Posted by: patenttranslator | January 25, 2026

Some People Hate It When You Prove to Them that There Is Always a Choice

We regret more things we didn’t do than the things we did.

(Attributed to Mark Twain)

When the formerly impenetrable borders of the former communist world opened up to me and I was unexpectedly able to return after nine years to my old home country, it was interesting to observe the reactions of some people to this defector who unexpectedly appeared again on their radar screen.

At first, during my first visits in the nineties, I heard comments like “Well, it took a lot of courage to do what you did.” I myself am surprised at how in the world did I find the courage and eventually figured out how to get across what Winston Churchill called in 1946 “the Iron Curtain that has descended across the Continent”. This Iron Curtain held Europe in its hated embrace for more than half a century. But I eventually figured out how to walk right through it. Somebody up there must have wanted me to give it a try and see if I would regret it later. Well, in my defense, I can say that I was still quite young (28), naïve and impressionable.

When I met a few former work-colleagues a few years later, still as a tourist who was living in America, I got a different reactions from different people. I felt that some were a little uncomfortable in my presence. I thought it was probably because I might have caused problems for them at the workplace, and I let it go at that.

But now I think it might have been more than that. Several people told me how they were going to “run away” too as illegal immigration was called in Czech during the communist times, but something somehow spoiled their plans. They were wondering what would have happened to them had they succeeded.

A former girlfriend of mine, the one I was unsuccessfully trying to talk into running away with me when it was just about impossible obtain permission to even just visit a western country, told me that in the meantime she got to see all the places she ever wanted to see anyway … after the regime fell.

I tried to explain to her that this is not the same thing as living in another country for a long time and thus in fact becoming one of the locals who lives with what is going on in the country, cares about it and speaks the same language and mostly thinks in the same language as the locals. I told her that this was the experience that I was craving: I wanted to know what it would feel like to live as a German in Germany, as a Japanese in Japan, and as an American in America, and I did experience just that. I was trying to find out whether it is possible and what it would feel like to cram several lives into my short human life. I think I did find out what it is like, but I don’t know if she understood what I was trying to tell her. Probably not.

I used to have a friend in Prague when I was studying at the Charles university as a teenager. I really liked him and I think he liked me too. We used to get together to drink a few beers every now and then with a few other buddies in pubs near the university campus around Staroměstské náměstí (The Old Town Square.) This was back in early seventies.

So just before I moved back to Czechia towards the end of 2018, I looked him up on the internet to discover that he was now a professor of Latin at the Charles University in Prague. I wasn’t surprised, he totally loved Latin and everything about antiquity … as did I, in high school. We were together in Latin classes for the first two years at the university, but then I decided that I did not want to spend my life learning and teaching a dead language just to keep translating the same texts of Cicero and Homer over and over again with a class of diligent students. That was why I instead graduated with Japanese as my major and English as my minor and eventually became a fairly successful translator of Japanese and German patents to English in America. And fairly successful in America usually meant and hopefully still does mean fairly prosperous.

I sent him an email to the university and I was really looking forward to meeting him to reminisce about the old times and wonder about how and why our lives followed such different paths. After all, I have not seen him since 1973! That’s 45 freaking years!

It took him about 10 days, if I remember correctly, to email me back. He explained very briefly that he forgot about my email and that was why it took him so long to get back to me. But I did not believe him. I think that he let me wait such a long time to put me in my place. After all, he was now a professor, and I … wasn’t!

So I told myself, f**k you, professor, and never replied to him. To put him in his place, I think. Maybe I am wrong, but I did get the feeling that some of my former friends from decades ago might have preferred had I become an epic failure in America.

Maybe we prefer to think that the journeys of our lives are somehow predetermined, written in the stars like the immutable journeys of celestial bodies, and we get offended if somebody, somehow proves  to us that we did not live our lives the way we decided to live them because it was the best way, our destiny that must have been written in the stars, because that could then mean that everything was a just a mere coincidence, and our decisions were incidental and nonessential.

And some of us are able to contemplate this possibility without getting too much bothered by it, but some of us get deeply offended when somebody proves to us that, actually, another choice has always been a very real option.

1 Comment

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | January 20, 2026

My Rather Personal Experience with Fluctuating Currencies

When you live permanently (if anything can be called permanent) in a foreign country as an American, you really care about the exchange rates of the greenback, almost as much as if you were a rich person holding stock in dollars whose wealth (or perceived wealth) fluctuates wildly depending on the current currency exchange rate.

When you live in another country on a fixed income drawn from your pension, currency fluctuations can be very dangerous to your financial health, so to speak, because they are difficult to estimate, yet inevitable.

I am not rich, but my Social Security old age pension is paid in US dollars to a US bank and I also keep what I am thinking of as my financial safety cushion in two saving accounts in US banks. I always keep two of everything, in case something goes wrong with one of these thing, which sometime does.

My very personal experience with the fluctuating currency started for me in 1985 when I arrived to Japan where I lived and worked for a year for a small Japanese import-export company. I remember that when I left San Francisco, the exchange rate was about 300 yen to a dollar, but when I was leaving Japan in 1986, it was already 250 yen to a dollar.

