Computer-Assisted Bilinguality
It can’t go on like this. I came to this country ten years ago, not voluntarily, but because of love, that is, a higher force, and I felt completely out of place at first. I worked as a German with the German language, and nothing was more important to me. So what was I doing here? It took pretty much two years until this feeling flipped and I didn’t want to leave anymore. The fact that I live here and continue to work on German stuff every day is just one of the many oddities about me. Deal with it.
I am ten times more deeply rooted in the German language than in English. In German, I have layers upon layers to descend into, registers to pull, echoes to play with. In English, I’m already happy if I can manage a grammatically correct sentence.
In addition, I can hide behind German quite well. My readers are an ocean away, and for my American acquaintances I do something funny that they are denied access to.
And what I do nobody would do in English anyway. You wouldn’t write about these things, at least not in that way. You would access the world in a completely different manner. At least that’s how it seems to me. I can’t prove it.
But we’re about to find out. Machine translation has made such great strides in recent years that it can cope with strange texts like mine and produce completely readable results. My machine of choice is DeepL, a service that is absolutely convincing in this respect. Most of the time, only minimal changes are needed before I get a text I can live with. By the way, DeepL comes from a German company.
So from now on I will publish everything bilingually, letting the machine do most of the work for me. Because it’s not just that I don’t have enough time or skills for that. It’s that every time I finish a text, I have the terrible feeling that I’ve really screwed up this time, that this text will cost me all my readers, that I may surely have written good stuff in the past, but this text irrefutably shows that it’s over.
In this state, I am conceivably unsuited to do a translation. So I need the machine for it, there is no other way. I plan to continue writing mostly in German and have it translated into English by the machine — but maybe I’ll sometimes write in English and have the machine give me what it thinks is my native language. This promises to be interesting.
I have two blogs. In one, fortlaufend, I write an entry every day. I’ve done that for eight years, interrupted only by a few days spent unconscious in an intensive care unit. Each entry, after I write it, is not published until the next day. This increases the quality a little bit and gives me the chance to prevent at least very gross blunders. But the good thing is that I am forced to write an entry every day, so I can’t really think about whether what I write is good, whether it’s worth publishing, or whether I even dare to.
The other blog, ferner folgend, works the same way, only monthly. This one has longer stuff. I have to write a post every month and therefore I have little time to think about whether it is worthwhile or whether I even dare. When I almost-don’t-dare, I feel like I’ve hit a good spot. I started this blog only a year ago, and it worked quite well, but was interrupted by the pandemic and the presidential election, which left me a bit speechless. Now it continues.
It was one of the most difficult things to find good English titles for both blogs. Fortlaufend is now called cnstv, which is roughly the consonants of »consecutive«, one of the many not really convincing translations of »fortlaufend«, but I like that it also looks like the cryptic call sign of a TV station, that nerve-racking but unflinchingly continuous accompaniment to everyday American life. And ferner folgend is called furthermore following, which is an excellent expression with roughly the same meaning and similar sound. I furthermore read that the initials, ff, also mean: Forfeit, Friendly Fire, and Final Fantasy. That’s good company.
I write these blogs exclusively for myself (one of the common lies that writing people tell about themselves). A text is good if the author uses it to solve a problem for him or herself that he or she has been unable to solve in any other way than through that very text. Things immediately deteriorate if I fall into the tone of an explainer or political know-it-all. For this reason, some things must remain cryptic.
The on/off-switch is herewith operated.
