Ratsima

I've detailed elsewhere my futile efforts to learn Thai (One Guy's Effort To Learn Thai In 14 Years), so I won't repeat the sad tale here. Suffice it to say that years and dollars spent have yielded little in the way of results.

I've resigned myself to the fact that I'll never be able to communicate in Thai, but the nagging feelings of guilt and shame over this are becoming increasingly difficult to handle. How could I have tried so hard and failed so miserably at something that I wanted so much?

I'm sure there are others in the same boat. How do you rationalize or otherwise deal with your failure?

I'm flying from Bangkok to LA tomorrow (May 19th). I live in Korat and decided to spend the night in Bangkok tonight to break the journey a bit.

Drove to the old bus station. Absolute chaos. Hundreds of people waiting to buy tickets and even more waiting to board.

Drove to the new bus station. More of the same. Thousands of people trying to get on buses back to Bangkok.

Called the State Railway of Thailand. Every seat fully booked for at least the next 24 hours.

I though the travel madness would be over by now. I was wrong.

Will get up in the middle of the night and hope to catch a bus then.

We are purchasing domestic air tickets from an agent. Here's the latest word from them:

Quote

We can hardly wait for our flight.

My wife works in a law office where she is often called upon to translate documents from Thai to English and vice versa. She frequently asks my help to clean up the English a bit. Generally this is no problem. However, there are times when her English translation has to be certified by the MFA as the document will be used for legal purposes.

In these cases she will brook no significant changes to the essence of the Thai original, including grammar (or lack thereof) and word content. She says that the MFA will reject any translation that does not contain the English equivalent of each and every Thai word in the original. Usually this isn't a big problem as it is possible to twist out an English sentence that is grammatical, meaningful and faithful to the Thai original.

Sometimes it is a big problem.

The other day, in an attempt to molify the MFA, she translated this: เรื่องทรัพย์สินก่อนสมรส และการจัดการทรัพย์สินให้เป็นไปตามสัญญาก่อนสมรสตามที่แนบท้ายทะเบียนสมรสนี้

Into this: A property prior their marriage and a property management shall comply with the pre-marital agreement attached herewith.

Tearing my hair out, I offered up several alternatives that were actually understandable and, I thought, reasonably precise renderings of the meaning of the original Thai. She rejected them all as certain to fail the MFA test.

What's the best way to deal with this situation? Is there some secret to obtaining MFA approval in cases where a word-for-word translation produces incomprehensible English?

Anyone done this route recently? Google Maps shows three possible routes and, of course, there are more. I prefer dual carriageway; even if a bit longer.