Alone in the arena

... and the people are watching. I learned that in Italian you are not an interpreter, you do an interpreter. Next time I'll be Italian. This state of being that screams of identity has been as annoying as superfast drying concrete. It seals the self in a sort of fixed, stultified role that knows no path to promotion. A corporate employee gets promoted and a raise. A freelancer simply improves and shuffles the business cards according to the situation at hand. There are lots of business books on business behavior, grooming, fashion strategic attitudes, how to speak, how to act. I haven't yet bumped into a real good example that raises the issues when you are alone in the arena. maybe selfhelp books for consultant will do. Suggesting mere copycatting of corporate persons lack the fact at the core that you start and end up the day alone. Debriefing will be mostly performed between you and yourself. It asks for early clarity toward the fact.

So you agreed after many email exchanges on the conditions and the schedule. The prior day, you receive at long last the presentation document - a draft you were told. It's already past 9 pm, and with nightly chores, you won't really start reading and annotating it before 11 pm. A mere 45 pages, not impressive, standard stuff besides some inner jargon no Wikipedia can help with. It should be fairly standard.

The following day you meet, start the presence work, smiling, small talk, reciprocal probing, understanding what will happen. That's where you usually notice that the visiting client is pretty much in the dark about details, who will attend, how many people, what are they geared at, and countless small things. You check, casually, if your client has any experience of business interaction through an interpreter. The answer is no. You suggest the minimum standards, the speaker should mostly watch the attendance, not the interpreter. Our coordination between us, when to start, when to stop and baton touch, will implicitly be understood after a few minutes into the action. The interpreter here, even if nervous, must claim for commanding part of the action, not by telling it explicitly, but by casually advancing with a cool attitude that she is piloting the interaction and will give clues to the speaker. The action takes place in a meeting room, a cramped one at that. Not calling what is your turf right away will cost you later embarrassment when it is clear that coordination is needed, especially when the client doesn't know the value of speaking not too fast and not too long.

Actually, this is exactly what you forgot to tell, speed and the length. You were busy relaxing the client worry about the degrees of bows, whether he shall call A with A-sama or A-san, and other issues of stress you, the long time resident, do not see the point about. Just be your business self, is the recommendation you deliver to the culturally concerned.

It start with a tsunami like wave of flowery speech as an introduction. You were focused on the PowerPoint document, but for a long, very long 5 minutes, everything that is uttered is not included, not mentioned in the ppt. Shuffling the papers while concentrating, taking notes and trying not to be seen as struggling are to you clear signs that you are struggling. Flowery speech, the cooing of business introduction, if only one contract, like a Vandross song, delivered at a car chasing speed - the customer is used to steering the wheel of his flowing words, all this you know you hate. You want hard stuff, specs, regain control thanks to the many cues on the ppt.

Also, you are an attraction, as usual. A Caucasian lad interpreting here is a never-ending attraction. You know your limits, you overstate to yourself that speaking fast, while you deliver though, is not your forte, what with in that foreign language. It is one of those still rare secret feat to yourself, that you can somewhat deliver while taking mental notes of what is not going OK. What you should focus on next time. More client's preparation, more prior concentration and anticipation of what was meant to happen. After a while, you get the rhythm, you compensate or check your stress by overtly taking charge with faked commandeering of the visual cues that order the client to deliver the next part of the pitch. You do not know because you do not want to know whether the Other side is listening to your riding of the tricky and mysterious local jargon with interest, awe, or concealed disillusion at your language limitations. You believe you are limited ... although the results so far do not suggest such is the case. They speak to each other.

Later on, you will feel secret solace to ask for clarification when the Other side's CEO is asking a question that requires reformulation, simply because it is not clear enough.

But you are reminded at your casual daily loneliness when in the restaurant at noon, where it appears that even broken English is enough to talk direct about food and the weather and leave the interpreter munching, you consciously refrain to participate to the exchanges, playing the intensively listening guy, helping the left side understand which pickle to start with - cultural guidance on the fly, your other competence - helping and being aware that you are the unavoidable "unconcerned but not indifferent" guest, or communication spare wheel soon to leave the place, leaving them with their socializing you don't belong to.

All is fine, it is loneliness business as usual. You remember how that seasoned veteran interpreter justified with semi-hidden irritation why interpreters don't mate with each other, "because they talk all through the day", and by the end of the day, they don't want to talk anymore. Debriefing with a glass of plonk will suffice. And that is when you start, devoid of affectation and hard emotion, to consider definitely, without any need for further argument, with a higher than ever level of self-confidence on that matter at least, that it sounded and still sounds to you, as far as argument to justify the anti-socializing trait of interpreters, as total bullshit.