foreign language—Russian,
when I started learning it in fourth grade. Russian was an obligatory
subject in communist Czechoslovakia where I was growing up. For
the life of me I could not understand why the Russians insist on their
funny Cyrillic alphabet and why they add strange endings to words
that mean something else in Czech. As far as I was concerned,
Russian was a funny language that one did not really have to learn
too much because most words were understandable to a Czech kid
anyway.
But I fell in love head over heels with French when I started
learning it in high school. I started reading “simplified French books”
for children, published by the Ministry of Education in Moscow with a
French-Russian dictionary at the end of books written by Jules
Verne, Alexander Dumas and other French authors. My favorite
station on the radio was France International (or “France-Inter”)
which could be clearly heard in Central Europe on my short wave
radio. By the time I was 16 I knew that foreign languages would
become the biggest passion of my life. In addition to French, Latin
and Russian which I was learning in my high school, I was also
learning German and English on my own. I started taking Russian
seriously once I discovered its mysterious beauty as a teenager. As
a teenager I also thought that Latin was the coolest language of
them all because nobody spoke it anymore and yet, people were still
learning it. Everything sounded so noble in Latin. “This town is
pretty” is just another sentence, but if you say it in Latin, “hoc
oppidum pulchrum est” has such a noble ring to it. My sister’s
boyfriend gave me a Latin translation of New Testament and I read
it with a Czech translation when I was 17. This Latin was much
easier to understand than the excerpts from classical authors that
we were reading at school. When I was 16 I spent a summer in East
Germany through a program for exchange of high school students
and when I was 18 I went with a similar program to France. I went
to Nice, Monte Carlo, the Alps, Paris. I had very little money, only
the little bit that I earned during a summer job for foreign students
in the Maritime Alps. But everybody around me spoke this beautiful
language and I could finally practice my high school French, refined
with the help of simplified books published in Moscow and
broadcasts of French radio stations, with native French speakers.
I studied French and Latin for four semesters at the Charles
University in Prague. I was still in love with the French language and
everything French, but my initial passion for Latin gave way to
disenchantment. There was nobody to talk to in Latin. I tried to
listen to Radio Vatican in Latin on short waves, but it was not very
interesting (probably not even for priests). Not nearly as interesting
as “France-Inter” with those incredible French songs, sung by
Aznavour and Adamo, and late night interviews with pop music stars
in Paris. I wrote a letter in Latin to an Italian girl who listed Latin as
her interest in a newsletter for pen pals. She was very impressed,
but when she replied in English, I knew I had to switch from Latin to
modern languages. By then, I could not go to France or Italy any
more, even though my pen pal was asking me to come. Traveling to
a Western country, difficult and very expensive during a short period
of liberalization in the late sixties, was now almost an impossibility
in the seventies. The university turned down my application to be
allowed to study a modern language instead of Latin and classical
Greek. The choice I had was either to finish my combination (Latin
and French) or drop out. The rules were very strict because
otherwise too many people would keep changing their minds,
making life difficult for the teachers. I wonder if the university was
as inflexible in 1343, when it was founded, the language of
instruction was Latin and the only foreign language that was taught
was classical Greek, as it was in 1972 when it turned down my
application for transfer to a modern language.
 I dropped out from the university, served for two long years in the
Czechoslovak army, and then applied again at the same university
for a different language combination—this time it was English and
Japanese. It is true that we get two chances at everything in life. I
had a second chance now, and I was not going to blow it this time.
But I was scared. I chose Japanese out of bravado—I read
somewhere that Japanese is the most difficult language in the world
to learn—so how could I possibly resist? But could I really learn all
those squiggly characters? After almost 25 years, I tend to agree
that it is probably the most difficult language to learn. But I am a
pretty good beginner by now and I have the rest of my life to keep
working on it.
I graduated with a master’s (magister) degree in Japanese and
English from my university in 1980 and landed my first job as an in-
house translator for the Czechoslovak News Agency in Prague. It
was a very interesting job. I was following in several news agencies
the latest news as it was developing and translating news releases
from German, French, and Russian into Czech (there was nothing in
Japanese), and there was a good chance that I would be sent
abroad after a few years as a foreign correspondent, probably to
Tokyo. There was a small catch, though. I would have to join the
Communist Party.
So I decided to drop out again. I bought a tour for myself and my
girlfriend to Yugoslavia, hitchhiked across the porous border from
Yugoslavia to Austria and Germany (without the girlfriend, who did
not want to go with me). Once in Germany, I applied for
immigration to US, Canada, and Australia, since all of these
countries were accepting political refugees from Europe in the early
eighties. The US embassy in Frankfurt was the first one to grant me
an interview, and I found myself in San Francisco in the summer of
