Cut-and-Paste Translation Project

By Don Frades

1993: I was just back in San Francisco after a year-long picaresque stint in Czechoslovakia, and there was supposed to be a big recession on. My erstwhile peer group of overeducated, unmotivated slacker friends were more than efficient in one thing: hooking each other up with one crackpot job after another through speed-of-light telephone networking. "Hey, there's some job testing video games all day in Oakland -- but you've got to call now!" "Hey, so-and-so just got hired in human resources down at somewhere-or-other -- he can hook you up with a job." There was that, and then there was temping, which is a whole other weird world best discussed in another article.

One friend had landed a job at a translation company downtown on Market Street, and within an hour of being presented with a project that required about ten people, had completely staffed it with just a couple of calls. Those ten people included my friends, roommates and the usual gang of fools, including my 20-year-old Czech girlfriend, fresh to America. This would be her cold-water introduction to US work culture. We were assembled in one small room around a large table, presented with our instructions; to wit: The Shimano bicycle company in Japan was defending itself in a lawsuit from some guy who claimed they had stolen his design for an oval-shaped front sprocket. Or vice versa. In any case, Shimano had hundreds of thousands of what I guess were invoices of bike parts, 8 1/2-by-11-inch pages of tabulated information: numbers, little Japanese characters and more numbers.

Our task was to turn these crates of documents into English. Since the Japanese portion only consisted of a dozen or so tiny symbols scattered willy-nilly around the page, we simply had to cut the English translation of the symbol out of a piece of paper and paste it over the Japanese. To that end, the company had given us stacks of pages with words like "sprocket," "pedal" and "gear" printed in neat columns at the absolute smallest font size possible -- so small sometimes they could just barely be made out.

Each of us was armed with an X-Acto knife and a pot of rubber cement. In retrospect, a water-based glue might have been a wiser choice, but more of this anon. We also received a short glossary that showed the dozen or more Japanese words and their translations. We soon came to translate them on sight. With the knife, we cut out a single English word, measuring about 1/4-inch long or even less. Then, stabbing it with the razor-sharp point of the knife, we touched it to the gummy cement brush lightly and pressed it onto the Japanese text. Then we repeated the process. We repeated the process hundreds of times a day for a couple of weeks. When we completed a page, we put it on a stack and took up a new page. Some only had a single word to change; some had dozens. We were making $10 an hour.

There we sat -- ten Berkeley-educated young people poking at confetti-sized bits and discussing the deeper significance of what had gone so terribly awry in the world to land us with such a fate. Added to all this was the worrying fact that the job did not particularly alarm us as it should have -- no one threw down a knife in disgust and walked out. No one complained. As time passed, we even began to take pride in our work, discovering new ways of cutting out the tiny words or a new way of laying them out in advance, sorting them in miniscule piles on the desk, and perhaps devising an ingenious method of pasting more than one word at a time.

Periodically our supervisor (who might have been there with us but for fortune, since he was, after all, another of our housemate/slacker buddies) would check up on us, commenting with no small concern on the lack of ventilation and the heavily rubber-cement-scented air of our worksite. He would also introduce valiant new innovations to try to make the job a little easier for us. A new way of printing up tiny words; a new way of sorting the documents to streamline the procedure. Of course, it was just cheerful futility.

The rubber cement started making us loopy. We talked, we cut, we pasted, we got very good at what we did. We ignored the tiny lacerations on our index fingers and thumbs. But the talking often turned to laughter; the laughter turned to loud laughter; we were asked to keep it down more than once. I recall at one point the laughter turned to irrepressible, tears-rolling-down-the-cheeks giggling. The giggling spread around to each and every one of us, until the entire project came to a halt and we lost all control of ourselves to a foolish, hysterical euphoria that was half rubber cement and half resignation to a job even a kindergartner could do better. Workers from the main office investigated and immediately threw open all the doors and suggested we go walk around the hall for a while to get some fresh air. So we took our giggling outside, where customers and passers-by assumed we were doing nitrous in the bathroom.

At one point I took a big piece of construction paper and drew an enormous three-foot thermometer on it -- the sort you see in small towns outside schools that want to build a performing arts center or whatever. At the top I wrote 100,000 (or whatever the number was) and "Our Goal!" and put some numerical gradients up and down it. And there in the little bulbous mercury reservoir, I filled in with red pen exactly how far we had risen toward completion of our goal. I think on a good day we were able to get about 50 pages done per person. Maybe less or more, but the fact remained that the unlikely completion of 500 pages a day still meant that we would be working 200 days. Divide that into five-day weeks, remove holidays, and it was the better part of a year.

For a couple of days there, at quitting time, I took a red marker and drew a thin line to indicate how far we had advanced. It was just barely perceptible. The authorities noticed the silly, sarcastic thing and that may have had something to do with the uneventful end of the project.

One morning, about two weeks into the project, as we were hard at work, cutting, pasting and giggling, our boss/buddy came in and announced that Shimano had settled out of court. End of project. Everyone can go home.

So home we went -- but not before we exited the building and hovered around, disoriented and feeling somehow used and unwanted. After all, we had given two weeks and a lot of university-educated brainpower into this project. And now it had been taken away from us.

We returned to our crammed, smelly little San Francisco apartments and waited for the next call.

(I wrote this with numbers and times as best as I could remember, but I could be wrong on specifics -- if you were one of the team back then, feel free to set me straight or write up your own recollection of this episode. I think the rubber cement is to blame.)