You have to do something if you don’t speak the language well. You throw your texts through the translation machine and then you translate it back so that you take out the odd translations.

Fortunately, the text for the announcement of the training at the Ilkhom theatre was posted on Instagram and Facebook by the theatre staff.

Then google’s automatic translation on instagram could still throw a spanner in the works. The text in Russian about the clown training at the Ilkhom theatre “A child’s encounter with a clown can be liberating.” is translated into “A child’s encounter with a clown can be frustrating…..” But most of the target audience speaks Russian so that wasn’t really a problem.

When announcing the training I organised myself, however, things went wrong. I didn’t see when translating back that it wasn’t quite right. So I was advertising a cloning workshop instead of clowning. Fortunately, both the director of the Ilkhom theatre and my Russian teacher in the Netherlands pointed out to me that what I had put on Instagram was not correct. So I went back to editing.

Now on the train from Samarkand to Tashkent for training.