1982.
I worked for three years as a visitor information representative for
the San Francisco Convention Bureau, which basically meant that I
was telling people in English, Japanese, and European languages
how to get from downtown to Fisherman’s Wharf, Yosemite, and the
Wine Country. I also started translating for translation agencies in
San Francisco, at this point only Czech, simple things like birth
certificates and correspondence on my typewriter. My job was easy
and enjoyable. I became an instant expert on San Francisco, or at
least I had to pretend that I knew everything about it, my funny
Central European accent notwithstanding. After almost three
decades of walking the streets of Prague and medieval towns in
Bohemia and Germany, I was now walking the streets of San
Francisco, taking the cable cars from downtown, where I worked, to
my small cheap apartment which I somehow found on lower Nob
Hill, with a view of the city skyline on one side and Chinatown’s
restaurants just a few steps away. I used to jog every Saturday
from my place on Joyce Street to Golden Gate Bridge and back.
Most weeks during the theater season I would have some free
tickets to theaters and concerts, even the opera in San Francisco as
a perk of my job.
Soon after I married my wife Yoko in 1984, I decided to go with
her to Tokyo. It took me three weeks to find a job as a translator for
a small Japanese import company which was importing BMW cars
from Germany. This was a new venture for this company, and my
job was to translate German into English and with some help from a
Japanese secretary into Japanese, and also Japanese into English. I
also started taking on jobs from translation agencies in Tokyo. I
remember one long translation of documentation (in Russian) about
a gas pipeline project in Siberia. All of my translations were done on
a typewriter, although I had been using a computer on my first job
as a translator for the Czechoslovak News Agency in Prague in 1980
and 1981. I was now walking the streets of Tokyo, learning the
subway and bus lines, just as I did in Prague, Nuremberg and
Munich, and then in San Francisco a few years ago. Unlike most
“gaijins” (foreigners) around me, I could read the signs and talk to
people in Japanese. But to my surprise, they would often insist on
speaking broken English to me, refusing to accept the possibility
that this “gaijin” might actually understand what they were saying in
their own language. After a while I got used to it. If they insisted on
English, I did not insist on Japanese. Only if they knew no English
whatsoever, was I free to practice my Japanese with them. My wife
explained it to me this way: ”When I see your face, I just have to
speak English.” I remember that once when I was in a Japanese
restaurant in Tokyo with my Japanese colleagues, I tried to respond
to a joke that our waitress told us in Japanese. I thought that what I
said was pretty funny until I saw her face freezing up. She looked at
my Japanese friends and said in Japanese, ignoring me completely:
“I hate it when a “gaijin” does something like that to me.” I have
never been more insulted in my whole life. I think that I have a
pretty good idea now, after having lived in Japan for a while, what it
may feel like to be a black or Asian person who lives among mostly
white neighbors.
All of a sudden, I felt homesick. Actually, California-sick was what
I felt. When my wife finally got the visa she needed for her green
card at the US embassy in Tokyo, I quit my job, and we decided to
take our delayed honeymoon trip to Hokkaido (which my wife always
wanted to see), and then we went back to San Francisco. I was
walking the familiar streets again, watching the cable cars loaded
with tourists freezing in their shorts and T-shirts in the San
Francisco fog, jogging in Golden Gate Park and checking out with my
wife Korean and Vietnamese restaurants in the Richmond district of
San Francisco where we were now living. I was happy to be home
again. Nobody was surprised to see my white face and hear my
funny accent. My accent might have been kind of interesting, but
not out of place. Not in San Francisco.
It was at this point that Alex Shkolnik, a technical translator from
Russian and Japanese in San Francisco, introduced me to Donald
Philippi, who as it happened, lived in the same neighborhood just a
few blocks away from my place. I read a translation of Don’s
translation of Kojiki, a Japanese mythological version of the origin of
the world and other Japanese legends when I was studying Japanese
in Prague in the seventies. Actually, my girlfriend at that time (the
one who would not go with me to America) gave me a translation of
his English translation of Kojiki (into Slovak) for my birthday in
1977. When I saw Don’s house, where three bedrooms on the
second floor were turned into one huge study with bookshelves
overflowing with technical dictionaries, etymological dictionaries and
all kinds of reference works, it dawned on me that I could make a
living by basically imitating Don’s way of making a living. Don was
originally a linguist without any technical background. And not just
some kind of linguist. He was working for many years in Japan on
the first dictionary of the language of Ainu—the original inhabitants
of Japan, and he translated Kojiki (a book of Japanese mythology)
and Norito (old Japanese Shinto prayers) into English. But since it is
much easier to make a living with technical Japanese than Japanese
mythology, he eventually became a technical translator specializing
in nuclear reactors. Don was also fluent in Russian, a language that
he loved passionately. We spent many evenings watching news in
Russian on a TV channel in San Francisco, following the breakup of
Soviet Union and discussing Russian politics, leafing through Russian
