pardonmytranslation

[pardonmytranslation]

I could move. I just deeply, spiritually, choose not to.

[pardonmytranslation]

Formatting, Fury, and Fonts from Hell

It all starts with a deceptively innocent email:

“Hi! We just need a quick translation. Nothing fancy. The file is in Word. Should take you an hour max!”

1. The Myth of the ‘Simple Word File’

You open the document. It’s 137 pages long. There are five fonts, three languages (one extinct), and something that looks suspiciously like a table that gave up halfway through formatting itself and now just exists as loose text with invisible borders.

There are headers. There are footers. There’s a floating text box that disappears whenever you scroll. There’s a watermark in Comic Sans that reads: CONFIDENTIAL DO NOT TRANSLATE. Naturally, it’s in the middle of a sentence you do need to translate.

2. The Inconsistent Formatting Olympics

You start translating, only to realize every paragraph has a different line spacing. The first is double spaced, the second is single, and the third decided to take a minimalist approach and is hiding behind margin #3.

You fix one bullet list. Another one spawns.

You set everything to “Normal Style.” The document rebels, unleashes “Heading 7” across every line, and Word crashes, leaving only the smell of burning hopes and the auto-recovery file that never recovers.

3. Tables: The Ninth Circle of Translator Hell

Have you ever translated a table inside a table inside another table? It’s a matryoshka doll of sadness. The cell boundaries are as unpredictable as a toddler on espresso, and the moment you try to adjust the width, the entire table decides to take a field trip to the next page.

Bonus: when translating, the target language is 30% longer. Which means… surprise! Everything breaks. Again.

4. PDF Conversion: A Tragic Love Story

“We couldn’t find the original file, but here’s a scan of a fax from 1994. Can you work with it?”

Absolutely. Right after I finish decoding hieroglyphs.

You run OCR. It gives you: “Ttxe cØmpányy pol!cy1 iz vry strictt — ” You start crying. You begin translating.

You finish, and the client says:

“Can you please deliver it in exactly the same formatting as the original?”

Madam, the original was a coffee stain and a shadow of someone’s elbow. I can’t format an existential blur.

5. The Joys of “Just a Few Minor Edits”

You submit the document.

“Looks great! Just a couple changes. We switched the document layout to landscape and changed it to PowerPoint. Also added 47 more slides. Should be quick!”

You question your life choices. You question everything. You translate the slides. One of them is just a meme.

6. And Still, We Translate

Despite the fonts with vendettas, the tables from Tartarus, and the mysterious formatting that changes when you blink — we do it. We translate. We format. We weep silently into our coffee. And sometimes, we scream at Word for inserting a random blank page that no one, not even Bill Gates, can explain.

Translators are not just linguists. We are code-breakers. Archaeologists of formatting. Therapists for text boxes. Warriors in the battlefield of Styles and References.

So next time you send a “simple file,” consider attaching chocolate. Or therapy vouchers.

We’ll still do it. But we might roast you in a blog post like this one. In perfect formatting, of course.

Footnote: This article was originally written in Word. It is now inexplicably 84 pages long. There is no content past page 3. The rest is white space and one rogue asterisk.