Continued...

I separated my most recent news into 2 posts because it was getting pretty long.
Anyway…
This week my counterpart and I had to translate a grant proposal from Mongolian into English. You’d think this would be a simple task for a Mongolian English teacher, but it was almost impossible. Mongolian and English really could not be more different, and if you try to translate directly it comes out as completely incomprehensible Engrish. (When I attempt to translate a sentence from English to Mongolian it comes out equally nonsensical.) We both got pretty bad headaches, but between the two of us, a dictionary, and google, we eventually figured it out. The grant was requesting money to build an outdoor sports field on our campus, which meant there were graphs detailing the costs of all kinds of specific construction equipment that I know nothing about. We had to figure out words like “autograder” and “coarse-grained asphalt.” But it was a little like a word puzzle. For example, one of the last words we couldn’t figure out was “bitum,” which was not in the dictionary because apparently it’s a Russian word. Nobody seemed to know what it was, though. Finally, my CP found a teacher who knew and translated his explanation for me: “It is black stuff on roads that is like gum but not gum.” “Tar!” I exclaimed triumphantly; I looked it up in the English part of the dictionary and it was right. Unfortunately, we weren’t actually on game show, so we didn’t win anything.
As for the actual writing, I took a few liberties with translation. There were more problems than just making it sound good in English. My CP told me one sentence meant that, due to the lack of outdoor sports equipment, our students are getting headaches and suffer from an illness that translated as “movement failure.” I told her I really didn’t believe that the kids were becoming paralyzed because they can’t play basketball outdoors, and that it would also likely sound suspicious to the foundation that would be reading the grant. Anyway, I’m pretty proud of the result, so I hope we get the grant.
I forgot to mention in my last post that my students and counterparts made a HUGE deal out of my mom’s birthday when I mentioned it to them. The fourth graders made her a card, my CP had her mom pick up a gift from UB, and my 10th-graders and my other CP wished her a happy birthday via Skype. That part was actually very cool.
Speaking of gifts from students, my 5th graders presented me with a new present this week—oragami roses that said “teacher” on them. I’ll include a picture in this post, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to snap a shot before I lost one and my cats chewed up the rest. Still, you can see that they’re pretty neat. I still have no idea why my 5th-graders like me so much (one boy screams “I love you!” and blows kisses whenever he sees me). I’m not even fun. I mostly just make them pronounce diphthongs over and over again.
In non-school news, my site mate Caitlin managed to get a huge donation from 88 Bikes, and there was a ceremony on Saturday to give them away to kids. Some kids also worked on murals that the government paid to put up in town. How cool is that? The day of the ceremony was 18 degrees and there was snow and ice on the ground, but I put on my layers and milled around outside for several hours like a real Mongolian. I was very proud of myself.
I think that’s all the news for now. I’m on a school break starting tomorrow, but I’m not allowed to go anywhere, so I probably won’t have anything interesting to talk about for a week or so.