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Italian to English: A PORTA PALAZZO MI COMPRO L’ABITO BIANCO General field: Other Detailed field: Journalism
Source text - Italian Joy ha un sorriso più irresistibile del solito, oggi. Esce a saltelli dalla doccia, le extension di treccine ramate gocciolanti. Si increma il viso e le lunghe gambe nere, indossa fulminea perizoma e reggiseno bianchi e affonda nel divano in pelle che continuo a pensare abbia preso da una discarica. Canticchia: «Fra una settimana mi sposo». Come, ti sposi? Eri tetra e avvilita, ti avevano dato il foglio di via condannandoti alla Nigeria da cui sei fuggita per finire a venderti nei campi spelacchiati fuori Torino, tanto dolore e botte dai marocchini ubriachi per trovarti punto e a capo nei sobborghi affamati di Benin City, e ora mi parli dell’abito bianco, uno qualsiasi, anche da 20 euro al mercato di Porta Palazzo purché sia bianco? E chi sarebbe il fortunato? «Antonio, mio amico che mi ha trovato lavoro alla cooperativa». Ma Joy, lui ha sessant’anni e tu 28. «Per me è come padre. È buono, mi aiuta, non vuole che vado a vivere da lui, continuo a fare mia vita però lui mi sposa così ho documenti e resto in Italia». Restare in Italia, fare documenti: Joy non parla d’altro. È la sua ossessione di nigeriana ingannata e trafficata, 10 euro a rapporto perché gli italiani preferiscono le bianche dell’Est e loro, le negre infibulate, quasi tutte dal sudest del grande Stato africano povero e violento, fanno da discount del sesso. Sono almeno diecimila in Italia, oltre la metà di tutte le prostitute secondo i dati della Caritas, e a centinaia finiscono cadaveri fra le erbacce. Joy no, lei ha trovato il suo lieto fine: l’ex cliente che smette di portarla a letto e la sottrae alla clandestinità. Un padre, a modo suo. Joy dorme su una branda in cucina nella fatiscente mansarda a due stanze che condivide con due amiche nel quartiere Barriera di Milano, a Torino. Zona di droga e balordi che a Joy sembra il paradiso, rispetto a Benin City. La prima volta che l’ho incontrata divorava rigatoni al pomodoro, da poco non era più prostituta schiava ma operaia a 6,031 euro lordi l’ora. «Sono contenta, è lavoro normale, io ce la fa» diceva nel suo italiano senza articoli. Aveva guadagnato qualcosa interpretando un documentario (vedi box) dove raccontava un sogno straziante: sua madre, morta due anni fa, arrivava a prenderla sulla strada nevosa su cui Joy infreddoliva in piedi, strizzata nei ridicoli short da puttana. La portava nella sua casa di bambina e preparava cibo in abbondanza, come non ne avevano mangiato mai. Il mondo di Joy lo abbiamo percorso a lungo, io e la fotografa Elena Perlino, comprendendo come le nostre leggi non possano nulla di fronte alle miserie d’Africa e alle speranze illogiche e tenaci di chi non ha scelta. Joy è arrivata in Italia nel luglio 2003 con un volo dalla Nigeria alla Francia e un treno fino a Torino, a casa di una connazionale. «Conoscevo sua sorella in Nigeria, procurava lavoro in Italia per pulizie. Ho detto portami, però non ho soldi. Paghiamo noi, ha detto lei, restituisci dopo». Molte arrivano così, con un visto per l’Europa procurato dal racket grazie a funzionari corrotti. Joy ce ne ha messo a capire quanti fossero i 50 mila euro del loan, il debito da saldare alla magnaccia che gestiva un nutrito parco schiave. «Mi fidavo, conoscevo sua famiglia. Sapevo che alcune venivano qui a fare prostitute, ma non era obbligatorio: chi vuole fa, chi non vuole trova altro lavoro. Pensavo così». Invece a Torino le dicono che l’alternativa non c’è, «così una sera sono uscita con altre. Il primo cliente è una cosa brutta, sì, fa male… Non ero capace, la prima settimana non ho portato soldi, poi ho imparato. Tutte le notti fino al mattino, sei-sette clienti, al sabato di più. Ho imparato anche a scappare, quando capivo che volevano rubarmi soldi e cellulare». Poi Joy rimane incinta, dice che si è rotto il preservativo ma chi la conosce bene sa che con i clienti abituali lo faceva senza per 20 euro in più. La magnaccia