Translation:
Keeping My Brain in Shape
Anne Stang | Article and Photographs
Many activities like crossword
puzzles and Sudoku are suggested
to keep your brain in shape.
The trick is to fi nd one to which
you can be dedicated, even
passionate. Something that has
worked for me is translation, in
my case from German to English.
Here’s my story.
It started ten years ago,
although at the time I did not
realize where it would lead.
Three cousins and I travelled
to Germany to meet long-lost
relatives that we had found
again after more than seventy
years. Our ancestors were ethnic
Germans who had emigrated
from the German-speaking areas
of western Europe to Russia
in the eighteenth century. My
grandparents moved from Russia
to Canada in the early twentieth
century, but the grandparents
and parents of these relatives
had stayed in Russia. They
suff ered terribly during
the Communist period,
but were able to emigrate
to Germany when the
USSR broke up in the early
1990s. Arthur, one of those
cousins, recorded their
family history in Russia
and presented each of us
with a copy in German. To
make it readable for those
of us in Canada, it had to
be translated into English,
which we did with the
44 | arta.net
help of Google Translate. That
was my fi rst project. The second
was another fi le from Arthur
describing more of his own story
and life in the USSR from the
1950s to the 1990s.
My third translation project
was a children’s book, In der
Fremde (Into the Unknown),
that I must have acquired on
one of my trips to Germany.
It contained stories of life in
Romania under the Communists
as well as their adjustment to life
in Germany, where they moved
after the USSR broke up. With
the help of the internet, I received
permission from the author to
put the English copy into the
library of the Germans from
Russia society in Calgary.
Next, I inherited a box of
historical family documents from
one of my aunts. One item was
not our own history, but that
of an ethnic German woman’s
experiences in slave labour camps
in the USSR in the 1940s and
1950s. It was called Mein Hartes
Leben (My Hard Life) and came
via Argentina, but that’s another
story. I translated her story just
to see if I could, and quickly
realized that the story should be
made available in English. Again,
the internet came to the rescue to
obtain the necessary permission
from the author’s son.
Project fi ve was Mein Herz
blieb in Russland (My Heart
Stayed in Russia), a much
longer book with 460 pages,
again connected to the German-
speaking people in Russia. That
took up all my spare time for a
year, but translating so many
stories of ordinary people had
improved my skills enough
that I could also translate the
rather academic language of the