anyone feeling like having a good laugh...

[smashingjj]

...and checking my English?

For a school assignment, I had to translate an article that i wrote myself from Dutch to English. Which was harder to do than I thought. Just finished that, but i'm sure there are a few mistakes. Care to show me what's wrong / akward about this article?

Together with Maria Fazecas, a coworker / fellow Windesheim student, I wrote this article for cut.up.media, the company I started working for during my internship.

The wildly hip music festival Bazar Curieux could function as a foretaste on its bigger brother Motel Mozaique. Organizer Harry Hamelink and his people planned these two festivals in their entireness and both have a lineup that’s alike. Most of the performing artists and bands are generally in the twilight zone of underground and mainstream and some of them haven’t had their breakthrough yet, but still promise to be ‘the next big thing’. Saturday, September 16th, this festival took place in Rotterdam. Fun, cool, trendy, groovy! Of course, we couldn’t be absent.
We, two reporters with completely contradicting opinions, collided when forming a conclusion and decided to publish this review in that way. Like a collision. Because truth doesn’t exist anyway.

Joeri/Maria: Bazar Curieux had an ideal location this year. That, we agree about. Just for once, this festive night could take place in the industrial monument where normally club Now & Wow has its home. At Rotterdam South’s Meuse harbour. For many, a visit to the premises isn’t anything new, since there are big events on a weekly basis. But for those unfamiliar to the old grain warehouse, it’s a fascinating experience. Just imagine, a huge building that noticably breathes the air of past ages, full of quaint corridors, stairways, chambers, siloes, gauges, tubes and machines. Sets and scenery present only in the three main halls and the long, colourful corridor. The rest of the gloomy building was grey, dim, dark and as industrial as possible. Nice and raw. All night long, there were guided tours. For as a visitor, your entrance was limited to the ground floor, but when you’d attend a guided tour, you’d get a lot more to see.

Maria: I went along with a big group. Curious for more. Inquisitive for history, ghost stories, or a curious architectonic experience. ‘Be early’ was the motto of this festival, so there was time enough to learn something. Near a relatively small elevator, compared to the ten story building, the group was divided in two. On half was elevated to the tenth floor, the other descended into the humid, warm, dusty cellars. Fearing to make my simple black H&M outfit, and I wasn’t the only one, I walked very carefully through the narrow stairways and workrooms. Everywhere, literally everywhere was dust. A beige-grey layer contracted all of the interior. Nothing contrasted to it. Just us, the sweaty visitors. I felt like an intruder in an old grave. At one point I thought I was in a disaster area, where a horrible incident took place years before. Chernobyl experience. None of the above. The voice of our typically Rotterdam guide pulled me back into reality and told passionately about the diligent working class that kept working, gruffly yet harmoniously, in the presence of thousands of rats, until black lung ensued. Armed with airguns, they managed to temporarily relieve themselves of the hairy little shrimps. This didn’t stop until three years ago (!).

After having walked up and down stairways, when we could finally go upstairs, I knew: this is my first and maybe last highlight of the night. After an adventurous tour, there was the most beautiful view you could from an old grain warehouse. Rotterdam by night, in all its glory, from the roof. All of this happening while a few floors below, the unsuspecting crowd let itself go on booming bass sounds and bought glasses of beer for four euros.

Joeri: A guided tour was a little too much for me and besides, I came for the music. (And the chicks of course.) The first appearance started at half past eight and that was by the instrumental psychedelia act Shogun Kunitoki. Apparently this band use the Commodore 64 as its main instrument; I mainly heard organ sounds, combined with – yeah, combined with what exactly?
There must have been something else in that band too, but I remember merely the organs. Those were fun for a while, but because of a lack of diversity (in instrumentation as well as tempo and dynamics), the fun wore off quickly.
Mauro started half an hour later in the main hall, offering an escape from the monotonously ringing organ sounds. Alas, it didn’t get a lot better there.
Mauro Pawlovski, former member of Evil Superstars, currently member of the latest incarnation of dEUS, did it on stage completely on his own and he couldn’t succeed. The first song sounded somewhat bare, but still quite cute in its sampled simplicity.

When the next songs started, the music seemed to be pre-recorded and Mauro was on stage on his own, it began to be painfully boring. For a studio recording the music would have been just bare and boring, on stage there happened so little that the gig was really quite bad. The following bands, Stijn and Cansei de Ser Sexy, both had a lot more of enthusiasm and spirit to offer. They couldn’t manage to keep being entertaining for the complete appearance, you’d need several good songs in order to do that, but the crowd was pleasantly amused.

