Racing-fever

Louisa actually has her own misgivings to overcome: is she only idealizing things? Heinrich does look a lot like his son, with whom Louisa was previously in love with but whom she later found fully disappointing. No, insists Louisa. Heinrich is a man of foundation and character; actually, he has exactly the type of personality that Eric lacks, and, in Louisa’s opinion, will never be able to develop.

But Heinrich replies that he is still way too old for her. He clearly shows signs of conflicted thoughts. He doesn’t want to see her marrying a “father figure” – she still has her entire life ahead of her.

Louisa can do nothing but smile in response. She doesn’t want a “father”; she wants a husband, and she doesn’t know anybody else that could compare to Heinrich.
She wants him.

Yes, these are my words. But thank goodness, this is not my writing. Someone that I met on campus one day “hired” me, so to speak, to translate a proposal for a TV-show. The show is intended for German television (German title: “Rennfieber”), and is technically speaking made in the genre of “romantic-drama”… in other words, it’s a soap. Really, the soapiest of the soaps: a love-story involving a beautiful young goddaughter and, believe it or not, horseracing.

Sappy story aside, I was surprised at how interesting it was to translate. I was translating a German document into English, much easier than the other way around. Just to think of how to translate German Redewendungen, expressions, was a really cool exercise because when we say them in English on a day-to-day basis we don’t really think of them as anything worth putting into writing. That was probably the hardest part: kaltschnäuzige Schnösel for instance, which has something to do with pig-snouts. I translated it in the end as “cold-hearted”, which is not quite as descriptive and visual but it still gets the point across. Luckily my roommate Anna’s mother, who spends a lot of time around horses, happened to be visiting. She helped me with some of the horse vocab such as “breeding” and “thoroughbred”, very big help since they weren’t in my dictionary. Unfortunately, every paragraph-long sentence in German takes three or four separate sentences in English, so I was worried that I was straying from the content when I wrote shorter sentences.

Around 15 hours later (over a few days, don't worry) I was done with the twelve-page text. Who knows if it’ll actually make it to the “small (TV) screen”. But damn, now I want to know who will fall in love next…