There was a terrible mistake on both sides of the ocean yesterday night when two views of cultures and totally different attitudes collided on the sides. As my agent told me later, your standard Language Line interpreter could not match the situation. Collision smashes those things taken for granted, the holly canons of the holly scriptures about communication, that harmonious beast.
Talk about for instance face and the absolute forbiddance to make it loose it. You know, all the stuff they write in "patterns of Asian communication" and the likes. If realities matched lofty esoteric principals, there would be no fighting samurai movies. Faces must be lost if you end up reaching for the sword. Yesterday, the Japanese side verbally mugged the US side - I was in no way briefed that the purpose of the Japanese side was indeed verbal mugging from the start. So much that the US side slammed the phone receiver and it took it to an end. It was a business setting, not brawl at OK Coral.
Blame it on Spring now sprouting out, the blood rushing through the young veins, the adrenaline and mucus, you know, life that throbs and make you go over the board. Last week, my client was smilingly put under shame (he didn't feel it though), being teased during a first time meeting by the other side's bragging boss. And this interpreter too got its share of verbal sneering and fresh arrogance laced with xenophobic smell (all this mixed in guffaws and pranky stances) on his competence at understanding and faithfully transfer meaning from his side to the other. Meaning was transmitted with instant reverse engineering, to the pleasure of my client enjoying the surrealist scene. Again, it was Friday and the cherry blossoms were about to pop. Is there in the background and all this the expression of a malaise regarding the Toyota fiasco?
Anyway, if not an interpreter (over the phone, due to the lack of visual cues, keep it to the scripture level of what liaison intepreting should be), I would have say : "May I suggest ...." you put a sock in it and focus instead on objectives. Objectives based meeting, and that's why I always ask client what their objectives are.
On both side of the ocean, they both lost track of objectives, and the invisible interpreter, in-between and above at the same time, God in a sense, could only but witness a failure like a crash accident taking place in front of his ears.
Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator
0 comments:
Post a Comment