Maria: Cansei de Ser Sexy. Tired of being sexy, in Portuguese. CSS, in short. Five chicks and a boy from Sao Paolo, Brazil. MTV nearly overplayed it: Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death from Above, their first hit. Cartoonish music that somehow reminds one of the Jap rock girl band Buffalo Daughter, but sometimes also to The Go! Team. Catchy, tipsy, jap-poppy-synth, thickly speaking guitars and voices of bad girls.
It’s trackpants music. Trendy, yet uncool. Soft, yet rock. Play it loud while vacuum cleaning, gum chewing or playing with makeup, before going out, during your first glasses of cheap supermarket wine, or maybe… Maybe a tad chick flick, yeah. But still, I see as much male as female specimens having a great time with this sextet.

From a place very closely in front of the stage, I behold lead singer Lovefoxxx, wearing her hair in a tuft and a legging with the most impertinently absurd combination of colours ever, roaring unashamedly: “So tell me he-he-he-he-he-he-he-he-hey: Do you wanna drink some alcohol?” Yeah. I’m getting in the mood. Looking behind, I only see laughing faces and real live dance steps are being imitated. “Lick lick lick my art-tit. Suck suck suck my art-hole.” Not really sexy indeed, but very relieving. Just like Peaches, showing us that it’s not bad to appear on stage half naked without a summer brown l’Oreal tint and a Vogue figure and make obscene gestures. I’m not really one for neo-feminism, but for Peaches I make a small exception.

Music-wise, quite poor, so far. Luckily I knew that the Liars could make it all up. If tonight they were in the same shape as when I saw them, earlier this year, in the Vera venue, that is. The, somewhat inane, announcing chick, lost the attention of the crowd to the maniacal grin of front man Angus Andrew, who walked behind her. After that, all hell broke loose. Liars’ strangling noise and the accompanying show, put a clear stamp on the night. Part of the crowd seemed hypnotized, another part was chased away. That part seemed to be bigger as the gig progressed. The Liars seemingly didn’t care, unhampered they proceeded with their possessed act. Especially the extremely tall Andrew was the man of the show and made havoc like a madman. Whatever the hell it was, that they were doing on stage, Liars did it convincingly and the gig was by far the best of all the performances. After that, Peaches did the crowd and she attracted the biggest audience, with her completely knocked loose show. Musically I still don’t care for her, but she sure can give a good show. Still I have to draw the conclusion that, despite the setting and the atmosphere, the Liars took care of the only really worthwile performance on this year’s Bazar Curieux.

Besides Shogun Kunitoki, CSS and sex bitch Peaches with her cyclamen pink glam bikini, the rest of the acts hardly appealed to me. I had got to see Liars, because that seemed to be genius. But after two songs I had to choose between slightly changing my definition of genius and embracing the teddy boys showing off, or positively refusing and walking away. Relieved, I chose the latter and I went for some hall hopping.
But after midnight, when the line-up had finished, I didn’t really feel at easy anymore. Just slightly under half of the people left and what was left was a layer of androgynous hipster boys and fairy tale girls of Rietveld academy calibre (explanation: not bad per se, but sometimes annoyingly pretentious). I don’t know. There was an air that demanded you to be hip, because there would otherwise be a chance that you were disqualified by the ‘door birds’ near the entrance. That I thought was a shame. It’s good that Now&Wow has certain outfit demands, but along with that comes the danger, that a kind of arrogance arises amongst the ‘approved’ that tried their very best to look good. An arrogance that hasn’t got anything to do with music or art, but with showing off superficially. A festival like that will then transform into some catwalk with musical support. That’s not what Bazar Curieux wants to be. Although, ‘Bazar Curieux’, freely translated Curious Market. Okay, that’s apparently not just about the artists… Next year off to London for some vintage shopping and listening to Liars more?



thanks. think of a reward that you'd like.

[Travis Meeks]

no, sorry

[RopeyLopey]

How could you go for chicks when you went with Maria?

[Travis Meeks]

Sorry about being a jerk, I didn't realize you wrote this

[benjamin619]

I rewrote your first sentence:

Bazar Curieux, the wildly hip music festival, is like foreplay. Sex follows: festival Motel Mozaique.

[Rockin' Cherub]

Originally Posted by smashingjj

Care to show me what's wrong / akward about this article?

Fun, cool, trendy, groovy!

.

[jenn]

Originally Posted by benjamin619

I rewrote your first sentence:

Bazar Curieux, the wildly hip music festival, is like foreplay. Sex follows: festival Motel Mozaique.

[jenn]

I majored in art history, not journalism but I have nothing else to do today.

"The wildly hip music festival Bazar Curieux could function as a foretaste on its bigger brother Motel Mozaique."

