Translation

There is a Word Press site that I visit once in a great while.  It's interesting that it posts a daily one word prompt designed to spark inspiration for bloggers looking for something to write about.  I often feel intimidated by the way people interpret the prompts.  I usually check out several of them and am rarely inspired -- my brain doesn't work in that way.

But today, I clicked on the prompt "translate," which has linked to nearly 200 blog entries sparked by that word.  It's interesting to see what people think of when they think of that word.  Some write poems.  

I have a hard time with poetry.  Most of it I don't understand. My brain doesn't think in high falutin' terminology.  I can write "there once was a XX named XX" and finish that quatrain.  And I often write haikus, though when Ned went to Japan and sent back haikus about his experience ...

...he learned that this isn't strictly speaking a "haiku."  Apparently Haiku has to do with seasons.  I didn't understand it, so I checked Wikipedia, but that was even more complicated.  I guess just the 5-7-5 syllables is not enough to qualify as haiku.  But whatever 5-7-5 is, I can write that, if not real poetry.

One entry talked about a dream and how to translate that dream into reality, another translated her cat's "language."  One talked about trying (unsuccessfully) to speak French, despite 10 years of lessons.  One was trying to make sense out of family conflict.  Not surprisingly, at least one entry tried to translate Trump.  One read a grave inscription and tried to figure out what it meant.

One took the word and talked about how we have lost the ability to relate to strangers and how we ignore pain and suffering around us and challenges the reader.  "Notice someone’s pain, take someone’s away, but there’s no good reason to cause anyone any pain."

Someone took a text by Stephen King and talked about the meaning behind the words.  One wrote a science fiction piece that I didn't understand at all.

I finally came to one that I could relate to.  It was about a woman who was learning how to translate medical jargon.  "I got a job as a USDA food inspector and started to learn a lot of really long words about chicken diseases, little did I know it would lead to where I am now."

She never became a medical transcriptionist, a job she found quite boring, but it did get me started thinking about my experience of some 30 years of medical transcription.

When I think of medical transcription, I think of my very first job.  I still cringe when I remember it.  A Japanese veterinarian brought a box of tapes from a conference to The Secretariat, where I worked.  He wanted it transcribed.  My boss explained that we had never done medical transcription before and he said that he knew there would be lots of errors, but something was better than nothing.

And so I took on the job.  I had tapes and a medical dictionary and it was my job for the next month or so.  All these years later, after I actually became a medical transcriptionist, I can't even begin to think of how horrible my translation of this conference must have been.

For one thing, even under the best of circumstances, transcribing a conference is the worst kind of transcription.  You don't know how many people are talking, you don't know who has what voice, there are people who talk on top of other people.  It's just awful.

Add to that the fact that they were speaking in medical jargon and that not all of them spoke English with an American accent and you get the idea.!  I think I did about 20-30 of those damn tapes and had to search the medical dictionary for nearly every word.  I'd love to read my transcription now.

The veterinarian seemed content with what I had done and we never heard from him again.

Later when I got a different job, working for The Typing Company, my boss, who was a medical transcriptionist, threw a dictionary and a tape at me and told me to learn it.  And I did.  She told me that when I knew how to spell cholecystectomy, I would know I was a real transcriptionist.  And I did.

But I also learned that the ability to translate the words of an orthopedist who spoke very clearly (and at great length) into a perfectly typed manuscript was NOT being a medical transcriptionist.  I went on to become the on-call transcriptionist for every medical office in town, when their in-house typist was ill or on vacation.  Going from orthopedics to gynecology was like going from French to Spanish and required a whole new learning curve.  Same with learning Internal Medicine or cardiology, or translating reports on lab tests.

Working for the medical lab was quite an experience.  For one thing, the typewriter was in the basement with the medical equipment.  I would get there at 6 a.m. and work until about 8.  I never saw anybody and nobody ever saw me.  I would leave my transcriptions by the machine and let myself out of the basement and go home.  I had some nice interesting reports to type, but my boss got the best one.

When you go to a lab, they have to report on anything that is taken out of the body.  Blood? Splinters? Bullet fragment?  In this case, what was removed from the body was a door knob that had been removed from a guy's anus.  As if that weren't bad enough, the patient requested that after the exam had been done they return the knob to him because "it was his favorite one."

I don't agree with the blogger who found medical transcription boring.  Being a medical transcriptionist in a small town is fascinating because you learn the most interesting things about people you may see every day, but of course you never mention it to anyone.  There are still people I see now and then whose quirks I know because I remember typing about them, but nobody ever knew what I knew (and those people never knew that I was typing notes about them either).  It's an experience I am glad I had...and I owe it all to a Japanese veterinarian and a very obnoxious orthopedist.

