In my experience, literary translators are - by default - in love with words, phrases and ingenius sentences. And the same way as "Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night" (as Woody Allen pointed it out) being bilingual (or at least being fluent in two languages) doubles your chances of stumbling upon memorable sentences or expressions that give you at least as much pleasure as a date on Saturday night, if not more.
For years I have been collecting little snippets from books - usually reading the original and the translation side by side - in simple spiral notebooks. Now that the stack of them starts to resemble the Leaning Tower of Pisa I decided to succumb to modernity and go digital. Leafing through a dozen notebooks to find one particular phrase started to look like a daunting challange.
So what you can do is open a simple Excel file, and start filling in the rows - in alphabetical order - with the hundreds of memorable quotes and their translations - and voiliá! - you have your own, personally edited dictionary with entries like "bro's before ho's", "check out my new squeeze" "handlebar mustache", "vertically challanged" - entries that are curiously missing from a "normal" dictionary.