I don't know if you meant it the way that it was proposed above (sex/foreplay) but it makes a lot more sense that way, and it's also an interesting lead-in. I would use that instead of this just because it makes it juicy.

Organizer Harry Hamelink and his people planned these two festivals in their entireness and both have a lineup that’s alike.

I would word this differently. Try, "These two festivals feature a similar line-up and were organized in their entirety by Harry Hamelink and his staff." I'm sure that other people could come up with a better way of wording it but it flows better this way.

"Most of the performing artists and bands are generally in the twilight zone of underground and mainstream and some of them haven’t had their breakthrough yet, but still promise to be ‘the next big thing’. "

I really like this part, except I'm a little confused as to what you mean by "twilight zone" can you clarify? Do you mean they're in-between the "underground" and the "mainstream"? If so, I would introduce some of your color imagery (from later on in the article) here and say something like, "Most of the performers fall into the massive grey-area between the mainstream and underground music scenes. This however, does not stop them from promising to be the "next best thing."

"Saturday, September 16th, this festival took place in Rotterdam. Fun, cool, trendy, groovy!"

This was very difficult for me to get through. It makes sense, and I understand what you're saying but it's choppy. Try, "This festival took place in Rotterdam on Saturday, September 16th." I'm not going to touch the "Fun, cool, trendy, groovy!" part with a ten-foot pole. I think you should put that into a real sentance format. Otherwise, it's a bunch of words mushed together that don't really do much to add flavor to the writing.

"Of course, we couldn’t be absent."

This is just a personal opinion. I wouldn't use "couldn't" I would use "wouldn't dare"

"We, two reporters with completely contradicting opinions, collided when forming a conclusion and decided to publish this review in that way. Like a collision. Because truth doesn’t exist anyway."

This is generally cool. Something about it makes it difficult to understand though. Hm, maybe try it like this "We decided to publish this review in a manner which reflects the collision of the completely contradicting opinions of its reporters."

Therefore, I would smooth it out and make the first paragraph read:

Bazar Curieux, the wildly hip music festival, is like foreplay. Sex follows: festival Motel Mozaique.

These two festivals feature a similar line-up and were organized in their entirety by Harry Hamelink and his staff. Most of the[list how many artists attended here] performers fall into the massive grey-area between the mainstream and underground music scenes. This however, does not stop them from promising to be the "next best thing."

[This festival we're talking about] took place in Rotterdam on Saturday, September 16th. We, of course, wouldn't dare be absent. This review is written to reflect the collision of the reporters completely contradicting opinions. Afterall, truth is in the eye of the beholder.

...but that's just me. I'm sure there are other people on here who would be way more qualified than me to help out.

[smashingjj]

Originally Posted by RopeyLopey

How could you go for chicks when you went with Maria?

actually, she wrote that part. just that one sentence, i mean.

chicks depress me man, fuck them.



but about the article: anyone? please??

[smashingjj]

oooh wow, didn't see that. thanks a lot jenn

[smashingjj]

Originally Posted by jenn

well i agree that some parts aren't really great when translated, but i tried to do it as literally as possible. i'm having a hard time figuring out how the translation should be - the thing is, it's hard to make a readable article out of it in English, without slightly changing what i said. I try to, but then you get these weird sentences that you pointed out.

i'm not really sure if it's the task to make a nicely readable article or one stays true to the original. but these fucking teachers never reply to my emails and when they do, they answer 1 of the 5 questions that i ask.

thanks again for putting time into this.

[jenn]

Yeah. I wish I could read Dutch because I totally understand what you're saying and it seems like an awesome article but translating any piece of writing into another language without totally altering what it originally said just gets rough around the edges. To be honest, I've never even noticed that English wasn't your first language on here so, I don't know why the hell your teachers are questioning you about it.

Sidenote: There is a Rotterdam, NY. I live about 15 minutes away from it.

[smashingjj]

Originally Posted by jenn

Yeah. I wish I could read Dutch because I totally understand what you're saying and it seems like an awesome article but translating any piece of writing into another language without totally altering what it originally said just gets rough around the edges. To be honest, I've never even noticed that English wasn't your first language on here so, I don't know why the hell your teachers are questioning you about it.

Sidenote: There is a Rotterdam, NY. I live about 15 minutes away from it.

haha thank you. well it's not that they're questioning it i'm sure, but there are just obligatory tests i still have to do. like... 22 of them, even though i'm fifth year student, while our study normally has 4 years...

about rotterdam, ny: you'd be surprised to know how many city names were directly taken over from the netherlands to the US, i keep discovering new ones every time i see or hear something from the US. but is it a rotterdam area in NY city or just in the state? city would be weird since NYC used to be....new Amsterdam.