* Enigmatic Mermaid *

Sotaques. Nos últimos tempos tenho apanhado bastante com o sotaque em inglês dos falantes mais diversos: russos, chineses, franceses, sul-africanos, indianos e até brasileiros que pronunciam "aussie" como "oz". Depois de amanhã tenho outro dia daqueles. Tentei me habituar ouvindo estes clipes, mas fiquei tão nervosa que achei melhor desistir. Alguém tem algum truque para lidar com sotaques, fora as legendas?

Sei não. Acho que é mesmo uma questão de hábito. Não pego chineses lendo transcrições fonéticas todos os dias, mas me lembro que já houve uma época que achava o sotaque alemão difícil, e hoje tiro de letra.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Ten things I have interpreted about this year.

1. Aluminum (don't ask)
2. Biodiversity
3. The wonderful world of SOA
4. New and exciting developments in roller bearing design
5. Hub ports
6. Retailing
7. HMOs and managed care
8. Programming
9. Branding (at least 3 times, what a popular subject)
10. IEC 61508 (more than I ever wanted to know about functional safety, a whole week in the booth)

Warning: do not try this at home.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Depressing Conference Starters. "Ladies and gentlemen, today is a very sad day for Brazil and for the organizers of this conference. Our dear friend and renowned specialist Jane Doe, who would be giving the talk on Topic A, will not be able to join us this morning because she was one of the passengers on flight 3054".

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Valhei-me São Jerônimo. Toda cautela é pouca quando você vai interpretar em uma reunião entre advogados.

Além do clima super tenso, do medo dos grampos e da paúra de errar um termo jurídico, se os advogados forem americanos, não tem coffee-break. Na mesa, água, café e balinhas de menta, sem um mísero pão de queijo para matar a fome.

É uma pauleira sem pausa para amenidades que pode se prolongar muitas horas após o seu cérebro ter adquirido a consistência de um quilo de carne moída. O ar-condicionado desligado eleva a temperatura da sala a uns 40 graus centígrados e resseca a sua garganta, produzindo condições ideais para um acesso de tosse.

No momento em que um impasse provoca a dispersão dos participantes pelos corredores em busca de um cigarro, você assume a sua melhor cara de samambaia e procura se afastar ao máximo de todos os grupinhos. O assunto que estão discutindo é tão confidencial que você sente que melhor era não ter ouvidos, nem olhos, nem existência corpórea.

Vocês voltam para a sala e o advogado resolve inesperadamente ler um contrato. Obviamente, ele não providenciou uma cópia para você. Nem por isso vai deixar de lê-lo rapidamente, porque a intenção é justamente confundir todos. Para melhorar as coisas, tem uma baita interferência no portátil. Você tem que interpretar na posição do bule de chá, com a mão grudada no quadril, segurando o transmissor em total imobilidade, porque se você movê-lo um milímetro vai ser aquela chiadeira.

Você está interpretando em pé, andando de lá para cá, porque desistiram de colocar um microfone de mesa, e você mal e mal está ouvindo a torrente de termos jurídicos. Você não quer invadir o espaço sagrado da mesa de reuniões com uma profanante garrafinha d'água e por isso não tem como molhar os lábios durante a sua meia hora. E de repente, o acesso de tosse vem com a violência de um terremoto. A outra intérprete está na sala e assume o microfone enquanto você tosse até lacrimejar. São 8 horas da noite e depois de ameaçarem com mais duas horas de overtime, eles decidem encerrar a reunião e retomar no dia seguinte às 8 da manhã. Você agradece a São Jerônimo e jura de pé junto que nunca mais vai trabalhar em uma reunião de advogados em sua vida.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Disaster. You come across major stuff in the booth sometimes. This week I'm working on a safety-related assignment and they showed us a video on Piper Alpha. It was kind of cheesy, with renactements that remided me of something you would catch on Discovery Channel on a Sunday afternoon. But boy, what a terrible sequence of mistakes. Tomorrow I think they are showing us Bhopal. And no, it's not the Yes Men at the podium.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

In case anybody was wondering...

