In this talk I will discuss two transversality results that are standard but perhaps not so widely understood: (1) Dragnev's theorem that somewhere injective curves in symplectizations are regular for generic translation-invariant J, and (2) my theorem on automatic transversality in 4-dimensional symplectic cobordisms (which generalizes earlier results for closed curves by Gromov, Hofer-Lizan-Sikorav and Ivashkovich-Shevchishin). The common feature of these two theorems is that both can be proved by considering the restriction of the usual linearized Cauchy-Riemann operator to the "generalized normal bundle" of a (not necessarily immersed) holomorphic curve.