A Tale of Two Translators

This is the first story in the "Stories from Under the Golden Roof" series. This stories contains some dialogue in German and the Tyrolean dialect, translations of the German dialogue is included. The German has not been edited. Any errors are entirely the fault of the author.

Wade is a poor, self-exiled translator meets the beautiful Ana, whose plans for him are less-than pure.

Wade, a poor translator, meets the beautiful, nefarious Anja

Chapter 1

The noise of the customers placing orders and chatting in German kept distracting Wade from his work; he loved listening to the customers and waitresses chirp g

rüss di

and p

fiat di

to each other like birds as they came and went. The snatches of conversations in their sing-song voices punctuated with

ja eh

,

amal

, and

oder

kept pulling him away from the same two sentences he kept reading over and over as his eyes blurred from looking at the computer screen.

He looked up when the waitress arrived. With a "

bitte schön

," she set his cappuccino with a leaf design in the foam, the two cinnamon cookies that came with it, and a glass of water on the side next to his laptop. "

Danke. Haben Sie viel zu tun heute

? (Thanks. Do you have a lot to do today)?" He asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. Her blond hair was pulled into a pony tail, her black shirt was stuffed into the rim of her black pants and money belt giving her a look of efficiency. "Meh, not really. The tourists usually come later in the morning. Are you a student?"

"No, I have an interview over there in a bit," he gestured to the building across the street. "I always drink a coffee before an interview. It's a good luck ritual, though it hasn't been working so well lately," he added grimly.

He had been woken up by a call from a harried-sounding woman asking if he was available for an interview later that morning. He quickly put on his now-wrinkled white button-up shirt, dark blue slacks and hurried over. He decided he could finish his translation assignment while he waited. He had to send it in before lunch, it was nearly finished anyway, he just wanted to proofread a few lines he had been having trouble with. "

Wie lange haben Sie hier gearbeitet

? (How long have you worked here?)"

She leaned over and looked at the line of text highlighted on his computer screen, Where the fabric of her blouse parted around the buttons, Wade could make out the shape of her pale breast pushed up tantalizingly by her bra, "

Die Frau von der die Rede war

."

"I'm translating a news article." Wade was quite proud of this. He had dreamed of being a translator since high school. It always seemed so glamorous in his imagination, you could finish your project for the day while sitting in your local coffee shop. But the reality was that when you can only afford one meal of rice or noodles a day, occasionally with chopped up hot dogs, it wasn't so glamourous anymore. Still he was doing something he loved. "How would you translate it?"

"I would say, 'The woman who gave the speech.'"

Wade turned back to the screen, surprised. He was going to go with 'the woman everyone was talking about,' but now he could see that her version was correct.

"

Sie k

ö

nnen ja gut

ü

bersetzen

(You translate well)."

"Meh, not really. We do have to learn English early here. I speak English so much at work, I almost forget German is my native language." She laughed.

Well, good for you

, Wade grumbled to himself.

The waitress straightened back up and held up a receipt, "So, €2.50 please." She held her chin out while she waited.

Wade hands her some Euro coins, "

Bitte, stimmt schon

."

"Thank you." She put the change into the money bag at her waist. "What job are you interviewing for?"

"It's a translation job."

"

Na, viel Gl

ü

ck

, good luck, as we say.

"

Danke

."

Wade fingered the edge of his coffee cup and watched the waitress walk away.

What do I have? 'English Only' written all over my face

?

Getting Austrians to speak German rather than English to him when he spoke to them in German was a challenge. It felt to him like you had to practically speak perfect German before an Austrian would respond to you in German. To get that far though, you had to get them to have a conversation with you in German. It was a vicious circle that he had to repeat each time he met someone new. It didn't help that his accent came out and grammar failed him when he was nervous.

It must be some secret code or some magical words that they don't want us knowing

, he laughed at his own fantasy, though it did seem to have some validity.

His first week in this new country, he had gotten a couple writing jobs and things looked bright, but then he didn't get anything the next two weeks. He was happily surprised when one company sent him a second, larger job, but so far he had barely gotten enough work to pay for food, to say nothing about rent. Now this waitress, he assumed she was a university student, translated better than he did. His hopes for getting this job grew dimmer by the second.

