I’ve just sat at my computer for about 10 hours straight, translating endless documents from German to English on arcane subjects like augmented reality and virtual tables and secure mobile agents - and even though my brain is mush and I could - and probably should - finally rise from this chair to which I have become rooted and go watch television or do something else mindless, I am still sitting here, still typing. I must be insane.

Actually, I’m just so tired that I’m practically not even looking at the computer screen as I’m typing this, and my mind is a complete swirling mish-mash of thoughts and languages and everything else. Which is probably why this entry is not going to make any sense whatsoever.

I just wanted to briefly comment on an interesting phenomena which I experienced for the first time today: “getting into a zone” - while translating. I’ve heard of athletes getting into a zone, and I’ve experienced what I presume is the same sort of thing myself while playing music. With me and music, it’s the point where I just lose myself and the music takes over. That sounds like such a cliché, but it really happens, especially when I’m playing music with other people. It’s the moment where everything just clicks and the music takes on a life of its own. The moment when I don’t feel like I’m really in my body anymore, the moment when it seems that something else takes over my hands and the music just plays itself. It’s a transcendent moment and it doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, it is sublime.

Anyway, something like that happened to me while translating today. When I’m translating, I usually have the German document open at the top of my computer screen and I work on my English translation on the bottom of the screen. I’m constantly looking back and forth between the German document, the English document, and a couple of different dictionaries, and I really have to stay focused or else I find myself translating over the wrong document or forgetting the translation of the word I just looked up, etc.etc. If you start to zone out, you get out of the translation rhythm, and it can be quite difficult to get back into the groove.

But towards the end of the day today, after I had already been translating for ages and had gotten quite tired, I started completely zoning out - but I suddenly realized that I was zoning out while I was translating. Or more accurately: I had already zoned out, but I was still translating - and translating pretty well. Without even thinking about it, I was sort of looking in two places at exactly the same time, and my hands were just typing of their own volition. As pretentious as this is going to sound, I have to say it anyway: I suddenly felt like I was just a conduit for the language. The German was automatically going in, the English was automatically coming out, and I was someplace else entirely. It was pretty darn cool.

Of course, this oh-so-transcendent experience didn’t last very long - once I started to become aware of what was happening, I started to lose the groove, and anyway, I couldn’t have sat there translating for very long before coming across a word that I would have had to have looked up, which would have disrupted the flow anyway. But nonetheless, for a short period of time, I didn’t just feel like I was translating, I felt like I was really a translator, a translator in the sense of some sort of linguistic medium channeling a dictionary’s worth of words.

I dig my job.