seshat's blog post - Zen

After commenting on the translation by a colleague of a legal document into Dutch (remarking some phrasing that sounded odd to me), this (francophone) colleague sent an e-mail basically telling me how to do translations, while he himself barely speaks Dutch and knows squat about translating (without his Dutch-speaking colleague he'd be helpless). I do not take kindly to such arrogance and I appreciated even less his condescending tone, so I had prepared a whole e-mail refuting many of his comments, and saying "no offense, but I don't need lessons from you on how to translate, I have enough experience in the matter, and without being arrogant, I'm confident about the good quality of my translations".

Then I went to one of my bosses, figuring it was best to have his opinion. He read the e-mail and said "this guy is crazy". But he agreed that I should send an answer, only he had a whole different type of answer in mind. And after some thought, I went with his advice:

"Dear X,

Thank you so much for all this useful information. In the future I won't hesitate to consult you for advice concerning translations of legal texts, and I'll be sure to transfer to you all questions I should receive about how to translate such texts."

Good luck with that, chump, you acted like an expert on translations into Dutch, now you can prove yourself.

But my (main) boss is going to blow a fuse I think, when I show her this e-mail. She's more "warm blooded" than the other boss, more like me He who looks for trouble will certainly get it, I used to take all sorts of crap (bullying when I was young), but now I'm not ashamed to use the means at my disposal to defend myself.