That scene!

Someone wrote down the translated beginning of the exchange between the interpreter and an ad movie director in Lost in Translation before the interpreter is to deliver the message to Bill Murray. I usually show the scene to be found somewhere over YouTube to my students. It is full of insights.

Director [in Japanese, to the interpreter]: The translation is very important, O.K.? The translation.
Interpreter [in Japanese, to the director]: Yes, of course. I understand.
Director [in Japanese, to Bob]: Mr. Bob. You are sitting quietly in your study. And then there is a bottle of Suntory whisky on top of the table. You understand, right? With wholehearted feeling, slowly, look at the camera, tenderly, and as if you are meeting old friends, say the words. As if you are Bogie in Casablanca, saying, "Here's looking at you, kid," -- Suntory time!
Interpreter [In English, to Bob]: He wants you to turn, look in camera. O.K.?
Bob: Is that all he said?

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Business at the speed of email

The position of the liaison interpreter in the business interaction between two sides is an interesting vista to observe how things are happening, or not. What is needed to be able to observe is to work with repeaters so that each new meeting in Tokyo after a lapse of several weeks or months is an opportunity for the interpreter to understand how communication went on since the last meeting while the interpreter was not, naturally, part of the loop. It is when the interpreter gets anointed as one of the team that liaison interpreting veers into the territory of strategic helper, if not yet some sort of local agent. It is a surprise to see though how much, with SMEs, the time between two visits to Japan is often a void of voice based communication. Epistolary means is mainstream. It leaves traces and traceability. But is it efficient? Face to face meeting should sandwich a healthy dose of over the phone or video conference based follow up and touch base contacts to check how things are moving, or not. Simply, it doesn't work like that for the regular customers I have. There are always promises of remote follow up by email, hints at possibly using the service of the interpreter to translate, and most of the time, as far as I can judge, much about nothing happens. People and corporations are busy, and distance cannot be shorten that much. Communication means are available but the mind is distant. Email, and the speed of it rules, and plays as a charming break with flowery introductions to the main part, at least in Japanese email letters (messages is a rude term). Not only the world is not flat, and the needs for business interpreting is here to stay, but speed is so much lacking that it puts in doubt at times the willingness on both sides to pursue just that, business that is.

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Off-topic : Getting in touch via LinkedIn

Via LinkedIn and the likes. I seldom get request for bonding over LinkedIn, but when I do, most if not each time, the requester sends a mail using the generic blurb asking to link. No customization, no personal message, nothing but that artificial message that reads like a speech robot. I check the requester's profile page because I often don't have a clue about who she is. The latest one was a translator/interpreter somewhere in Europe. "I don't know this person" is the only sensible choice I consider these days. A little personal message could make a difference, even if we will end up contemplating alone on each side our rooster of contacts (better than "friends"), and do nothing else. Reach someone and get in touch, or was it get in touch and reach someone? was the catch phrase of some US phone carrier some years ago if I remember well. That was before the Internet. My son has a collection of cards with strange beasts and specs, much like our roosters of contacts. He flips the card, I click on these.

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Bloglines dead and readers uncovered

RSS Bloglines reader is apparently dead, prompting a move to Google Reader. That is where I discovered there are 8 people reading this blog. Nice to meet you. I you are into interpreting or Japanese language learning or teaching or whatever, say hello.

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Japanese serious podcast : more dead than alive

Alps Economist Eye stopped delivering from this month. Sekai Keizai Dial has not been heard for more than a week. That's a long time for a weekly podcast. NRI video podcast stopped broadcasting last year. And the NHK ... ha! the NHK. No podcast in Japanese yet. Who would want to listen to Japanese public radio while commuting in Japan anyway? They changed the design on the NHK news web site. I have a hard time listening to Japanese that is not chatty, not manufactured like junk food, not marred by neverending BGM. The slump is hitting in very tiny corners, including podcast. What is left is the muck of commercial radio sliced in mp3.

But there is hope. I knew NET-IR had financial report conference calls both in audio and video with PowerPoint documents. I didn't know they also had corporate presentations packaged the same, of course for free. It's a boon, the real thing, real business Japanese live. Not mp3 but it's worth taking the time to merge the documents and use it for everything under the interpretation training roof.