He looked at the time on his computer. 15 minutes to go, '

Fuck it

.' He saved the file and sent it off to the client before draining his cappuccino in one swig. The street was full of people hurrying off to work, the cool fall air felt good on his cheeks. He waited for a car to pass before rushing across the street and up the stairs of an old, grey building.

The secretary in the front office directed him to a large room with several large desks with several chairs at each of them. He walked over to where a middle-aged woman sat bent over a stack of papers. The austere wooden cross hanging on the wall behind the woman was silently judging him, frowning in disapproval at his wrinkled shirt and slacks. He was perspiring slightly from walking up the stairs. A bead of sweat ran down his cheek, he hoped he hadn't ruined his shirt.

The woman looked up from the resume in front of her as Wade approached. "Are you Wade Sprakwyn? Thank you for coming in today, I apologize that we weren't able to give you much information over the phone." The woman shook his hand. "My name is Gabi Stein. I am a project manager here. We do translation services and some large projects have come in that need to be finished quickly." Wade's ears pricked up at that. "In your resume, you wrote that you have done some literary translation. Is this something you might be able to help us with?"

"Y-yes, I'd be interested in helping."

He dreaded the idea of having to go back to the Republic of Cascadia and face a crushing amount of debt. His plans to pay off his student loans with a cold-brew coffee shop/modern German bookstore went up in smoke when the hot yoga studio next door caught fire due to a short circuit in one of the electrical cables for their solar panels. For some reason, his insurance didn't cover solar accidents and he was stuck with paying for an industrial strength coffee brewer and a ton of German books and magazines.

"Super! When can you start?"

Before he could answer, the door behind him opened.

"

Hey, mausi!

Mia san heit g'gang'n

. (Hey, babe. We went today)"

Wade looked over to see a young woman with full lips come into the room, talking animatedly on her cell phone. "The weather was terrible. But on the peak it was totally sick." Wade loved the inclusion of the Californian surfer slang into the otherwise very Tyrolean sentence. "Haha. Yeah, right on! We have to go boarding again sometime! Yeah, kisses, ciao, ciao."

"

Anja, h

ier ist Herr Wade Sprakwyn. Er wird dir mit den

Ü

bersetzungen

helfen

. (Anja, this is Mr. Wade Sprakwyn. He'll be helping you with the translations.)." Gabi turned to Wade. "This is Ms. Anja Nemec, one of our translators. You'll be working together on this translation project."

I get to listen to that voice? Booya

! Wade thought to himself. "

Sch

ö

n Ihnen kennen zu lernen

. (Nice to meet you.)" Wade stood up and extended his hand to Anja.

She shook it, eyeing him suspiciously. "Have you ever done translation before?"

"I've translated some newspaper articles and a few short stories," he brushed a few strands of light, brown hair from his eyes.

Anja turned back to Gabi. "How can someone who's never done literary translation help us? We don't need someone else like David again to come in, try to take everything over, and mess it all up again."

"You need someone who can edit your literary translations so that they sound natural to English-speakers." Gabi gathered up a stack of papers and a workbook stuffed with sticky notes. "Can you send me the rest of the translation before lunch? Then you can concentrate on the second half."

"

Ja, sicher

. (Sure.)"

"Wade, we can get you registered in my office."

Chapter 2

The words on the screen in front of Anja blurred. Her eyes stung when she squeezed them shut. She rubbed her temples, trying to stem the coming headache as she thought of what needed to get done,

I need to finish all 10 pages by tonight? I hope that new guy isn't screwing around. All I need right now is another David messing things up.

"

Anja. Servus!

(Anja, hi!)" A man wearing a beanie with the image of a marijuana leaf appeared over her shoulder.

"Hi Jörg. I can't talk right now. I have a lot of work to do." She reached a hand up to adjust her scarf to cover the neckline of her blouse.

"What's going on with you?" He plonked down into the seat next to her. He wasn't going anywhere.

"We have a large project for an important client that has to be finished tonight. I just found out I have a new coworker, who knows how he's gonna work out. I need this job to work out, until I can get that journalist job." Anja slammed the Enter key hard as if to emphasize her point.

"You, a journalist?" Jörg scoffed.

