Someone's Typing in Ukraine

I spent the weekend and my early morning hours this week translating broken English into Americanized social media content for Ukranian journalists.

Within two minutes of waking, I am carefully rearranging snippets of horror to help pierce the veil of comfort on Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok with the visceral descriptions of war in a country I have never seen.

The dispatches are dark and heartbreaking.

14-year-old boy struck in the head by shrapnel bleeds to death when rescuers can't reach him.

Six-year-old shot in the family car

Mother of 12 and combat medic killed in fire fight

I learned an American journalist was shot dead while sitting on my couch well before American media could confirm it. It felt surreal.

Each day, I volunteer with an unlikely band of mostly American proofreaders brought together by a passion to right wrongs. We are teachers, former journalists and editors of various time zones using our language to help the journalists hiding in Kyiv and other cities under siege shout their stories to the world.

The news bulletins come across in chunks of Ukrainian text, another band of keyboard translators sift the content into workable English, and then I and the other proofreaders finesse the misplaced prepositional phrases, verb tenses, and nuanced idioms in the way only native speakers can.

There are shifts when news out of the war zone is non-stop and others that are slow. One proofreader tells Dad jokes in the chat room to lighten the mood, and others on the ground talk about the simple treat of neighborhood sushi before the war. And then there are the signing off salutations that reawaken the fear.  " Air raid siren, I have to go ...or I am going to try to sleep with the sirens and hope I don't wake to explosions."

While I write this the other proofreaders are online wondering if our group has been hacked by saboteurs or worse that something has happened to our Ukrainian friends because the news feed has stopped for more than an hour. 

Finally, a new post appears. 

None of us know what it says yet.

But we patiently eye the "someone's typing" bubbles, relieved for any sign of life on the other side of world.