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Natural simultaneous interpreter

Looking at A. moving around, an iphone in one hand with headset, pointing at some devices on the meeting table, sending short side messages and glances while allowing the conversation between the remote teams to flow, in simultaneous mode, I can't ignore that all this goes against the stories around simultaneous interpretation. The setting is no international conference for sure, but regular business meeting involving teams scattered over the planet. No one is expecting for formalities. As long as the shows goes on, it meets the requirements. A. has no training at all in interpretation. He just does it while managing the dynamics of the exchange. The managing side is part of liaison interpreting, what a liaison interpreter MUST do in small scale meetings so that the communication mill turns. I wrote about the liaison interpreter as an interventionist. I never wrote about simultaneous in liaison interpreting because simultaneous is not associated with liaison. Why is that? Where is the threshold? A. is expecting me one of these days to jump in to the pool of simultaneous as he does, that is, by doing it. The discussion going on is poorly formatted, in the sense that nobody is reading a text. There are rather short burst of exchanges, dialogue interpretation it is.
Lately, in close settings, table as small as in a restaurant, three people at best besides myself, I have tried in short burst to do quasi-simultaneous, that is cueing in purpose the speakers to go while I voice over without much delay. The purpose is to accelerate the flow. It sounds messy. It must sound messy to the listeners, maybe so to the speaker. But at times it works.

I have been into the market for a portable system, so called tour guide system, I could carry around and use in small settings where I usually deliver liaison. The Panasonic Panaguide system is a candidate. Only, it's a professional system, that is priced at corporate price and way to big an investment for a freelance interpreter. Does anyone reading this has an idea for an alternative solution?

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Information Technology

IT stands for Information Technology. It is simple pronounce I T, the two separate letters. In most organizations it is the computer department. The place where all the geeks gather to hunch over clicking keyboards to get the computer to do some wonderful new trick. That is what people imagine. In fact the IT departments are one of the key elements in today's technology. Without IT departments, there would be many items we commonly take for granted no longer available to us.

IT departments are responsible for every banking system in the world today. It was the IT departments who first made it possible for online banking. It was the IT department who came up with computer software designed to allow the use of debit and credit cards. Lending institutions and finance companies who depend on amortization calculators would have to go back to figuring by hand with out the use of the programs developed by IT departments.

In short, if a computer generated the program for the device or system you are using, it was an IT department somewhere who designed it. Thus was born the business analyst. The business analyst may or may not have been from the IT department. He or she may not be able to write code. They do know the intricacies behind it. They are the ones able to speak with others to determine what the IT department should be doing.

The system works something like this. The stakeholder, someone in business or with a business interest, has an idea he or she thinks may sell or make the business more money. The idea may only generate an easier way of doing things. Faster production means less man hours. Less man hours means less payroll. Less payroll means more money for the company to spend somewhere else. The problem came when the stakeholder tried to explain what he or she wanted from the IT department. The IT department caught on to the general concept and designed an application for the program. The stakeholder found he could not use the code. Enter the business analyst.

Investing For Your Future in Business

Entering a business school is a serious endeavor for many aspiring business owners and entrepreneurs. After all, many of the graduates of some of the top business schools in the U.S., Europe and Asia are highly acknowledged and respected members of their respective industries. Business school graduates have gone on to establish successful careers in business, politics, marketing and other private and government services. Choosing what business school to go to is also a huge investment, requiring time, effort and money. It can have a huge impact on anybody's career and future.

To help you decide on your choice, here are several important considerations to keep in mind:

The degree and program
A business school is only as good as the quality of its business programs. Find out if the school you are checking out offers the degree you want to earn and the program you want to learn. MBA programs, for example, can vary from one school to another. The type of curriculum included also matters, particularly if you want to pursue a certain field of specialization.

The length of time it will take to complete a program should also be considered. There are MBA programs that can be completed within one year, two years or four years. Some programs can also be completed on a part-time basis or as part of distance education.

Off-topic : Japan despite it

The opinion article by Robert Dujarric of Temple University in Tokyo published in the Japan Times of yesterday starts with :

"More than 20 years have passed since the Berlin Wall fell, yet Japan remains shut out from the rest of humanity by its own wall. Though it is a shapeless partition that we cannot touch, it nevertheless cuts off the country from the world beyond its shores. What are the characteristics of this invisible barrier?"

And it reads just like that, an article published 20 years ago. Yet, you have to take it with a grain of salt. Not that the opinions of the author are wrong, but the role and value of the Japan Times are to be perceived at face value first. The Japan Times is the gaijin (that means "foreigner" and more precisely white westerner) soapbox you hate to read, and you hate yourself to read after so many years here. It is an irreplaceable useless newspaper. A soapbox in the middle of Sahara that doesn't count, yet that will not disappear. Nowadays at least, you can hide behind your computer screen and read it, know about the fairs at international hotel, read some poorly paid bump journalist writing about a trip in Okinawa, listing out the "okinawan villages" he visited without a blink and irreverence to the meaning of what an X- village (replace X by whatever place name you like) means it terms of authenticity.