Labels: My_Life_as_a_Translator, My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Lawyers say the damnest things. I told my friend L. about the shinto shrine short-circuit and she replied that sometimes it's not something that is too close to home that throws you off. A very unexpected word in a quasi-predictable context can do the trick. She illustrated her point with a little tale.

Once she was interpreting in an arbitration meeting awash with legalese when the speaker casually remarked that "certas decisões arbitrais mais parecem um ornitorrinco". The effort she put into searching her memory for the word platypus- which she managed to deliver without resorting to "you know, that strange animal with duck feet and a bill that is actually an egg-laying mammal"- was so intense that her brain's CPU burned out for the rest of the day.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Short-Circuit. This is how it happens. You are in the booth, interpreting a lecture on high tech office buildings. You studied the terminology in the powerpoints, had a look at the architecture pages on Oxford-Duden and are expecting transoms, raised floors, HVAC systems, sustainable buildings and even gold collar workers to pop out of your speaker's mouth at any given moment.

But your speaker decides to make a long detour. You to think "how fun, we're going on a ride" as he starts to talk about the collapse of civilizations that were not wise enough to conserve their resources.

From the Mayan Empire to Easter Island and Greenland and you're easily following the track, feeling comfortable and delighted to be interpreting sentences that actually mean something to you. Not only can you understand where he is getting at, you actually have great sympathy for the political statement behind the words you are interpreting.

Suddenly, the world tour veers to Japan and things get a little murky. Maybe statiticky is a better word. You can sense there is some interference, but can't really pin it down to the fact that you're currently reading Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami.

You are still tagging along. Your speaker goes on talking about warlords, the mountainous terrain once covered by forests (your mind beeps at this word, because forests are a big thing in the book, and an image of the forest as you had imagined it while reading the book flashes by; you tense up feeling that the harmless spin around the globe is about to turn dangerous).

And then comes the word that completely short-circuits your brain. Shrine. Shinto shrines, he repeats as an overpowering image from the book impresses itself upon your mind, blocking out all else, including the correct translation for shrine, which is at the tip of your tongue.

While the audience is hanging and some part of your brain processor is looking for the translation for shrine, you remember vividly an important scene in the book. Hoshino, goaded by Colonel Sander's, goes looking for the entrance stone. They meet in a shrine, needless to say. The entrance stone Mr. Nakata wants to find is right there in the woods by the shrine and Hoshino is going to get it for him. You see the entrance stone, you see the woods, you see Hoshino and the shrine.

In the meantime, that part of your brain that is looking for the linguistic equivalent of shrine realizes that if you dwell in that image of Japan, you're screwed. The image is too powerful, too VISUAL and NARRATIVE, and has you spellbound. Trying to save your skin, the processing brain goes into Thesaurus mode, airlifting you from dangerous Japanese soil. You remember that other religions also have shrines and the expression "Are you going to temple?" leaps out of some dusty corner and there you have it.

Templo. It comes to your lips, passes through the interpreting unit and goes into the audience's receivers. In the nick of time.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Who said interpreting was hard?

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

English Next. I know I am supposed to be dead to blogging. But once in a while I work on an interesting conference.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

For Novice Interpreters. The tone is a bit discouraging and patronizing. Vega was set up by established interpreters wishing to provide useful and cautionary information to the newcomers to the profession. I mean, just the fact that it's listed under Interpreter Wannabe in the AIIC website, come on, aren't there more respectful ways of calling newcomers?

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

yours truly on a day that will live in infamy for the Bulls



riding limos everywhere...

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Back from Windy City. Last Saturday I arrived from a most excellent trip to Chicago. I was there interpreting for a conference and had a wonderful time with the group of executives.

I got a chance to take a peek of Milwakee too. Sadly not long enough to take the Miller brewery tasting tour.