(And here when I started this entry I thought I was going to write about speaking foreign languages or learning how to speak "dog.")

Where Are You When I Need You?

8 April 2011

I stood there looking at the door and started laughing as so many memories flooding in.

My friend Ruth recently had replacement hip surgery and had her post-op appointment at a doctor's office today, but she can't drive yet, so asked I could drive her to Sacramento for the appointment. I've been missing our bi-weekly lunches, as I haven't seen her in a month, so I was happy to oblige.

Daniel M. D'Amico, M.D. is not her doctor. He is in partnership with another orthopedist, but D'Amico's nameplate is on the door and oh what memories. I've never met the man. I don't have a clue what he looks like, but he changed my life.

When I first went to work for The Typing company, the owner, Ann Holke, was a medical transcriptionist. I would work all day on student and business people's orders and Ann would pound out medical records.

One day she tossed a tape and a medical dictionary at me and said "Here...learn medical transcription." The tape was dictated by Dr. D'Amico. She chose him because he dictated more clearly than any of the other doctors whose dictations she transcribed.

It was very difficult in the beginning. I was looking up every other word, it seemed. As I began to learn the medical terminology, I realized how horribly I had botched a huge job that we had been given by a Japanese veterinarian when I was working for The Secretariat. The doctor had said "just type what you can hear" when he handed us about 50 tapes from a veterinary medical conference. Conferences are the most difficult thing to transcribe under the best of circumstances and when you are dealing with a vocabulary you have had NO experience with, it's even more difficult.

But I kept plugging away on D'Amico and I did learn. Then I went on to type for other doctors and to learn the vocabulary of other specialties, eventually centering on ob/gyn, where I then worked for about 15 years, in one office for 12, in another for 2 and then some transcription at home.

The thing about D'Amico was that he droned on...and on...and on... He would repeat himself and then repeat himself over again. He had the kind of soporific voice that could put you to sleep even while typing.

My favorite D'Amico story, though concerns my friend Diane. I had never met her, but she and Ann had been best friends and had raised their children together. Diane was a medical transcriptionist in the Seattle area, when I was learning medical transcription in Davis. During a particularly busy time for The Typing Company, Diane offered to take vacation from her regular job and come down and help Ann out with our overload.

While we typed student papers, Diane sat at a typewriter transcription D'Amico's work.

Now one thing doctors don't realize is that the transcriptionist hears everything that you are doing while you're dictating. I swear I once heard one of the doctors I worked for peeing while he was dictating.

On this particular day, Diane, who was such a funny lady, kept complaining that D'Amico had a cold and that he kept snuffling and sneezing and coughing. She said "If he spits, I'm out of here!"

Then suddenly she ripped the earphones out of her ears, leaped up from her chair and shouted "He DID! He actually DID!"

Diane and I became great friends during her time in Davis and our friendship continued after she returned to Seattle, though she and Ann kind of lost touch with each other.

As I sat there in the office today, waiting for Ruth to have her exam, all I could think of was that I really wanted to tell Ann and Diane where I was and how much I was thinking about them.

Sadly, they are both dead and there is nobody else who can fully appreciate how weird it was to be sitting in the office of Daniel M. D'Amico

When you are in the last years of your life, the sad thing is how lonely it is that so many of your peers, the people with whom you have a shared history, are no longer here to remember with you and to laugh at the time that Dr. D'Amico spit phlegm while he was dictating and how funny Diane was when he did it.

The Transcribers Club

Little did Tony Kahn know what he had unleashed when he made an innocent comment on his Morning Stories podcast that he and co-producer Gary Mott thought maybe one of the listeners might be interested in helping transcribe the archive of Morning Stories podcasts so that those who either couldn't hear them, or who wanted to use them as an aid to help learn English, could read them.

(That's Gary on the left, Tony on the right)

I didn't hear the request until several days after he made it, but I immediately dropped a note to Kahn and Mott and volunteered my service. Unbeknownst to me, an amazing woman named Liz Cooksey...

...had already volunteered to spearhead the project and a couple of other volunteers had been working on the archives. I immediately set to work on doing transcription along with the others, who ultimately numbered 13 -- men and women, in this country, in England and in Italy -- working to complete the backlog of episodes.

It is three months since we started this project and there are only a handful of shows in the archive left to finish (I am embarrassed to admit that two of those are mine. With the complication of computer problems, houseguests, and trips to Santa Barbara, among a few other things, I just haven't been able to complete them--but I should have them finished this week.)

