Create your own dictionary

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. 

Jack of All Trades

Based on the knowledge gained from my recent translation works I should be able to:
- assemble an indoor fussball table
- discuss the effects of Pilates training on young Brazilian futsal players
- perform a colonoscopy or a 4D foetal ultrasound
- perform knee surgery
- talk somebody into buying a small Swedish forwarder (which is a forestry machine - for those, who don't know)
- fix any problems with a waste-water reclaiming system (especially the ones caused by the ultrafilters)

In the Works

Right now I am working on the following - a book where the storyline features a dog that gets separated from his owner (I can get really emotional even just thinking about it - I guess that's what happens when you treat your own dog like one of the most important person in your life), a web-site for a medical center, and a description of an indoor fussball table.

I cannot complain that my work is dull or unvaried.