Vivisecting the market perspective until it hurts

There is an interesting side to the course I am teaching tonight as always on Monday. It's a rather light but practical course on business interpreting, with a broad meaning, where we work on a real Power Point document about some "technical" subject - last week was a timely description of the state of the Fukushima nuclear plant. As I tell often to my students who are most of them working not in interpretation but rightly take the course to gain a different perspective on language acquisition, it is the course I wish I had.

The "interesting" side would most probably be better referred to as "cynical". There's but few professional reasons - à priori - to aim at professional Japanese-French interpretation except as a potential side job. The market is so small and captive. The course is ushered in as an opportunity to reproduce in the classroom a close to reality setting, one among other possible settings which is the business meeting with consecutive interpreting.  There are other possible realities but this one is the easiest to set up.

The Mar. 11 has had incredible impact on interpreting at large. Unless you work for the US iRobot in Fukushima, or some of the engineering corporations from abroad maneuvering to get a chunk of the nuclear mess market, chances are you are jobless currently. The problem is to try and get feedback from the market. It has always been a problem. Most interpreters I have met here are shunning at pair meeting, out of pride, or out of discomfort, them having to bear the consequence of stress from a negatively oriented market. Unless you know a direct "competitor" willing to share a little bit, you are lost in haze, all the more when you are out of the agencies scope. And if you base your analysis on bits of rumors, you risk mental hazard. Being a non-native in Japan practicing interpretation between Japanese and French makes you a cousin of the recently introduced new Panda at the Ueno zoo in Tokyo. Pandas are a rare species and the "locally generated" market is designed so that access to it is very, very narrow to put it under optimistic light. The point in assessing the markets outside the local one, and reaching some sense has been to put it under hypothetical light, and start working on it.

One agency who gave me the opportunity to work as an interpreter maybe three times over +20 years (many more in the past with translation) called me last week. We had a chance to talk, too briefly. We could meet face to face. We are a 15 walk distance away but things are different here. They wanted to get voices from abroad about people's view on the current state of Japan. Was radiation such a concern?

The market,this agency market, mostly international conferences, is staled. Dead. Conferences to be held in Okinawa, that is a close to 2000 km away from the Fukushima plant have all been canceled. The closer you come to the capital city, the easier it is to infer what is happening. Although I am not concerned with international conferences, it is a sure sign. Another sign is touristic influx. It has slumped, unsurprisingly. Although I am not in the touristic market, except for one to three times a year and on totally order made confidential fashion, this is yet another indicator. People are not coming by a high percentage.

Some years ago, I bet that the market was multiform, mostly English, and a deep understanding of it was a requisite to try and figure out where I was standing. The conclusion long postponed out of a lack of competence to vivisect the ecosystem came under harsh but hopeful light years later. Thanks to the Internet and opening a shop in the clouds, I could expect to be found. It worked to some extend, seldom enough to fulfill the month, but side activities, including teaching, compensated although with ups and downs. Also, as you say lightly, interpreting was (profoundly) fun and intellectually fulfilling. It still is.  Why should I quit?

I discovered a few facts that helped further vivisect the market. Here are the major features :

- There was a market googling for an interpreter to meet in Tokyo (rarely elsewhere in Japan), skipping the agency altogether. Is skipping the agency done on purpose, or has scouting resources direct a matter of fact? I don't know.

- That market was not made out of single businessmen or tiny SMEs. I was surprised to discover that they covered all the gamut in terms of corporate size, from the consulting cabinet to the big boys. A department in a big, big engineering company would contract me for a visit in Japan. That department was in itself a corporation. The department was the client, not the company at large.

- Inquiries would come direct, from the future service user, or indirect, from an assistant. In Japan, a corporation would invariably rely on a local agency, and not expect the interpreter to be foreign, at least for Western languages. Exceptions do not rule in the Japanese-French pair. The implications here were telling a story of dynamic and innovative research method from the client's side. Google was King and being visible under Thy Light a requisite more than ever.

- Clients, at least those transformed, wouldn't care my not being a native English speaker. I must highlight here that the majority of inquiries would come from English speaking countries, or English as a matter of fact lingua franca for business (Germany comes as an example). France was out in that sense starting from day One. The French speaking clients would be rare and occasional. Creative usage of Google would be anecdotal from France. GoogleAd was a sure judge on that matter. It has more to do with differences of human interactions, the French version being surprisingly closer to the Japanese - under the contemporary French cool and "tutoiement de rigueur" than one could fathom.

- The preference for a Japanese lady interpreter (proved many times - Japan has been a Western's wet dream since the 19th century, especially in Japonism stroke Europe), what with the push toward lower prices - the more the Euro would gain, the less clients would be willing to pay - yet additional proofs that this one market was not only peculiar, but resembling the inquiries from India and South-East Asia where they expect the interpreter to charge less than what they pay hourly at MacDonalds in Tokyo. I have put under the knife the French language market of visitors to Japan, both in terms of how it is generated and channeled, so much I could draw a map. In fact, the map exists but is private.

- Clients would seldom repeat. You could attribute this to several causes : I am a bad interpreter, I am too expensive for the budget. Bragging apart, it appears that in most cases, it was a matter of single shot mission impossible, a specific need to have an interpreter in a situation that was exceptional, a rare visit to Japan, a rare face to face encounter with local partners, a one shot trial at selling something.

It also suggests that surviving means having a portfolio of recurrent clients. When clients do not come to Japan as it is the case right now, the market, that is, that very market dependent on the influx of businessmen, is dead. Any exception will have to be treated as an exception. Exceptions don't inform but feed the buzz around the coffee machine.My next scheduled recurrent client visit comes next month and will be a 1.5 day assignment. I am also an unofficial agent to them but this time may be the last time. They will probably quit trying and push into Japan anymore.

Where do we go from here? There are a set of very limited options based on vivisection like analysis of the state of the markets (take note of the "s"). I might have input from one of it at a meeting tomorrow.

To be continued ...