08/02/06

Translating

During the summer after my freshman year, while scouting for a source of income as translator I connected with the modern language department on the top floor of building 26. Department head William Locke introduced me to Prof Fritjof Raven who was running a translation service. Fritjof was really an academic linguist interested in Sanscrit, Gothic, Icelandic, Middle-High-German, Norman, Celtic ("the first twelve languages you learn are the hardest; then it gets easy!" He used to say ). He was very fond of creating multi-lingual puns, and happy to have found somebody capable of appreciating at least some of them..

He was very happy to have me take over the growing workload of scientific and engineering translations he had reluctantly been accepting, and I was equally happy at getting two cents a word. I developed a technique of dictating into a wire recorder (yes, the first magnetic recorders used piano wire) without taking my eyes off the original text, and then typing from the recording into a mechanical typewriter, and later into electric IBM machines. Sometimes I hired Barbara (Babs) Fleming the language department secretary to do the typing. I was earning a very handsome income in what little time the sophomore year left me, and soon I bought my first motorcycle. More of that later. The winter of 1947 was long remembered for its record amount of snow.

A US Navy Contract was our original task We translated virtually all German wartime technical documents for Naval Research, Naval Intelligence, and the David Taylor Model Basin, now the David Taylor Lab, and other Pentagon agencies I was familiar with from my military career. I was also familiar with the technical subject matter from my work with project paperclip. I was in an ideal position for the work. Subjects the Navy was interested in included sonar, magnetic amplifiers, fire fighting equipment in submarines and surface vessels , periscopes, cycloidal propellers, (Voigt-Schneider omnidirectional thrusters), marine Diesel engines, torpedo design, and rocketry.

Gradually all the patent law firms in Boston heard of our service, and our volume quickly grew beyond my own capacity.

As the fall term began I hired a group of students with specific language skills and technical expertise. I kept all their data on McBee Keysort file cards with two rows of peripheral holes, a database system developed for the military during the war. I edited most of their output because many of the foreign students didn’t know much technical English. Soon the MIT Translation Service was operating in earnest, and it lasted through my graduate years and continued with Elizabeth’s participation until we were too busy raising children and building Weir Meadow. .

Elizabeth had a knack of translating from languages she didn’t really know by her linguistic intuition and knowledge of Germanic or Romanesque philology. She was willing to tackle any job and enjoyed the challenge. Dutch is a blend of Germanic and Anglican roots, and all the Scandinavian languages share Norwegian roots, Elizabeth majored in Germanic philology at Harvard, and had a Norwegian boy friend during her junior year in Zurich. She did a lot of translating herself, with some technical help from me.

Much of our work was of little human interest, but we also met a number of memorable projects and clients worth telling about in these pages.

Polaroid Corporation was another early client. They heard of us through founder Edwin Land, who knew me through his friend and one of my faculty contacts Prof Jerrold Zacharias. Land was challenged by a Professor at the ETH, (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule) the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, who had invented and patented a method of instant photography very similar to Edwin Land’s. When lengthy arguments between attorneys got nowhere, Land invited the Swiss Professor, whose name I forget, wined and dined him, had him give lectures at MIT, and bought his friendly cooperation with grants to his university. The patent suit was settled out of court, and a series of Polaroid cameras flooded the world market. Land was a hyper-active hands-on entrepreneur and researcher interested in everything. He developed his own theory of color vision among other things. In 1978 he made headlines. He was held up by an armed robber as he was about to board his limousine in Cambridge. While his armed driver and bodyguard raised his hands, Land spun around and smashed his attache case into the robbers face. The robber dropped his pistol and ran. Land died in the eighties a very rich man, but Polaroid barely survived without him.

Warren Ogden was one of our more memorable clients. Referred to us by his father, a very successful patent attorney we had worked for. Warren wanted us to translate the historic literature on wood turning , mostly in German. Warren was a technician at Raytheon. But mostly he was a devoted historian of technology and president of the International Guild of Wood Turners. He was independently wealthy and had a complete machine shop in the basement of his house in Andover. He collected antique guns. At one time he wanted to make a half-scale version of a Japanese WW-2 pistol of which not a single specimen had been preserved. The task required that he build a spring-winding machine to make the square magazine-feed spring. With infinite patience he created the pistol and donated it to the Smithsonian.

The Holzapfel lathe was Ogden’s Holy Grail. It is a very elaborate lathe controlled by an array of cams, a marvel of ingenuity invented by a medieval wood turner in Nuremberg named Holzapfel. The Holzapfel lathe can turn spiral and fluted newel posts, elaborate wall plaques, rosettes and bowls, rifle stocks and curved axe and adze handles. Warren had collected and restored all of the existing Holtzapfel lathes he could lay his hands on, and was negotiating for all of the remaining ones he could trace. One of them was owned by the U.S. Treasury Department, and used to engrave the elaborate scrolls and squiggles on the printing plates that protect U.S. currency from counterfeiters to this day. The scroll pattern was changed annually to facilitate detection of counterfeit money. I suppose computers can generate the patterns now.

