Last two days I did translations for a friend. Usually I do from German language into English (by for sure being aware I make mistakes!), but this time it was the other way round. And honestly, I felt about it as extremely difficult to do for quit a few different reasons at the same time.

Not I would mind such work! In a difference to that I felt honored about my friend having all that trust in my "language" abilities and liked to do this little favor for him. But being trained the other way round thinking backwards is quit a big difference.

I still remember the days I’ve started to write and talk in English. It was years after school and Ansleigh (my first victim) a rather friendly and nice online friend of me, certainly must have felt physical and mental pain reading through my lines. Today after years we are still in contact and even we are both busy people, from time to time we do pass us on some short and friendly greetings. In between she is a proud mum of two and taking the chance here I wish her and new baby Erin all the best for coming over the actual difficult time (Erin was born far way to early) soon.

But speaking about translations I still owe you the reasons about, why it was hard for me to do.

Today more being used to using English, I no longer think in German and start to translate before speaking it out. Even I do for sure not understand every term, I usually get or know it’s meaning and go using words without to think whether or not they might be the best one to use. My friends often tell me I have a few very characteristic "issues" in my English, but they nearly do like that … nearly … You get it?!

But the most difficult challenge I had to go through was knowing about I would write something with a real serious business background, talking about places and details I have nor seen nor even talked about before. It were just English (excellent English) descriptions used with the idea to advertise something to sell.

Boy that was rather strange. How would you describe a place you don’t know in real?!

Whenever I write in English, I’m using my second language. Therefore I’m used to write carefully by being aware I never will really do it right … But recently I got two curious feedbacks about making me really wondering about.

Yesterday a fellow wrote me an email with the wishes: Could you quickly send me the sqlstatements for creating two database links between the following Oracle Databases?! Hey! Every stupid nerd could get this syntax in seconds by querying Google for it.

Knowing this I made effort figuring out about why he could have trouble creating these connections and found out about missing TNSNAMES.ORA definitions and created them for him. Being carefully I even created one database link myself successfully and finally wrote back  …. I did blablabla and tested it myself with success. Use the following generic syntax and replace the keywords with appropriate values.

His answer was … I perfectly know the syntax, but have trouble with these two database links now …. Didn’t I wrote I’ve prepared it all?!
Honestly?? Is it me or just him too lazy to read?

The other feedback was as curious as well …. A few days before I’ve wrote about Teamviewer here and passed on a similar info a list. Menioning it’s free for personal usage, within my next line I wrote about it’s handy to check things on a customer PC or MAC from remote! Why does someone then implicitly think I would suggest using this tool in a commercial environment without paying for it first?!

Honestly …. the German Language is much more exact about such things! Is it me, my English or perhaps the language itself?  Or hey my friend! Does it may just need you … thinking one or two more seconds about my lines?