Finally!

Finally!! Finally!!! After two months of stumbling over my words, I finally finished the project I've been working on. It has been a bumpy ride, with constant help from Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary along the way, but I'm somewhat pleased with the result.

However, I'm still anxious because I know, as a person whose first language is not English, and who's not formally trained in English, the chance of my making mistakes was rather big. During the translation process, I kept worrying about whether or not I used the right tenses (there's no such thing as tenses in Indonesian), prepositions, suffixes (imagine using ‘s behind the name of a person ended with s; well, I think I should've used ...s's instead of ...s', but I decided to choose the latter due to aesthetic consideration, which is probably going to be slashed by the editor later on), the right words (like the time I used "bat" instead of "club" to refer to the thing people use to knock down thugs; I realized it too late, because the script, which was handed down in installments instead of in complete form like I used to do, had been sent to the editor). You could say that I'm worried about every possible grammatical/structural/whatever mistake one could make in English.

My greatest fears are the editor grumbling as he/she sees my work, saying, "Does this translator even know how to use English properly?" since there are so many mistakes and the book's author crying, "What has she done to my work? She had butchered it!" as he read my transliteration. I pray to God that such thing will never happen.

But I have to say that the project was very enjoyable since the book is a really good one (despite its heartrending aspects, which I have mentioned in my previous piece of writing). I just hope that people reading the English translation would find as much joy as I did reading the real thing written in Bahasa Indonesia.

Note: By the way, the movie version of the book is in production. It'll certainly be a fresh alternative, among local cheap horror flicks, lovey-dovey craps, and perverted comedies that roamed around the cinemas these days.