What I Actually Do at My Internship

So I realized that I haven't really talked much about my new internship, except for commenting that it's boring but a lot better than my old one. I will attempt to rectify that oversight at this time. Basically, I am in charge of researching a guidebook that Anthem Press is developing. It's a guidebook on the parks and gardens of Europe. I do a lot of internet searches to try to find a bunch of different information, like the opening hours, the contact info, admission fees (including concessions such as students or disabled individuals), guided tours (when they are, what languages they are in, how much they cost, how they can be arranged), facilities (handicap accessibility, restaurants on site or nearby, etc), special events, rules (ex. no dogs, no picnics), how to get there by public transportation and by car, and three key features (ex. largest collection of orchids in Germany). Then I also get to write a 130-150 word description of each garden. I don't know how good my writing has been though because I'm supposed to get 6-8 of these done per day.

It doesn't sound like that difficult of a job, which it isn't in the sense that it doesn't really require much brainpower. But it is really difficult to find all that information because a lot of it just isn't on the internet (in which case I have to email the gardens and feel presumptuous to expect them to speak English to me). Of course, English is the best language to know for this project if you're only going to know one because it's the most common "second language" for Europeans to speak and for the websites to be available in. But many of the websites don't have English-language versions, so I've been relying on Google's automatic translator in conjunction with online language conversion dictionaries. The automatic translator is very helpful and I don't want to belittle it, but it's also good for a lot of laughs. One thing that's really funny is that it tries to translate everything it can, including names. In a list of German names like Dr. Maria Dobner, Bernhard Winzenhörlein, and Renate Hudak, I also saw: "Dr. - goats bacon - Weg 10." I'm not sure what the Weg 10 is for, but Dr. goats bacon is actually Dr. Ziegenspeck. I was seriously trying so hard not to laugh because I didn't want to have to explain myself to my coworkers, who probably wouldn't have found it that funny. But when you're sitting there for hours and hours, trying to decipher Google's ridiculous translations, things like that are just hilarious. Another interesting thing Google translator does is change around special characters from other languages. For example, it translated "Tropengewächshaus" (which I happen to know means "tropical greenhouse" because of my new German vocabulary) into "Tropengew & auml ; chshaus." As though that's any more readable. It's also funny because Google can't determine contexts at all, which is where the German-English and French-English dictionaries come in handy. For example, one of the words in German for "guided tour" is the same as the word for "leadership." So Google translated it "leadership" all over the place and I guessed it was supposed to mean "guided tour," and the dictionary confirmed that for me.

As a sidenote, it's very annoying to copy and paste things that have been automatically translated. (I have to copy and paste all my sources into a Word document to be printed off later.) When it's pasted, it alternates the original language with the translation, so I have to go through and find all the German/French and delete it so that only the English remains. But it's a little complicated because about every tenth word or so of the translated section is still in another language because Google was unable to translate it.

I am also highly amused by the way these botanists talk about their subject. One person was hailed as being one of Europe's greatest plant geographers. (I'm sure that doesn't sound all that funny to all you normal people who don't have to read these things for hours on end.) One of the botanical gardens in Belgium called its trees "champion trees of Belgium." It's just really obscure things that I can't really imagine being excited about, but they are just thrilled by them. It's very funny when you read these things for hours on end in Google's ridiculous automatically translated language.

I insert all the information I can find into an Excel spreadsheet and I email the gardens to find any more information or to ask for clarification, etc. And then I move on to the next garden. As I said, it's a bit boring and I don't feel like I'm getting a great feel for the book publishing industry as a whole. Actually, the press I work for is so small that almost all of their editing and cover design is done by freelancers. But the people I work with are nice and at least I have a book publishing internship to put on my CV (resumé). And THANKFULLY it's not my old horrible internship at Goodlife! So overall, I think it's a valuable experience. And at the end, I will have my name in the book and they'll send me a copy gratis.