Jiwon's Log (Hindi, German et al)

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Wie ist es mit dem Prof gegangen? Er war bratschist, oder?

[Jiwon]

Wie ist es mit dem Prof gegangen? Er war bratschist, oder?

No he was a baritone, a Kammersänger, and professor of vocal music at Leipzig.

I enjoyed every single moment of my guided tour with the professor. We went to Gyeongbokgung Palace and the War Memorial Museum. It was a great opportunity for me to brush up on Korean history (which I never got to learn much as I spent my secondary school years in Sri Lanka), and to explain all that auf Deutsch! We also spent a lot of time talking about Korean students of music. He was giving masterclasses in Korea, and was deeply impressed at the talent the Korean students had. Yet he pitied the fact that most of them are not fluent in German, which would be a big disadvantage for studying abroad, especially since Germany is the favourite destination for music majors in Korea.

I still have around 120 pages of "Fundamental Rights" to translate. This is proving to be a very hectic task. The problem is that Korea is a civil law country and adopted many legal principles and terminologies from Germany (via Japan, of course), which means that it is easier to find German translations for Korean legal terms than English translations. Both the UK and the US are under jurisdiction of common law, and the way law is discussed is so different from the Korean one. In fact, I am making up most of the principles and theories as they simply do not exist in English. I looked up abstracts of papers written by Korean professors, hoping to find English translation of key words, but either there seems to be no "standard" translation for most of these terms, or the professors chose to write their abstract in Korean and German.

All this has left no time for me to study any other languages. My daily routine for the past few weeks has been "wake up - translate - eat - translate - eat - translate - sleep". I resent the fact that I have to do this for another week and a half, but of course I may change my mind once I get the paycheck.