The JT has a role, a function, that of make believe that people like Robert Dujarric's opinion has any value. By value, I mean, impact. The least read newspaper in Japan (or is the Daily Yomiuri) has alternatively flipped op'ed between westerners living in Japan - flipping that neverendingly chanting "I hate it here, I love it here" mantra - and the visiting guest personality spreading the patronizing good words at the American Chamber of Commerce with the standard bag of suggestions reading "Japan should do this, Japan should do that". The Japan Times is massively a westerner concern, a westerner malaise, a westernized soapbox for "invited"Japanese, a westerner's syndrom. A Petri dish (this sounds "petty") you peruse with the feeling that it peruses back at you and your emptiness. Why on earth are you still reading it, you tell yourself. Why not the world number local newspapers like the Asahi, Yomiuri or Nikkei?

Japan has not changed, the story tells. But what about you after all these years?

Thanks to the Internet, you have almost quit feeling bad about starting your day reading a newspaper published 10 000 km away from Tokyo (the rest of Japan doesn't matter). The only Japanese thing you will allow yourself to read early in the morning is the weather forecast. The rest can wait.

It has been "despite it" for a long time between you and it, because things are moving between you and it despite things that are not moving, the foreignness of it all to start with.

The JT is the itching powder you can't leave alone, you can't live without. Its op`ed writers can confidently flip back in times to equivalent articles published years ago, and copy paste the arguments, spreading a few "as usual" along the trail.

I have yet to find any op'ed article that moves beyond the lamenting, that analyses things beyond the standard moaning. The JT, Japan, may have not changed much, but the autopsy of it all doesn't seem to have changed in any way. And this is the mystery : how and why are the analysis tools stuck in time?

As far as communication is concerned from a point of view of objective based strategy, this blog has allowed its author to somewhat move beyond the clueless moaning personae to dry understanding at how the clock works. It is not a pretty sight, but it clarifies things at least. Op'ed articles at the JT deceive the clear headed readers, and fool their authors at the same time.

Some Advices on Working with a business interpreter in Japan

I have been fine tuning the following over the past week. It will soon reach novel length. I am inclined to add a section on why working with an interpreter rather than without. Here it is at this current stage anyway.

Some Advices on Working with an interpreter in Japan

Home
(Adapted and expanded from the Financial Times)
How to avoid garbled communication

Finding and selecting an interpreter
1. If possible, talk to other businesses and get their recommendations.
2. In Japan, most interpreters work through agencies. You usually will not be allowed to interact directly with your interpreter prior to day one.
3. If you secure an interpreter through an interpreting agency, most of what you will provide orally as background information to be transfered through the agency to the interpreter will be lost to the interpreter. Dispatch written documents and written recommendations to be used by the interpreter for preparation.
4. Avoid interpreters who see themselves as translation machines. Business interpretation doesn't stop at language competence. In Japan, many interpreters value language competence but may be poor at supporting your objectives. Some even may believe it's not part of their job.
5. Insist on the right personality. How your interpreter comes over as a person will affect how your company is seen. Find an interpreter who suits your culture and who can project the personality of your brand.
6. For highly formal situations with speeches and toasts, you will prefer a Japanese native-interpreter. For down to business settings where you welcome on the spot communication guidance besides pure interpretation, considering hiring a non-Japanese interpreter is meaningful in terms of your strategy.
7. Non-Japanese interpreters in Japan are a rare species though. Local agencies usually do not consider a non-native to be capable to work as an interpreter. They are wrong. But as a consequence, you will be on your own if you are looking for an interpreter keener to your side in the multicultural balance.
8. Look for interpreters with experience who have worked in your industry. But do not look under interpreters new to your industry. They may have worked in parallel industries, and they are usually good at challenging new domains in short time. This is actually part of the competences of an interpreter, and a business liaison interpreter.
9. Agencies usually are remote to the realities of the job and their only concern is to keep you from getting in touch with the interpreter and get their commission.
10. The major advantage of going through and agent is that if your interpreter is suddenly not available, illness, etc., they may secure another interpreter at short notice.
11. Some independent interpreters work in loosely fashioned cooperative networks although these are a rare bread. However, they may end up facilitating the finding of another resource.
12. If you are planning to often come to Japan and regularly meet with the same partners, try and use the services of the same interpreter if you were satisfied with him or her.