But the amazing thing is not that we completed the archives in three months (and plan to rotate through the group of us to keep things up to date when a new podcast comes out), the amazing thing is the community which has formed around this little group of dedicated, semi-faceless people.

It started, as these things do, simply with e-mails flying back and forth all concerning the business of getting the transcription done: getting consistency in format, assigning new shows to various ones of us, and reporting back on how many had been finished and where we were in the list.

But somehow in the course of all that "business" we started popping in personal messages. There were cheers for "Wonder Woman," for example, who seemed to be working at this 24 hours a day and flew through the transcripts, putting us all to shame.

And then there were little jokes that crept in, especially with the woman in Italy, who once mentioned something about a "piazza" which I mis-read as "pizza" and the fun that ensued because of that mistake.

Gradually we began to learn about each other's lives, the woman with the special needs child, the woman who is in a race with our daughter-in-law Laurel for who is going to give birth first, the young man who is having settling-in difficulties at his college. The woman who just broke both her wrists (and Walt thought he had it rough!)

We began to talk about our lives.

And then there was crazy Geo, who really sort of became the heart of the expansion into a real community. Geo, with her offbeat sense of humor and her internet expertise. She set up a blog for Morning Stories readers, where they can download the transcripts and chat with others about them. She also set up a private blog for the 13 of us to discuss things more in depth than in individual e-mails.

She also spearheaded getting all of our information, such as addresses and birthdates (you don't suppose she's a stalker, do you? :) ). And it was Geo who suggested that we all get on Skype so we can chat with each other, so slowly we are all getting Skype accounts and though the first call has not yet taken place, I know that it will.

I love it each morning when I check my e-mail and find a whole slew of e-mail from the Transcribers Club.

Now Tony Kahn has decided to make us a morning story. A couple of weeks ago, he interviewed half of the group and planned to interview the other half a few days later, but got sick. Organizing six people for interviews on days and blocks of time that are convenient for all isn't easy, so it wasn't until today that we had our interviews.

Tony has kind of been haunting me for...well...years. He's on the panel of Says You, and I've seen him interviewed by several of the vloggers that I know. There was a period of time that no matter what I clicked on, there was Tony! So our chat was like chatting with old friends.

Now he has the task of blending all of our babbling into a coherent Morning Story. Having listened to lots and lots of them now, I have every expectation that it is going to be fun to listen to when it's all finished.

In the meantime, I have a Skype chat set up with the woman in Italy. We'll either be on the piazza or having pizza. I'm not sure which yet.

Talking with Tony Kahn

The Search for Perfection

There are many jobs for which I am woefully ill-prepared. I watched something the other day about some sort of a job that involved checking, re-checking, and re-checking again to make sure that whatever was produced was absolutely, positively perfect.

Definitely not my job. I'm more a "good enough for government work" or "close enough" kind of person.

The first experience with "getting it perfect" that I remember came when we were working on the first Lamplighter book. We were creating an historical archive and it needed to be as perfect as we could make it. If it hadn't been for Alison's training and knowledge about (and passion for) the importance of what we were doing, I would have gotten the project done, but in a half-assed way that wouldn't have been nearly as scholarly as it ended up being.

The current transcription project is aiming for perfection too. There are 10 of us on the team and we have a style sheet to use which seems extremely detailed for something which started out as a way to simply allow people to read the broadcast material. Updates to the style sheet come along as people screw up or as new thoughts emerge.

The problem, though, is that we all started out doing it in our own way before the style sheet evolved and when I looked through a lot of transcripts which have been posted on line the other day, I don't think there is unanimity in half of them. The typeface is different, or the format is different. Do you use italics or underlining for emphasis? Is the capsule summary in italics or regular type? Is it one space between sentences or two spaces--and does it really matter? Etc. To me the important thing is that we are getting it done--and the end is in sight. Close enough for government work. But then I don't come from a "make it perfect" mentality.

I have to admit that the increasing oversight, combined with both the amount of work I have on my plate right now, and the fact that the transcription team has a "wonder woman" who seems to be doing the lion's share of the work and is cheered whenever she finishes her next batch, have left me kind of putting transcription to the bottom of the stack of work that needs to be done, knowing that it will get done by Wonder Woman, who will apparently do it more perfectly than I am capable of doing.

We are also expecting the most perfect granddaughter in the world.

I have loved following Laurel's on-line pregnancy diary and watching as she keeps track of the baby's progress and muses about the way they are going to raise their child. Tom and Laurel are going to be such wonderful parents.

