I want to shoot myself in the eye

I swear, I'm going to kill myself.

I didn't have a lot of work to do, so I agreed to do a translation for my boss. I'm translating a chapter, from French into English, for his colleague.

The title of said paper, in English, is "Theory and practice of human rights in post-traditional societies: The Romanian case".

The last translation I did had to do with immigration in pre and post-Communist Romanian society and it was a delightful read in sociology. I minored in sociology at university so I found it education and informative.

This is...indescribable. The author is the head of Philosophy at the university of Cluj. Prestigeous, yes. Understandable, absolutely not.

I want to shoot myself in the eye. His focus is on phenomenology, which, according to my fine friends at Wikipedia, is "a current in philosophy that takes intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience".

I would smash my head against the keyboard if I had the energy. It's interesting and legible, but to translate? Ever had to translate philosophy from one language to another? Then you know what I'm talking about. It was taking me forever until I had the brilliant idea of putting the entire thing into Babelfish and then using that as a basis of my own work.

Here's a sample paragraph that I've done:
"The veritable forma mentis of Eastern Europe – whose blurred and vague “complexity” (to use a euphemism) concerns in fact a sort of reciprocity between traditionalism – the avatar of a tradition which doesn’t exist anymore – and modernism – a ghost of a modernity which does not yet exist. This does not mean that – situated between the past of its tradition (which has already left) and the arrival of its own modernity (which has not yet arrived) – Romanian society will find itself in a present which is, finally, its own. The renunciation of the past, which produces the show of traditionalism, and the renunciation of the future, which produces the show of modernism, does not involve a suitable present automatically."

Obviously it's not perfectly edited, but you see the style in which it is written.

Riiiiight.

*pop*

That sound you just heard? It was a blood vessel in my brain.

On a lighter note, this is an academic translation and it good experience.

I'd just like to thank my friend Urgo for helping me translate such words as "calage" and "cotoie", words that I have never seen in all my eighteen years of studying French. And Pete Yorn, whose songs "So Much Work" and "Turn of the Century" are on repeat.