In 1986, having just landed in Baltimore from Taipei, I spoke almost no English and couldn't finish the simplest sentence without getting stuck on some unknown word or phrase. One by one I looked them up in my Chinese/English dictionary.
Last week, having just landed in DC from Taipei, I thought of my 10th grade self, who used to live 40 some miles away. I had met the folks from Civic Taipei during my trip and promised to send them a quick guide on uploading online videos. Disoriented from jetlag, I'm not sure I realized I'd be answering their questions in Chinese. But then a Chinese follow-up email landed in my inbox. I'd apparently taken on a nearly insurmountable task.
Typical. File. Formats. Did I know how to say any part of that in Chinese? Copy embed code and paste in HTML? Yikes. Google Translator lookups are a whole lot faster than flipping through a paper dictionary, but it's still a struggle to string bits and pieces of text together in a way that sounds right. It brought back such vivid memories of having done this before. I am almost exactly where I was, geographically and linguistically, 23 years ago.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there" L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between. (Good film too by the way, the adaptation was by Harold Pinter).
Posted by: Arasmus | January 09, 2009 at 08:03 PM