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5th ProZ.com Translation Contest: "Travel" » English to Vietnamese

Competition in this pair is now closed.

Source text in English

All travel is now merely a means of moving a camera from place to place, all travellers are ruled by the all-powerful lens. Visitors old-fashioned enough to wish only to stand and look with their anachronistic eyes are shoved aside by the photographers, who take it for granted that while they do their ritual focusing, nothing else may move or cross their vision. Those peculiar souls without a camera must step aside for those more properly occupied, must wait while the rituals take place, and must bide their time while whole coaches stop and unleash upon the landscape the Instamatic God. And the populations of whole countries seeing themselves cannibalised, swallowed up, vacuumed into the black-ringed staring eye, wrench what they can from the cannibals. You want picture my house, my camel? You pay.

None of this would matter, perhaps, if anything worthwhile was being accomplished. If all the constant busyness and clicking produced, at its end, what had not existed before, images of beauty captured or truth told. But, sadly, this isn't so. The camera is simply graffiti made respectable.

The camera is the means by which we stamp ourselves on everything we see, under cover of recording the Wonders of the World already wonderfully
recorded by professionals and on sale at every corner bookshop and newsagent. But what use to show Aunt Maud, back home, postcards of the Tuscan landscape, since we are not in the picture to prove that we were there?

No stretch of rocks has verity unless I am within it. No monument exists
but for my wife, leaning against it. No temple is of interest without my face beside it, grinning. With my camera I appropriate everything beautiful, possess it, shrink it, domesticate it, and reproduce it on my blank sitting-room wall to prove to a selected audience of friends and family the one absolutely vital fact about these beauties: I saw them, I was there, I photographed them, and, ergo, they are.

from "Amateur Photography: the World as it isn't and our Fred" by Jill Tweedie in the Guardian

The winning entry has been announced in this pair.

There were 6 entries submitted in this pair during the submission phase. The winning entry was determined based on finals round voting by peers.

Competition in this pair is now closed.


Entries (6 total) Expand all entries

Entry #3061
Winner
Voting points1st2nd3rd
266 x41 x20
Entry #2464
Voting points1st2nd3rd
143 x41 x20
Entry #2923
Voting points1st2nd3rd
123 x400
Entry #3046
Voting points1st2nd3rd
71 x41 x21 x1
Entry #3005
Voting points1st2nd3rd
61 x41 x20
Entry #3055
Voting points1st2nd3rd
1001 x1