It seems I rarely post about the work I do (exceptions are here and here).

For the most part, I spend my days trying to decipher sentences like this one:

It was also recommended that 10 kinds of trees used for land evaluation should be used and land map adaptation 1:10,000 should be constructed with 18 kinds of adaptations, thus, proposing 8 types of lands to be used and appropriate fertilizer putting down, coherent with the district land condition and development orientation.

Or,

However, the amplitude enlarging of this modulation, with its advantages and disadvantages, is an undeniable truth.

I am a manuscript editor in the English department of The Gioi Publishers. I am not a translator: my Vietnamese is not that good. Rather, I am given broken English and asked to fix it.

However, there is another aspect to my job that is often equally as challenging. A few of my coworkers translate English books into Vietnamese. They occasionally come to me with words, sentences and ideas that their dictionaries cannot sufficiently explain.

Some of these questions are easy to field. What does it mean to dunk in basketball? Here, watch this YouTube video:

Others are not so easy. One of my colleagues is translating a book about Feng Shui. When she comes to me with questions like, “What does it mean to centre your inner energy flow?”, I have to refrain from answering, “Nothing. They’re just meaningless words.”

The author of that book has given subsections “witty” headings like Here a Fence, There a Fence. I am forced to explain and sing Old MacDonald (though the singing might not have been strictly necessary), to prove that the author isn’t, in fact, referring to two fences.

A second colleague is translating a book titled How to Think Like Einstein, subtitled “Simple Ways to Break the Rules and Discover Your Hidden Genius”. It is a book that counsels counterintuitive thinking in order to break out of self-imposed ‘rule ruts’. Unfortunately, in my observation, the Vietnamese tend to be rather literal. (The Vietnamese word for diabetes, for example, is “to pee sugar” – đái đường.) Explaining why you would preemptively discard obvious and sensible ideas in order to approach a problem in a radically new way is like explaining vegetarianism to a pig farmer.

The same book also described the (re)productive exchange of ideas between people as sexual intercourse between two minds. This was not only difficult to clarify, but rather awkward as well.

Despite the challenges, or perhaps because of them, I always enjoy it when my colleagues bring me questions like these. I love words and language in general, and sometimes their questions prompt me to research etymologies I had never thought to investigate (why, for example, do we ‘dress to the nines’?). The English language is a flexible and culture-saturated organism. It’s a messy, wonderful thing.