My most important job at work (my god i am unimportant) is to gather all the news articles pertaining to the Olympics- past, present and future and compile them into a document. this is a task that some people would find fairly entertaining and, I'm sure that many would enjoy staying up to date on the latest sports news. mostly i find it pretty boring, and some days i wish i had a job that related to something i'm actually interested in, like looking for articles about the newest david lynch or kristin chenowith's concert. sometimes i do get a kick out of reading the articles though. for instance, i am rooting for abuja, nigeria or peongchang, korea to be successful in their 2014 olympic bids (russia or austira would be so boring). imagine the olympics in africa! that'd be some crazy shit. crazier even than doing it in china, something that i still wonder at every time i leave my apartment. and the NBA's recent decision to team up with Mongolian milk as a marketing partner is golden, just golden.
i am also planning to start translating a young adult version of Outlaws of the Marsh into english in my spare time at work. translating, i have recently discovered, can be kind of a blast. i've started with the blog of the chinese girl who wrote Shanghai Baby, a racy novel that has bored most western critics, but having been banned in the mainland, has become extremely popular over here. her blog is pretty ridiculous, full of advice for girls looking to get a husband like "if a guy doesn't treat you to a meal he won't make a good husband" and "the woman should never ask the man out." i told my friend Dan-Dan that it was ridiculous and she said "no, this is important for chinese girls to know." well, i guess its pretty much like that book "The Rules," and American women seemed to think that was important for quite a while. anyway, it really makes written chinese come alive reading a blog rather than a dialogue in a textbook. my other great discovery was translation programs, which tell you what a character means when you put the cursor on it. because chinese is so effing hard, this only gets you about halfway there, and most sentences still require me to puzzle over them for 5 minutes. but it's a start!
i am also planning to start translating a young adult version of Outlaws of the Marsh into english in my spare time at work. translating, i have recently discovered, can be kind of a blast. i've started with the blog of the chinese girl who wrote Shanghai Baby, a racy novel that has bored most western critics, but having been banned in the mainland, has become extremely popular over here. her blog is pretty ridiculous, full of advice for girls looking to get a husband like "if a guy doesn't treat you to a meal he won't make a good husband" and "the woman should never ask the man out." i told my friend Dan-Dan that it was ridiculous and she said "no, this is important for chinese girls to know." well, i guess its pretty much like that book "The Rules," and American women seemed to think that was important for quite a while. anyway, it really makes written chinese come alive reading a blog rather than a dialogue in a textbook. my other great discovery was translation programs, which tell you what a character means when you put the cursor on it. because chinese is so effing hard, this only gets you about halfway there, and most sentences still require me to puzzle over them for 5 minutes. but it's a start!
posted by Amanda at 10:51 PM
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