Where You Sit DOES Make a Difference

When you are booking a business trip, there are a lot of important decisions to be made. Obviously, the important issue is your business objectives and that everything you need so the business you will do when you arrive comes off well. So you will spend the majority of your efforts on those preparations or so you are well equipped for the trip.

But to use the old phrase, it’s the little things that mean a lot especially when you are enduring the inconvenience of business travel. You put up with a lot of inconvenience and having to accommodate the needs of others in airports where everybody wants to be comfortable. Little things mean a lot on a long business flight from how well you eat to the kind of car you rent on the other end. Just a small surprise or accommodation along the way can set put you in a good mood on the trip and that mood could even influence the outcome of the meetings you will conduct when you make your business contacts at your destination.

Some people do not have a preference where they sit during the plane flight. But there are a number of issues that can become significant during those hours where you are essentially immobile as you fly cross-country. Some of those are.

The Australian model

"Interpreters' role perceptions in business dialogue interpreting situations" is an interesting paper I had not notice so far. It was published in 2006 by Takimoto, Masato at Monash university in Australia. The title is expressive enough to understand what is the subject covered. In the second page of the paper, the author listed up the interpreters he interviewed, Japanese-English liaison interpreters in Australia. I was surprised that four out of the seven listed were native speakers of English. Australia tells a different story compared with Japan. Four out of seven may not reflect a statistical reality but it shows that professional interpreters of Japanese-English are not drastically limited to native speakers of Japanese as it is the case in Japan.
Close to 30 years after graduating from university, the emptiness of the program offered at that time not only still looms in the background, but as new vistas have been open up through this blog, it tells of how inadequate the curriculum was, and still is in France, based at least on the reading of pathetically coarse exchanges of current students in public chat rooms.
I saw one point in the paper that may be a major clue to investigate the big difference, not only between Australia and France, but also between Australia and Japan. All the listed interpreters were mentioned as being accredited by NAATI. And no only only that. The Monash Japanese language faculty blurb online specifically refers to the interpreting and translation strand as geared toward getting NAATI accreditation as a launch pad into the real professional life. There are no national accreditation system, both in France and Japan. Pseudo-accreditation is in the hand of schools, and worse in the case of Japan, in the hand of private schools, like Simul. It close-circuits the scope of what could be the local market if it were not manipulated by a closed knit network of schools doing the marketing and luring students into a professional market they hide the boundaries of.

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Off-topic : The Japan that can't say no

This is off-topic, but not totally unrelated. I sent sometimes in November of last year an email to a Japanese publisher, complaining about the poor quality of the CD attached to a language manual otherwise very valuable. The lack of recorded sources of natural spoken Japanese is a major issue for learning and teaching liaison interpreting. The scope of Japanese podcasts is paltry as usual, featuring mostly lame commercial content, over formated or stifled audio journalism reciting pieces of printed material. This one rare manual was basically the recording and transcription of interviews with many next door Japanese people giving their opinions on a lot of social issues. Again, it was a rare piece of audio content I was looking forward to exploit with my students. That was before I listened to the audio CD. How such a poor recording quality could have been made into a product was beyond imagination. Even in poor over the phone interpretation, I never met with such useless audio environment.

Four months later, I received an answer to my message. The publisher is blaming the author of the book who came with that poor recording in order to sell her project. The recording was poor because the author was not a professional at recordings. The publisher originally thought the poor recording worked against the project to make it into a CD+Book product, but the idea was so good (it is), and the author so pushy that they accepted. The publisher even states that the recording was somewhat manipulated by some professional to make it a little bit less worse. She ends up being sorry but comes up with the bright news that someday, in the second print, they may consider getting the help of some (more) audio professional to somewhat try and make the recording less worse than worse.

It's a great piece of sociology and human relationship down here in Japan. I am not sure if you can call the author the winner, but in the country where the customer is king, it is the king that gets dethroned. How the publisher shifts the responsibility of the poor recording to the author and begs for forgiving to having abode to the author's desperate plea to get published is brilliant. A typical Japan that can't say no situation. You will read in books about giri, jinjo and all the paraphernalia of human relationship and still not get it until you experiment all this in an extreme way.

I, as a customer, almost forgave the poor author, but not the publisher. They have to get read of the first print and fraud another few hundreds customers to be until they may take action with the promise of a possible better version. As they say here, you just raise your hands as a sign of letting it off.

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