SURF Student Translates East German Sci-Fi

Wilson Ekern opens the PDF copy of the 1984 East German collection of short science fiction stories "Windschiefe Geraden" on his laptop side-by-side with the translation he's been working on all summer. He stares at the line: "Mein Arm", flüsterte Dart erneut, "der Computer hat meinen Arm gestohlen!" With painstaking precision, he begins to translate. A page that might take one or two minutes to read can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour to translate. After reviewing the sentence several times, he arrives at his translation: "My arm," Dart whispered again, "the Computer has stolen my arm!" Ekern, a Carnegie Mellon University senior with a double major in technical writing and communication and German studies , received a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship from CMU's Undergraduate Research Office (URO) to work on translating four short stories from the collection, written by authors Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller, under the direction of Gabriele Maier , an associate teaching professor of German in the Department of Modern Languages. After reviewing his own translated pages multiple times, he would send those pages to Maier who would offer her own revisions. The idea of technology taking precedence over people is a common theme throughout the collection of stories. "Science fiction can be a mirror into the past.