“Cave Signatures”

So along with the territory of being an English-speaker comes a variety of odd translation jobs. Pat has been stopped in the streets of Tarata by people asking her to help translate the directions to medication that they need to take and we frequently get the requests for help on homework. But my favorite incident happened recently one night while I was over at Pat’s and we were watching a movie on her DVD player. A gentleman came to her door asking for her and said he was a friend of one of the students in Pat’s English class and he needed some help translating something. Let me remind you that it was already odd enough to be showing up on her doorstep at around 8 or 9 pm since small towns like Tarata pretty much shut down after dark unless there is a festival going on. When Pat couldn’t make sense of the document she called me from upstairs to come down and help her with the translation job. The gentleman handed me a piece of paper with some diagrams that I had no idea what it was but it was titled “Cave Signatures.” I started “translating” it for him but then again it wasn’t making much sense because it had something to do with building some kind of agriculture-related or architecture-related thing that probably doesn’t translate well directly. I kept on asking “cueva firma?” which means “cave signature” as a direct translation but he just gave me a blank look and eventually I had to tell him that my Spanish really wasn’t very good and if “cueva firma” didn’t mean anything to him that I probably couldn’t help make sense of the rest of the document. I enjoyed the incident thoroughly though since I take pleasure in randomness (it’s the key to success, anyone remember that saying?) and it certainly was random.