Preparation



13. Provide background information in good time. Interpreting is a difficult and demanding job. Interpreting is to a large extend about understanding contexts. Clients who fail to provide speeches, agendas and presentations create unnecessary problems for themselves.
14. Be as much detailed as possible with suggestions for reading material beyond presentation documents. Suggest articles, white papers and anything of value freely available online.
15. Nowadays, chances are your company, service or products have been highlighted through video, audio interviews that may be available as podcasts, YouTube or equivalent audiovideo sources.You may also have corporate audiovideo documents of value to help the interpreter better understand your context. Be creative when thinking about preparation documents.
16. Interpreters are not responsible for the lack of prior information and the consequence of potentially less than average service. However, some interpreters are ready to challenge short-noticed, urgent requests.
17. A competent interpreter should be able to give you advices on the validity of presentation documents to be used in Japan. Remember however that the time of the interpreter besides the assignment is not a free lunch.
18. From an interpreter's point of view there is nothing like a mundane or general, non-specialized talk. Any setting is a specialized situation even if it sounds trite and routine to you.
19. Try and brief your interpreter as much and early as possible, once if you can get in touch days or weeks before the assignment, and one more time an hour before the meeting.
20. During briefing, state your objective, what you want to achieve by the end of the session. This will help the interpreter match the context with your intentions. Clarity of purpose will help both of you.


During the session


21. During your presentation and in any situations, use simple language and steer clear of jokes. They are useless, inappropriate and put stress on the interpreter's task.
22. Try and avoid as much as possible conceptual talks as they usually are not understood here. Stay with tangible, practical speech. Be down to earth and sprinkle with lots of examples.
23. Beware of examples that are too local to your country, and too foreign to them.
24. In many cases, most of your Japanese interlocutors have made their homework of researching your company and context. Don't teach and preach them on what they may already know.
25. Especially with specialists, don't teach medicine to a doctor, engineering to an engineer. Create instead a rapport of implicit professional sameness.
26. On the slides, prefer flowchart like descriptions of processes, with icon illustrations, over long sentences.
27. Don't try and cover everything. Stay focused and follow your agenda.
28. Don't boast you are better than the competition, even if it's true.
29. Don't speak like an ad copy. Pure marketing talk with magazine like flowery jargon is terribly difficult to interpret and inefficient. Besides, your counterpart will politely hide their scorn at the fluff, but the interpreter will have a hard time concealing her malaise.
30. When things are "culturally different" in the examples you raise, that is, they may be based on realities of other countries outside Japan, briefly state that you know that they "certainly know that things are somewhat different here in Japan but" ... .
31. For Japanese with no serious experience living abroad, "foreignness" is usually a foreign concept. However, if you talk with top brass, avoid this tactic even if their experience abroad is thin or nil. Suggesting that they don't know something is rude.
32. Look at the opposite side, not at your interpreter when you speak. Create human contact through the eyes and facial expressions.
33. Speak directly to your counterparts. Do not speak through your interpreter like "Tell them that ....", or, "Ask them if ....".
34. When listening to you interlocutors, show you are indeed listening by nodding from time to time. Don't stare. Nodding doesn't mean you agree.
35. Be ready to accept on the spot request for clarification from your interpreter. Keep it brief.
36. Don't rely on the other side to provide interpretation for the meeting. The other side's interpreter is not your interpreter.
37. Neutrality of the interpreter is a book concept that does not apply in business and professional realities. An interpreter in face to face contacts leans on the side of his or her customer and must be an agent for your benefit first. Also, if their interpreter isn't up to the job and misrepresents you, your business will lose out.
38. Don't assume the other side has only one or no interpreter and don't understand you. Other members of the team may speak your language too, although they might not reveal it. So, watch what you say in the cloakroom and on the sides of the meeting room.


Debriefing


39. In most business cases, you should debrief your interpreter.
40. A business interpreter with no opinion at debriefing may not be the person you will want to work with next time.
41. Interpreters may have opinions but they are not stakeholders of your business. However, they may provide valuable insights.


Post-session



42. Going to diner and after-diner with your clients still means working for your interpreter.
43. Selecting a female interpreter will run into the potential for late night entertainment with your clients. They may be eager to bring you at a club to a last drink. Young interpreters may be inappropriate in such precincts by lack of experience and knowledge on how to behave.
44. Let your interpreter not drink. Interpreting requires a clear head.