"What's that supposed to mean? For your information, I can write great articles, I got that travel article published didn't I? I'm gonna write another one about snowboarding through Nepal and Tibet. Now, if you don't mind, I really have to get back to work!"

Jörg raised his hands in mock defeat. "OK, I'll see you later then."

Anja closed her eyes and rubbed her temples.

I can't let him get to me like that

. She chided herself

, he can be such as asshole sometimes though

.

"

Hi Anja. Alles klar

? (Hi, Anja, what's up?)" Wade came in a few minutes later. The smell of coffee filled the room.

Anja looked up over her laptop with a picture of the eye and hand of the Buddha on the back and scowled when she saw him leaning back in his chair across the desk from her. "Where were you?"

"Huh? I had to sign my employment contract."

She shook her head impatiently, "I emailed you the first part of the translation. Correct it and send it back to me." She disappeared back behind her computer screen.

"Is there a copy of the German original that I can use?"

"You do not need the German version, just correct the translation."

She had an almost British-sounding inflection to some of her words mixed with German-inflected English that Wade found charming. Wade opened the file and frowned when he read the first sentence. "Why's she watering a garden in the middle of downtown?"

"A waitress calls the tables she serves her

Schanigarten

."

"Oh, she's a waitress! So 'she's watering her garden,' means she's serving the customers drinks or whatever?"

"

Genau

. (Exactly.)" Anja wrinkled her nose. "How can you help with this project, when you do not even understand half of the expressions in the story?"

"Well, some these don't translate well into English. There's a few other things that don't make sense," He looked at the translation again. "For example, why's she giving him a flower basket..."

"She's turning him down. We do have to finish this before the end of the day. We do not have time to go over every little detail!"

"Look, I'm just saying that the way you translated some of these phrases doesn't make sense. We don't use those garden terms in English. If you could give me the German original, I could redo some of this and it would sound a lot better.

"

Denkst du, dass du mehr

ü

ber

ü

bersetzen weisst als ich?

(You think you know more about translation than me?) I've been doing this for four years! You just fix any spelling or grammatical errors, but we don't have time to debate every little line! This needs to get done tonight!"

They say when someone gets emotional, they switch to speaking in their native language, if they weren't already. The emotional impact of Anja's statement in German resonated through Wade as he took a deep breath and his eyes slid over her features: Her face was lightly glistening from perspiration, her strong shoulders moved up and down with her angry breathing. Her full breasts already strained against her light shirt, seemed ready to burst out whenever she took a deep breath. Her hands rested on either side of her laptop, she was almost leaning over him. The top of her shoulder-length black hair, highlighted against the fluorescent lights behind her, stood on end. An energy seemed to course through her, like she could spring over the table at any moment and made her shoulder-length, black hair stand on end.

There was a flash of lighting outside the window, thunder rolled passed outside soon afterwards followed by the sound of a heavy downpour. Anja;s shoulder's dropped and she hung her head, all the tension seaping from her body with each breath. Anja sank back into her chair and reached out for her own coffee cup. "

I hob die Schnauze voll von diesem Projek

.

(I'm sick of this project.)"

"

Was

?"

"

Nichts

(Nothing)." She took another deep breath. "I've worked really hard on this story. It's been one thing after another, either the client or Gabi wasn't happy with one thing or another. Now we're almost finished and you won't ruin it!" Instead of the softly undulating local rhythms Wade heard when she talked on the phone, the "s's" of Anja's High German now mimicked the hissing of a teapot and her "k's" and "sch's" the banging of silverware against a plate.

"Hey, I also want this project to be successful! I don't want to go back to sitting in a call center talking to whiny customers about why I can't remove a charge from their bill. But I can't help a lot when all you give me is the English translation and won't even answer my questions!" Wade took a deep breath and pointed at his computer screen. "Look, some of these expressions don't make sense in English. Like this one: after the guy tries flirting with the waitress, his friend says '

Only the tough come into her garden.'

What is that? Is his friend saying she's high-maintenance?"

"High maintenance?" Anja wrinkled her nose,

the girl wasn't a machine to be repaired

.

"She's difficult to work with."

"He is telling his friend to keep trying."