Laurel is a "make it perfect" kind of person. They had the perfect wedding--and it was the perfect wedding, everything by the book she had researched so carefully and followed so closely.

This grandchild is being researched with even more dedication, as well she should be. This is, after all, OUR granddaughter! Laurel is going the extra mile to do everything right for the baby now, as well as after she's born.

I do, however, smile, when I read about things like decisions regarding whether the child should or should not be exposed to television and what material the bottles should be made of. I remember when Jeri was born and how perfect we tried to make things (within my ability to make things "perfect")...and how you discovered which things don't need to be quite so perfect when you have subsequent things to worry about.

With child #1 you sterilize the pacifier if it falls on the floor before you let the baby put it in her mouth again. With child #2, you run it quickly under the faucet. Cold water? No problem. Just plunk it quickly back in the mouth. With child #3, you brush the pacifier off on your pants before reinserting it into the kid's mouth, and by child #4 (sorry, Tom), you don't even bother wiping it off unless it drops in the mud.

You never let child #1 watch television, but when child #2 is screaming, you turn on the TV to keep #1 occupied while you attend to #2. By #3, you watch the clock, longing for it to be time for Sesame Street so you can get a break for a few minutes. By #4 all four kids are watching everything from cartoons to game shows.

Maybe my parenting wasn't "perfect," but it was "close enough" and I think that we raised some pretty good kids despite my inability to be "perfect."

Necessity is the Mother of...SPENDING!

What a day it has been! I ended this day feeling like a real reporter, lemme tell you.

At 1 p.m., I had made arrangements to meet a delightful man named Liam Creighton, who is the producer and director of a film called Julie, Julie, which is being entered into the French Film Festival in Sacramento in July. I am doing a feature story on him and on the film. I had already spent a lot of time on their blog, going over the production videos they had made and reading up on Liam and his wife Courtney and spent the morning watching the latest videos and getting up to speed with what I'd seen before.

(I've finally done it--I've found a way to make my internet obsession actually work for my job!)

At 1, I went back to good ol' Mishka's cafe (where, coincidentally, Liam had once worked) to meet with him. I was going to take the computer, but ended up no. I just brought my "trusty" tape recorder.

We had a delightful chat. He told me about his background, about how he came to make the film and all sorts of wonderful things. About 30 minutes into the interview, I went to check the tape, as I usually do, and that's when I discovered that the tape recorder was not working. The tape had just stopped about 30 seconds into the interview and because of the noise and clatter in the coffee house, I didn't hear the warning beep. I didn't have one single word on tape.

I pulled out a pad of paper and my pen to take notes, which I do badly (which is why I tape a recorder in the first place), and discovered my pen was out of ink. This was not looking good! Liam got a pen from behind the counter at Mishka's and I did what I could, but all the while I was groaning inwardly because at 3 p.m., I had an appointment to interview another guy--and this guy wasn't going to be anybody that I could just "wing it" with.

"The guy" was Rinde Eckert, who is the playwright / director / choreographer / performer and current Granada Artist in Residence at the University. He is about to present his Pulitzer Prize nominated (he was one of 3 finalists) Orpheus-X for one performance on February 16 and then he is directing a student cast in his Fate and Spinoza the following week. I've seen Rinde in performance before and knew that his interview was going to be more cerebral than just a couple of folks sitting around talking about movies and knew that if I was going to pull off a feature article over the weekend, I really needed a recorder I could rely on.

A-HA!

I remembered the last writing group meeting we had at Joan's house and how one of the women and Joan had been comparing their digital voice recorders. I didn't have a clue how much they cost, but since there was only 30 minutes before my meeting with Rinde, I decided to bite the bullet and buy one--at any cost. I went to Radio Shack.

To my delight, they were not only significantly cheaper than I feared they were going to be, but the clerk told me that they all pretty much did the same thing and the cheapest model was even on sale. It's amazing. It holds sixty-nine hours of dictation (for $20 more I could have gotten 114 worth of dictation, but I felt that was probably overkill!)

I told him to ring it up, add batteries, get it set up for me and show me how it worked. He did, I raced home, checked Rinde's address, went to the bathroom, and then showed up at Rinde's apartment, heart and digital recorder in hand. I plunked it down on the table, pressed the record button and hoped for the best.

[May I add, parenthetically, that I may have had my salary cut in half for stuff like this, but this is really the perk of the job. I just love meeting these fascinating people--and without exception, everyone has been just as delightful as they have been interesting, Rinde Eckert definitely no exception!]

