Today, we began our translations of Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger, in which we convert the colloquialism of the 1950’s into the speech that we, as young adults of 2014, would typically hear on the streets of New York City. It was very interesting to hear so many varying perspectives on today’s language. Each person inserted a little bit of their own character into it, illustrating how vastly different everyone in today’s society can be, regardless of what period we are living in. The most exciting part was listening to the changes in tone as the reader switched between character roles, and expressing each role with the counterpart in today’s current society. While some took a more casual approach to their translations with slight changes, others embellished theirs with profanity and particular four-letter words.

The most difficult task in this assignment is interpreting the language of Holden Caulfield. In my assignment, rocks replaced the word for valuable gemstones on jewelry such as rings; personally, the word “rocks” was so out-of-context, since  teenagers now would say “blings” instead. In addition, other words that Holden used could not easily be translated into modern speech, forcing me to make a decision between completely omitting the word out or simply leaving it as is.