Early in January, Avril and I travelled once more to Dar es Salaam in the muggy heat for a six-day stay. The purpose of our visit was for me to sit the exams to qualify as a French to English translator - the project that has engrossed me for the past 20 months - since I last failed those same dreaded exams.
The British Council is a charitable organisation run by the UK education system, established to educate by British standards and invigilate UK exams for wealthier foreign people. So it was to the BC that I headed on January 13, to sit a series of 3 exams, all on a single day, seven hours in total. Like last time the experience was testing in the extreme, physically and emotionally as well as mentally.
I felt on the whole that the examinations went as expected. In particular I knew that all the preparation in the world would be useless if the texts chosen for the exam did not suit me, and so I realised that I would need considerable fortune on my side if I were to pass all three in a single attempt. In fact my tutor (on a correspondence course I did) said that few people succeed, even well-prepared candidates. Fortunately I can return to re-sit any failed examinations next January.
On the day the three texts were about diverse subjects. The first general paper was a text from Le Monde French newspaper about the role of intellectuals in the French government, which concluded that there wasn't any. Paper 2, the technology paper, to my horror, was nothing to do with France and wasn't even my idea of 'technology' either. It was about the Three Gorges hydroelectric project on the Yangtse river in China and its engineering specifications, as well as its advantages to the local communities. Care was needed to transfer all the data and the units of energy so on. On the other hand, I felt the first two papers weren't too difficult - though I hope I'm not speaking too soon.
The third paper spoke of a ray of highly energised photons from the centre of the galaxy, and speculation as to the astrophysical phenomena which could give rise to such rays. Though I felt the subject matter suited me - compared to other topics which might have featured - I did feel that this was the hardest of the three papers. This was not least because, on beginning work on that paper, I had already been sitting working on hard translations for five hours. Extreme stress and mental fatigue was setting in. After drawing on my last reserves to translate the piece, I paused to read over the result, only to find that there were certain logical problems with what I had written - the text didn't make sense. Try as I might, I could not find where my mistake lay, if indeed there was one. I tried to make clever use of English to mitigate the contradictions. So I have my reservations about that final paper. I would be somewhat content to pass two of the three, and re-sit just one next January.
The Diploma in Translation is a Masters-equivalent degree in translation. It qualifies a person to become a chartered translator with the Chartered Institute of Linguists. Qualifying would certainly lead to major changes in our expectations economically over the final years of the system (- 1 Corinthians 7:31.)
No comments:
Post a Comment