wish lists and dreams
Jun. 14th, 2005 12:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesWhen I can afford it, meaning sooner than everything on the "when I'm rich and famous" list, I'm going to buy the graduate lab a good French medical dictionary. It doesn't own one. I don't own one either, which means that I'm going to have to find somewhere else to get one for the ATA exam. We're not allowed to use computers, although we can bring as many dictionaries as we think we need. I'd like to own Routledge's Technical Dictionary, but it costs $200 used. Which reminds me, I should ask R if she wants the Dictionnaire de Management for the exam. We're not allowed to share dictionaries, and the lab only has one copy of that.
What all that boils down to is, if the financial/legal elective passage is legal, I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. If it's financial, I'll be in better shape, because I do have a financial dictionary. If the scientific/technical/medical elective passage is medical, I'll do that one instead. The passages are only 250 words apiece, so it's not going to be anything terribly in-depth. There's one "general" passage that's required, and I choose which elective passage I want.
Come to think of it, I did say I was going to go through all my legal and quasi-legal translations and compile myself a glossary. I should get going on that. Mostly it's a lot of "this set expression in French is this set expression in English" sort of stuff, because legal boilerplate can't be translated literally.
On to another subject...sometimes lately it scares me how much of my life has become about doing what I want, instead of doing what I "should". I'm getting away with murder, more or less, on the apartment front, and I'm not rushing out to look for a job because I'm staying in Ohio long enough to take this exam, and after that I'm moving to a place I want to live, instead of getting a job and basing my life on where the job is. Is it arrogant of me to be going about it that way? I don't know, any more than I know whether or not it's smart to be going about this the way I'm going about it. I think being a student again has infected me with some of the "anything is possible" vibe you get on college campuses. It's nice to be able to dream beyond "some day the people I work for will appreciate me" again. Of course, knowing what I know now, I know that dreaming doesn't get you anywhere beyond giving you ideas; you have to go figure out how to get the ideas to work, afterward. I know that I'm going to have to get a job to pay bills with, and I know that it almost definitely won't be in translation or even in the language industry to start with, but I have to remember not to get so caught up in paying bills that I end up closing the door I opened for myself by going back to school in the first place. So where does that leave me? I don't know. But at least I have a dream to not forget about.
What all that boils down to is, if the financial/legal elective passage is legal, I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. If it's financial, I'll be in better shape, because I do have a financial dictionary. If the scientific/technical/medical elective passage is medical, I'll do that one instead. The passages are only 250 words apiece, so it's not going to be anything terribly in-depth. There's one "general" passage that's required, and I choose which elective passage I want.
Come to think of it, I did say I was going to go through all my legal and quasi-legal translations and compile myself a glossary. I should get going on that. Mostly it's a lot of "this set expression in French is this set expression in English" sort of stuff, because legal boilerplate can't be translated literally.
On to another subject...sometimes lately it scares me how much of my life has become about doing what I want, instead of doing what I "should". I'm getting away with murder, more or less, on the apartment front, and I'm not rushing out to look for a job because I'm staying in Ohio long enough to take this exam, and after that I'm moving to a place I want to live, instead of getting a job and basing my life on where the job is. Is it arrogant of me to be going about it that way? I don't know, any more than I know whether or not it's smart to be going about this the way I'm going about it. I think being a student again has infected me with some of the "anything is possible" vibe you get on college campuses. It's nice to be able to dream beyond "some day the people I work for will appreciate me" again. Of course, knowing what I know now, I know that dreaming doesn't get you anywhere beyond giving you ideas; you have to go figure out how to get the ideas to work, afterward. I know that I'm going to have to get a job to pay bills with, and I know that it almost definitely won't be in translation or even in the language industry to start with, but I have to remember not to get so caught up in paying bills that I end up closing the door I opened for myself by going back to school in the first place. So where does that leave me? I don't know. But at least I have a dream to not forget about.
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Date: 2005-06-14 11:55 am (UTC)