Tag: interpreting

Interpreting, mainly between Japanese and English.

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.

Just say in Japanese what we say in English.

Several years ago, a potential interpreting client emailed me to ask about interpreting for a business meeting that was scheduled in only a few days. After emailing back promptly to ask what the subject matter was, but not getting any substantive response, I called and asked what the meeting was about. The reply from the non-Japanese fellow was “Oh, you don’t need to know that.”

Huh? I explained to no avail why I wanted to learn about the subject matter and why he should also want to tell me about the subject matter. After a few more attempts to pry some information out of this guy about the meeting, he proceeded to explain interpreting to me. “You just say in Japanese what we say in English, and then you say in English what the other side says in Japanese.”

It was so comforting to get this lesson in interpreting. I would never have guessed what interpreting was.

I explained that he would need to look elsewhere for interpreting, which appeared to leave him puzzled. That was probably the most clueless prospective interpreting client I have ever encountered.

But that is not the end of the story. About ten days after the date of the originally scheduled meeting, a woman from the same company calls me with precisely same meeting parameters (“interpreting” in a “meeting”). When I started explaining that more information was required, she realized what she had done. “Oh, you’re the guy who wouldn’t help us the last time.” Guilty as charged. The call ended promptly when she realized it wasn’t going anywhere and neither was I.

That left me wondering whether they had found an interpreter the last time and the interpreter was not successful in working with that minimalist briefing, or whether something else had happened.

The place was a tiny company that appeared to be involved in credit card settlement services, and was staffed by two foreigners, both Japanese-incapable and both clueless about interpreting. I am not sure if they ever acquired some clues, but my attempts at educating them had come to an end.

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.

30 Years ago and 7 years ago

It is March 20 in Japan and today we mark not only the Vernal Equinox, but also the 30th anniversary of the sarin gas mass murders committed in the subway in Tokyo by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. The media is alive with coverage looking back on that domestic terrorism and looking at the present of some of the survivors.

It was a high-profile incident and a long, high-profile trial, leading to the criminals being executed 23 years later, in 2018 at the Tokyo Detention House, something I was told about just a few months later as I started what would be a 35-consecutive-day interpreting assignment at that same facility, in a case that was also certainly also high profile and in the news for months, but that did not involve mass murders, or any violence, for that matter.

The successor of the Aum Shinrikyo, Aleph, is still apparently operating as a cult, collecting “believers” and their money, and is still considered a dangerous group.

That said, Japan has not been very good at neutralizing such cults. Perhaps it’s because some of them lay claim to being religions and Japan has a rather dark history of being nasty to religions that it doesn’t like. It has had a dificult time bringing The Unification Church to justice, and that group is still open for business under a different name, but with the same goals of sucking up money from victims.

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.