On Frankfurt, lodging and gaming consoles.

Did you know that Frankfurt airport has oversized telephone booths for people to smoke indoors? They look like fish tanks, the people standing in there vacantly looking out while they smoke their cigarette because what else can you do in there?

That was a rhetorical question, so no lewd suggestions in the comments, please.

Anyway, the smoking booths are my most striking memory from the flight, followed by the sheer number of airplanes flying into Frankfurt. I don't think I've ever flown as closely to another flying airplane as I did on Saturday. After landing, as the plane turned to park, the lights from at least six other planes as they started their landing approach could be seen.

The rest of the trip to Heidelberg, in a brand new Mercedes with a driver, was unremarkable. Upon arrival, I met the apartment where I'll live for the next three months. The good new: it's a duplex. The bad news: it's a small duplex. Still, me and my roommate have already found the other students who are staying in a big apartment in the guest house, so we already know where the parties will take place. The stove is going to be hard to get used to. It's a crappy electric thingy with two heaters so close that if I want to use the frying pan, it takes all the space. At the moment my first experiment with it and rice is underway.

Speaking of parties, social events where the reason I haven't written a proper blog post yet and why you get this condensed version of the last five days instead of individual funny stories written with time to spare. It's just hard to sit down to write them after arriving from the course and grocery shopping when I only have one hour to cook and go downtown for drinks.

The course started on Monday and so far has only been basic biology for non-biologists and basic computational stuff for biologists. The most fun has been the gymkhana that the administration section has prepared for us, where we have to chase signatures from a dozen different rooms in the various buildings. I have no shame to say that I eventually I got lost. Yet I can hold no grudge against the institute: this place rents Nintendo Wiis and Playsations 3 to any member of the staff! How cool is that?

Hello from Germany

Just to let you know that I arrived in Heidelberg, I am safe, and internet connection at home is now established.

I am in a hurry to cook dinner and then go into town, but I'll try to have a proper blog post tomorrow.

Until then.

FYI

It's done.

And now I rest.

To whom it may concern

Thank you.

Old habits die hard.

So. Still here.

Lots to write about, that with hectic weeks of thesis writing and what follows that, but since it’s still ongoing I don’t want to say a word about it before its over.

Instead, I’ll tell you about something that happened today.

I’m at a lab retreat. Not my lab, but a sister lab. Since one of the projects I’ve been working on has a strong collaboration with them, my boss, my replacement and I were asked to join the retreat for a few days to discuss it. My boss and I arrived today in the company of a foreign collaborator. The car trip from Lisbon was spend listening to and talking about music, with an idea for a start-up that will make us multi-millionaires popping up in the middle.

We arrived past work time for the people already at the retreat, so the rest of the evening was spent eating, drinking in moderation, talking... you know, enjoying ourselves (although at a certain point some people were singing karaoke). Jabs were taken at my young age and the advanced chronology of certain members of our gathering was brought up in retaliation. I received advice on where to get drunk and what clothes to wear in Cambridge. Science was discussed. Jokes were told. Good fun.

Then people started playing a mimicry game. You got told a name of a person and you had to impersonate him or her. I quietly moved to the side. It’s a fun game to watch, but I don’t really enjoy playing it myself.

Several rounds later, I am told that I’m next. After respectfully declining, I am told that I can’t stand to the side, enjoying myself and laughing at others without putting myself in their position. It’s only fair. C’mon, it’s going to be fun, you’ll enjoy it. Do the next one.

If it’s okay with you, I prefer not to. I really prefer not to. I’m not comfortable doing it. I’m really, really not comfortable doing it. All this is blurted out quickly the second time the question is asked. I fidget. My eyes dart around looking for an exit. A deer in the headlights looks more courageous.

When the evening ends, someone with whom I’ve discussed life, the universe and everything during the past year and takes me aside and apologises for asking me to play. He didn’t know I got nervous about that kind of stuff. That’s good. This used to happen much more frequently. I managed to pull off a full year of witty banter and serious topics looking and acting confident. But take a silly game of mimicry and...

Old habits die hard, I guess.

In which I put myself in the shoes of one of my most hated enemies.