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What the search engine Knows

It wasn’t that long ago that a tremendous scare went through the internet community. The issue had to do with the huge amount of data that can be collected on individuals using search engines online. This large body of information naturally drew the attention of the Homeland Security agencies who are charged with the job of finding out all they can about potential sleeper cells of terrorism in this country.

The stand off came when the government began to demand access to the search records of all users of the major search engines. When this upcoming struggle for privacy began to come to a head, many of us who depend on search engines for both personal and business research began to get that “big brother is watching” feeling.

It’s a tough compromise. We know that our government must have the ability to find and put a stop to security risks that might result in another disaster like September 11th 2001. But at the same time, Americans are tremendously protective of their liberties, their privacy and their right to be left alone by the government.

Of all of the search engines who were in the spotlight during that struggle, Google’s resistance to allowing undue invasion of privacy of their customers stood out as an act of courage in a difficult confrontation. It turned out that Homeland Security really wasn’t becoming “big brother” and was simply researching how to use statistical data to possibly find terrorist patterns in search engine usage. But many of us remember that while Yahoo and others knuckled under quickly, it was Google who stood up and protected user information rather than immediately turn it over to Uncle Sam.

Virtual Employees

When we say something is “virtual” in modern terminology, we are almost always talking about something related to the internet. So Virtual Dating is dating using the internet. “Virtual” does not mean something that does not exist. But it implies you are replacing a normal physical entity with a real but for the most part unseen entity that lives online.

The trend in strategic business planning is to incorporate an aggressive “virtual marketing” plan with your traditional plans. So it makes sense that eventually the move to virtual resources would reach human resources with the availability of virtual employees.

In the last two or three years, virtual employment has taken off and become a very real resource for businesses wishing to tap into valuable experience and subject matter expertise that cannot be found locally. Agencies such as Team Double Click and Rent-A-Coder provide an army of ready to work professionals that can step in and get a job done quickly and efficiently for an employer.

The obvious first application of virtual workers is to subcontract to an online employment agency certain task specific projects that have a short beginning, middle and end. Building a new function into a web page is a good example of a project that can be packaged into an understandable project and signed over to a virtual consultant to perform the work and return to the online employer. The handling agencies collect funds via escrow so neither the employer or the consultant are at risk and the handling company claims a percentage of the fee as part of their pay for facilitating the partnership. Everybody wins.

But the concept of virtual employment is going beyond providing another variation on outsourcing to a consultant. Many virtual employment agencies provide administrative assistants, sales support and many other functions normally associated with a full time employee but those services are done “virtually”. A virtual office manager can have calls routed to his or her remote phone, emails redirected and conduct office meetings and negotiations with vendors via email or instant messaging. Using these modern tools, a virtual assistant can provide almost every function an on site assistant might be able to do but do so at a lower cost to the employer.

The better than Thee debate

I am witnessing some arguments over a discussion list within a translators association.
Things have turned nasty. The argument evolves around the matter of competence and the lack of it and whether it is appropriate to talk about the matter, and the difficulty not to tell names.
It is easy to claim being more competent than the next door guy. I am not immune to this. But I have noticed over the years this tendency to be true with many stellar specialists here. I see several facts fueling this :

- The strong unbalance of the spread between non-Japanese and Japanese interpreters that make the former having developed over the year a discourse centered on me versus them.
- However, this discourse goes beyond matters of nationality and is standard within same nationality interpreters.
- The issue is fueled by real or perceived limitation in access to work and the volume of it. But it tends maybe to persist even after one has carved a legitimate high position and secured regular work flow.
- The struggling to get better, find work more and often, what with the need for recognition entertain the original sense of precarity even when one should be satisfied.
- Apparent accessibility to the field by newcomers with or without competences is a cause or worry an scorn, even if the interpreter stands so high in the hierarchy and deliver in highly specialized context that the newbies do not stand as competitors.
- Scorn from the client's side seems rampant on the Japanese side for cultural reasons I won't dip into here. It affects Japanese interpreters maybe more than non-Japanese, in a sense.

The better than thee discourse leaves few room to the more interesting subject of how to get better than the current self.

I have more experience than Thee is a founded and at the same time inappropriate way to expose the issues at stake. There is a thin line between boasting and giving away at the same time value to those with less experience than oneself.

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The call of sim

I have noticed a kind of discrepancy between the formal speak about simultaneous interpretation and what I witnessed the other at some client's office. Simul delivered by one professional and one "unprofessional", or shall I call him "natural simultaneous interpreter". The apparent lack of tension, easy-going of that natural chap contrasted strangely with the more automated and sharp delivery of the professional. A matter of character maybe ... well, I don't know, but I know that I was indirectly invited to consider trying my hand at sim sometimes in the future. I am already feeling the tension.