As we spoke (well, he spoke and I listened), I was desperately hoping that the recorder was working because there was absolutely NO way I could ever remember 1/10th of what he was saying, much less quote him on it. Try, for example, remembering this:

He stands, in my estimation, kind of astride two worlds, one the world of the lyric, of the elevated, the high brain, essentially and this other world of the Dionysian, the animal, the inchoate, the natural. He’s able to talk to rocks; he knows the language of the rocks and therefore he’s trusted by the rocks. That requires a very different order of poetic imagination than the Apollonian high lyric. And so he stands as this pivotal figure between our more primitive and animal natures and this higher nature, the higher poetry.

Yeah. Right! Please, dear God, let the recorder be recording!

I was pretty sure I knew how to listen to the recording, but I didn't dare even try until I'd double checked the instructions at home and to my delight the 1 hr 21 minute interview had not only recorded, but in amazing clarity, the difference of night and day from a tape recording. AND, what was even better, I could transfer it from the recorder to my computer.

When I volunteered to work on the Morning Stories transcription project, the coordinator told me about a program called "ExpressScribe," which is a free download and which you can use to transcribe files on your computer. It even has keyboard controls to stop and start and speed or slow down the recording. I checked my Eckert interview that I transferred to the hard drive and there it was, playing through ExpressScribe.

I am an amazingly happy camper. Now I just have to transcribe it tonight and tomorrow and write the article on Sunday. I also have 3 more interviews to conduct, but they will be over the telephone, so I will type them as I talk to the subjects.

Once a Transcriptionist...

I thought I was finished with transcription.

And really I am, but a "job" of sorts has fallen into my lap and I'm just delighted about it.

I don't know how to explain Tony Kahn. We first encountered Tony Kahn as a panelist on Says You, which we have listened to on the radio religiously for several years.

But then he began popping up all over my life. When I got into vlogging one of the first video blogs that I began to follow was "Drive Time," where a guy and his wife drive people around Boston and interview them in the car. Their first guest was Tony Kahn. I excitedly called Walt in to show him the interview.

Then another Vlogger posted an interview with Kahn. Periodically I would check something on line and...there would be Tony Kahn. I won't attempt to write his bio because it's done rather nicely here. I recently downloaded his fascinating public radio series, "Blacklisted," which tells the story of growing up under the shadow of the infamous black list, since his father, Gordon Kahn, was one of the blacklisted screenwriters. It has given him an interesting background and a unique view of life.

In addition to everything else, Tony Kahn is the producer and director of Morning Stories, a weekly 8-12 minute podcast which is produced by radio station WBGH in Boston and which consists of fascinating little vignettes into people's lives, with people reading their own stories, stories that run the gamut from the funny to the profound. I listen to the program off and on and have a lot of back (unheard) episodes stored on my iPod.

When we had our blackout and I was desperate for entertainment, I plugged in the iPod and started listening to a few of the Morning Stories. The stories are all introduced by Tony Kahn and after the recorded story, there is chitchat between Tony and his "right-hand man," Gary Mott.

Following the particular episode that I had just listened to, Tony read an e-mail he had received from a Vietnamese man who said he was enjoying listening to Morning Stories and that he was using them to help improve his English. He then asked if there was an available transcript for the stories.

After reading the e-mail, Kahn laughed and said that the entire "crew" of Morning Stories was himself and Mott and then he tossed out the offer that if anybody was interested in helping to transcribe the stories, to let him know.

I didn't know how old the program was, but my ears perked up. How much fun it would be to transcribe something like this instead of psychiatric chart notes!

We still didn't have power at the time, so I waited until we got our power back on again and immediately dashed off a note to Morning Stories offering to help transcribe. I was disappointed that I didn't get a response by return mail, but figured that they had found someone to do it.

Then this morning, when checking Flickr, I checked the Morning Stories page, where there are miscellaneous photos of people who have submitted stories, pictures of Tony Kahn and Gary Mott, and the newest photo, of a woman named Liz Cooksey who is identified as "spear-heading the Morning Stories transcription project."

My immediate reaction was disappointment that someone had beat me to the punch, but then I read the next line, which said, "Find out more by dropping Liz a line at transcripts_liz@bellsouth.net." So, just for ducks, I dropped her a line and received a reply almost instantly. She already had other people on the project, had set up a style sheet, and would love to have me help out. (There are three years worth of shows to transcribe.)

When the programs are transcribed, they go to Kahn to correct and to Mott to put into HTML format and post on the web.

I've did my first two stories this afternoon and am loving doing the transcription. I think this is going to be a fun project!