We translated the source literature for Warren’s history of wood turning, much of it from manuscripts he found in monasteries and museums all over Europe. Warren asked what he could do for us in exchange, since we never accepted money. After some reflection we decided to ask for a set of egg cups made of solid rosewood to match the rosewood dining table of Elizabeth’s great-grandfather. With his usual persistence, Warren managed to buy matching rosewood large enough, a very rare find. . Then he researched the design of egg cups matching the age of the table, made a turning template, and presented us proudly with a set of four egg cups perfectly matching each other and the rosewood table. They are slightly top-heavy and could probably use some lead in their bases (as was customary in chess figures). We admired and used them several times a day, since our chickens laid more eggs than we could eat for breakfast.

Eventually they were replaced by our more practical and more space-efficient stainless steel egg stands from Austria.

Speidel is a Bavarian farmer who invented the elastic stainless steel watch bracelet sold to this day under his name. It consists of a series of transverse channels, alternately open upward and downward, each of these links connected to its neighbors by flex-springs inside the channel. It is basically simple but very hard to describe. When an American company infringed Speidel’s patent his German attorney hired one of our client law firms to litigate. Eventually they brought him to Boston to testify, but he didn’t speak a word of English. They came to Weir Meadow for us to interpret. He was surprised to find such unspoiled woods in America, and was full of admiration for everything here. He walked all over Weir Meadow and told us all about his farm in Bavaria. Elizabeth just loved him for his enthusiasm and honest modesty. They ultimately won his lawsuit. I have worn a Speidel bracelet on my timex watch for over ten years.

The Saugus Iron Works, now a national monument, were restored in the early fifties with support from Bethlehem Steel and the Iron Institute. It was a unique collaboration of industry, government and academia. My English Professor E.N. Hartley of the MIT Department of Humanities, a historian of technology, was hired to research the European background. He soon found that virtually all of the history of iron-making, even in England, was in German. So he hired me to abstract and translate from microfilms he had collected. He ultimately published a book: "Ironworks on the Saugus" by E. N. Hartley, 1957, University of Oklahoma Press, Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 57-5956. He acknowledges everybody’s help but mine. The book is for sale at the Saugus Ironworks, an illustrated paperback.

It was fascinating to read how the forests of England, Scotland and Ireland were denuded by the Navy for ship lumber and masts, and by the Army for charcoal to make iron for swords, spears, hallebards, muskets and canon. Eventually the illegitimate son of a Lord Dudley invented coke, a means to use coal instead of charcoal for iron making. But he refused to give his invention to some alchemists who had already obtained "patents of the King" by filing fake recipes on how to make iron from coal. Dudley built his own coking furnace and iron foundry and kept the process secret. But he burnt down his foundry before they dragged him off to prison as a royalist during the Cromwell revolution. As a result, England lost its iron industry for two decades, and the American iron industry was created by German iron-makers, imported by John Winthrop the Younger, founder of the "Undertakers" who built the iron works on the Saugus (German for pig iron, literally sow iron; no male chauvinists those Germans) . I am curious why Prof Hartley didn’t include the story of Dudley in his book.

United shoe machinery was a prolific client. They invented high-tech shoe machinery and leased it to the entire shoe industry world-wide. They never sold their machines, and depended heavily on their patent position in every country to hold competition at bay. Thus we were often called upon to translate back into English the translations of their patents made by their foreign attorneys. This led to some amusing translations, particularly since neither we nor any of our translators were familiar with the terminology of the shoemaker’s trade, which sometimes dates back to medieval times. One term Elizabeth and I chuckled about for years was: " heel and tow crimping machines", the German name for what we simply call "Lasting machines". These are the machines used to stretch the body of a shoe over a wood or steel last.

I G Farben notorious employers of slave labor from concentration camps, were busy selling their detergent technology to US manufacturers, like Lever Brothers with headquarters on Memorial Drive. This resulted in a flood of translations from the patent firms hired by Lever to scrutinize IG’s patents. We learned that bubbles are good for nothing but impressing housewives. Industrial detergents are made to minimize bubble formation because bubbles just clog washing machines and break the prime of pumps.

Microclimatology was the subject of a series of German patents referred to the Agriculture Department by the Navy. All of the papers were written by a German research couple named Duell. I remember this because I was struck by the enormous difference that can exist between the two sides of a house, or a hill, or even a boulder. The Duells called attention to how agricultural output can be affected by even modest levels of human intervention. A case for successful "control of nature". John MacPhee should read the Duell papers.

Walter Gropius was certainly our most illustrious client. He had just founded his firm "Architects Collaborative" at Harvard Square. The prefabricated "core house" was his last inspiration, and he had retired to his home in Lincoln in the early fifties, to write an English version of his books on the "Bauhaus" movement. He hired Elizabeth and me to translate some of his German essays, both published and unpublished. We visited him on our motorcycle several times, and had coffee in his living room as he browsed through our translations, reminiscing about his early career in Germany, alternating between German and English. He proudly showed us his external spiral staircase, more correctly helical staircase, which he had just added to his house. He ranted against the fashion for small individual lots and strongly advocated cluster zoning to preserve natural environment. "Five Fields" in Lexington was the first cluster development, and I believe it was done by Architects Collaborative. Our friends the Stoneys bought a house there. A development in Helsinki called Tapiola became almost a monument to the Bauhaus philosophy.

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