Helping on Twitter-sphere...
Yes! Heard it?! A complete stranger on Twitter!
This took place last week on Friday, the same day as the opening of Euro 2012.
A Tweet sent by a user seeking help through his Twitter for his friends that speak Mandarin. Out of curiosity (well, that what I always be...) I replied his Tweet, "Why you need to translate?". Later I got a Tweet reply from him stating he have to make a video in Mandarin and asking me to help. I didn't think anything was amiss on that. I figure out for a while and came up with a theory, this guy was not seeking any financial assistance from me or did not ask me to meet him at some place (It's not a rape scene like in the movies and there won't be so much of reel life scenes in real life anyway...), so why I should be so resistance?
After considering all the facts and possibilities, I decided to help this stranger on Twitter. To be precise, it'a actually checking the grammar of a conversation in Mandarin. What he mentioned beforehand, he translated the script in Mandarin and he didn't feel right about it. Therefore, he need help to double check whether it was correct or not. He notified me that he had sent the Word file to me later.
I tend to prioritise stuffs based on their deadlines. That's me! If deadline is tomorrow, I'll finish it by tonight. If deadline is nowhere near, I'll do it on some other day... His deadline was not 'urgent', but it was 'soon', as he mentioned. 'Soon'?! How 'soon' actually? No further hesitation, I went downstairs in my house, switch on laptop and start working.
Everyone that use Google Translate should know that this thing is a crap. Come on, you can't DIRECTLY translate one language to another. You can't translate Chinese to English or Bahasa Malaysia directly! You can only reasonably express it's meaning in other language (I know it well, as I speak and write in 3 languages... Well, not perfectly fluent but I can converse fairly well).
Back to the translation story, I asked him why he need to do a video in Mandarin. He told me that he's currently taking Mandarin classes in his uni.
It was middle of the night when I was doing all the translation work. Sleepy, tired and dark. Furthermore, the weird pinyin and translation were killing me! And some of the sentences, I can hardly translate them directly to Mandarin. I sent Tweets to him to clarify more, so that I can make sense of it.
Around 1.30 am, I had finished all and sent the file back to him...
The person that I helped... What I learned from his Tweets, he could be a UiTM student and is doing Mass Comm as I am.
I had a lecturer, who taught me and will be teaching me again, also lectures in UiTM. I'll just ask her if this person DO exist.
Just for the sake of... knowing.
p/s: Excited for Germany's first win yesterday against Portugal! Hope they can get another win against the Dutch.