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The technical element

When liaison interpreting in business veers toward mediating, monitoring, mending, is it still interpretation? My take on this is, yes.

Interpreting is the technical element. The rest is value added service. Without the VAS, the client looses much of the value of interpretation.

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What is Agile Analysis?

Agile analysis is being spoken of more and more frequently in the world of business analysts. This form of analysis is becoming more and more popular as the next generation of business owners comes into play. It is a more hands on approach to the business analysis. There is more communication. Face to face discussions occur more frequently. E-mails and faxes are becoming few and far between. So what is agile analysis?

Agile analysis is the warm concept of business trouble shooting. The business analyst who uses agile analysis is more of a hands on type of person. The stakeholders who demand agile analysis are more informed than the normal upper management. Agile analysis incorporates all stakeholders and participants into one unit each with a given task. Communication channels are always open when it is concerning agile analysis. The qualified business analyst is more dependent on his or her people skills with agile analysis than any other type of productivity.

Reading about Japanese Business Culture and Practices - Part 2-1

I just received yet another volume of "how to do business in Japan" reading material. This one is "Japan - Doing Business in a Unique Culture" by Kevin B. Bucknall. It should be mentioned that the author is not fluent in Japanese, or at least it is my understanding. It doesn't lesser the book à priori interest. There is a single praise for the book by no one else than Jim Breen of Japanese Page and WWWJDIC: Online Japanese Dictionary Service fame.
I believe for once that this doesn't read like a "I have yet to read the book but I heartily recommend it anyway" kind of nice blurb. This praise is a service between Australians and it's OK that way. I flipped the book over Google Books before purchasing it, feeling that this one might be different. I could not resist and jumped right away to the chapter "Language and Interpreters". I must reckon I was floored down by reading on page 90 this single suggestion : "It is best not to use a Korean as your interpreter, even if born in Japan, and therefore totally fluent. The Japanese team would not be impressed by your choice or judgment."

The author does not elaborate an inch.

Before stopping here and reading further, I must take note for myself that the malaise for someone having lived in Japan, investing much time and endeavor learning the language, not feeling at home but feeling accustomed in a way, that malaise at reading such books may stem from the fact that they are correct in the assumption that doing business here is indeed "doing business in a Unique Culture". But what the books that elaborate in sometimes too much impractical details implicitly tells is that when in Rome do as the Romans do, because the Romans competence at envisioning things potentially being different and at the same time meaningful to them is close to nil. Just like you can't exactly translate "integration" in Japanese, you can't translate exactly "flexibility" because both are not part of the local blueprint. I do not mean that in action, flexibility is a common feature on the other side of the formula. I mean that it is an option to be debated. Not here in Japan.

Despite the gloom consequential of thinking that way, it opens up, from a dry professional point of view, new vistas of cold strategy I am going to start investing into now.

Addendum : This is an excellent book. It puts the previous one to shame. I don't know if Mr. Bucknall speaks Japanese to fluency level, but he knows his business in Japan and has the exact approach I now favor, and that should guide liaison interpreters in their services and interaction with the client here in Japan but elsewhere as well.

Right into the preface, the author states that "If you are there on business it is particularly important to behave in an acceptable manner, because this can speed up the all-important development of your relationship and shorten your stay. This saves you both time ad money."

And even more up to the point : "Behavior seen as proper is also likely to improve your chance of actually reaching agreement, so it is really worth making the effort. (...) You might find yourself wondering "Why must I do it their way, why don't they do mine", but remember that you want to sell, buy, sign or whatever, and a few sympathetic changes in your behavior can help you gain what you want."

It's all about objectives based strategy, just like my take on objectives based interpretation. I have patched the book already with dozens of post-it-notes. Mr. Bucknall is nor sympathetic nor antipathetic describing Japanese manners. He is a pragmatic.

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Who's calling?

Who are doing cold calls asking for your services?

- SMEs, usually no direct but through an assistant via email.
- Very Small Enterprises, usually direct, via email for the cautious, live over Skype for the avant-garde.
- Telecommuters of large companies with senior or close to senior position, VRPs always on the road. They use the Internet in a way much freer fashion than they would do or be allowed to do at the head-office. They behave much like freelancers although they are not. They are your gateway to getting assignments with non-standard large companies.

