Of noise and making the best of that lingering feeling

"I would appreciate your position as a neutral party." This is a smart and sharp request from a new customer, one I have never read nor ever received so far. I could write pages on this matter but will keep quiet this time.

My understanding was that meeting would take place in a meeting room. It started in a coffee shop and ended there. Will someone give me an informed opinion on this kind of gear? Unless you have experienced it, stating that doing interpretation in a noisy environment, BGM and the likes, is hard, is only but a tiny part of the story. After 2 hours and a half non-stop, I was washed out. Ear dropping, literally cornering the ear to try and catch what they say over there at the table I am supposed to interpret is massively stressing and tiring. In a quiet meeting room, you usually don't need to over focus on hearing. Focusing is enough. In a coffee shop, standard conversation may be tiresome depending on the decibel level of the BGM and the level of each participants. But the interpreter is listening, full time, non-stop, non-stop deciphering, analyzing, grabbing context rich information in side-talks not to be interpreted to better understand what is at stake. Hearing is paramount to everything else. That's what I tell again and again at courses. But what when hearing is impaired because of the environment?

As for that lingering feeling, a white trace in a blue sky, it is both the result of sheer fatigue and the conclusion of a meeting, the standard little drama that develops each time, because things went pretty OK, the client is happy, and chances are this 2.5 hour encounter will never happen again. The unplugging when all the "arigato" are distributed, the noises of the chairs behind pushed away, and the first noise you don't care about because standard listening, which is partial listening, is now authorized. That's where the trail starts, and accelerate when you start sailing your own path back to the train station where no participant is heading. You are alone.

The standard bragging about interpreting, better than translation because when things are over, they are indeed over and you can call it quit is ... totally wrong. It's a trail and a tail at the same time. Flash reminiscences of things that took places a few minutes ago, the longing for something more especially when human contact with the client has been especially pleasurable - it does happen often. All this makes for boatload of virtual luggage your start dropping item by item as you move away from the professional scene. That's the substance of the trail.

Making the best of this time at long last alone with the self means doing a debriefing between you and you, a silenced but serious debriefing on what went OK, what went less than OK. Even if it does not transpire in this blog, because 99% of it is confidential, and because after a few stations, the mind starts focusing on the future like what to fix for dinner, it aggregates somewhere and will be of some use next time. For instance how checking the self to stick as best as possible this time to the request of keeping a neutral position, awareness in doing so, allows for further reflexion for the future about what is referred to when talking about neutrality in liaison interpreting, and more. Instead of pretending to call it quit when something doesn't want to quick, better investigate while it's hot on the (professional) meaning of it all.