This period was referred in Japan as “endaka” (円高 strong yen), while the present period is called “enyasu” (円安 weak yen). My ex-wife, who now lives in Japan and also draws a retirement pension based on my work record of 37 working years in USA, (thanks to president Roosevelt’s New Deal in 1935), is fortunate that Japan is now in the weak yen period, because this means that her pension from US is about twice as much as the same amount would have been in 1985 – 86 when we both lived in Japan, because the current yen to dollar exchange rate is 1 : 158, instead of 1 : 300 as was the case more than 40 years ago. Good for her!

I don’t care much now about the yen-dollar exchange rate, but the Czech crown-US dollar is kind of really crucial to me as I have been living in Czech Republic since the end of 2018 as an American retiree whose income is mostly received in dollars that are exchanged for crowns (in addition to a small Czech pension in crowns based on 10 years of my work record in Czechoslovakia prior to emigrating). I also worked and paid relevant taxes in Germany and Japan, but only for about year in each country, which is not enough to entitle me to any pension from those countries.

I remember that when I was finally able to visit Czechoslovakia in 1990 as a Czech-speaking American tourist, the exchange rate was 40 crowns to 1 dollar. Wow, it was 40 to 1, and the prices were much, much cheaper than today! As of today, the exchange rate is 20.78 crowns to 1 dollar, or about half as much as 36 years ago, and everything is priced in crowns at more than twice as much as back then.

On the other hand, things are still much cheaper here than in the states: for instance the rent for my spacious 1-bedroom apartment, about 100 square meter or a little over 1,000 square feet, plenty for one senior person, is 16,000 crowns, or between 750 to 775 us dollars at the current exchange rate, which is not that much for me.

So after the exchange of Czech crowns to dollars was for a short time 40 to 1 in the early nineties of the last century, I see that when I arrived to Czechia to spend my retirement years here in October 2018, the exchange rate was 22.43. So my rent for my present apartment in the town center, next to a park and close to restaurants, cafes and a couple of supermarkets, very convenient for an older person, would have been 713 dollars back then. The rate fluctuated at about the rate of 22 to 14, and even 25 for quite some time during the last 8 years that I have been living in this country, which means that the dollar to crown exchange rate is now at about the lowest level ever.

The thing about the exchange rate is, as I noticed, is that it either goes in one direction for a long time, and then for some reason the direction is reversed and it goes again in the opposite direction for some time. It is difficult to estimate how much the exchange rate will be in the near future, let alone years from now. All I can tell is that the rate is very closely tied to the Euro exchange rate. As soon as the Euro goes up and down, so does the crown. It looks like Czech Republic is not going to switch to Euro as any time soon as it was originally supposed to. Neither will other countries, like Denmark or Sweden. Most people here want to keep the local currency, which makes a lot of sense to me.

Had I stayed in the United States, I would not have to worry about currency fluctuations. So the obvious question is, did I do the right thing by moving back to Czech Republic for my retirement?

I think so. Moving back here after so many years was in a way like immigrating again to a new country, and something in me enjoys the challenge of starting again from scratch in a new country. I did it several times already: first by moving to Germany, then to US, then to Japan, then to US, and finally back to Europe again. That is four times already.

Had I stayed in America, I would not have to deal with the uncertainty of fluctuating exchange rates. But there are other things to consider. Although the inflation rate is quite high here, it seems to be even a lot higher in US, as is the general cost of living. I would need to have a car in America, which I don’t need here. To me it is liberating not to have to worry about a car. Medical care, very important for you when you are in your seventies, is much more expensive in US, and in my opinion it is also better here. You just have to figure out the best way to use it, which takes some time.

But possibly the most important aspect of emigrating to another country for me is that I am a maniac about learning new languages and learning about other cultures. This is something that I realized about me already when I was a child, and I see no reason not to continue this interesting passion of mine in my seventies and beyond. In almost four decades, the country changed so much that I did not really return to the country where I was born. You can never return to something that existed once.

Czechia still is in many respects a new country to me. Even the name of the country changed in the meantime, and so did its language in many, almost imperceptible but very interesting ways.

And I really enjoy again the opportunity to be relearning everything there is to know about this country, both old and new to me.

Leave a Comment

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | January 12, 2026

Our Connection to Film Stars Used to Be the Safest Way to Experience Instant Happiness

I can think of a number of things that will result in instant happiness.  Depending on the person of course, it can be booze or drugs, a pet, a new love affair. Booze or drugs can have serious consequences, especially if there is too much of that, pets need a lot of care and they require a lot of our time, as do lovers, but falling for a film star does not really have any negative consequences that I am aware of.

Yesterday, when I could not find an interesting movie either on Netflix or on Amazon, I turned on a channel showing old Czech films and I found there an old, black-and-white Czech comedy from 1937. It was amazing to me how the face of my friend who was sitting next to me on the sofa, immediately brightened and lit up with happy memories as soon as she recognized the actors in that old movie. She was suddenly smiling and started to happily announce their names. She remembered the names of four of them, as did I, and she could not remember only the name of the fifth one. Neither could I, although I remembered him well too. Our personal recognition of the actors from almost a century ago and our remembered connection to the old Czech actors brought on a moment of shared instant happiness in both of us.