la imbottisce di Cytotec, un farmaco per l’ulcera che provoca aborto, emorragie, dolore, il rischio di lacerazione dell’utero. Sta male per un mese ma non si angoscia: tante ci sono passate e non sono morte, almeno quelle che conosce lei. Decide di lasciare la strada una notte, durante una retata. Oltre a dare i soldi alla magnaccia, Joy pagava 200 euro al mese agli albanesi per l’affitto del joint, il suo pezzo di marciapiede. «Io paga per lavorare qui, sono in regola» quasi sputa in faccia ai poliziotti. Le spiegano che niente è in regola, e lei capisce. Dopo tre anni. «Allora ho detto alla magnaccia: basta, io non pago più. Avevo dato 35 mila euro. Sono uscita da casa sua, lei ha detto tanto io tengo tuo passaporto». Gli sfruttatori sono abili a intrappolare le donne schiave: a Joy avevano detto di dichiararsi liberiana, non nigeriana, alla frontiera di Ventimiglia, perché nel 2003 in Liberia c’era la guerra civile e a molti suoi cittadini veniva dato asilo in Europa. Così anche lei, finta liberiana, ottiene un permesso di soggiorno rinnovabile finché la Commissione nazionale per il diritto d’asilo non esaminerà la sua pratica. Ci vogliono anni, e intanto si può avere la carta d’identità e anche un lavoro regolare. Ma Joy vuole sapere che accadrà dopo e chiede alla Caritas, a suor Maresa, dolcissima mentre scaglia parole come pietre: «Sarai convocata a Roma dalla Commissione, ti faranno un esame con membri dell’ambasciata liberiana e scopriranno che hai mentito. Basta la lingua, il liberiano è tutto un cinguettio». Joy si prende la testa fra le mani. «Perché non denunci la magnaccia?» butta lì la suora. «La legge prevede un permesso di soggiorno per le ragazze che denunciano. Certo, occorre che la tua magnaccia sia un pesce grosso, che alla polizia interessi prenderla. Puoi fare il suo nome a me, e io non farò il tuo, solo tasto il terreno in questura». «No. Sua famiglia in Nigeria fa male alla mia. Non voglio casini, io». Joy esce. La suora sospira, come davanti a una scena già vista. Dicono che le magnaccia nigeriane usino il voodoo per avvinghiare a sé le schiave. A Joy è bastato appiccicare sulla porta della mansarda la frase, in inglese: «Nessun sortilegio prevarrà su di noi. Nel nome di Gesù, Amen!». Lei teme la violenza. Quella vera, fisica. «Non denuncio» ripete «troverò altro modo». Quando la convoca la Commissione per il diritto d’asilo, non sa che fare. Si rivolge a due associazioni che aiutano quelle come lei: una le dice di non andarci, assolutamente, magari ti danno l’asilo d’ufficio, succede. L’altra, con grande ritardo, la rimprovera di non essere andata. Joy è confusa e tradita: «Perché nessuno sa come funziona? E adesso?». Arriva il foglio di via, velocissimo: entro 15 giorni Joy deve lasciare l’Italia. È ufficialmente clandestina. Ha sempre la sua carta d’identità di finta liberiana, ma fino a quando ingannerà i carabinieri e la cooperativa per cui lavora? E rischia pure la galera per aver dato false generalità. «Ci vado in galera, è colpa mia che ho creduto alla magnaccia. Basta che dopo mi fanno restare in Italia». L’avevo lasciata così, Joy. Spenta e fallita due volte. Invece si sposa, con un nulla osta che la sua vera ambasciata, quella nigeriana, le ha rilasciato senza vedere il suo passaporto, ancora nelle mani della magnaccia. Sposa Antonio, che ha figlie più vecchie di lei che la guardano come si guarda una puttana negra ma al diavolo, lei avrà il suo permesso di soggiorno, e poi la cittadinanza. Non tornerà in Nigeria sconfitta e invecchiata. Vorrei dirle: e se questo Antonio diventa un altro carceriere, che ne sai? Ma poi penso che una roccia come Joy io non l’ho mai incontrata, una che ogni centesimo avanzato dal debito lo mandava ai cinque fratelli, che ci hanno costruito una casa di dodici stanze a Benin City. Una volta mi ha detto: «La vita che ho fatto è una cosa brutta. Sono colpevole, nessuno si può fidare di me». Ma ai puri come lei basta poco, pochissimo, per cacciare l’inferno sotto un tappeto e tornare a convincersi che una seconda possibilità c’è sempre.