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Building instant rapport during live inquiries

When your business life line massively depends on the Internet and prospect querying for "Interpreter + Tokyo", you must be to deliver right away. There used to be the email, the written text that created a layer of time delay to fine tune your answer to an inquiry for service. It is still here, but when you are online over Skype, an inquiry into your fees and availability may pop up out of the blue, and your competence at selling yourself in a flash is yet another competence they don't, nor will they never teach you at schools. I must spell the obvious here, but if you don't want to deal with the stress of showing that you are indeed available to answer inquiries on the spot, don't show you are online now over Skype.

If you do want to stand at the edge of liaison interpreting freelancing, then, discussing about readiness is nothing mundane, but instead, mission critical, as your mission is to get the job with the best of conditions, that is, your conditions. In a month's time, I received two live inquiries, that is, messages popping out of the blue over Skype, followed in minutes if not seconds by audio conversation. There's no time to call the sales manager. You are the sales manager and building rapport of confidence while at the same time checking the validity of the prospect asks for experience. It could ask for some discussions to get ready before rather than after.

I am not yet confident boasting what you should do, self-help book style like. But here are a few things I believe may stand as buds of strategies.

- Take control of the conversation by asking question following the first question or introduction from the prospect. Usually, prospects are cautious, and you should be cautious too, but weird prospects will show weird very quickly. If the prospect doesn't mention it right away, ask about the industry she's involved with, even if the prospect's first concern is your fees.

- Grab as much as essentials as fast as possible : who, when, where.

- Over Skype, check the caller information card. More than often, it is not informed enough. Blank cards are not totally suspect, but they may be.

- Try and jump to the prospect's company web site while talking. The point of course is to find out on yourself the URL, or simply ask.

- Show professionalism but check first how familiar with Japan the caller is.

- Go over the edge by offering suggestions - do you have business cards in Japanese, will you come with translated version of your documents? No? You should, definitely, etc.

- Engage the caller to tell more about the context, then add additional questions to clarify the big picture, not to go into details.

- Look to close the discussion after 10 minutes, pledge to send a recap mail with your fees within 10 minutes, hang off and write away that mail right now. A template may be a good thing to use but cautiously. All customers are not made equal.

- Don't wait for feedback more than 24 hours. You have an agenda to manage for other prospects.

Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator

When Banks Explode

The proliferation of branches of banks in most American cities has become so epidemic that it is hard not to notice the dominance of this kind of business on any street corner in your town. In many cases, a busy intersection which might be used for retail operations such as fast food restaurants, cleaners, gas stations and quick stop stores has been taken over by banks. In some cases you will see three of the four corners of a popular intersection in town occupied by different bank branches.

It makes you wonder, just how many banks do we need in town and why are the banking institutions spending so much money to put branches in virtually every location that has open space? It is a business trend that gets your attention and it makes you wonder what is driving this bank explosion. After all, in many cases there are not more customers for those banks. You have to wonder how banks can cost justify such expansion when the growth of bank branches is not even in step with population growth in a given community.

The phenomenon has become more profound in the last ten years than ever before. And much of it has to do with changes in how banks are regulated and the financial objectives that these branches are targeting, financial objectives that bring big money to the banking institutions spreading all over town.

· Regulatory Changes. The rules for how many branches a bank can own and where they can open them have changed significantly in the last decade. Now banks can open branches inside grocery stores and at a greater density than before. And this has set off the growth war of branch banking that we notice going on all over town.

Reading about Japanese Business Culture and Practices

In those long years, I had never seriously read any "how to make business in Japan" books. I have started reading some lately, and the impression is weird, to say the least. Take this one, "Japanese Business Culture and Practices - A Guide to Twenty-First Century Japanese Business". The author is an ex-professor of sociology. The co-author is seemingly, or used to be, well, much about nothing besides being Japanese. If nationality qualifies as a competence, then yes, he was, and I assume still is, Japanese, like others are engineers. In the dedication page, the author unleashes some venom to "the Department of Sociology, scarred by scandal, internal conflict, general backstabbing, false friends, and a disinterest in undergraduate education, has little to recommend it." A nice starter that made me think to send back the book to Amazon. But too late it was.

Anyway, hum, hum. I don't know if one should be qualified to write a book about doing business in Japan while being not fluent in Japanese. Or rather, one should be allowed, granted, one modifies the title with something like "how to do business in Japan from the point of view of someone not fluent enough or at all in Japanese so much that his vista is that of a non-Japanese speakers positively relying more than often on interpreters". You can see why such book would not sell.