Of course, other very important elements for whether and how much we fall for a movie include whether the plot is believable, how well it is put together and also how skillfully the dialogues are written. Some dialogues or monologues are so interesting and clever that we can sometime remember them word for word even many years later when a situation in our life reminds us of the message of the film.

But I am now talking about the times, long, long time ago when many, or even most movies used to have a message. I dare to say that many or even most films today don’t really have much of a message and instead feed us car chasing and shooting scenes. Oh, they also throw in some cheap sex too if we are lucky, which is nothing new. Or if they do have a message, it is as weak as a very watery, cheap beer that contains mostly fructose instead of high-quality hops typical for full-bodied biers that are pleasure to slurp once in a while watching the story on the screen.

But our personal connection to the star(s) of a movie is in my opinion still the most important element. That is why they get paid the big bucks, right? And most of the time, we don’t even envy them too much the big bucks because we know that we would not be able to pull off what they show us so skillfully on the screen. Acting looks easy, deceptively so easy that anyone could do it. But I think that the opposite is true.

It takes a very special person who has a very special talent to bring us a fascinating role in a film that we will remember for many years. Although, on the other hand, it is probably also true that many or even most actors and actresses are fame and money whores who will do anything for money. For example, for a few million bucks, a famous actress will support a political candidate’s pre-election campaign, not realizing that we will never look at her the same way as when we used to fall in love with her because of her film roles. Or knowing that full well but not really giving a damn, right? Money doesn’t stink as the Roman emperor Vespasian put it quite a few centuries before film was invented.

How much are our beloved film stars paid to support a political campaign? Beaucoup, beaucoup bucks! For instance, Vice President Kamala Harris’ failed presidential campaign spent at least $20 million on celebrity appearances during her failed presidential bid, federal election records revealed. And for what was all of this money spent? Literally for nothing.

The Federal Commission records show that Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions was paid $1 million on Oct. 15, weeks after Ms. Winfrey hosted a star-studded town hall featuring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. Oprah says that she personally wasn’t paid any money for her work on dear Kamala’s campaign, but do you believe her? I don’t. The truth is that our stars experience instant happiness when they make a million or two for a few minutes work. The overpriced appearances of our darlings didn’t help much Kamala, but that is mostly because she is the opposite of a charismatic star that we could identify with. All was lost already once the audience heard her dumb, long-winded monologue topped with her cackling laughter! And her team of high-paid political consultants did not understand even that, that is how dumb these people are!

It was much easier to make a human connection to a film hero or heroine in the old, analog world because the people we admired on the screen were not as easily manipulatable as they are in our present, digital world. How do we even know whether we are seeing a real person or an AI image designed to manipulate us? Truth is, in the new world we cannot trust anything because even the film scripts are now designed to manipulate us to believe another hidden element of a crazy globalist ideology designed to enslave us in order to wring out more money from us, their obedient slaves. The Queen of England is black, and men on the screen are kissing men instead of women. Unless at least one role in the movie is written for a highly positive gay character, the film will not receive financing. The goal here is to reeducate the viewers, to make them understand that black is white, man is woman, and cold is hot.

The new world order’s propaganda, so clearly visible in what film studios have been producing in the last decades, is transparent and much less believable to me than the propaganda I experienced for the first 28 years of my life when I was living in a communist country.

Unlike when I am watching a for example a black-and-white movie from 1937, it is now for me really difficult to achieve instant happiness by watching a recent movie.

Leave a Comment

Posted in The Translation Business

Posted by: patenttranslator | January 8, 2026

Saru Mo Ki Kara Ochiru (さるも木から落ちる)

Even Monkeys Fall from Trees

This is a lovely, colorful Japanese proverb that I learned decades ago. A plain substitute in English would be “Everybody makes mistakes”, while the nearest equivalent in Czech it would be probably “I mistr tesař se někdy utne” (“Even a master carpenter sometime cuts himself”). A Latin equivalent might be “Errare humanum est” (To err is human, which sounds a bit pompous, because everything sounds pompous in Latin). And so on, and so forth … Personally, I like the Japanese proverb the best.

I have fallen from many trees, and cut myself deeply many times, like most error prone humans. But after falling, I just get up, shake off the dust and continue on my merry way, just like a courageous monkey would do.

The worst mistake I ever made was probably marrying my ex-wife … and then staying married to her for 34 years. We were not exactly compatible. Not compatible at all, I would say. But at the same time, despite the turbulent decades together in spite of the incompatibility of the Japanese and Slavic spirit, it was probably also the best mistake I ever made. Lets face, even if all women are not the same, the difference between them is not really that big. The good thing about this monkey’s fall from a high hanging branch on his butt was that the two children we had together were no mistake. They turned out just fine, and how do I know what what kind of progeny would there be had I married somebody else?

Many people will probably identify with my experience of what the marriage result is in the end about. More than half of the marriages in most countries, or at least in most Western countries today end up in divorce, and many of the couples who do not divorce stay married for very pragmatic reasons having to do mostly with finances rather than with “everlasting love”. I’m probably not compatible with any woman anyway, so why not assume that the way things happened was ultimately for the best?