Translation - English I BUY THE WHITE DRESS AT THE PORTA PALAZZO
Joy has a smile that is more irresistible than usual today. She comes hopping out of the shower with extensions of copper coloured trickling braids. Her face and long black legs lengthen, she’s wearing a striking white loin cloth and bra and she sinks into the leather sofa that I keep on thinking has been taken out of a rubbish dump. She softly hums, ‘A week ago I got married’. What, you got married? You were gloomy and disheartened, they had given you the deportation order condemning you to Nigeria from where you had fled in order to end up selling yourself in worn-out fields outside of Turin; so much pain and bruises from drunk Moroccans, by meeting you nothing has changed in the starved outskirts of Benin City, and now tell me about the white dress, any one which, even for 20 Euros from the Porta Palazzo market as long as it is white? And who would be the lucky man? ‘Antonio, my friend who found me a job at the co-operative’. But Joy, he is sixty years old and you’re 28. ‘For me he is like a father. He’s good, he helps me, he doesn’t want me to live at his house, I continue to live my life but he married me so that I have documents to stay in Italy’. Staying in Italy, having documents made: Joy speaks of nothing else. It’s the obsession of a deceived and messed about Nigerian woman, 10 Euros per sexual encounter because Italians prefer the whites of the East, and the infibulated blacks, almost all of them from the southeast of the poor and violent big African State, offer sex at a discount. There are nearly ten thousand in Italy, more than half of them are prostitutes according to the data of Caritas, and hundreds end up as dead bodies among the weeds. But not Joy, she has found her happy ending: an ex-client who stopped taking her to bed and rescued her from clandestinity. A father, in his way.
Joy sleeps on a foldaway bed in the kitchen in a run-down two-storey appartment that is shared with two friends in the Barriera di Milano district of Turin. It’s an area renowned for drugs and crime but to Joy it’s paradise compared to Benin City. The first time that I met her, she was wolfing down rigatoni in tomato sauce, she had not been an enslaved prostitute for a short while, but she had worked for 6,031 Euros an hour before tax. ‘I am happy, it’s normal work, I have made it’, she said in her Italian without articles. She had earned something while interpreting for a documentary (see box) where she tells of a heart-rending dream: her mother, who died two years ago, arrived to take her onto a snowy road on which Joy was shivering on foot, squeezed into ridiculous shorts that whores wear. She took her child home and cooked a lot of food, as though they had never eaten before.
