Hi
I´m dead – yes, really dead.
Reason: I´ve to write a skilled work (I´m not sure if this is the totally correct translation for it because I´m still at school) about „The evolution of birds“.
The ones among you who are a bit interested in (feathered) dinosaurs might ask: „Where is the problem? There´ve been found a lot of fossiled feathered dinosaurs and early birds in China during the last years!“ And THAT IS THE PROBLEM. Almost all books about these fossils are written in English – I can´t find any translations in German. Books about the archaeopteryx (as fas as I know all fossils of archaeopteryx were found in Germany) are available in German BUT my teacher said I shouldn´t concentrate on the archaeopteryx. Her argument is that people (I think she talked about herself) know already much about it – she wants news from the evolution of birds. Plus I´ve to give a presentation about the archaeopteryx in the fourth semester (now I´m in the third).
What should I do now?!
I got a book from the library yesterday which has some very interesting images and surely very helpful texts. But I´ve to search for almost every third word in the dictionary and I often can´t even find the words in it. I haven´t had any English lessons for more than a year now – the only time I think about English is while beeing on dA. And additonal to the normal words there´re a lot of technical terms (of course one can´t look up those in a normal dictionary). And even if I could translate these books there would be another problem: Most of the truely interesting books are not available in German libraries – they are in the U.S. or in GB. First I don´t know if those books are allowed to be lent in other countries and second such a lending would be very expensive...and buying is also impossible for me. I can´t afford a single (!) book which costs more than 90.00 €.
I don´t know what to do. My teacher kills me if I tell her now that I´ve problems with getting enough stuff for my work (it´s too late to change the theme). There´re a lot of websites with information about feathered dinosaurs (sadly almost none about early bird formes) but there is the next problem. We ´re a not allowed to take most of the information for our skilled works from the internet. The reason for this rule is quite easy: internet´s infos are too unsure.
I could cry now. Why did they only find the archaeopteryx in Germany and no other feathered dinosaurs?! Or better: Why are too less people interested in the evolution of birds to translate those damn books?
That´s a terrible situation for me. I hate it when I don´t know what to do in order to fix a problem. The only thing I know exactly is: I can´t work with those English books . My knowledge of English is simply too low.
I´m desperate.

Sorry for getting on your nerves with my incompetency.