It might have been worse, is all I’m saying. I might have stayed married for the rest of my life, living the life of quiet desperation for the rest of my days like so many men who stay “happily married” for many years. Women probably too. I do not feel qualified to speak for women on this or any other subject since I never understand what is going through their heads even after so many years of trying to figure it out.

I know one thing: What at first appears as a major failure often turns out to be a much better outcome. But we will usually realize what has really happened when the context is clear to us after some time has passed, once we fall from a broken branch, get up, shake off the dust and continue living our life.

1 Comment

Posted in The Translation Business

Posted by: patenttranslator | January 2, 2026

My New Year’s in Different Countries and Different Times

I remember that on New Year’s Day on January 1, 1981, I woke up with a horrible headache due to the fact that the night before I drank too much liquor. I need to walk it off, I thought, so I walked to a tram stop, took the tram to the Prague’s Castle and walked down from there, across Charles Bridge to return back home by tram again. Charles Bridge was almost empty, except for a few people who got the same idea as I did, to walk off New Year’s booze. Back then, foreign tourists were kind of rare in Prague. By the time I got back home my head indeed stopped hurting as I was breathing in cold January air and the trip took about an hour. I remember that the whole time I couldn’t stop thinking, it is so damn beautiful here, I will probably be heart-broken for the rest of my life if my plan works because I can never come back. But I simply have to get out of here or I’ll go crazy.

My plan did work. On January 1, 1982 I was drinking some Schanps to celebrate my escape with a few fellow new Czech emigrés in Bavaria, more heart-broken than happy that the plan worked. I did not want to stay in Germany. It is a beautiful country too, but I knew that I do not belong there. Germans only like Slavs who did not mind becoming Germans, and I did mind. I simply could not imagine living there for the rest of my life with my Slavic soul intact.

On January 1, 1983, I took bus number 38 also called the Geary bus from downtown San Francisco to the end of the line, the Cliff House overlooking Land’s End and Pacific Ocean. I was amazed how far I made it. I will probably stay here for the rest of my life, I was thinking to myself. Quite a few people told me during my first year in San Francisco, upon hearing the melodramatic story of my life so far, “Welcome to America”. Interesting, I thought. Nobody told me “Wilkommen nach Deutschland” during my 14 months in Germany.

Just after midnight on January 1, 1986, I walked from the house of my in-laws just a few minutes to Shakuji Koen park in suburban Tokyo. I remember thinking to myself, well, I would not do such a foolish thing at night in a park in America. That would be asking for trouble, probably even in Golden Gate Park. But life in Japan was not for me either. Within a year, I got with my fairly new wife (of two years) back on the plane to Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was pretty sure that this time, I was going to stay in this country. It was big enough for me and it did not ask me to renounce my Slavic soul and replace it with some local flavor. All it asked from me was to speak English and pay my taxes. So, I was doing that without protesting or feeling shortchanged too much for the next 35 years or so.

Unlike on several occasions during the last 37 years, I don’t remember what was it that I was doing on January 1, 2019. But I was back in Bohemia, less than a hundred miles south of Prague where I started my journey around the world all those years ago, and I am still there on January 1, 2026.

As I am still in the same spot. I guess my years of wandering the earth have come to an end.

I have come a full circle and I am pretty sure that I am not going to move anymore, at least not to a different country or a different continent. Not that I wouldn’t like to do that, I would, but I am too old at this point.

I wouldn’t mind trying this time what it would be like to live for instance in South America. I started to learn Spanish a long time ago in San Francisco and it would be so much fun getting to know better another beautiful language in another beautiful country.

But in my seventies, I now have limitations that I did not have during the past decades. I have lost what could be called “the youth privilege” – the certainty that my healthy body will continue performing as flawlessly is it always has. I mourn it a little bit, the way (formerly) very beautiful women probably mourn the loss of what is called “the pretty privilege” when they turn 40 or 50. I now need a health insurance that works without costing me an arm and a leg, and I do have that here. Would I still have that in America? I don’t know, but I kind of doubt it.

The world has changed so much since I set out on my journey around the world 45 years ago, and it is changing again, only much faster now. It is impossible to tell how much it will change during the next four or six months, but the chances are it will be quite different again.

There was no internet in 1981, let alone Youtube or Netflix. I used to live back than in what was called “Eastern Europe”. Now I live in what it is still “Eastern Europe”, although it is still right in the middle of Europe. Although most Americans probably still think that Central Europe is in Switzerland, which would mean that there is only a pretty tiny Central Europe, almost nonexistent only some two hundred years after it used to stretch from what is now Poland to what is now Croatia.

But who cares. East is West and West is East now that I live in what is still called European Union, although it has basically nothing in common with the original idea of European Union, which will probably break up anyway in a few years if not sooner. Good riddance, as far as I am concerned.

It is incredible to me that after 16 years, my silly blog is still on the internet. There are not as many subscribers as there used to be when I was writing about translation. This is because, as everybody knows, translation will be no longer be done by humans, it will be done only by AI to save money, and AI is better than humans anyway, everybody knows that too.

Maybe our teeth will still be pulled out from our aching gums by human dentists even after a few years, unless somebody figures out how to use AI and get rid of dentists too to save money.

You can’t stop progress.

Happy New Year 2026!

