13 Mayo 2011

As Tiffyn and I were relaxing in our first bath in a week at the volcanic springs I got a series of exasperated phone calls.
“Where are you? We need you here.”
“I told you I needed to bath and wouldn’t be there for an hour.”
“We need you here now.”

As I am begging Tiff to hurry out of her first moment of cleanliness in days, she poignantly notes, “You let people walk all over you sometimes.”
“I like helping, and they need my help.”“Yeah, but you also need a bath, you stink. They can wait.”

With nervous energy due to my tardiness, I finally arrived at the meeting, refreshed and ready to do the work they needed and everything was fine. Thus began the quickest translating I have ever done in my life.

A sister of the catholic church had run a soup kitchen in Yanque for years. It fed a large community of children for decades (my apologies for not knowing the specific details). When the sister passed away, the director of Quechua Benefit promised her he would make sure her work was continued. The local church immediately took over the responsibilities and QB didn’t worry about it. In less than a year the church lost their funders and could no longer manage the soup kitchen, so now, QB wants to gracefully step in and make sure what needs to get done gets done. My job: translate between the QB director and the father of the church and make sure communication was clear and no one felt their toes were being stepped on.

What I realized this day: there really is something odd about my ears. I mean, we figured it out when I was little that I was a freak that had some sort of relative/perfect pitch, and I know I am an audio learner and need to read out-loud to make studying effective, but this meeting was just ridiculous. My auditory loop was out of control. The average phonological loop is extremely limited, especially with primacy and recency effects that you find in speaking language (in other words the stuff that comes before and after makes you forget what is in the middle). Somehow I could allow the words of one language to continually enter my ear and my mouth would translate it as it came allowing for no retroactive interference. Just barely speaking over the speaker, with no lost time, the listener could get a translated version then speak directly back. I was like a little computer chip they could put in their ear. Of course I had to stop a couple times for vocabulary I didn’t know, but the whole meeting was so important and went so fluidly I felt proud when I left. It was fun to be the person to ensure communication between two parties so different from one another.

There was a This American Life Episode quite a few years ago about a man who translated for political meetings in the middle east. He talked about how intense the responsibility is to translate properly. The fate of a nation could be in the words you decide to use. There is so much trust involved in choosing a translator. I am not a human dictionary by any means, and could never be a translator by profession. But, the reading of anther person, in a second, that is so necessary in translating, is a bit of a challenge I have come to enjoy.