etymological dictionaries and listening to Don’s collection of unusual
records and CDs—anything from Byzantine music to guttural songs
of Mongolian nomads. Don was also holding meetings for Japanese
translators in the Bay Area until he died in 1993. During those few
years from 1987 to 1993, I was fortunate to meet a number of other
translators from Japanese and other languages living in the Bay
Area, mostly through Don’s meetings. (There are three interesting
interviews with Don Philippi on Don Philippi's memorial Web page at
http://www.jai2.com/dlpivu1.htm. These interviews were conducted
by Fred Schodt in 1984.)
Under Don’s influence, I started specializing in Japanese patents
for two very good reasons: 1.—there are so many of them, and 2.—
somebody has to do it. Since I translate several patents (mostly
from Japanese, but also from German, Czech, and French) a week, I
must have translated thousands of them since 1987. Some of them
are sent to me by law firms in the Bay Area and elsewhere in US. An
agency in Tokyo sends me, once or twice a year, materials from the
Japan Patent Office. I translated JPO’s Web site with an interesting
history of the development of the intellectual property system for
patents in Japan. A large patent law firm in San Francisco keeps me
busy on a good year (such as this one) with boxes of Japanese
patents, which I first have to sift through and identify in their office
in San Francisco.
Some people are born to become translators, as other people are
born to become painters, architects, or tennis players. But although
most people are born with a unique talent, relatively few people will
ever find out what their special talent is, let alone realize its full
potential. Those who discover their calling and later work hard on
what they have been born with will eventually become very
successful in their field—but more importantly, unlike most people
who wake up every morning to go to work to pay their bills, they will
truly enjoy their work. Perhaps I was a translator in another lifetime.
I might have been a scribe translating the Bible from Aramaic or
Saint Augustin from Latin with a quill and an inkstand in some
Middle Eastern country. If I close my eyes, I can still see the dark
and dusty cave where I was working on my translation and smell the
flickering candle in my translator’s office, fifteen hundred years ago.
The holy texts of our time, for me, anyway, are patents and
scientific papers that are at the beginning of every modern
invention, from ATM machines, modems and cell phones, to the
cruise control in your car and satellite transmission of your TV
stations. Thanks to my Russian, French, Latin, and science teachers
at my high school, my Japanese teachers at my university, Don
Philippi and other people who showed me the way later in life, the
little bit of talent that I was born with was not wasted on a boring
nine to five job. I can only hope that my children will be as fortunate
as I have been with their teachers and friends.
Most of the patents that I translate at this point deal basically with
one problem: How to cram more circuits and semiconductor
elements into a tiny computer chip. There seem to be no limits to
miniaturization of circuits for engineers working on the design of
memory chips. A tiny computer chip can provide an almost infinite
amount of space if you know how to arrange properly all the
elements in it. I wonder what will happen when all of the seemingly
infinite amount of space is finally used up. At that point, the chip
design will be probably thrown out the window and replaced by a
different concept, just like the vacuum tube was replaced by a
transistor. The only chip that does provide an infinite amount of
storage for information is the human brain, with its billions of
connections between the neurons, arranged in layers and designs
that nobody will ever understand. Unfortunately, this storage is not
permanent. But then again, nothing is really permanent.
It is my job to transfer information that was arranged according to
the rules of one language into another language, using the rules of
both languages that I am working with and my understanding of the
concept of what is said in the original language. It is a highly
enjoyable and challenging job. It keeps me on my toes, and it often
makes me very tired. Japanese is so different from an Indo-
European language, it is almost like visiting another planet. To
translate a long, rambling sentence in a claim of a Japanese patent,
you first have to run a wrecking ball through the structure of the
sentence and break it up into individual bricks. If you understand
the design (the meaning) of the original wall and of the new
structure in the other language, you can then put the bricks back
together in the proper order. You can start your analysis of the
original sentence from several places in Japanese, although the end
of the sentence is usually the best place. The key is your
understanding of what is being said. You will never know as much as
you need to know about any language, or any technology. But the
more you work on the architecture of the language and of the
technology, the more you understand it. And after twenty years or
so of running your wrecking ball through the walls in foreign
languages and building new structures from the old bricks, you will
be a pretty good beginner at the old and noble art of translation.

May your experience be as enjoyable as mine!

May you and your children be blessed with good teachers and
friends as I was!

May your eyes, neurons, and fingers never become tired of the
challenges that translators struggle with every day in their
never ending struggle to ensure continuation of civilization and
 technology on this planet!

Steve Vlasta Vitek, technical translator

© Copyright 1998 Translation Journal and the Author

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