3 Comments

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | December 21, 2025

Bara Ni Wa Toge Ga Aru (Roses Have Thorns)

Warning: this silly post will be about what I think about marriage. You may want to skip this post unless you are actually interested in the subject.

I was married for 34 years, or most of my adult life. And because it has been more than 8 years since my divorce, I will try to briefly and probably unwisely opine on what was or is to me the actual difference between the blessed and highly desired married lifestyle, and the perhaps even more desired lifestyle of a single man.

Well, it has to be said that it will be very difficult for me to make a comparison like this: It is truly comparing apples to oranges because when I got married, I was quite young: I reached this particular achievement of adulthood at the San Francisco City Hall when I was 32, still full of naïve expectation of a life filled with mutual love and appreciation … and now I am 73. Different kind of life now, different expectations.

I did not consider getting married a big deal. Since I thought it was nothing much more than signing a piece of official paper, I forgot to buy the rings. Well, I still think that my wife to be should have thought of that herself and remind me of that particular funny custom, since I tend to be a bit absent minded. But she was in too much hurry to do the deed ASAP, mostly because her US visa had expired, and she had either to do something about it, or return to Japan. For her it was either get married this boring guy, or go back to her boring life in Japan. So, she married me. I should have given more consideration to this interesting tidbit. But of course, I didn’t. I was too overjoyed that this beautiful woman wanted me by her side. I thought I was the one who won this big contest, but now I realize it was probably San Francisco that won, not the boring guy.

Forgetting the ring must have been a relatively common occurrence at the City Hall because when I sheepishly admitted my major faux pas, the practiced Citty Hall officiant reached into his pocket and kindly lent two temporary rings for this memorable occasion to the happy, albeit somewhat ill-prepared couple.

We celebrated the occasion with a festive dinner to which we invited a few friends, more like work acquaintances, at a Japanese restaurant on Union Street. I don’t remember what was on the menu, probably shabu-shabu, suki-yaki, some sushi and the like, but I do remember that the French cognac was simply supreme! No Wiener schnitzel and potato salad on the menu, that would have been too exotic for that place.

The first few months, even years, it felt wonderful being married. She moved into our 1 bedroom apartment on Nob Hill and we walked all over the historical parts of San Francisco, of which there are many: the Hill Telegraph, the Waterfront, we took a bus to places like Park Presidio, Land’s End, the Golden Gate Bridge and walked across it to Sausalito in Marin County. I was proud to be a Czech who was becoming a suave San Franciscan after three years in the city, and so was she. I remember how once we met two Japanese tourists on Nob Hill who looked lost. So she asked them in Japanese, “Mayoimashitaka? (Are you lost?) and showed them which way to go.

We both felt so worldly, sophisticated. Most months I would have free tickets to classical music concerts, theater plays, even Chinese acrobat performances as a perk of my job. Once she felt asleep on my shoulder at an opera performance. I let her sleep as she continued gently snoring … I was Janacek’s “Jeji Pastorkyna” performed in Czech with American accents. Neither of us understood a single word, and the libretto looked pretty dumb too … it must have been the most boring thing I ever saw.

***********************************

It was only after we came back from Tokyo, our two children were born and we moved out 1 hour north to the Wine Country that she really started showing her claws. And it’s not like I wasn’t warned: She told me one day early on “Bara ni wa toge ga aru” (the rose has thorns), but I was not paying much attention. I thought she was just trying to teach me another cute Japanese proverb, but I think that she was already determined to teach me a lesson. This flower sure had plenty of big thorns. But they all do, don’t they?

Women are smart, their claws come out slowly over time, when it is generally too late for men to change anything … because of the children, of course, the famous last words.

I have been divorced, or single again as I prefer to think about it, for almost 8 years, which is a pretty long time. I am so glad that I finally did find the courage to cut the Gordian knot, even though it was really late in life for me after such a long marriage. I should have done it sooner, at least right after the kids were out of the house, but I was too scared of the complications, especial financial ones. My wife did not have a job for more than 30 years and I figured that I would be stuck with paying for her expenses anyway, even after we were divorced.

I figured it out in the end by letting her keep most of the money after we sold our house. Once she saw that I would let her keep the money, she was ready to sign the divorce papers and return to Japan. It was not complicated at all. All she really cared about was money, I did not really need the equity from the house, and she also got enough to live on from my pension, which I did not have to pay myself, thanks to the Social Security System created by president Roosevelt in the thirties, plus she also probably has a small Japanese pension. Good for her.

I think Albert Einstein got it wrong when he (allegedly) said that the most powerful force in Universe is compound interest. I think that he got it right when he said (also allegedly) that the most powerful force in Universe is Inertia.

I think inertia is the real reason why it took me 34 years to finally get divorced. On the other hand, this inertia was good for something too. Our two children got to grow up in an almost normal house, at least normal to the extent that they had both a mother and a father who did not fight much with each other. I thought that was the most important thing, and still do.

Becoming single again after a long time of a f-up marriage does take some getting used to. It’s like trying to walk normally after limping for more than three decades. It is so liberating, exciting and scary at the same time. But it is infinitely preferable to living next to somebody who does not even like you and who you don’t like either, let alone love anymore.