We have travelled far in the world of Joy, myself and Elena Perlino, the photographer; realising how our laws are nothing compared to the miseries in Africa and to the illogical and tenacious hopes of those who don’t have a choice. Joy arrived in Italy in July 2003 on a plane from Nigeria to France, then on a train for Turin, to the home of a fellow countrywoman. ‘I knew her sister in Nigeria, she got a job in Italy by cleaning. I said to her to take me, but I don’t have money. We will pay, she said, repay us later.’ Many people arrived in this way, with a visa for Europe obtained by a racket thanks to corrupt officials. Joy had begun to understand how many people take out loans of 50 thousand Euros, the debt to pay off the pimp who managed a nourished enslaved park. ‘I trusted her, I knew her family. I knew that some women came here to be prostitutes, but it wasn’t compulsory; whoever wanted would do it, whoever didn’t found other work. I thought this was the case.’ Whereas in Turin they say that there isn’t an alternative, ‘so one night I went out with the others. The first client was an ugly thing, yes, it hurt… I wasn’t able, I didn’t earn any money in the first week, then I learned. Every night until the morning, six/seven clients, more on Saturdays. I also learnt to escape, when I knew they would steal my money and mobile phone’. Later Joy became pregnant, she says that the condom split but those who know her well know that with regular clients she would do it without protection for 20 more Euros. The pimp plied her with Cytotec, a drug used for ulcers that causes abortions, haemorrhages, pain, the risk of lacerating the uterus. She was ill for a month but she wasn’t distressed: so many women had passed along and didn’t die, at least those that she knew of. She decided to leave the street one night, during a round-up.
Besides giving money to her pimp, Joy paid the Albanians 200 Euros a month as rent for her place, her piece of pavement. ‘I pay to work here, I’m above-board’, she nearly spits in the face of the policemen. They explain to her that nothing is above-board and she understands. Three years later: ‘now I say to the pimp: enough now, I’m not going to pay anymore. I’ve given 35 thousand Euros. I left her house, she said several times I have your passport’.
The pimps are able to trap the enslaved women, they told Joy to declare that she’s Liberian, not Nigerian at the Ventimiglia border, because there was the civil war in Liberia in 2003 and a lot of its’ citizens were granted asylum in Europe. Therefore, she pretended to be Liberian, she obtained a residence permit that can be renewed as long as the National Commission for the Right of Asylum doesn’t test her knowledge. In some years time, and in the meantime, she could have an identity card and even a regular job. But Joy wants to know that it will happen later and enquires at Caritas, with sister Maresa, very sweet while her words hurl down like stones, ‘If the Commission summon you to Rome, they will make you do a test with members of the Liberian Embassy and they will discover that you have lied. The language itself is enough, Liberian is all a twittering’. Joy puts her head between her hands. ‘Why don’t you report the pimp?’ the sister throws in. ‘The law provides a residence permit for girls that denounce. Of course, it may be that your pimp is a big shot, who the police would be interested in taking in. Then you can tell me her name and I would not mention yours, I’ll only test the grounds at the police headquarters’. ‘No. Her family in Nigeria hurts my family. I don’t want to cock things up’. Joy leaves. The sister sighs, as though she’s already seen this before.
They say that Nigerian pimps use voodoo to bring the slaves to them. For Joy it’s enough to stick the English phrase: ‘No witchcraft will prevail on us. In the name of Jesus, Amen’ on the appartment door. She’s fearful of violence. It’s true, physical. ‘I won’t denounce’ she repeats ‘I will find another way’. When the Commission for the Right of Asylum summons her, she doesn’t know what to do. She turns to two associations that help women like her; one tells her absolutely not to go, maybe they give you asylum as a matter of course, it happens. The other one, with great delay, scolds her for not going. Joy is confused and betrayed. ‘How come no-one knows how it works? And nowadays?’ The deportation order has arrived, very quickly, within 15 days Joy must leave Italy. She’s officially clandestine. She permanently has a false Liberian identity card, but for how much longer will the police and the co-operative whom she works for be deceived? There’s even a risk of imprisonment for having given false details. ‘If I go to jail, it would be my fault that I believed my pimp. It’s enough that later on they allow me to stay in Italy’.