Anyway. I wonder how much the author picked out from other look alike books to cram his own with a slew of bewildering bits about the dynamics of Japanese work and corporation. You get the standard mystifying and utterly useless dash of Japanese vocabulary like wa, honne, tatemae and the likes. You get bucho and amae sandwiched with Japanese eating etiquette, Japanese drinking etiquette, and another carload of etiquettes. This spreading of Japanese words to set the mystics is something that should be condemned by having the perpetrator gulp down 15 pieces of Otoro, sorry, fatty tuna, sushi in a row.?What does amae and bucho add to the comprehension besides the shroud of "Asian Mystery" that so much describes Japan in the Western blurb. You know, the kimono clad girl with a mobile on the ear, the ying and the yang of hightech and lovely traditions. The shroud of Asian Mystics, sticky as a spider web whose bite induces smiling slumbering, has been such a deja-vue yet compulsory means for the authors to state their mastery of the subject that it goes unnoticed. That is, again, granted you have not spent half of your life here, or more.

The end result of so many facts on the dynamics of work, life, human relations and the innards of corporation is that you get the description of a religious sect with Yoda at the top and tiny yodas around, mysteriously speaking, eating, keeping silent, belching, slumbering during meetings, being cryptic even in the toilet. You, the rude, coarse, boasting, arrogant, face-loosing, salvage rogue of a Westerner is going to meet cunning cuteness, intelligence at best, perfection which is Asian therefore perfect, etc. Once you read through, and it's a tremendously annoying exercise when you know more, the conclusion is a big : SO WHAT?

The only practical chapter I mostly agree with is the one on the absolute need to use the services of your own interpreter, not theirs.

I am still waiting to read a book starting from : what you want to achieve coming here doing business in Japan, and what are the local elements of the dynamic that will clash with your expectations, and what can be done despite differences to try and meet your goals.

Nobody I know or I have read about would state for instance something like : "conceptual talk is absolutely cryptic and meaningless for most Japanese (businessmen, the girl that brings tea, the boss, the bucho, the kids, housewives and pets). Smear your presentations - the PowerPoint things - with examples after examples. Use abundantly flow charts with pretty iconic pictures, even if you don't see where there is a flow in the abstract. Don't tale for granted that things being different here and there is unnecessary to stress. It is."

Also, don't expect your standard interpreter to be aware of these facts and to help you in anyway reach your goals, or at least try and reach those. So the next book to write, granted it is not here would be something like "An objectives achievement based guide to doing business in Japan". And no amae, no wa, nor even fatty tuna would appear in it.

Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator

Just general matters

M. told me of an assignment that did not get well, a meeting between two corporations. The agent told M. the content will be nothing special, "just general matters". How many incompetent agents are there around that do not help the interpreter get briefed? If by all means you need an interpreter, think about the fact that agencies blocked precious access between the client and the interpreter, and this has no small consequences. Unless there are special reasons why you must go through an agent to find an interpreter (there are special reasons), skip the agent and deal with the interpreter direct.

Managing blunders in liaison interpreting

There is an interesting article in the book "Triadic Exchanges - Studies in Dialogue Interpreting" by Annalisa Sandreli titled "Teaching Liaison Interpreting - Combining Tradition and Innovation". It refers to C. Wadensjö book and articles where liaison interpreting main tasks are described as relaying other's talk and co-ordinating other's talk. This valuable summary ignores of course the finer lines of a multidimensional activity. There's a lot of coordination of the self involved as well. Steering the wheel of communication means holding the wheel, not sipping Martini at the lounge bar.

Among the many subjects that could be raised about self-management is the management of blunders, that is the common sentiment of shame that comes attached with blunders. Blunders happen, they happened, they will happen again. Nobody's perfect but the interpreter is expected to be perfect. When blunder strikes, shame sets in and is a major risk to the business of interpretation continuity. Just swallow your pride, say you are sorry, correct the trajectory, put back on the wagons on the rails and push on. Or was it pull? Easier to say than to apply.

At school as outside school, shame just like tension and fear of delivering, a precursor of potential shame to be experienced, is one among many other self-management issues I usually cover briefly, still more than what books and articles do on that matter (nothing?). Talking about the things that matter is both teaching and healing, in a sense. It doesn't cure the next blunder occurrence to come in the future, but it helps. I should rather write : it must help, talk must be delivered as a pill for the time being, expecting longer positive after-effect. Two books that are powerful enough that come to my mind is "Shame: The Power of Caring" and "Dynamics of Power".

Technorati Tags: interpretation, interpreter, interpreting, Japan, japanese interpreter, Japanese language, japanese translator, liaison interpreter, liaison interpreting, Tokyo, translation, translator