Anecdote – Translation & Leeches – you forgot the Hyenas, my dear Misfit

Political asylum is a big business all over the world. So it has both good and bad sides for those who translate the documents brought by the asylum seekers, especially when talk about Bangladesh. First of all, most of the stories and documents supporting those are just absurd and ridiculous. One must possess a fantastic quality of patience and humour to become translator of this kind of writing. Because the work helps someone to organize his own thought process which is good for his or her future projects. This is the good side. He or she doesn’t become a translator, but becomes a person of self-respect.
On the other hand, the bad side has multiple facets. The asylum seekers are easy preys of self-claimed translators. But there are not only Leeches, there are Hyenas. The leech types are just a group of uneducated or half educated lumpens who just take advantage of the vulnerability of the asylum seekers in desperate situation. So they are easily identifiable. And they don’t care even if their frauds are divulged and the victims call them bastards. The leeches are inspired of easy and fast money. They are mainly from Bangladesh.
But the Hyenas are educated group of persons who proudly call themselves translators. But if one just do their background check, it would be easily established that none of them never did translation in their earlier life. Most of them arrived in France with a dream of becoming world famous artists or cinéastes or writers. But France is a difficult place where such kind of people come from different parts of the world, and the possibility of success is very feeble if one doesn’t have high level of passion and extraordinary ideas. So the aforesaid group of persons couldn’t achieve their dreams and to survive they become translators in a fine morning. They are mostly of Indian origin. They know they are failures. And to hide the feeling, the take advantage of their position in the French society as educated persons. They start to proclaim that they do serious translation of gibberish documents from Bangladesh, and of such high quality that even Victor Hugo would have tears in his eyes. They fix their standard at so high imagination that they look at each other with highest praise. The asylum-seekers find themselves astound before their great personality and exorbitant non-negotiable price (exmaple : when you buy goods in supermarket, you don’t negotiate) and they go to the streets and metro stations to sell fake perfumes, pirated dvds etc to generate cash. And thus the Hyenas continue eating their helpless preys for years after years. And back home, they create an aura among the families and friends that they call the shot in France, Great artistes… and a handful of white-collar bangladeshis (with dubious past as no one is sure if they carry a real name or fake) have joined the Gang of Hyenas.
N.B : Of course, there are some real translators with high literary background from both of Bangladesh and India who help us to feel pride of our origine.