I left her thus, Joy. Burnt-out and bankrupted twice. Instead she gets married, with no obstacles to her genuine embassy, the Nigerian one, it has released her without seeing her passport, which is still in the hands of the pimp. She married Antonio, whose children are older than her, who look at her as one looks at a black whore but sees the devil, she will have her residence permit, and then citizenship. She will not return to Nigeria defeated and aged. I would like to say to her, and what if this Antonio becomes another jailer, who knows? But then I think that I’ve never met a rock like Joy, one that sends every 100th instalment of the debt to five brothers, who have built a 12-storey house in Benin City. Once she told me, ‘I’ve led a terrible life. I’m to blame, no-one can rely on me’. But to the pure ones like her a little, very little is enough to expel the inferno from under the carpet and to convince herself again that there’s always a second chance.
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Translation education
Master's degree - University of Leeds
Experience
Years of experience: 20. Registered at ProZ.com: Oct 2002.
I have done a degree (Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Modern languages - Spanish and Italian) in which I achieved oral distinctions in both Spanish and Business Italian. I have also successfully completed a Masters Degree in Translation Studies. Since graduating I have undertaken several translation assignments both on an ad hoc and contract basis while working in full-time employment but now I translate freelance full-time. I have over eight years of professional translation experience. The types of translations that I undertake are certificates, legal (contracts), medicine, clinical trials, pharmaceutical translations, driving licences, marketing/ tourism, websites, (non-technical) manuals and market research responses on car manufacturers. I have a 100% track record of delivering translations on time which is attributed to my excellent time management skills. I continuously strive to raise my awareness when translating and so I have attended a medical terminology workshop series via Proz.com to further enhance my understanding in this specialist field. The courses were about the Cardiovascular and Lymphatic Systems, Skeletal and Muscular Systems and Integumentary and Gastrointestinal, Endocrine and Urinary Systems, male and female reproductive systems. As well as translating, I also offer English proofreading/editing services and I also produce English summaries of press articles written in Italian/Spanish.
Although I was born and raised in the UK, I have a rich Indian heritage. I am completely fluent in Katchi (which is a Gujarati dialect) and I have done interpretation both simultaneously and consecutively using Katchi and English. The standard of spoken Urdu/Hindi is at an intermediate level. I successfully completed a Beginners course in Arabic in 2010 and I am hoping to take it to the next level in the near future. I am completely passionate about languages, people and diverse cultures. I take my profession very seriously so I joined the ITI (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) in the UK in order to keep up-to-date with developments within the translation industry.
Besides my linguistic capabilities, I have worked in project management in the field of market research for three years, I have also worked in customer services for seven years, and for two years, I was working in administrative roles. Therefore, together with my linguistic capability, I feel that I have an all-rounded experience portfolio that I can offer when conducting translations/interpretations.
In terms of leisurely pursuits, I am a huge fan of yoga. I practise Vinyasa yoga on a weekly basis and in the last three years, I have been on four yoga holidays and have also practised Kundalini yoga. I am a frequent gym attendee too and every now and then I do a bit of Pilates as well.
Please do not hesitate to contact me for your language needs.
Best wishes,
Salma
Keywords: Spanish, Italian, Katchi, English, proofreading, editing, translations, medicine, pharmaceuticals, medical reports. See more.Spanish, Italian, Katchi, English, proofreading, editing, translations, medicine, pharmaceuticals, medical reports, project management, customer services, administration, administrative, general text, environmental text, birth certificate, marriage certificate, transcripts, diplomas, driving licence, journalistic text, shipping contract, market research responses, linguist, linguistic, Indian, over 7.5 years professional translation experience, very experienced, automotive text, certificates, contracts, rental agreements, tourism, marketing, market research, yoga, pilates, spiritualism, spirituality, health and fitness, punctual, timely, adheres to deadlines, efficient, English proofreading, English summaries, native English speaker, clinical trials, pharmaceuticals. See less.
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