I had never been to Chicago and simply adored the city. It's much more beautiful and tourist-friendly than NY. I have some pictures. I especially like the one showing Denise and I in the booth, I will try to upload them later. Still on the subject of first times, during this trip I had my first hands-on experiences of an NBA game and a SUV limo, dubbed "The Centipede" by the awestruck Brazilians. We stayed at the Chicago Hilton and Towers, which was gorgeous for a Hilton. I didn't have time to see any museums or even the aquarium, but boy did I get stuffed on baby back ribs. Brazilians love ribs, who would have imagined. To sum it up, it was great, though I didn't get to see everything I wanted and almost had a ribs overdose. I hope I can visit Chicago again soon.

On the plane back to Brazil I sat next to an IT manager who was not only charming and cute but also has tons of documentation to translate into Portuguese. How lucky is that?

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Conference Interpreting: Quality in the Ears of the User.

Abstract: What do the recipients of interpretation mean by "good interpretation"? What are the features they consider most important and what do they find irritating? Following a brief overview of user expectation surveys, the paper contends that the target audience is an essential variable in the interpretation equation. Quality of interpretation services is evaluated by users in terms of what they actually receive in relation to what they expected. Consequently, measurements of service quality that do not include user expectations miss the point.

I think I posted it before, but make sure you browse the wide array of articles available at Meta (1966-2001), where this paper was published.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Rebellious Words . " A tongue twister is defined by its propensity to provoke pronunciation problems for just about anybody who attempts to articulate it. In a sense it is like a virus: it strikes at a collective, provoking the same symptoms in each individual. And as with a virus, a minority seems to be immune!

What I call 'rebellious words' are in my view related to tongue twisters, but have characteristics all their own. I'll start by offering a simple definition of a rebellious word:

A word that blocks the flow of interpreting time and again, establishing a pattern; a word with which one 'has a thing,' as people are apt to say; a word that produces a kind of allergic reaction in the interpreter as soon as she/he hears it.


All other interpreters might find the term perfectly harmless, but when you encounter one of your personal 'rebellious words,' you must intensify your concentration to get through it, dedicating comparatively much more energy to this specific obstacle than to other parts of the discourse that are visibly more technical and difficult. "

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Smoking Out Your Brain. Here's an interesting example of an interpreting pitfall, cleverly avoided by my booth mate this week. Just to clarify: sometimes the words involved aren't difficult at all, but because they fall simultaneously in a zone of false phonetic and true logical contiguity, the chance for mistakes is high.

The speaker was talking about retailing and gave an example of how cigarrete packs can be contained in cartons and cartons may be contained in cases and cases contain both of the preceding units. She went back and forth, twisted and turned around to explain how the retailing information system retrieves information about the number of packs, cartons and cases that have been sold in a store depending on how they are bundled. I think it went on for about two minutes, but it felt much longer, and this is why:

The linguistic equivalence of this set of words in Portuguese is as follows:

pack= maço
carton= pacote
case= caixa

Since pack and pacote sound alike and carton and pack are being used in a logical sequence, there is a temporary short-circuit in the interpreter's mind. Bear in mind that this all takes place in a split second and that there is no room for mistakes, because if you say that there are "10 pacotes em um pacote" you're obviously going to blow it big time. Everytime the word pack is said, a mental alert flag is raised. You must step back and disentangle the linguistic crossover while at the same time maintaing the logical lines straight. It's quite tricky.

You may be wondering, is there a workaround for this? This is what my colleague did: she wrote down the equivalences above on a sheet of paper and interpreted with her eyes glued to that aide-mémoire.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

Death by Packet and Smarting the Stupid War. Telexpo was a drowsy affair, at least for the interpreter crew. Very little work to be done, which means that the gringos didn't fly down to Brazil because they were too cozy watching CNN. We idled the days away in our booths, reading magazines, gossiping, walking the corridors and eventually stopping at the digital TV booth to look at the alarming difference of the images shown by Al Jazeera and CNN, enough to turn you schizofrenic on the spot, let alone the fact that my first husband was also sporting one of those Serviços Oficiais- Intérprete badges.

