Translation practice 1.0: Seth's Blog

Tweet Inspired by Dr. Kubler's lecture on advanced learning strategies (see last weeks post) I decided to try my hand at a translation exercise this past weekend. Rather than pick something I've personally written in English, I used Seth's Blog as inspiration. For the past year or so Seth's (short) words of wisdom have been filling my inbox. His blog covers a wide variety of topics and uses language in a powerful and inspirational way--something that is perfect for translation. By using his words I'm forced to step outside of my own Chinese comfort zone.

I'll be following up on this translation practice in the weeks to come (once finals are done and I've had a week or two to decompress), but for now, here are the results of my first translation challenge:

你到底作出啥？

決定。

你並不是個勞工，你所要做的事情就是做決定

問題是，一位種玉米的農場主對自己所有的任務一清二楚。他不會避免種玉米或拖延收割，並且他絕對不會去說服鄰居過來替代他種玉米。

你必須多決定，才能進一步。

I learned a few new words like 農場主、 拖延、收割 during the writing process, and can't wait to write another one of these again in the near future. The fact that Seth's post was A) awesome and B) short made this that much more fun to do! Got any suggestions on how to make my translation better? Please leave them in the comments below.

Original post from Seth's Blog:

What do you make? 

Decisions. 

You don't run a punch press or haul iron ore. Your job is to make decisions.
The thing is, the farmer who grows corn has no illusions about what his job is. He doesn't avoid planting corn or dissemble or procrastinate about harvesting corn. And he certainly doesn't try to get his neighbor to grow his corn for him. 

Make more decisions. That's the only way to get better at it.