... but duty calls. I am taking a short sanity break from translating a legal contract on a short deadline, which is very exacting work, and I can't use a translation memory because it's in badly scanned pdf form and the reader can't convert it to text. I'm of a mind to change my price list to charge more when I can't use translation memory, because not only does it mean more typing for me, but I also have to figure out the lay-out of the document and hand-count the words. Unfortunately it also means a higher risk of error, so maybe that evens it out. It's some consolation that the contract happens to be fascinating...
-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
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