That ought to have been quite a momentous encounter, but it's such a done deal with him, everything so perfectly settled in mind and heart that I got more of a thrill by soaking in Al Jazeera, reading the newspaper that made my blood bubble with rage, laughing at the Founded and Losted sign, that is, when I was not too busy obsessing about the war.

Death by packet, title of this modest and obviously pointless post, was a line from a keynote speaker. He used the term in Japanese, and explained that it means to surf the Internet so much with your cellphone that you're doomed to death by the avalanche of packets piling up on your phone bill. It was a great enthusiastic talk, the interface looks brilliant, shiny and sleek and very much like this good old Internet of ours and the name of the thing is i-mode, in case the Hairy Eyeball is wondering. By the way, the number of active users is not uptodate in that site. My keynote speaker said it's 37.5 million users in Japan alone. And they are looking for a partner in Brazil, so there you have, a golden chance for the Brazilian carriers who are regular readers of my blog.

Maybe next week my mood will be lifted by this speaker, who I'm going to interpret on a videoconference, yet another proof that gringos are not flying anywhere at least any time soon. And next Friday, there is this ritzy 15-minute assignment for one of the seven sisters of oil. Such a sweet deal and quite glamorous as it is one of the events paving the way to the Brazilian Grand Prix. But maybe the most politically-inclined readers among me will understand that it sickens me considerably to have anything at all to do with an oil company right now, except perhaps filling up at the gas station.

I've been having these self-aggrandisizing fantasies in which the speaker will start praising the American invasion of Iraq and that I will simply put down my pen, because on top of everything, this is going to be a consecutive assignment, get up from my chair and leave resolutely, slamming the door behind me.

Of course, this is strictly a canapé, champagne and lubricants affair. Not a chance of that happening. But sometimes, I almost wish it would.

Labels: My_Life_as_an_Interpreter

A Inconfidência dos Lusófonos. Sim, eu sei que faz tempo que não publico nada aqui no blogue, e com boa razão: trabalho, falta de tempo, e uma preguiça ancestral de escrever em inglês. Isso explica a descarada tentativa de escrever em português, pra ver se sai alguma coisa que preste ou que pelo menos encha de curiosidade os meus 33 leitores anglófonos. Dá-lhe Google Translate.

Hoje, a intrépida intérprete que vos escreve, pegou o metrô, vestida com trajes apropriados para o calor africano que se abate sobre as ruas de São Paulo e desembarcou no Bresser para mais um dia de língua e ouvidos para que vos quero. Mentirinha de efeito não dói. Foi uma moleza, e o melhor, a minha co-cabina era a deliciosa J. Já tinhamos trabalhado juntas uma vez este ano, ocasião em que constatamos que meu santo bate com o dela. Misturar Ogum com a Federação Israelita de São Paulo pode dar certo, não duvide. Ao final, não resisti dizer que adoro o estilo dela. Sua voz levemente arrastada, de timbre metálico, tem um toque cômico. Ela tem que se cuidar para não fazer a platéia rir apesar de o palestrante não ter feito nenhuma gracinha, ou para não transformar uma piadinha esquálida em uma trovoada de gargalhadas.

Estou com pouco trabalho esta semana, o que reaviva os planos de escrever no blogue com freqüência um pouco menos bissexta, portanto fiquem ligados. Tenho também que preparar a minha apresentação como paraninfa da turma de formandos em tradução da Alumni. Essa vai ser boa, porque me sinto em crise profissional. Deus dá nozes a quem está com dor de dentes, or as Vitek put it:

"Several translators told me that they are addicted to translating. If they go cold turkey for too long (when there is no work), they feel the pain, and it is not just the usual pain connected with meager accounts receivable. I know what they mean. I think they miss the magic moment that comes from understanding the natural order of things, when, for a fleeting moment, we become a secretary of the big clockmaker, architect and translator, and take the dictation at record speed without making a single typo."

Labels: Live_from_Merlandia, My_Life_as_an_Interpreter