harlekins spirit

When I read the quote from Karl Valentin this morning, I had to think of us Harlequins and our Harlequin.blog. Because even small works of art are a lot of work.

For more than 3 years we have been writing,  inexperienced but eager-to-learn “fumblers in the dartk”, and have published a new text every Friday. Each author follows his own path. Some look at IT and change projects with their consulting glasses, others discover stylistic howlers in (real?) life and others philosophise about all the world and his wife. With time we have built a list of guest authors who like writing for our Harlekin.Blog.

The author of the following article is Caterina Berger. She works as a freelancer for the translation agency Linguation in the field of content creation and online marketing. She majored in Japanese Studies and is working towards a doctorate in General Linguistics. Her favourite area is sociolinguistics and intercultural communication. We are pleased to have her as a guest author.

Admittedly, my title is not exactly original, but there are good reasons for that. In fact it is hard to describe life as a translator more accurately. Between clients who question every syllable of their ten-year-old internship testimony and those who would like to have their 500-page dissertation translated into Chinese by the end of the week, we have the pleasure of coping with unpaid invoices, unclear instructions and corrupt file formats.

This morning after the yoga flow programme and feeding the birds in the garden, I discovered an article in the newspaper that took me back in time: The Bauer publishing house is opening its Bravo Archive from 1956 – 1994 (https://www.bravo-archiv.de/home.php).

Yes, yes, Bravo. When I discovered it then, at the age of 12, shortly before the Olympic Games in Munich, I was immediately one of its millions of enthusiastic readers. Because when I was 12, my life consisted of school, homework, meeting friends on the street and on weekends largely of boredom. Bravo was a grateful distraction, as it fuelled a 12-year-old girl’s many fantasies.

Did you read it too? In Greenland and Hong Kong the consumption of alcohol has been banned or severely restricted. And in Mexico the Corona brewery was closed down. While in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, no more alcohol can be purchased, in Hong Kong no drinks with more than 2.25 percent alcohol content were allowed to be served and sales were completely prohibited.