November overload

If the teaching season in full swing wasn't enough, November brings along a string of film translation jobs for the film festival AleKino!, incredibly enjoyable but time-consuming. In previous years I could barely manage to keep so many balls in the air and this resulted in a period of tense, undercooked lessons and some shoddy translations, but this year my discipline and time management got better and I retained high standards while remaining relatively relaxed. Still, I could find neither time nor energy to post entries on the blog, even though I had more to say than ever.

Let's try to make up for it by looking back at the past three-four weeks, in particular at the films I was commissioned to translate.

How often do you get to see a Latvian production? I had this rare opportunity with Little Robbers, a skillfully-told story of an ordinary Lativan family that finds itself in a pickle when the father loses his job, defaults on his mortgage and the bank mercilessly reposseses their house. Angered by this drastic turn of events, Robby (5) and his sister Louise (7) set out to help their troubled parents and draw up a scheme to rob the bank that took away their home. They nearly get away with the robbery, but eager security cameras record as they get out of rubbish bins, having first visited the vault, and leave the place with stolen cash. What they don't know is that most banknotes had been counterfeited by the bank employees.

The hapless team of security men and the bank manager, all of them involved in the counterfeiting fraud, rush off to chase them, ending up at their grandparents' farm where the poor family holds out in tough times. Through grandpa's cunning and Robby's bravery, all fraudsters get beaten up or caught in shameful circumstances and the police arrives to discover the extent of the bank fraud. In the happy end, Robby and Louise are given the award for their contribution to uncovering the rigging scheme at the bank and the family moves back to where they'd been evicted from.

Even though Robbers weren't designed for my age group, I enojoyed the charm of a simple story behind it (how topical it was in the bank-induced financial crisis) and its clear good-or-evil message that modern children are in a tremendous need to be exposed to. And the language - how often do you get to hear some beutiful Latvian?

To remember:
1_ This is a picklock and lock picking,
2_ Not a lot of people get to see a bank vault,
3_ When you have a puncture, you drive with flat tyres,
4_ A mutt is another way to say a mongrel dog,
5_ I'll box your ears = You'll get a good thrashing.