Last month I was hired by a research project at the history department to translate eighteen pages of text from Swedish for the English version of their website. I agreed to have it done no later than the end of the year, but last week I promised the professor who hired me to have it done before Christmas, which gives me tomorrow to finish it (in Sweden, “Christmas” means “Christmas Eve”). I’ve got the work nearly done now, so it will be no problem to get it in to her on time, but after spending most of today working on it, my brain is all wibbly-wobbly with words. The text covers everything from reaping grain with a scythe to building a web platform, and I feel as though I’ve personally spanned centuries in the course of this relatively small job.

I don’t think I’d want to be a translator full-time, but this bit of work has given me a new appreciation for the advantages of having a discrete task to perform in a set period of time. It’s quite unlike my “real” work, for which the task is, essentially, “Write a book within the next three-ish years”. I suppose I should probably get busy doing that.