What is a proposal, anyway?

I imagined a bulk of papers heaped on my desk, books toppling over the purple ottoman like a waterfall over the carpet still not vacuumed. That might have been my junior year, but as I wrap up the details of my senior project proposal, there seems to be glints of wonder abounding in the process.

Academia is an uncertain feeling, but finding knowledge is not. Lately I have spent many nights hauling thick books back to my dorm room under the cloak of evening. By now, I suppose I have  22 books on my shelf - all borrowed, but only half are dedicated to my senior thesis. Despite this gathering of materials, the proposal has yet to be entirely finished, it waits in my documents folder to be finalized.

But what is a proposal? The least romantic thing, the beginning of the end in the case of my undergraduate career. The hardest part was deciding how to bend on one knee and deliver a lean guide to my final two semesters to the director of my department. Will I be reading or producing? Analyzing or recreating? What will it mean? What will it be used for?

Waste is a despicable thing, and this belief no doubt influenced the desire to create. Who said, after all, that the epitome of your college struggle had to be encapsulated in a elongated paper, presented to the world and then locked into a library? Certainly not me.

I've designed, God willing, a creative project. A translation project. An active work that allows me to bend my perception of language, to build upon basic skills, and then discuss via analysis essay the process and meaning behind this. To discover and explain what fascinates me about language, and languages.

Now I am translating a short story from English into German and Russian. Even with only two pages of the German loosely screwed together, I can see errors and conflicts in syntax. Verbs. We use smoldering for embers, but is German is it used more idiomatically for love than in English? I've used this adjective twice - does it mean the same thing the third time? Must it be generalized or specialized?

And of course, there is the hope that my language skills will improve. That my German will blossom into a upper B2 butterfly, and my Russian - well, it will be conversational, at least.

But where will all this end up? Where will this proposal take me? Will it leave me at the alter? Well, I guess we'll find out at the defense. Until then the invitations - tidbits and nibblets about translation and morphology to come.