Hunting down my son's killer (2012)

Hunting down my son's killer (2012)
matt.might.net

This text is one of the texts I have read most in my life. Not only is it emotionally powerful, but I have spent weeks translating it into German.

At one time, Matt asked on Twitter if there was a German willing to translate, there was a deadline and it was important (for reasons he explained later in personal mail).

I offered my help, with the caveat that I‘m neither a professional translator, nor with any medical background. I wasn’t totally inexperienced, I had translated a few things here and there, like Mark Nottingham’s Caching FAQ.

But boy, was that text a challenge! I always wanted to write that up, but by now my memory has faded a bit.

Quite stressful, but it felt more meaningful than translating a technical text.

And I learned a few things along the way. And I found several errors in the original. I had read the text many times before, but only when translating, you‘re really struggling with the text on a fine-granular enough level to actually notice things. Like when you look up the list of ultra-rare genetic conditions in some medical research database I‘ve never heard of before — because (a) Wikipedia doesn‘t have an article for all of them, (b) if so, the German-language Wikipedia doesn‘t, and (c) some of those have names in German that are not straight translations of the English name — you may notice that Matt listed one or two diseases twice, where the disease has two common names or aliases.

In the end I wonder if anyone really cared about the translation, because the original reason for wanting a German translation kind of fizzled out, in my perception.

Still, it was a cool time.

(That‘s a repost, because the Quora question has been deleted)