How To Make A Fool Of Yourself
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008I’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! 
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