I have an issue with translators. Not the automated kind, far away from the Babelfish though they may be. Those are just stupid machines that don’t know better because the geeks among us haven’t come up a way to deal computationally with natural language yet. However, we also don’t have machines fully act as doctors, artists, you name it and we still manage to diagnose people, fill up museums and galleries and do what is it that whatever you named it does by using humans proficient in those tasks. Likewise, we have humans that are supposed to be proficient in translating texts from one language to another. It is those translators that I have an issue with.

To clarify further: I have no problem with the act of translation itself. Since I am only proficient in two languages, three at most, I am, in fact, very grateful that translators exist and have done their thing to books which I would otherwise not be able to read. At its best, a translation is an invisible layer that allows the author to seamlessly reach the reader.

My issues are with the spots and scratches that appear in many English to Portuguese translations*. There have been novels that I couldn’t continue reading until I got the original version, so bad were the glaring translation mistakes. Mistakes that sometimes completely changed the meaning of the sentence and for which a quick internet search for the phrasal verb in question was all it would take to correct them.

It got to the point where I actively avoid any translation into Portuguese. Maybe because there is a bigger market, maybe because I don’t know enough to spot the errors, translations into English seem to be of better quality and are my choice when I find myself linguistically challenged.

Recently, however, I was asked to translate an English text that I helped composed in a small way. Giving it to someone else was a problem because there was no one else. Also, there was a girl saying “please please can you do it” and I’m a sucker for that. It was time see if I could to walk the walk as well as I talked the talk.

For most words where I was unsure about its direct translation, a quick search in the dictionary and/or Google would clear things up. Other were not so straightforward and the final version may not have the same exact meaning, but it’s the one that I think fits best, short of writing down the whole definition. As for phrase structure, sometimes it took some time to think about some other way to write that was the same sentence with translated words, but eventually everything fell into place. On the whole I am happy with this exercise. It was done quickly, neatly and made me put myself on the line on an issue where I usually just fire away criticism.**

The bottom line? I’ll still get frustrated and complain about bad translations. It is a great responsibility to take someone else’s words and reinvent them. On top of that, especially if the source material is good, poorly translated passages stand out and cloud one’s enjoyment of the whole. However, I’ll also have more respect for the good translations I find. I reworked a two-page text that I had helped shape, had access to the original author anytime I needed and still ran into some difficulties. I can only try to imagine what it is like to translate a doorstop novel whose author died ages ago.

*I mean book translations. For the sake of brevity and to avoid the use of profanity, no comment will be made about subtitle translations other than the following understatement: the median quality of a subtitle translation is on par with the Fast Food Song by the Fast Food Rockers (google it at your own peril).

**Some would argue translation is just one of many such issues.

Subway crushes

There isn't much I miss from the daily commute from Oeiras to Lisbon. Sure, the train whistling by the riverside can be beautiful and having the choice to get off the subway at any time to experience what a city can offer is nothing compared to my current walk in the suburbs, but most of the days my commute was nothing more than a boring, repetitive and awkard task to be performed daily.

Let me emphasize the awkward part. The worst situation is being without a book or a window seat in a carriage with just enough people to fill all seats but with no one standing up. You can't move your arms or legs because you are arm to arm and leg to leg with complete strangers and everyone stares at their own little dot in space, trying to avoid any eye-contact. It's just uncomfortable and those were the thoughts crossing my mind when I got on the subway at Cais-do-Sodré.

A couple of stations later, however, a perk I had forgotten about appeared: a subway crush. Those fleeting crushes last just as long you and the object of your afection are in the same train. It's longer than just passing someone by on the street, but not by much. When you first notice, you are smitten. There is not enough time to focus on whatever imperfections she surely has. Of course, as soon as one of us leaves the subway, the crush disappears as quickly as it appeared.

Today's crush appeared, as I said, a couple of stations after my trip started. I was happily strumming with my fingers and tapping my foot to the music I was listening to when she enters and sits in front of me. Dark auburn hair, blue short-sleeve blouse, a tinge of preppy but not too much, headphones in her hears and also strumming along to her music (which, I'm sure, was every bit as cool as mine). Some stations later, she leaves and the crush is over. It felt good while it lasted, though, and today's boring, endless commute was less of a chore.

Note: I remember talking with Hugo Z. about subway crushes some years ago. I don't know how much of what it said made it's way to this text, so some of the credit (or blame) goes to him.