Tag: deposition

Oto-ire (音入れ) and O-toire (おトイレ): I’ve worked in both.

These two terms would appear identical (オトイレ) if written in Japanese phonetics, although they are distinguishable by an intonation difference and, of course, context. I have added hyphens to separate the semantic elements of each. These demonstrate why writing Japanese with phonetics syllabaries only is a non-starter, but that is a topic for a different post.

Oto-ire refers to the application of a sound track to a video, for example. My oto-ire (literally, sound insertion/entry) experience came with a request from a company to translate a narration of a video promoting their technology and products. They hired a professional to read my narration, and I sat in on the studio recording. I was there to handle problems in reading the narration (since it included some Japanese names) and to deal with any last-minute changes requested by my client, who was also present in the studio. This assignment provided me an informative look into how these things are done.

Fast forward a few years and we come to the toilet. My toilet experience was not working for a Japanese toilet manufacturer named after Dorothy’s dog, but we were surely not in Kansas anymore, because it required me to interpret while sitting in a toilet.

During a deposition interpreting assignment in Tokyo for patent litigation, there arose the sudden need to have a telephone conference with people in the US before the last day of depositions. A person from the Japanese party needed to participate.

We were to join in the conference from a hotel room in Tokyo. Amazingly, the telephone didn’t have even a speaker function, and we didn’t have the time to arrange for a conference-type telephone. Passing around the telephone handset while interpreting wasn’t going to work, so the solution we settled on was for me to sit in the toilet of the hotel room and interpret using the wall-mounted telephone handset provided there to enable hotel guests to answer phone calls while they were answering other calls, so to speak.

It worked fairly well, the only problem being the acoustics, which probably made me sound like I had my head in an empty barrel or perhaps in the toilet bowl.

Diversity of assignments and experiences is one of the things I enjoy about interpreting. But some interpreting jobs are garbage. One I had actually was garbage, and had me traipsing around two waste processing plants in Saitama with an environmental auditor.

You just never know where the next job will take you, but all of my subsequent encounters with toilets have been quite ordinary, and my interactions with garbage are limited to making short trips downstairs to deposit same.

Why don’t you ask the deponent yourself?

While interpreting one day in the US Embassy in Tokyo in an examination of a Japanese deponent by a US attorney, the attorney turned to me and asked “Could you ask him to describe his educational background?”

My reply was, “No, but you certainly could.” It got a laugh from people sitting around the table, including the other interpreter, and the attorney sort of slapped his forehead in recognition of the problem caused to an interpreter when they are asked to actively participate in an exchange.

Unbelievable? Well, he was new at both examining witnesseses and working through an interpreter. The interpreter should never be asking questions of a deponent or responding to questions from a deponent. Attorneys (and other using interpreters) need to keep in mind that, in this sense, the interpreter must be invisible, even though they are speaking more than either the attorney or the deponent, because they are going in both language directions.

Why didn’t Ms. Tanaka attend that meeting?

This question came up in an examination of a Japanese deponent, a middle-manager at a company here. The examining attorney did not know whether Tanaka (not the actual name) was male or female, but they were on the organizational chart of the department holding the subject meeting.

The response was “This was an important meeting, and we don’t normally have female department members attend such meetings.”

The court reporter typed “urge to kill” and quickly took it off the screen. Only the attorneys and the interpreters saw it. The deponent probably wondered why some of us were reacting with smiles to what was for him a straightforward explanation, based on traditional Japanese corporate culture. I suspect the deponent figured it out when he was spoken to by his attorneys at the next break.

How exciting: A clueless interpreter broker in the US

Sometime around 2005, I received an inquiry for deposition interpreting from what appeared to be a one-person broker in the US. Although I have almost never worked for brokers, in a moment of weakness (and because she agreed to my high fee) I accepted the assignment. What ensued was a good demonstration of the value that most brokers do not and cannot add to the process of deposition interpreting.

After much effort, with scant case information from the broker (because she had scant information), I was able to discover what case the deposition was for; the broker didn’t know and probably didn’t care. I discovered on my own what law firms were involved and contacted the relevant attorney who would be examining the witness. Surprise; it turned out to be the CEO of an airline here in Japan. An additional surprise was that it was the CEO of an airline involved in a different case with an airline client of mine, although the involvement did not represent a conflict that would preclude me from interpreting for this deposition.

When I told the broker who the deponent was, the reaction was “How exciting!” This is a good demonstration of how brokers for interpreting services can operate without any knowledge of, or interest in obtaining information about the specific cases for which they are brokering interpreting services.

I never heard from that broker again, and that was just fine with me.

How old were you during the war?

I interpreted in a deposition of a senior executive of a major Japanese corporation in connection with patent litigation in the US. Things were going well, until one question from the examining attorney near the end of the allotted time for the deposition.

The question came just after the attorney went back at the end of the deposition to ask about the educational background of the deponent, something that is normally done at the beginning of a deposition. In part of his reply, the Japanese executive indicated that he attended the Army Cadet School just before WW2. This prompted the attorney to ask “So how old were you during the war?”

This was to be a jury trial in a state that is not known for being generous with non-Americans. The attorney was fully aware of that, and I can only imagine that it would be seen as advantageous for the jury to think that the deponent had—or at least was old enough to have had—participated in WW2.

Naturally, the attorney on the defending side justifiably went berserk. Such a question had no bearing on the merits of the case. Getting to watch this kind of provocation and the reactions thereto unfold is arguably a benefit to deposition interpreters. Mostly, though, it is mind-numbingly boring, particularly if the subject matter is something the interpreter is not interested in.