As a borderless, hometown-less international student/travel junkie, I am an expert at translation. Translation of all sorts. The classic kind, translating and interpreting between languages, is one that I have been practicing since the second grade, when I started attending my English-speaking international school in Bangkok as a little Korean girl. Every semester, I would translate for my parents and teachers at parent-teacher conferences. I love love loved doing this as a kid, because I could pretty much tell my mom whatever I wanted, regardless of what the teacher was saying, because my teachers said everything (both positive and negative comments) with an unsettlingly bright smile.
Teacher: “Raimy is loud and talks out of turn in class. I’m afraid she is distracting to her classmates!”
Me: “He says I’m perfect.”
Well, maybe not exactly like that, but I have definitely been able to take artistic liberties (?) all my life because of the fact that I live in the grey space between two monolingual groups of people in my life.
But I am also a translator extraordinaire in other aspects of life. My dad is a purser for Korean Air. That means I get to ride airplanes for free most of the time, but also that I kind of never know where my dad is at any point in time. When I lived in Bangkok while he lived in Korea, I especially didn’t know where he was. When I got old enough to start keeping track and knowing where all the places in the world are, I kind of started memorizing time differences with Korea as standard time. Bangkok is two hours behind; New Zealand is four hours ahead. Now that I’m here in Boston, there’s this stupid thing called daylight savings that makes my life harder in different seasons. Korea is 14 hours ahead of Boston (so add two and switch the AM and PM), but only during the winter.
Weather is another language I am learning to speak more fluently. I think in Celsius, like most other people in the world. So when I’m in the US, I have to be really good at approximating the temperature from what Americans tell me if I don’t want to walk out into a deceptively sunny 30F with a light cardigan. I have a few baselines – 32F is a 0C, anything over 90F is apparently “boiling hot” according to Northeasterners. It’s all about survival.
Lastly, currency is a weird one. Not only do you have to know the raw equivalent, you also have to have a general sense of “Is this overpriced? Would this $10 Forever XXI shirt be worth the value if I bought it in Thailand?” In the shirt example, a Forever XXI shirt that costs $10 is about 350 Thai Baht. That is ridiculous. While $10 may be an insanely cheap shirt in the US, 350B is insanely expensive for my standards in Thailand. I can go out into a market and buy a shirt of equivalent quality for like, 100B.
The strange kind of knowledge you accumulate when you move around a lot, huh.