Tag: interpreting

Interpreting, mainly between Japanese and English.

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.

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.