translation work

D, a friend of my mom's from way-back-when, suddenly emailed me out of the blue, after years of silence, to make a request on behalf of her sister. Both D and her sister JA are obsessed with genealogy, and JA is working on some project that requires her to comb through a 14-page(!) French document that dates back to the 1920s. D gave me no time limit to complete a translation of the document into English, and I'm already a couple pages into it. I hope to be done within a week, but I told D—just to give myself a buffer—that the job would take me "a week or two." She seemed okay with that.

The document itself is a genealogical treatise on the Le Grand family, which has several sub-branches. I wish I could say translating this is easy work, but as I'm discovering, I don't know much genealogy-related French, so I'm learning a ton of terminology with the help of various sources ranging from my online Lexilogos French dictionary to Google Translate to even ChatGPT, which responds in French when you type questions in French. So the whole thing is a slog, but it's also fairly educational as I learn vocabulary related to coats of arms and the symbols that appear on them, Church-related and society-related feudal titles, etc. It's a completely different universe. Drives me crazy, but I'm mucking through it.

Oh, yeah: money was never mentioned, and I never asked for any. We could say, cynically, that D knew I'd never charge her anything, but even if that's the case, I'm doing this gratis since she's practically family. D used to take my mom in to work for years: they both worked at NALC in DC, the huge postal-workers' union's national office at 1st and C Streets NW, right at the corner of the Capitol. D's family and mine used to be close when I was young; she had a son, S, who was my age. D is white, but her husband at the time was Filipino, so with S and me hanging out all the time, people thought we two half-and-halfs were brothers. As the years went by, my contact with their family became less frequent, and after Mom died, I didn't speak with them at all. This sudden email from D was, therefore, a bit of a surprise.