1 Comment

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | December 15, 2025

How (Not) to Reinvent Yourself in Your “Golden Years”

Most of us … really all of us go through different periods in our lives when we need to radically change what we are doing, because otherwise we might lose something important: health, status, the confidence in ourself, or something equally important. This transformation is sometimes called reinventing ourselves.

I remember a neighbor in Virginia who lived across the street from my house. He was about 15 years older than me back then when I was in my early sixties. He was retired, lived in a nice house, but I remember that my wife told me that he was just renting a room there his from relatives. Obviously, wives always know everything about their neighbors, unlike their clueless husbands. We would just say hi to each other every now and then, but I never really got to talk to him.

I would only see him when he was going to his car with his golf clubs to go play golf or when he was coming back from his golf. There were several golf courses nearby and playing golf was clearly his passion. As far as I knew, that was all he was doing for many hours every day.

Then one day, I saw that there were an ambulance and a fire truck parked across the street from my house at the curb of the house where this neighbor lived and then I saw as a stretcher carrying the guy emerged from the house to take him to a hospital.

Apparently, he suffered a heart attack as I found out later. When I asked him jokingly about a week or so later why did they need to come for him with both an ambulance and a fire truck, he told me he did not know, but he seemed pleased that the world would care about him so much that this world would need to dispatch both expensive vehicles with expensive crews to save his life in this manner. He must have had a very good insurance, but maybe he did not have children, or was not on talking terms with them since I never saw them.

So I guess this is one way how to reinvent yourself when you are retired … You don’t bother with any major reinventing or transformation of yourself, you are happy just doing what you like for the remaining years or months: you play golf, and play golf, and play golf. And then one day, the ambulance comes to pick you up, and you either make it … or you don’t.

This idealized image of what retirement can look like may certainly work very well for some people, probably many people. And it would not be a bad way to go either, but I have a feeling that if you fall for this kind of dolce far niente in retirement, American style, it may actually shorten your life. Because, is life without real challenges, other than a challenging golf course, still a real life?

I don’t think that one necessarily needs a grand purpose after retiring. Some people perhaps do need that, but I am not one of them. But I do need a little more than happily puttering around daily in a garden or on a golf course, especially since neither of these two things were ever my thing to begin with.

There are old challenges that I could recreate for myself to feel important and make more money. I could resurrect my old website, which has a domain prepaid for several more years, although I don’t use it anymore for anything. It might still work to find me new clients for translation of patents with a suitable redesign of the old, ramshackle site that is now 25 years old even now in a very different business environment with AI.

But I don’t want to do that. It would be too much work and I had enough of the crazy rat race when I had to feed a wife and two kids, pay for the mortgage and also pay for several cars in America, four at one point when my kids turned 16. But at this point I am responsible for only one person: my retired self. Plus, I don’t really need more money now.

So I will be doing other things now, things that give me personal satisfaction and fulfillment and that will keep me busy for a while, hopefully until I kick the bucket as a wonderful English idiom puts it.

I do enjoy teaching languages, partly because I did learn something in this field over the last five decades on three different continents, partly because I enjoy contact with people who genuinely want to learn the languages I teach, and also because that is what I was originally trained in: I was supposed to become a teacher of Japanese and English and although most of my life I was doing something else, mainly translating patents, the main reason why I was doing it was that there was a big need for this kind of work for something like 30 years, and of course, also because it paid much better than teaching.

So now in my old age (if there is such a thing), I am getting back to my original mission. For that purpose I created (through a talented website designer) a new website for teaching Japanese, English and Czech at www.uciteljaponstiny.cz (which means Japanese teacher in Czech). Wish me luck with?

I am also putting together with a friend of mine a new Facebook group called Whatsup-Expats for expats here in Ceske Budejovice, Southern Bohemia and elsewhere. I just want to meet once in a while with people who may have gone through similar life experience to mine over a cup of coffee, or a glass of beer or wine.

A grand design for the rest of my life is not required.

But puttering around on a golf course for many hours every day until an ambulance comes to take me to a hospital from which I may or may not return would seem like a waste of the rest of the life and energy that I still have left in me.

6 Comments

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | December 2, 2025

The New Refugees Don’t Call Themselves Refugees

The world has always been full of refugees, all kinds of refugees.

I was a refugee once, 44 years ago, which is a pretty long time ago. Or is it? It is a long time in the life of one person, but then again, in the grand scheme of things, which is usually not that grand anyway, it seems more like a blink of an eye.

Back when I was young, people were escaping a totalitarian regime and they were usually moving from East to West. As did I …. first from Czechoslovakia to Germany, and then then from Germany to California and Virginia where I eventually settled down for the next 37 years.

But among the many refugees wondering the Earth nowadays, there is also a new kind of refugee that is escaping something to move somewhere else. These people are not calling themselves refugees, they mostly prefer calling themselves expats and they are usually moving from the West to the East

Some of them are escaping new totalitarian regimes that are being created, little by little with the salami slicing method in many Western countries, including Germany and California, but also for instance in Canada and other countries.

One of them is a pretty, young Canadian woman, who, if I remember her story correctly, was born in Canada to a Russian-Ukrainian mother and a Canadian father. I used to follow her travel vlogs when she was documenting her journeys in Russia and Russian speaking countries of the former Soviet Union. The videos that she was making a few years were very insightful because, while she saw the world around her from a Western perspective, she also saw the Eastern perspective because thanks to her mother, she is fluent in Russian.