"So, it means something like, 'You have to work hard to get her to accept you?' We could try something like "You gotta work at it to get with her." Or...if we wanna keep the garden puns going: "You gotta be tough to get into her garden."

"Yes, that does sound better." Anja grudgingly admitted.

Maybe he will actually be helpful

.

"See, if I could have the German original to look at, I could look up the expressions and we wouldn't have to do this."

"I already told you! You do not need the original. Just work through the translation, if you do not understand anything else, ask me!"

Wade sighed and turned back to his computer screen. Most of the translation was easy to fix, there were just a few words here and there that needed replacing or inserting, or slight grammatical changes to make, but there were some phrases and expressions that he just couldn't make sense of. His eyes blurred when tried to read the words on his computer screen.

Wade comes into the breakroom just as Anja and Jörg part ways.

"

Verstehst du uns wenn wir so reden

? (Do you understand us when we talk like this?)" Jörg ran his eyes over Wade.

"

Meistens. Das Dialekt ist schwer zu verstehen

. (Mostly, the dialect is hard to understand.)"

"The dialect here isn't too bad. It's a mix of High German and dialect. But there are a few good things to know," Jörg started off importantly, "You say '

lei

' instead of '

nur

', but if you really want to sound local, put '

oder

' at the end of every sentence." He took a sip of his drink. "So, Gabi says you're a translator?"

"Yes, mostly business articles, but some short stories."

"Oh yeah," Jörg set his cup down and leaned back against the counter, arms crossed. "I did a Google search, and I couldn't find anything that you've done. Where'd you get your translation published?"

"Well, it was in a journal, you might not have been able to find it on Google."

"I'd still be able to find out with a "translated by..." search," Jörg stood back up. "You lied in your interview. I wonder what Gabi would have to say about that."

Before Wade could respond, Jörg walked nonchalantly out of the breakroom.

After lunch, Wade had to fight to keep his eyes open, despite the adrenaline from his conversation with Jörg. The few hours of sleep he'd gotten last night were starting to take their toll.

I'll just rest my eyes for a minute...

In his dream, misty words kept floating up to the surface of a dark sea. He somehow knew the ephemeral shapes of the letters spelled German words, until they morphed and solidified into their English equivalent that he could read.

Another clap of thunder started Wade out of his sleep. The rain had let up and the mountains glowed bright orange as the sky shifted from light to dark blue. Pinpricks of yellow light glowed where the ski lifts were beginning to shine against the mountains that he could see through the office window.

"

Jörg, hallo

. Hey, I really can't talk right now. I'm still at work. No, I don't want to come to your place!" Wade's ears perked up. Her German was now more hushed, nowhere near as animated as earlier. She had her head down, covering her mouth with her hand. Wade watched Anja stand up and look out the window at the mountains as the sun set across the valley. "Yeah, fine at the Roof, See you later.

Ja, bis dann

."

Why doesn't she just go outside? Wade wondered and looked up to see Anja stretching her arms overhead, and Wade caught a glimpse of her trim stomach underneath her shirt.

He looked over at the clock. It was only 6, still time to do something before going home. "

Kann ich dir auf einem Kaffee einladen

? (Can I invite you for a coffee)?" Wade leaned back in his chair, stretching his long arms overhead. "I should speak more German with you. Then I could understand these expressions better."

Anja cocked her head before handing him a wastepaper basket, "It's too late for coffee now. Anyway, whenever I see you, I automatically think in English." She winked before grabbing her jacket and slipping it on. "So, we will see us tomorrow, c

iao, ciao

." Wade smiled and threw his empty coffee cup into the trash.

"Anja, Wade? Can I see both of you in my office?" Gabi poked her head in, just as Anja had gotten to the door.

Chapter 3

It was raining again when Wade flopped down onto a bench outside the office building and leaned back, letting the cool rain wash over his face. The cold air felt good against his skin. Wade heard Gabi's words from just before he left, still fresh, they cut Wade to the bone: "Unfortunately, we will no longer require your services after tomorrow. The client has decided to cancel the rest of the project for cost reasons and we do not have anything else in queue at the moment." He couldn't believe it, Gabi had said there were other projects to work on and now those had disappeared! So much for a steady job. Still, a day there had earned him more money than working freelance had.