What is “hime”? What is “ermik”?

Part of the reason that I haven’t been writing much lately is not for a lack of material. It’s a lack of time, and to a lesser extent, a lack of desire. One thing that kept me busy in the last couple weeks was a series of translations from Albanian into German. When the Director told me that he wanted me to write something in English for our Austrian partners that work with us a couple times a year, I foolishly said that I could write it in German instead. That’s how I ended up getting to translate proposals written by our school’s experts on the following topics: cows (how much milk they produce, how much food they need); chickens (what food they need, what the ingredients of their food are, how many eggs they can lay) and setting up rows of grapes to eventually produce wine (tilling the earth, creating rows for the grapes between the rows of fig trees that are already growing). And translating words like “hime” and “ermik,” (semolina and bran) into German… even if most of the Albanians I asked didn’t even know what these words were in Albanian. Did I mention that I work at an agricultural school?

One method of English learning that is popular here is the “grammar translation” method. The main way of practice through this method is by translating. Although we kind of frown upon it since there are many ways to teach a language, it definitely has its advantages. Aside from speaking, which is often difficult for beginners, reading and writing are good ways to learn. Translation is the best, in my opinion, because you are working directly with grammatical structures and accurately understanding connotation. Working with Albanian texts is something that I haven’t done much but have found incredibly beneficial, even if I’m translating into German instead of English.

The Austrian work group arrived at our school last Tuesday, and I was called in to translate. At the beginning, it was incredibly hard. MADTV used to have a sketch where Bobby Lee played a Chinese translator who clearly was not translating with any accuracy, and that’s kind of how I felt at first. I had to rely on another English teacher to translate into Albanian, which wasn’t the most efficient system. On the second day of translating it went a lot better. The Austrians presented a lecture about cheese making and milking and I translated like lightning. I had never done this particular type of instant, face-to-face translating. I mostly was tied to a computer and LEO (a gigantic, online German dictionary) with all the time in the world to perfect the translations. The Austrians remarked on the second day that my language skills came back almost overnight and told me that we needn’t bother with using another translator; that I could just wing it from German into Albanian.