Category: Shrapnel Removed from a Word Warrior

Throwbacks to some silly things and some meanngful things, brought to you by a veteran translator/interpreter.

Don’t bother can be good advice.

Some weeks ago on LinkedIn, I made some comments about the lack of translation career opportunities for students of foreign languages, basically because of the adoption of AI to replace professionals in the translation process.

The comment was met with virtual nods of heads by some readers, but one person piped up to say that I discouraging newcomers from entering translation, thereby leaving more work for me. He actually sounded serious. He was chiding me for essentially telling students not to bother, and what’s worse, for personal gain.

Reflecting on that, I recall having a distinct experience of being one time told not to bother and having that be the best advice I could have gotten.

It was at the end of 1975. I had been working in a fiber optics laboratory of Western Electric in Princeton and had just completed the last half of an undergraduate engineering program at night. I had a degree in engineering, but that wasn’t going to lead to anything exciting at the laboratory, where the researchers were PhDs and there was nothing between engineering associate and member of research staff. So, I decided to move on and shift my focus.

I contacted the head of the Japanese department at a nearby university in Philadelphia to see if he would speak with me. He quickly agreed, and what ensued was enlightening. I was already functional in Japanese, and my interaction with him was in Japanese.

I had intended to get an advanced degree in Japanese. His advice was quick, being essentially “Don’t bother.” He explained that, with my already-acquired Japanese ability, I would not be learning any more language in a graduate program. He additionally (in a soft tone, not to be heard by several of his students in the room at the time) said “You can easily get an MA or even a doctorate, but do you want to be stuck like these people?”

His advice was clear; add my Japanese ability to my engineering degree and real-world experience and run with it, as that was much more promising that becoming a Japanese specialist.

Admittedly, this being the 1970s, it was still possible to become a translator of sorts with only foreign language or translation in your skill set, but his advice was spot on for me, and I only became a translator after a suddenly available job elsewhere provided me more than three years’ experience working as the Japan branch manager of a US manufacturer, that offering me a great learning experience that prepared me for the real world of providing language services to direct translation consumers.

Being told not to bother can be the best thing you can hear, if it opens your eyes to other, better opportunities.

I’ll repeat the advice to Japanese learners. Don’t bother learning Japanese if your goal is to be a translator. It’s too late. Your chances of success are tiny, and it would be better to just add Japanese ability to a solid qualification and skills in another area that would provide a career even without Japanese ability.

Landmines in the Evening

It was 1976 when I visited the Japanese trading company handling the electronic measurement products of my US employer. I was soon to fire them, switch to another trading company, and move to Japan to manage the directly run operation, but working with them provided me an inside look into the situation of going through a trading company to sell products of a US company in Japan.

One day, while chatting with my contact at the company—a section head at the time—he happened to mention that people from Korea were visiting them that day. It was about 5:30pm. He said they always visited around that time, and you know exactly what they expected to be treated to. It still being in the 1970s, might guess was that it was not just dinner and drinks.

The trading company evidently got the benefit of a war reparations agreement between Japan and Korea (money from the Japanese government given to a foreign state and boomeranging back to a Japanese trading company, which is not uncommon), and I guess that emboldened the Korea people to ask for something more than products sold by the trading company.

The only other time I had encountered such entertainment was a few years after that, when I was at dinner attended by a company president—now deceased, and the founder of an older, TSE-listed company (before he was essentially ousted by a bank and a major computer manufacturer in a takeover)—and a European dealer of his new company, who was visiting Japan.

At dinner, the CEO leaned over to me and essentially asked me whether he should arrange for a woman for his visitor. Without interpreting, of course, I advised him that it would be a risky move and might even worsen the relationship with his dealer. He (I hope) withdrew the idea of setting his visitor up with some evening diversion.

There are landmines on the road to success in Japan, and sometimes the Japanese themselves risk treading on them.

“What the deponent wanted to say was …”

One day in the early 1980s interpreting in a deposition for US patent litigation, after I finished interpreting into English a response of the Japanese deponent being examined, the check interpreter commented “Mr. Lise’s interpreting was fine, but what the deponent really wanted to say was …”

Not surprisingly, the examining attorney ran up and down the side of the check interpreter’s head, figuratively of course, since violence is frowned upon in the US Embassy here in Tokyo. The attorney, of course, questioned how the check interpreter had acquired his mind-reading ability.

The check interpreter immediately realized his error and started to apologize on record for his mindreading, whereupon, just a few words into his apology, the attorney that had engaged him said “We’re going to take a break,” and literally took the check interpreter by the arm, guiding him out into the space outside the deposition room. The attorney surely did not want the apology to go onto the record, as that would cast doubt on his interpreter’s ability, although it might serve to bring attention to his interpreter’s supernatural abilities. Perhaps he could find work entertaining at parties.

Depositions are usually filled with boring examinations of boring witnesses, but occasionally we enjoy a bit of drama and comedy.

They speak English among themselves: The delusion of a clueless expat

In the late 1970s, I was the branch manager of a US company here in Japan, and one of the banks we used was the Tokyo branch of a bank the home office used, the now-defunct Seafirst bank in Seattle.

We had no particular problems with them, and I distinctly remember them gifting me some tickets to watch Sumo tournaments in Tokyo. One day, however, it was brought home to me just how clueless an expat in Japan could be.

Most of the people running the bank were, of course, native Japanese speakers. My contact included one Japanese employee and an American, apparently from the Seattle headquarters. One day, when I was meeting with the American, whose name I do not recall, the Japanese fellow participated, using his English, which was quite good, this being necessary because the American was not a Japanese speaker.

When the Japanese fellow left the meeting room to get something, the American said to me, with a straight face “You know, these people use English among themselves, even when we foreigners are not around.”

I was toying with making a quip about the language of the sound a Japanese tree might make falling when nobody is around to hear it, but I refrained. Such an attempt of sarcasm might have cut me off from the Sumo tickets.

Be careful, because we’ve had a bomb threat.

One day at the start of a deposition interpreting assignment in the US Embassy in Tokyo, an Embassy official came in and asked us to be careful, because there had been a bomb threat, and we had heard about it, right?

Right. I imagine he was just following instructions from his boss, but perhaps he didn’t realize the questions that left.

How are we to “be careful?” I asked. No meaningful response was forthcoming.

Were we to walk around looking for the bomb? Except for brief toilet breaks, people in depositions are essentially confined to the deposition room, and there didn’t seem to be any bombs in the deposition room or the toilet.

Did he mean we should be ready to run away really quickly if we heard a blast? That doesn’t sound like being careful, but more like being terrified and wanting to be able to interpret in the deposition the next day.

It turned out that we were to be herded out the Embassy shortly thereafter and made to wait outside for about 45 minutes, standing around with the huddled masses yearning to breathe free with the visa they were applying for—such people form the core clientele of the Embassy—until the Embassy people were convinced that it was a hoax.