Stan's Cafe

Another smooth day. With smaller statistics the order of the day and with Daniel and Anja arriving to supplement Olivia in our translation team we were able to pick up the pace.

Again we have become embroiled in fascinating translation discussions. There often isn’t a German equivalent to a word we want to use. Regularly a German word, whilst it means what we want to say, carries an implication of something else, which isn’t quite right. Where the English label reads “Tourists Visiting Majorca Last Year”, the German translation in effect has to say “Male Tourists and Female Tourists Visiting Majorca Last Year”. In reverse English becomes less elegant than German when writing about “Female Florists in Germany” and “Male Florists in Germany”. In German the gender of the florist is communicated with a change of suffix.

An extended pause in the Stan’s Cafe touring diary earlier in the year meant the post of full time Production Manager became unsustainable. In the inelegant language of the workplace “we had to let Karen go”. We miss her. In the relatively quiet time just past we’ve missed her presence, not with touring picking up again we’ve started to miss the work she did and today, with a packed queue at the table for labels, costumes all crumpled and three of us in serially and in parallel grappling with the dark arts of merging documents we missed Karen acutely. Nevertheless, all was well come press-call time.

I gave a brief introduction talk before letting the journalists loose. Having just finished a radio interview I looked around the hall to see Graeme in the midst of another radio interview, Jake in front of a TV camera and Jack being quizzed by a gang of tour guides. Everything is shaping up well.

James