- How did it happen that you’re doing this?

- Did you actually dream of this career path?

- What do I need to do to start translating for N***x? (Hello, stupid NDAs)

Over the years, I’ve come up with a standard story about how I freelanced being a student and how I eventually came back to it after many years in other businesses. How I worked with all kinds of tasks and clients. How one client back in 2016 asked me to do a translation QC for a TV series, using only an Excel spreadsheet. And how I liked it and started digging into this area as heavily as I only could. I took every training there was. I volunteered for Coursera and T.E.D. translation projects. I worked 30 hours a day. Don’t ask me how it was possible. It just was. It is always possible when you know what you’re doing it for. And then, when Netflix ran their Hermes test, I was ready.

But that answers only half of the question. That only tells how, not why. And to tell why, one word would be just enough. Pain. For many years, I’ve often felt it when watching foreign language content translated into Russian. Sometimes the pain was quite mild, even closer to a tickling, so I even could laugh about the source of it. But sometimes it was brutal. It was an inconceivable mixture of pain, anger, and Spanish shame (vicarious embarrassment, Fremdschämen). It came to a point where my wife refused to watch anything with me. I was just unbearable. I’d pause the video and ramble on what was actually meant, how it must have been translated, and why the existing translation was a piece of crap.

Here is one example of what could drive me crazy. This is a classic example for me. It excruciated me the moment I saw it over 15 years ago and I remember it every day till these days. Or, better to say, I only remembered the false translation and the pain it made me feel. I did not remember the movie title, I did not remember the actors or anything. But today, I came across this pic on the Internet and decided to finally google the details. This is a shot from ‘Good Luck Chuck’ (2007).

The text is simple. “Miss you already”. Some flowers from a guy for his crush with a note saying that he’s missing her already. How many possible translations of this can there be? I can only come up with one. Not in terms of wording, of course, but in terms of meaning. But here is how it was translated. For those who can read Russian, “Мисс ты уже”. For those who can’t, that is something close to “You’re already Miss.” I just can’t, as they say. It’s just rubbish in so many ways. But this is exactly what motivated me. This is my ‘Why’. To fight away the pain of mistranslations and bullshit.

It feels like there must be some wise conclusion to it, but there isn’t. I just wanted to share my little story. I hope it might be useful for someone somewhere.