Balance of Fear

I recently did a job that I got through a friend of mine. I was absolutely terrified and this is good.


I'm normally pretty nervous when I translate because whatever I write is going out into the real world, not a closed environment like school, and will have repercussions. Repercussions for myself: a good job means more work and more money, a bad job means less work from that agency/person and possibly from others (I was once told that a good review is spread to six people and a bad one to 100 people). Repercussions on the author: based on what I write, they may end up looking foolish at best, they may lose clients, etc. And also repercussions on the reader as well. Mark Twain once said, "be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint." A mistranslation could be just as bad. I realise that I'm not usually translating anything that is quite so important, but I'm nervous nonetheless. In this case I was also worried because if I did a bad job then it would reflect poorly on my friend, in addition to all that other stuff.


But I think it is good to be nervous, it makes me careful. I worry about mistakes so much that I check everything. Even the things I think I know, especially those things. In my experience, that is where the mistakes are and I've made more than enough of those. One of the things that I noticed at WIPO is that when they checked my work, the things that I agonised over barely got a comment, but it was in the parts that I was confident of that I made mistakes. This makes sense when you think about it because I focused more on where I thought I might be wrong than on where I thought I was right. 


In short, I get nervous about my work and this is good, so long as I don't let it paralyse me and I can use to make my work better.