Understanding a foreign language has never been easy for me, which may explain my difficulties translating Eastern’s student catalog.

You see, I, like most students, am attempting to graduate, and May is my target.

However, the university catalog and its seemingly undecipherable dialect have done their best to thwart my plan.

The catalog’s onslaught has focused on my lack of proficiency with foreign tongues, which incidentally has nothing to do with my inability to seduce Shakira.

The Spanish language and I have a long-standing history of contempt, and the catalog has done everything in its power to foster that unhealthy relationship.

When I was a freshmen in high school and possessed all the maturity my 14 years of existence had provided, I got a D in Spanish, partly because I struggled to comprehend the language and partly because I was a nuisance in class.

When I came to Eastern, the catalog laughed at me because it knew that my D, coupled with a C in Spanish my sophomore year of high school, translated into two more semesters of the language.

My sophomore year at Eastern I took Spanish, and I managed to get a B. I enrolled in Spanish II at a community college that summer, and the catalog began to snicker.

After many miserable weeks of working construction each day trying to learn Espanol at night, I received a D in the course.

When I returned to Eastern, two translators, one from the foreign languages department and another from the Records Office, explained to me that, according to the catalog’s convoluted text, the D that I had received over the summer would absolve me of my language requirement, but I would receive no course credit.

However, a passage in the catalog translates to read that if I went back to the said community college and got an A in another course, my D would be elevated such that I would receive course credit for it.

That didn’t make sense to me, but then again the catalog hardly ever does. My D in high school Spanish was unacceptable despite my good marks in other classes, but the catalog said the same standard did not apply to the community college realm.

Well, I never attempted to elevate my D, but with my Spanish requirement filled, I thought the catalog and I would be at peace. That was until I applied for graduation and the person who was reviewing my file, a woman paid to translate the great book, misinterpreted its verse.

She passed her mistranslation on to my adviser and, although he is a journalist and journalists are taught to question authority, he was not about to question a reader of the great catalog.

He informed me, much to my dismay, that I would have to pick up an additional four hours my last semester to graduate on time. He didn’t offer much of a reason why, just that a reader of the great book had spoken.

With the help of a more resourceful and perhaps more interested professor, I managed to straighten out the situation. We discovered the mistranslation, the reader of the great book had thought that I was planning on using the hours I hadn’t received from the D in Spanish to graduate, which I wasn’t.

So, after two years of high school Spanish and two semesters of the language in college, I can barely order a burrito, but I can translate several parts of the catalog.

Two semesters isn’t enough to learn any language well enough to use it, which is the fallacy of the foreign language requirement. But, with the right teacher, a student could possibly be taught to understand the catalog in two semesters.

However, no one has proposed adding courses on the university catalog to the Foreign Languages Department, so I can only hope other students have better translators than I did.