One day I received an inquiry about interpreting in a meeting to be held between several foreigners and an undisclosed number of Japanese participants, regarding an undisclosed topic, and the failure to disclose turned out to be the deal-breaker.
When I asked the inquiring foreigner what the topic of the meeting was, he replied that I don’t need to know that. I tried to explain the reason the interpreter should know what the subject matter is beforehand, not the least of which is determining whether even to accept the assignment, but it fell on deaf ears—those ears apparently were positioned at either side of a brain that needed to work a bit harder on the problem of securing interpreting services.
In what appeared to be frustration at my having the temerity to ask what the meeting was going to be about, the clueless foreigner launched into Meeting Interpreting 101, describing to me what interpreting was.
He kindly explained to me that “We’ll speak in English, and you will say what we said in Japanese, and then the other side speaks Japanese, after which you say what they said in English.”
I was flabbergasted—people who know me will understand that my flabber is quite gasting-resistant—and told him that he needed to go elsewhere. Story over, or so I thought.
Just several days later, a female called to ask for an interpreter. It turned out to be the same clueless people. My guess is that they were having the same sort of responses from other interpreters they spoke to. Some people are ineducable.