Then about a year ago she started looking for a country to move to from where she lived in Toronto, Canada. As a “digital nomad,” she did not want to stay in one of the most expensive cities in North America and after visiting and considering several countries in Europe, she eventually moved to Bulgaria, where she has been living for the last few months. Bulgaria is one of the least expensive countries in European Union, the Bulgarian language is quite similar to Russian, it uses the Cyrillic alphabet, there are beautiful beaches along the Black Sea coast, as well as beautiful mountains in the north of the small country, which has convenient airline connections to anywhere in Europe and beyond. I spent a month in Bulgaria a long time ago and I loved it.

Her mother will now move from Canada too. She is moving to Kiev, Ukraine, because the management of the apartment she is renting in Canada has raised her rent by 30%, which means that her Canadian pension is no longer sufficient to pay her Canadian rent.

There is a war in Kiev, she knows, but she does not care about that too much because the wars waged on pensioners on fixed income in countries that are nominally at peace seem to be now as cruel as the wars that are being fought with real bullets on actual frontlines. Since her small Canadian pension is still sufficient to pay her bills in a country that has been at war for several years now, she is moving to that country instead as she cannot afford to stay in her home country, which will thus now become her formerly home country.

Here is a fascinating factoid for me, and may maybe for you too: When I came to America in 1982, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was about 40 to 1. I was able to live a pretty normal life back then in San Francisco. Even on the starting salary of a new immigrant in the pricey San Francisco housing market, I did find a convenient and comfortable 1 bedroom apartment that I fell in love with right away. True, it took me a couple of years to find this place on fourth floor on Joice Street and I also had to find a roommate to be able to afford it. But how many roommates would a guy working for a starting salary in San Francisco need to afford the same apartment today, when the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio at the Low-Wage 100 companies list widened by 12.9% percent from 560 to 1 in 2019 to 632 to 1 in 2024 (Forbes).

Which war is worse now, the war in Kiev, or the war against regular people as I was back then, or the non-rich, which is the great majority of us, and not only in San Francisco? I think the Russian-Canadian lady just answered this question by becoming an expat again.

There are many kinds of refugees in this world, always have been, always will be. That’s just how it is.

3 Comments

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | November 26, 2025

Where Do You Go When You Can No Longer Afford Even Walking Around Money

From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached.

Franz Kafka, The Trial

There are of course many such points in our life. We eagerly anticipate the point when childhood will be finally left behind, called adulthood, but later not as eagerly what is called middle age, let alone old age. The main reason for that is probably the fact that along the way we are starting to realize that the point that we will all reach in the end is … Valhalla?

Maybe, although probably not. Something else will be waiting for us there and we don’t know what.

On my first job in San Francisco as a Visitor Information Rep in 1982, I was not making a lot of money, but I had a fine-looking business card with a picture of a golden cable car on it, which made me very happy.

After living in refugee camps in Germany, I was now somebody again. I remember that I did not worry too much about walking around money. There was a tiny pizza place right above my office on Powell Street where I would sometime have a slice of cheese pizza on my lunch break from 12 to 12:30 for 1$. If I was really hungry, I would walk one block down on Market Street to a Chinese restaurant on second floor. It was always full of office workers between noon and 1 who were helping themselves just like me to a cheap Chinese lunch for a total of $2.95, including delicious chowder soup. I met my first Japanese girlfriend there who handed me a piece of paper with her phone number and said “Call me” after she overheard me talking in Japanese to a colleague from work. After about two years, she moved without warning once I introduced her to my second Japanese girlfriend. Either to “Philly”, where she used to live, or back to Japan, I will never know.

There were several bookstores on Powell and around Union Square where I would sometime buy a book for a few bucks to read later, maybe on the weekend. Some weekends I had to work on Saturday and Sunday, but weekends’ work was quite relaxing because there were no telephone from visitors asking always the same dumb questions about San Francisco and California. On Sunday I could “blow the joint” (close the office) at noon, and then I was free to do whatever I wanted until Wednesday morning, because after working the weekend, I had almost three days off … when everybody else had to work. So I could walk around the city, watching how it lives, or jogging from Nob Hill where I lived in a small apartment on fourth floor on Joice Street, and read the book I bought during the week, or listen to my favorite oldies on Doctor Demento’s radio program.

It took me one hour from my apartment along the Golden Gate Promenade to the red bridge and one hour back, up steep hills, chasing the cable cars.

I could walk to my apartment through Union Square and then up on Powell Street, but sometime I would take the cable car. My monthly “fast pass” used to cost $36 and it covered all city buses, trams and metro, and initially also the cable car, which back then used to cost $1 for tourists who were anxious to enjoy the genuine San Francisco experience. After a while, the cost for the cable car went up to $3, and when it was jacked up to $7, only tourists, called by some locals “turkeys”, were still riding it.

******************************************************************

I didn’t really run out of walking around money when I moved back to South Bohemia from Virginia at the end of 2018. But that did not happen back then only because although I was officially retired for about a year, I was still translating, which meant that with the combined incomes from the pension and the translations, I was still able to pay all the bills, including a reasonable mortgage of $1,200 (after refinancing several times) for my now ridiculously large house with 5 bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.

