Netnet Camomot  Yesterday morning, I was trying to simplify details for a tarpaulin. Familiar with PowerPoint presentations that resemble a page of a book? The kind filled with too many words, even President Rody Duterte’s drug matrix would look simple compared to it. The operative words in PowerPoint are power and point, with each frame representing a recap of your thoughts. And it’s now your responsibility to expound on those thoughts once you’re speaking in front of an audience. Don’t read your presentation like you’re reading your memoirs: Once upon a time… If you’ve used cue cards before, then, you must be familiar with this. A tarpaulin should be more concise, using lesser words that do get the message across. It’s usually displayed somewhere, with people looking at it from afar. Thus, each time you’re preparing details, and editing and approving a layout for one, you have to imagine how it would appear once it’s printed. There are too many tarpaulins out there. How to make one stand out? That’s the question. President Duterte, though, has no problem with standing out. He’s probably the only leader of a country to direct a p**** i** at a US president. He may have lost millions of dollars of promised investments, but it’s now proven he doesn’t make pa-cute with anyone. But there are people who say it was a case of lost in translation. Well, some Pinoys did try to translate p**** i** to a version more familiar with English-speaking countries. And it still doesn’t sound sweet. President Duterte has always been a public relations nightmare, even before he expressed any intention of joining the presidential race. A p**** i** thrown here, personal tales of killings thrown there, and a colorful life thrown everywhere. The word “throwing” by its lonesome could already mean throwing people off helicopters for him. This is the former Davao City mayor whose reign has resulted to a city that other cities in the Philippines could only wish for—no smoking, no drinking and karaoke beyond a certain hour, no overspeeding. Its pedestrian overpasses have “30 kph” in a font size that must be one million. You do get this feeling that Davao City’s secrets to success are not merely hinged on smoking, drinking, singing, and overspeeding. That there’s more to it than meets the eye. And the recent bombing of its night market must be a clue? Hmmm. That’s why the extrajudicial killings have some friends now debating on its pros and cons: There should be due process! Drug addicts are human beings! They have rights! And does that include the right to remain silent? With silence, your words will never be misinterpreted. There will be no cases of lost in translation. You keep your mouth shut and let others read your thoughts if they can. That’s the same as receiving a set of photos, with no accompanying piece and captions, prompting you to wonder if people now regard you as Wonder Woman: I wonder what these photos are supposed to represent; yes, I can see they’re projects, but what projects? “Can you read my mind?/Do you know what it is you do to me?/Don’t know who you are/Just a friend from another star.” That kind of mindeading. Presidents, though, have to translate their thoughts without adding colorful words, otherwise the listener to their speeches and the reader of their statements would need a translator. When you receive such confusing messages too often, you would have to reach for a Dolfenal, like what some editors do whenever they edit pieces that lack the basics: who, what, when, where, why, how. There’s this joke about a panda that enters a café where he orders and eats a sandwich, shoots the café’s other customers, and leaves. When the waiter asks him why, he tosses a badly punctuated book at him, and says, “Well, I’m a panda. Look it up.” There on the book is this line: “Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.” This joke has resulted to a book on punctuation, Lynne Truss’s “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” Lost in translation can mean bad punctuation, bad grammar, bad English but people do survive despite… Unlike the panda’s shooting victims, that is. The worst, though, is bad gossip. Well, is there any other kind, like good gossip? Haha! It’s already gossip and if it’s the bad kind, can there be any worse lost-in-translation cases than that? Years-long friendships are destroyed after the bad gossip is whispered from one curious ear to another. Woe to those whose faith and loyalty are wanting, for they will easily believe the whisperer. There’s this American movie filmed in Japan. Titled “Lost in Translation” to emphasize the miscommunication between its American and Japanese characters and the unsaid words between Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), it has scenes where you, the audience, would want to be there and translate for everyone already. Happy endings are not the norm in this oh so cruel world. Some translations will be lost forever when one of the parties involved decides to quit and move forward. And there are people that thrive while in the midst of a loss in translation, with their happy ending dependent on the number of people who will listen to their translation. Pathetic, eh? So, better finish that tarpaulin already—at least there’s one getting its message across clearly.