Category: Shrapnel Removed from a Word Warrior

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

Will the Czech interpreter raise their right hand?

One day interpreting in a deposition in which a deponent from a Japanese company was to be examined by a US attorney, the US official came into the room to administer the oaths as is the normal practice. We were all introducing ourselves and, when my turn came, I indicated that I was the “check interpreter.” It is customary (and almost always the case) that a Japanese/English interpreted deposition is attended by a lead interpreter and a check interpreter, the lead interpreter doing just what the position indicates, and the check interpreter listening to the interpreting and offering any corrections that they feel necessary.

When it was my turn to be sworn in, the Embassy official, whom I had never had the occasion to meet, reading partially from his cheat sheet and apparently filling in as he thought necessary, turned to me and said:

“Do you solemnly swear that you know the English and the Czech languages, and that you will faithfully interpret the questions in English into the Czech language, and that further you wil…”

It turned out that he was new on the job. It was a bit of comedy relief before a stressful day of interpreting between two people, one who wanted to ask questions and the other who was not necessarily cooperative.

Lise, please don’t interpret this.

I was interpreting at a Japanese law firm one day in a meeting between my Japanese manufacturer client, their US attorney (also my client), and the Japanese manufacturer’s local Japanese attorney. It was a meeting regarding US litigation between the Japanese company and a European competitor in the US.

The meeting was going ostensibly well for about an hour, when suddenly the Japanese attorney turns to me, saying “Lise-san, please don’t interpret this.”

He then addresses his Japanese client (also my Japanese client) and launches into:

“What’s happening here is that both you and the opposing party are being manipulated by your Jew attorneys, so …”

The term for Jew and Jewish in Japanese is yudaya, obviously fully understandable as a slur when used adjectivally before the word for attorney in either its English or Japanese form.

That aside, did the Japanese attorney stupidly think that, by telling me not to interpret, he would keep his antisemitism a secret from my client? Or did he just want to avoid annoying his US attorney at least during the meeting while insulting him as he sat there?.

I needed to travel with the attorney after that meeting, and he let me know that he was well aware of what has transpired already as we rode the elevator down to the ground floor after the meeting.

I mentioned to him that, upon hearing this slur, I was toying with the idea of letting drop in the meeting that I am a Jew (although I am not), but discarded the idea, as I could imagine getting into an ugly and time-consuming debate with the jerk about his lack of civility and common sense about what is and is not proper behavior in a business meeting.

I am happy to say that this Japanese attorney was never my client, and that the US attorney remained my client after that.

Don’t interpret, just translate.

I was interpreting one day in a deposition in the US Embassy and needed to make a comment on the record about why I had interpreted a certain term in English the way I did. Everyone appeared to understand and agree with the comment, but one of the attorneys piped up to say “Please don’t interpret, just translate.”

Both the interpreters in the room had to hold back from laughing. The attorney was demonstrating one of the reasons people outside the interpreting/translation tent often confuse the terms and call an interpreter a translator. I have often corrected people when they get these terms wrong, but I think we translators and interpreters (and the rare individuals do both translation and interpreting between JA and EN) might consider admitting defeat in the interpreter/translator battle.

It’s just a translator.

Some years ago I was interpreting in depositions at the US Consulate in Osaka. It happened that the opposing side’s interpreter, who would be interpreting for the attorney examining the deponent, was engaged rather suddenly and was not yet on the list of persons to be allowed into the Consulate. He was being made to wait on the first floor while they tried to work through the administrative problems to let him in.

Since the deposition couldn’t proceed without a lead interpreter (I was the check interpreter), we took a break. In the waiting area outside the deposition room, the deposition-taking attorney was at a window discussing the problem.

“Is it an attorney downstairs waiting to enter?” a Consulate official asked him.

“No, it’s just a translator (sic)” was the reply, referring to the interpreter.

The mistake of characterizing an interpreter as a translator aside, this makes me wonder how the attorney intended to examine the Japanese deponent if the person who is “just a translator” was stuck downstairs, waiting among huddled masses of visa applicants (mostly Brazilians that day, as I recall), yearning to breath free or whatever they intended to do in the US.

The interpreter in question is well-known and had spent many more years perfecting his professional skills than did the youngish above-noted attorney.

Mixed Kanji/Katakana Feelings

At one time many years ago, because my surname was sometimes misheard by Japanese speakers on the phone, I made a habit of orally glossing my name with “利益のリに是非のゼ. It apparently usually worked, perhaps because most people realized I was not a Japanese native and was giving them the pronunciation as rendered in katakana. It backfired one day, however, perhaps in a way that might give me confidence in my Japanese speaking ability.

After phoning someone and being told that a person I needed to speak with would be returning to the office in a while and would return my call, I left a message, giving my name in the above manner.

About two hours later, I received a phone call from someone asking for Toshikore-san. The person on the other end of the call could not see me figuratively slapping my forehead in recognition of what caused the problem of him thinking he was phoned by this person Toshikore. What had happened was that the person taking my message wrote down not the phonetics associated with two kanji characters, but rather the kanji characters themselves, thereby rendering what could look like—at least to an older reader—the name Toshikore (利是). It was sort of like a dog owner pointing to a stick they had thrown to have their dog fetch it and having the dog instead fetch the owner’s hand. But it was nonetheless my fault; I was pointing to the wrong stick.

I bade farewell to that flawed phonetic device and switched to explaining explicitly that my name was written with two katakana glyphs.