Emotional arcs

I had an interesting experience today - the writers out there may appreciate this.

Someone had written an account of a harrowing ordeal - the sort of thing you'd find in Readers Digest (and I don't mean this disparagingly, that's just the best way I can think of to explain the kind of ordeal involved). My co-worker was assigned to translate it, and I was asked to edit the translation. (This is a bit different from normal editing - we normally don't touch structure, but we're excruciatingly critical about word choice.)

First I read the text through for plot. I don't normally do this, but I was far more curious than usual about what happened. As I read I marked a couple things that I thought could be improved, but I didn't indicate how to improve them. I just wanted to see what happened. My reaction at the end of that was "Wow, that was a pretty harrowing ordeal," but emotionally it didn't have much more impact than a newspaper article.

Then I went back to do proper editing, thinking of ways to improve the things I'd marked, making sure that everything was clear so the reader doesn't have to make any effort to understand, making sure that it sounded natural in English. I tweaked a few places, replaced one or two awkward metaphors with more typically English cliches (a good thing in translation), inserted a few synonyms, and re-ordered one or two sentences to make sure the emphasis was where it needed to be.

My reaction at the end of this was like I had gone through an emotional experience. Not the most hard-core of emotional experiences - it was like a perfectly serviceable episode of television drama that had nothing wrong with it but never knocked you off your feet - but completely unlike anything I've had before from work.

I don't normally work on material with emotional arcs. If it has a plot, it's either set out as a series of facts, or it's supporting a thesis to convince the reader of something. But this one was simply telling a story of an ordeal, for people who have never been through that sort of ordeal. I've gone through emotions when translating material with difficult subject matter, but you really have to get inside the text when translating (I find it's more mentally intensive than writing itself, although not everyone agrees on that) so you generally experience the plot from far more inside than the average reader does. I always figured editing was more on the surface, and I certainly didn't expect that it would be so much more emotionally involving than simply reading, especially after I'd already experienced the plot. The emotional arc had already been built by the author and renovated by the translator; I was just walking around with touch-up paint, and yet I came out feeling like I had been sawing wood and hammering nails all day too.