“la parole exportée”

I’ve just posted a note on Facebook to call people’s attention to my Facebook Page here, the one that I set up for my professional service, not my Profile page.

Understandably, my Facebook Page doesn’t attract many visitors. Thanks to View Insights I know that there are a few visitors, they probably take one look, and move on in search of more interesting stuff. What’s in it for them? Nothing of value, unlike “10 Hot Tips To Get Caviar With Breakfast Tomorrow.”

Translation may be a boring topic, but that’s mainly due to the fact that people take translation for granted, so they have forgotten its real value. So the short comment I wrote to go with the note got me thinking. And this leads me to:

Imagine a world without translators. By now you know that I mean, of course, human translators.

photo credit: we-make-money-not-art

How would countries and people communicate, beside telepathy, smoke signals, or learning 6,000 different languages? Some argue that translators are not needed anymore, that machines are a cost-efficient replacement, that a universal language would be sufficient. Some believe in science-fiction and Santa Claus. But I don’t think that even in prehistoric times humans spoke one language. My guess is that they had translators already, back then. And translating is probably, probably, one of the oldest trades.

Back to our modern world: Take the current French PR mission in China. How could the French government hope to talk to the Chinese government, given the present situation, through robots and GTalk, and not start a war between France and China? A machine-translated document almost escalated into a diplomatic incident between The Netherlands and Israel last year.

Are you are a reader? If you read foreign fiction, how would you understand the plot, get a mental representation of the characters, unless someone, picking words with utmost care, weighing this one against that one, hadn’t for example produced the best translation of Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Are you interested in what is going on in the world? Are you prepared to learn at least 5 or 6 equally difficult languages?

Are you a marketer, a businessman trying to sell goods and services in foreign markets? How are you going to convince the rest of the world of your intrinsic importance, unless someone, somewhere is there to relay your pitch? Do you think that Seth Godin wrote this in French?

So I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it difficult to imagine a world without translators. Or am I mistaken?

When my children bought my dog for me in 2002, that year’s letter for pets’ names was the letter T. I went to the vet’s when the puppy was born and picked up a leaflet of suggestions. I settled for Taïga because I wanted a short name, one with Russian connections, and suitable for a white dog.

I found that a few English-sounding names were suggested, and they made me wonder: who on Earth would want to call their dog Tablespoon or Takeout, is beyond my understanding. Only people with absolutely no knowledge of English would use those names, that’s probably why they are suggested. I wonder what kind of funky French names some poor pets have been given in non-French speaking countries?

The name Taïga itself does raise a few eyebrows, so I explain… (but I’ve given up explaining that ‘No, she’s not a poodle, she’s a Bichon Frisé,’ a very different breed).

The first time Taïga set a paw on English soil, the Customs Officer took one amused look at her and said: “Hello Curly, how’s life?” So now Taïga has an English name too. When we are in England and people ask her name, she’s “Curly,” it’s easy and self-explanatory. Sometimes you have to be practical.

She’s got another name too. As I was standing in a queue at the local garden center on December 23 one year, a young guy joked to his girlfriend: ‘Regarde, un chien de Noël (Look, a Christmas dog)!’ I turned round and thanked him for being a poet.

For all intents and purposes, I don’t mind people calling her other names, because she knows only one, the one I gave her. She’s my dog and to her, all that matters is that I’m the leader of the pack!

On Monday, I have an appointment to lunch with the associate who keeps my interpreting schedule. She is one of the team of three who run this rather specific business, but I am equally in touch with the other two, one of whom kept my schedule for a few years.

We call them a “secretariat” but it only dawned on me recently that they are really our Virtual Assistants, but only for interpreting, and only for calendar planning (no billing, etc.), and we pay them quarterly fees for it.

photo credit: Miss Gong & The Flickers

Why do we have this specialized system in place? As interpreters cannot be there physically at all times to pick up their home phone to take offers, a specialized service was developed around the 70s. Remember that there were no cell phones at the time, and only a handful had answering machines to enable them to pick up messages. Add to this the fact that some meetings took place in far away places, and someone other than your kids’ babysitter had to take business calls.

The system is not automatic as it would be if you were automatically transferring all your phone calls to them. It’s technically possible of course, but I don’t think that they would operate along those lines, since their nature is more of a contact point for clients and prospects who call to check with them if you are free on a particular date, or to ask who else is free, or to simply look for interpreters.

It sounds easy enough seen from a distance, but their team has very busy times, most notably ‘in season’, when conferences and meetings seem to blossom in Paris, the highest point being UNESCO’s General Assembly. They have a few hundreds of interpreters on their lists, for all language combinations, and that is enough to keep them very busy.

All communication is done by phone, or by e-mail. They have to know exactly when you are available to work, the days for which you have a contract, or simply an “option”, the days when you want to be off the grid (you don’t have to specify a reason), the clients whose offers they can accept immediately on your behalf, those whose offers they need to check with you first…

They have tens of thousands of calls every year, and it’s good, from time to time, to simply touch base and meet over a coffee or a meal, to discuss developments and get back to a more ‘human’ level of communication.

photo credit: stu_spivack