Baron Pal Podmaniczky and the Norwegian Bible | Page 8

as Livonian. Since he lives in Riga, Lithuania, I assume he is bilingual. I hope he will eventually respond as did my Lappish translator after one and a half years.
> One of our Finnish friends had promised to look for a Lappish translator. Much time passed and I had given up all hope of ever getting that translation but now I do have it.
> The next year Venice Marathon brought me two further languages. After my husband had run the marathon on Sunday, we took a trip to Verona on Monday. On our way there, a group of four happy, talkative young people entered our compartment. The three sisters and a brother spoke an interesting sounding language, unknown to me. I asked them if they were Swedish. Smiling, they said, "No", but that I wasn’t the first to mistake their language for Swedish. They were speaking Swiss German. Later on they changed to formal German, so we could understand them. They promised to translate my short story into their mother tongue. I received it in one month’s time. They wrote that at home they were sitting around the dinner table the same way that we sat in a round in the train compartment. And sentence by sentence they translated the text together.
> The next day, our friend the Italian translator took us on a trip into the Alps. We passed a region where, he said, a small group of people speak Friuli, a Rheto Romance language. He promised to ask one of his customers who lives there to make the Friulian translation.
> My eldest brother’s Dutch art partner who organizes figure and medal exhibitions for him, translated the text into Dutch. I wrote to a Biology professor from Belgium who I met some years ago in Eger (my home town) and asked him to translate the text into Flemish. I sent him the list of languages and translators as well, asking him to fill in his data, also. Instead of the Flemish translation I got a short letter in which he said he felt it not to be important to write a Flemish translation since he saw I already had the text in Dutch. These two languages are, as he wrote, similar in written form, and only in pronunciation are there some differences.
> He did not make the translation, but some month later another Belgian couple visited us. Listening to my request they asked for a typing machine and immediately translated the short story into Flemish. They also promised me a Cashmirian translation because a Cashmirian man lives in their village, they ask him to do the work. Later on they wrote me it was told them that Cashmirian is a spoken language only, They use Hindi script while writing, but Hindi I already have. Instead of the Chasmirian they organised an African language: another friend in their village, couple from Zaire translated the short story into Luba language.
Later, my short story continued its role as a magnet and brought me two new friends; two language fans. As I had begun to think about publishing a book, I had to look for and ask permission for copying the language descriptions from the writer of the "Lord’s Prayer in 121 European Languages". Looking for his name in the Budapest telephone book and finding four Németh Zsigmonds, I had the same good fortune as I did in my Toronto search. The first number I dialed was his. He was very friendly. We met in Budapest and went together to the Indian Embassy. I wanted to ask them about the herd of the Indian language for which I have translation. He asked about some language problems pertaining to the preparation of his next book entitled, "Asia’s Languages Shown Through the Lord’s Prayer in Different Languages." He directed me to a new language at this time because he sent my story to:
> a man who constructed a new artificial language, Vikto.
Mr. Németh brought me to a friend of his who became interested in me when she heard I had written about 31 languages with Hebrew among them. Kató Lomb studies Hebrew at the Budapest University. It is the 17th language she speaks. She is a synchron translator. She speaks in 16 languages, but as she said in an interview, the number of languages by which she has already earned money is about 30. She wrote four books about languages, her language learning method, other multilingual people, and her journeys around the world as a translator. She autographed one of her books and gave it to me. I had brought two others with me and she autographed those as well. The fourth title I bought the next week in a secondhand book shop. In a week’s time I had read all four of the books