Every parent gets the email, amidst field trip announcements and gentle reminders about snack policies.
Subject: Head lice was reported in your child’s classroom. It’s an ordinary thing, an email you can delete. It’s always someone else’s kid.
Until it isn’t.
Ours arrived on a Thursday. I was at the dinner table, wearing my soft pants that say “I give up” as I sputtered across the finish line toward the weekend. My evening plans were to eat tacos, play Candy Crush, and be in bed by 9.
The girl was scratching her head. The boy was scratching his head. Come to think of it, my head itched, too.
5 minutes later, I was throwing a coat over my pajamas and driving toward the kids’ salon before it closed. I burst through the door like a mad woman, blurting out my confession: "Lice! Help!"
While translating my grandparents’ memoirs for The Poland Project, I’ve had a lot of help from Google Translate. I grew up bilingual, but my Polish is rusty and my vocabulary falls painfully short in areas like World War II weaponry and spy tactics.
Google Translate is powerful, but not perfect. Often the translations are too literal, too formal, or not quite right. I’ve spent hours smoothing the translations into English sentences and paragraphs that (I hope) convey the original meaning.
In doing so, I’ve become aware of – and felt indebted to – the people whose fragmented conversations are the building blocks of this database. So I accepted Google’s invitation to improve Translate by adding my own knowledge. I’ve translated or verified more than 1,000 Polish words and phrases into English.
Here are a few things I've discovered:
