How To Make A Fool Of Yourself
I’m reminded of the following anecdote by a blog post written by Werner Patels.
It goes to show how obsessed with acronyms translators can be. Once upon a time, I interpreted at a rather hard meeting and at breaktime, we were lucky to get hold of the printout of the next presentation.
On one page, there was a diagram of a process, with, right in the middle of the page, in big bold evenly-spaced letters, this *acronym*:
E C H E C
So I asked the speaker: What does this stand for?
He looked at me with a funny look, and seemed a little uneasy.
So I asked again, in my best professional voice.
So he laughed. What? You don’t know what ECHEC means?
That was NOT an acronym, it was a REAL word!
Ever heard of the word ‘failure’? That’s what ‘échec’ means. If you didn’t do this properly, the process failed.
Of course I knew the word. But when you have very little time to talk to a speaker before his presentation, you tend to go for very technical words and acronyms.
What a laugh! (and how I hate to look so stupid! 
)
Tags: acronyms, Interpretation, Translation
October 2nd, 2008 at 11:10 pm
Nadine, while we all hate to look stupid it always makes for a funny story later.
October 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 am
I guess the reason is the more you think about something, the more you tend to get into complications, rather than keeping it simple. Want a good laugh? In one of my first assignments I came across a female German shepherd reacting in a positive way to somebody’s don’t-remember-what behaviour. And I was wondering what was a German countryside woman doing in a totally alien environment and why on earth should one specify that woman’s job. Of course, it was a dog.
Ilarias last blog post..Responsibility
October 3rd, 2008 at 12:08 pm
@Karen. Thanks! That was a good laugh though.
@Ilaria. Welcome to the club! Yes, I’m sure we could build a compendium of those jokes. I think our job makes us behave like police investigators all the time, asking questions such as: what does this person REALLY mean to say? In your example: Why is this woman here? In my case, my unconscious was telling me: Why on earth is he using an acronym that I’ve never seen before? What does this mean?
October 4th, 2008 at 10:03 am
One of my professors in translation school would have called that an example of déformation professionnelle