#postgrad shenanigans

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Me literally two weeks ago: No, even if I do a PhD eventually, I am definitely not applying this year, I would be applying next year at the earliest.

Me after going to one (1) talk that overlapped vaguely with my research, taking six pages of notes, and spending two days coming up with ideas: ... *googling funding deadlines*

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BREAKING NEWS: local goblin submits thesis

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Articles I’ve suffered through, Celtic Studies / early medieval edition.

Honourable mention to “article from 1843 that you have to go to a specific basement to read” and “article by a lecturer/colleague that you secretly disagree with but can’t diss vocally without screwing yourself over”, which didn’t make the cut.

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Is it too extra to email an academic directly and be like, “I think you got Cú Chulainn’s age wrong in your latest article, but you said it with such confidence that you made me doubt myself, and now I need to know where you got fifteen from when it clearly says seventeen in the text,” or...

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Translation process updates from my Instagram story.

I know people do say that to learn a language effectively, you should do the thing that you want to do with it -- if your goal is to talk to people, you should seek conversation practice; if your goal is to read articles about early modern literature, learn by... reading articles about early modern literature. So this is probably very good for me, because conversation classes definitely weren't getting me any closer to understanding this kind of language. But oof, it's hard-going -- there are some technical terms and highly topic-specific language that sometimes Teanglann doesn't even have, so I'm having to guess some of those. There are also some idioms that I'm struggling with, but so far none of them have been super essential to understanding the gist of it.

The good news is that the second page took me maybe 40 minutes to (roughly) translate, which isn't too terrible. Obviously, it's twice as long as I'd have spent reading the entire thing in English, probably, but if I'm improving my language skills at the same time, I guess it could be worse...

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In which my supervisor’s comment on my latest essay draft sounds like a summary of my academic career.

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I’m tidying up the parts of my Oidheadh Con Culainn translation that my supervisor has corrected, and we’re stuck on how to translate the word ‘gille’. It’s often translated ‘servant’, but also ‘youth’; the word still technically exists (particularly in Scotland, I think), but it’s hard to come up with a workable translation that fits the context.

Yes, Láeg is a servant, being a charioteer, but there isn’t the status difference the word might imply, at least not in this text. He’s not younger than Cú Chulainn, so ‘youth’ isn’t right. I need something that conveys their closeness, as well as Láeg’s position/status, and I’m struggling.

So of course my brain gave me “assistant” and cracked me up, because, well, it’s theoretically not wrong, but it just reminds me of this post from @incorrect-ulster-cycle :

[original post]

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Supervisor: You need to read and cite this article here.

That article: is in Irish.

Me: 😭

Anyway, if you need me, I will be crying into a dictionary. Somehow none of the Irish classes I've taken as an adult learner have covered "translating articles about early modern literature"... it's all been things like "giving directions" and "describing people". You know, conversational stuff that I'll never need because I don't talk to anyone. But it's more or less impossible to learn academic Irish without learning conversational Irish first, and as an English Celticist who did not learn Irish at school... basically I just suffer.

The first page of this took me about 45 mins, but there's a gap in the middle and one paragraph of it is just summarising a story I know very well, so while the article is only 10 pages overall, we could be here... a while.