Petit vengeance (?)

My stance has been so far that Japanese agencies don't give interpretation assignments to Westerners. There are not enough Westerners clearly designed and self-touted as interpreters here to negate the point, except for the exceptional. I know a single French national in Tokyo being a top class interpreter of all trade. I suspect another one to be. That makes a two. In some countries, it's called a throng. There must be a trickle of Westerners in niche totally undercover doing most exclusively non-simultaneous. Non-simultaneous is the massively performed technique (and that also means "situation") and the massively ignored subject - unless you happen to work for the US army in Irak or Afghanistan and get killed by your own son as it was reported some weeks ago.

You get touchy, too much, after all these years, starting from despair, moving toward self-claimed deep understanding of the ecosystem of your profession, the muck of the untold, the weight of the cream and recognized kins who pace the rules and themes of academic world. An invitation from a Japanese organization to fill a survey the other day, with the mention "only simultaneous interpreters apply", this survey being led by a mostly famous non-Japanese interpreting scholar in Europe. Anyway, what's the fuss.

I have claimed so far that local agencies as a rule don't give assignments, except for the exceptional. I have a clear memory of an agency I was involved with for +20 years that gave me an assignment, one in +20 years. The management of it was awkward enough to suffocate on it.

I now must reckon I am mongering biased information. I just now remember an assignment from a trade fair agency at a shoe exhibition in Tokyo, maybe 20 years ago. That makes two. Now, I have a third exception to log for posterity. An agency just emailed me with an offer for a two days assignment. They wanted me to come to their office to discuss it. What are the modern telecommunication technologies worth in 2010 Japan?

Anyway. They announced right away the fees. I had the immoral pleasure to answer back right away that I do not work for such fees, and that I am the one who set my fees, not my customers.

In the good times, not brilliant but good as it has not been for 6 months in a row in a long long time, you start to be pretentious. You are on the verge of forgetting the very roaring speech and definition you like to hammer on the head of others, that knowing the hardship of having no work for quite a while, the human being optimistic at boots, once you survived the despair zone (we are know flying through a despair zone, fasten your seat belt and hold on for a few years), once the better times are in until the next hole in the sky, you tend to forget not to forget to be aware of the market, you tend to forget that market scanning, understanding your professional ecosystem is never acquired, is never mathematically proven.

A tiny voice tells you in the back that behaving in such a pretentious way toward the third agency that dares and come forward to offer you an assignment, the third over 25 years, should be treated with courtoisie. After all, haven't you been reading these days books on courtoisie and politeness after all these years of ups and downs (many ups)? But no, the middleman most probably wanted to meet me and "check" if I speak Japanese among other claims (good at fixing dinner except dessert).

Some believers of fate and the voices of the unknown whisper that you will pay one day to having sent back that agency where it belongs - the mostly incompetent but can't do without band. And yet, you can't settle on the feeling of shame, whose opposite is not pride. That's for the manicheistic lot.

Talking about "know THY market", I was lured into buying (for speed) the electronic version of a book named "The entrepreneurial Linguist - The business-school approach to freelance translation". It's a broad surface scanning of things with at least a 150 pages to let go. A 20 pages book, pointed list, would have been enough, rather than skimming of the surface of things like "how to register to Facebook". There's a strategy of not showing the book index. Because the index might be enough.

I knew the book to be (so American!) yet another cool book claiming to be different just by lurking at the promo site. It's OK when you start in the profession(s), but it tells too much at face level. And misses something I have seen as crucial over the years : know Thy market, which means more precisely, develop a model that allows you to understand as best as you can the ecosystem of your profession, starting from who teach what to who, down to who does what and how job is created, passed along and filtered by who. It takes a good concept map and revisions to come up with a never perfect version. I have such concept map nurtured over some 4 years now, with the latest entry dated a few days ago. IHMC Cmap Tools is the free software. Pretty enough for the purpose and good.

It is the map of the Americas of the profession as seen from Tokyo, and still an unfinished roadmap. Nowhere in the book I read sideway (en parallèle) could I spot a clear invitation to know Thy market, and that the knowing is an endeavor over time (because the market doesn't want you to be known down to its innards).

So that makes 3 over 25 years. Not bad.