Working with an Antique’s Dealership

AntiquesPaidPortfolioTranslation

Intro

Why Antiques

Intro

Having worked once in Oberursel near Frankfurt, I ended up making some contacts there and had the opportunity to work for one of their relatives. I had absolutely no idea at the time what one charged for translation but the wife of said relative was the one who ended up paying me, a “poor student”. That money helped pay for the consequent trips to Oberursel I took before I went to university to study languages “properly” (and was much appreciated).

Why Antiques

The man I was working for dealt in antiques. He had found that a portion of his stock was just not selling in Germany and so he was branching out into the international English speaking market, hoping to find more business there.

I had never had reason to read much about jewellery and old knick-knacks but I learned a lot in the course of this job, as he hired me to translate all the sales descriptions before he sent them to the online auction site (which, from memory, was called Red Hawk or something, but looking it up some ten years on now, I can’t find anything that looks familiar).

Most notably, he had a large collection of jewellery and pottery. These involved a lot of pearls that “accentuated one’s natural bosom” and clay vases with “adventurous cracilature”. There was also a lot of gold filigree and paint styles which I spent a while looking up so that I could describe them adequately.

The Task at Hand

The difficulty with this was not necessarily the subject material but—and I’m not throwing shade here—the man who wrote the descriptions in the first place. Although his descriptions were technically accurate, he also enjoyed—in very German fashion—creating compound nouns and adjectives which weren’t otherwise in a dictionary. Basically, he made up words by smashing together terms. This sounded nice and flowery in German, but picking apart those terms and then trying to find a way to express them in English was a challenge.

Also, he liked pointing out how nice one’s cleavage would look with certain pieces of gold and pearls and I had to find a way to translate that so that it was palatable to an English-speaking audience (as the phrases went from “descriptive” in German to “vulgar” in English when taking a more direct route). As I was staying with his daughter’s family at the time and she only worked 3 days of the week, I spent a good amount of time sitting on the sofa bouncing compound German words off her as she did the housework so that we could break them down and work out what he was getting at.

Issue 1

There were a couple other notable events that happened during this period. First was that when I started the job, it was post-editing Google translations. Similar to when I worked with the townhall though, once I had proven that I could do German (and was far faster and more accurate than the Google Translate of 2015), he started sending me all the files directly.

When I then finished the job, he mixed up the files and sent the auction site the pre-post-editing Google translations. When they turned around and told him to get a different translator, he then passed that feedback to me…

Thankfully, he also sent a copy of the problematic files and gave me a “second chance” (which under other circumstances would have been very good of him). I noticed very quickly that the files weren’t my translations. His daughter, who had brought me the news and was looking over my shoulder as I worked this out, took it upon herself to correct the issue…by yelling at him for 20 minutes over the phone.

Sadly, as a qualified professional, I have to fight my battles myself now, but as someone who was barely 18 at the time, I was very grateful (if not a little mortified listening to the actual phone call) that someone was willing to stand up for me.

Issue 2

Despite that bump in the road, I continued working with the client, completing a few extra sales’ descriptions for new antiques he had gotten ahold of and was adding to his collection.

One of these items in particular is worth noting. Namely because someone tried to use my client to sell a fake painting (either a forgery or as a fake sales listing). I can’t remember the name of the painting but from memory it was French, maybe from the 1700s, and depicted a scene from some war or another, and it came with a description provided by my client’s client (henceforth, Mr Client²) that I was meant to translate.

Several things were suspicious about it though:

The German of the description was off in several places (even as a student who had only recently gotten his head around German grammar, I could see that the verbs and adjectives were conjugated weirdly and that it wasn’t a personal style thing).

When looking up the painter to see if I could find any background information so as to provide myself with some context for translation, I found the painting on Wikipedia…including the museum it was meant to be in. Not only that, but the description that was on Wikipedia was weirdly similar to the one provided by Mr Client², as if it had been taken from Wikipedia in one language and then had been machine translated into German before it came to me.

My client hadn’t been given a deadline for this particular job and I, accordingly, pushed it back so that I could complete the other work he’d given me. However, Mr Client² began pressuring my client, which of course trickled down to me, so I moved it up on the timetable and decided to complete it “outside of hours” to take the pressure off both of us before then proof-reading it the following morning and sending it off. Apparently, me sleeping was offensive because Mr Client² was starting to become belligerent about the translation “taking too long” which was in turn making my client suspicious about their motives (Mr Client² had apparently been quite cagey from the start, too).

So when I handed in my work along with the notes I had taken and my suspicions about the weirdness of the job, my client took that as the final push and decided to report Mr Client² to the police. Sadly, neither of us got paid for that one, but I was already being treated rather nicely so I kept my peace. For less “cash under the table jobs”, one expects to be paid regardless of the circumstances. (Pay your contractors with what you have, not what you will have and all that).

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I never found out how well my client’s venture at selling abroad went, despite the fact that he showed interest in hiring me again the next time I was in town. Being older and not quite as socially inept, I regret not keeping in touch with him directly (most of my contact was through his daughter and her family, who I lost contact with after I moved to Japan). My Oberursel family will always be in my heart however, and the experiences I had there, as well as my fantastic teachers at my 6^th Form in Rushmoor, were what spurred me to study German and, later, to get qualified and take up translation professionally.

Image credit: me