How long would I be able to pretend that I am not old and alone, even though on paper I was still married? At a certain point I realized that, as per an old French song, to live without tenderness makes no sense. So, we finally got a divorce and I bought a plane ticket back to Prague. My son took me and my two pieces of luggage to the airport, ex-wife said she didn’t have time. She said she had to do the laundry. Good riddance, I thought, so we are not going to be friends, as I thought originally. Even after 34 years of marriage, she is still the same narcissist that she turnout to be once the children were born and she saw that there was no way out for me, only even worse now.

I knew it was only a matter of time before I would no longer be able to live in America without continuing to work my ass off, anxiously checking my emails not to miss an important message from a client or a potential client many times every day when there was no work. Once you read a certain point, you are done … and I reached that point at 66.

After about 50 years of never questioning the fact that I need to work to survive, I finally found the courage to say to myself, screw it, leave it all behind! It did mean that to be able to pay my bills, I had to move to a different country and start from scratch again. But that was something that I had done several times already, except that this time I was moving to a country that I new quite well …  or used to know very well some 40 years ago.

After almost half a century, every country changes so much that it becomes almost unrecognizable to you. And part of the fun, a big part of the mystery of living, is getting to know what you used to know and then forgot about … all over again .

2 Comments

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , , ,

Posted by: patenttranslator | November 23, 2025

I Used to Have a Valuable Skill Set Called Foreign Languages

Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

John Lennon

This valuable skill set, which for the most part I still have, is called knowing foreign languages. I still have it, I think, except that it is no longer considered to be very valuable by many people, at least not very valuable anymore in terms of making money.

Yet, this skillset in the parlance of Human Resources employees

worked for me quite well for a long time, about half a century. I will start with the time period when as a precocious teenager I realized for the first time how much fun it is to listen to people talking to me in another language (as long as I can understand most of what they are saying), and responding to them in the same language. A much bigger world full of surprises opens up to you when suddenly you are able to take advantage of this ability, which after a while turns into a passion that is hard to explain to people who did not fall under the same spell as you did.

At first, I took advantage of this weird enchantment by spending 7 wonderful years at one of the oldest universities in Europe, starting from 1970 when I just barely turned 18. Because I was at that point already at a university studying languages, and because females are generally more attuned to languages than males, most of my fellow students were girls. Helas, I was too shy and too stupid to take advantage of this obvious advantage for a teenage boy. If I could go back to being 18 as a student in Prague again, I would definitely be more active in that respect … but this is not very likely to happen, is it?

Back then I did not care about how to monetize this newly discovered skill set. At first, I didn’t even wonder whether I would be able to use it to somehow make money with it. But it turned out that right after graduating, it took me only a few weeks to find a new job thanks to my language skillset, both in Prague, and then a couple years later also in San Francisco. The two most important tools in my skillset back about half a century ago were fluency in English and Japanese.

**********************************************************

I wonder whether it would still work like this today, when everybody seems to think that languages are not really important because we can have everything translated instantly by computer, or by using the new religion called AI. The new religion called AI could prove with time to be as profitable as the old religions, although it is hard to tell at this point. I think that AI will be very profitable, but just like the old religions, mostly just for people who are already very rich, not for the rest of us. It is also likely that just like the old religions, AI will be used mostly to keep us easily manipulated and as poor and ignorant as possible to ensure an obedient mass that can be governed relatively easily.

Although I am not sure whether I would still be able to use my strange thirst for learning other languages to feed a family of four now in 2025, which is what I did with this strange predilection of mine for several decades up until relatively recently, I am sure that I did pick the right field of study as a young man because what I learned over the years still works for me, only somewhat differently.

Now that I am a retiree who has no financial responsibility to anyone except myself, (plus maybe to another gold digger if I am not careful), I am using my passion for languages differently. Just like for millions of other people, my mornings begin on internet, mostly on YouTube where I can pick and choose sources of information about various subjects in several languages. Although the most important language for me will always be English, I also follow my favorite news sources (mostly bloggers) in several other languages: Czech, Slovak, French, Russian Polish, Japanese, and German.

So for instance, thanks to the fact that I have always loved the Russian language, I have a good idea about how Russian speaking Ukrainians (which is the great majority of those living in my town) feel about Czechs, Slovaks or Poles, without requiring a translation and interpretation by a docile “journalist” in English or Czech. Or why Germans are looking for countries to emigrate to, now a popular topic on European blogs.

I also have my favorite Japanese bloggers, but those are mostly young women who demonstrate impeccable design of Japanese rooms, or how to cook properly shabu-shabu, although most apartment décor videos that I follow are in English. I am fascinated for instance by young women who move to New York or San Francisco (where I used to live in the eighties and nineties). I know, it’s the dirty old man in me, but what can I do?

So when I was young, I not only had a lot fun with languages, but I was also able to make a good living by using this particular asset of mine, while now I mostly use it to have fun and stay connected to the world.

Not a bad ending at all.

5 Comments

Posted in The Translation Business | Tags: , , , ,

Older Posts »

Categories

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started