Today I had to translate a message that was ostensibly coming from a middle-aged man (but was more likely written by his staff.) I translated it from French to English as I normally do, but once it was finished, I realized it didn't really sound like something a middle-aged man would say. It sounded more feminine. Specifically, it sounded like a slightly eccentric female tenured professor who wears scarves and has piles of paper all over the office, when it needed to sound like it was coming from a staid middle-aged man with a mustache. I don't know if that's a function of my own voice, or a function of the fact that the staff person who wrote it was female (I don't know if it was a female staff person or not), or if it's just a function of the French language, which tends to be more emotive. But I had such a struggle getting the tone of the text to sound like it was coming from the person it was coming from!
Since I'll have to do a lot more of this in the future, I briefly considered creating an online persona who's a middle-aged male, just to practice getting the tone down. But even if I could pull off a male persona, there's no way I could do middle-aged. Especially since I'd have to be proactive in saying things, and I don't think I can come up with things that it would occur to a middle-aged male to say. If I could pull it off, it would have to be reactively. But I could never be proactive about it. But then, I've never been very good a role-playing anyway.
I'm sure at least one person has come away from this secretly thinking that I really am a middle-aged male in the guise of a 25-year-old woman.
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