It's great when things start falling into place...

Today's wakeup call did its job, and I'm getting ready for a pretty hectic day. The phone tech I mentioned yesterday did show up soon after my call, and he found a loose wire in a service room down the hall, and this was apparently preventing me from receiving any incoming phone calls.

Where is that loose wire when I need it?

Among the announcements at last night's SLD dinner was that the time of my presentation tomorrow has changed. The specifics were not immediately known, and I'll nail down the details within the hour, I expect, but it was as much of a surprise to me as to everyone else in attendance. Good thing my presentation is all but ready. :^)

Oh, well, at least there's not many dull moments at this conference.

Excelsior!

Cheers...

Continuing education...

I'm back from an interesting presentation by Lynn Visson, a U.N. Interpreter who stepped in for Pat Newman at the last minute to deliver the annual Susana Greiss lecture at the ATA conference. (Ms. Greiss is a long-time member of the ATA, and was instrumental, if I recall, in the creation of the Slavic Language Division. May her tribe increase.)

Ms. Visson has a very dry wit, a reserved delivery, and the observations she offered on interpretation - based on her experience at the U.N. and in working with mixed Russian-American marriages - were right on the money, in my experience.

Her talk was informative. I did not know that the beginning of simultaneous interpretation as we know it occurred at the Nurenberg Trials after WW II. I also did not know that there are a limited number of language combinations employed at the U.N for simultaneous work (six official languages does not imply 30 categories of interpreter).

Instead, there are a handful of combinations - for example, interpreters who do Russian and French into English - and speeches are disseminated to other-speakers by relaying them to other interpreters. (It made sense when I heard it; I'll need to map it out to understand it fully.)

Her one comment on handling sayings and aphorisms in interpreted speech was alone worth the price of admission to the conference. (Well, almost.) Basically, the idea to keep in the back of one's mind when faced with a speaker intent on delivering a choice saying is: "We have a saying in our country that covers this situation," without actually providing any interpretation of the saying at all.

She also warned that sometimes, finding the appropriate equivalent phrase in the target language was fraught with danger. For example, the Russians have an expression "to buy a cat in a bag" that is almost almost perfectly communicated by the English expression "to buy a pig in a poke." Unfortunately, you can never be sure that the speaker won't try to engage in conceit and build on the idiom, for example, by following the "cat in a bag" remark with a comment to the effect of "What if I open the bag and the cat should run up a tree?" Try to wriggle out of that with your "pig in a poke!"

I and fellow attendees who subscribe to the Lantra-L mailing list met at the hotel's 'Watercress Cafe' for lunch today. The price for the lunch buffet was advertised as $12.95 and included soup, salad, and sandwich. I figured what the heck, why not? While waiting to be seated, I took a look at the take-out menu on the wall and noted - without my glasses - a price of 51.75 for a cup of hot chocolate, and was only mildly puzzled until I realized that the '5' was really a '$'. What bothered me was that seeing '51.75' as a price for food at this estabishment did not particularly surprise me; my sticker-shocked nerves have been numbed, apparently.

The Lantra company was excellent and the food was edible. A good time, I believe it can be said, was had by all, at least judging by all the pictures that were taken. My eyes bugged out, however, when the bill came. The house had tacked on a 17% gratuity to the tab (discreetly leaving a blank space for any additional gratuity I wished to add), which - plus tax - amounted to over $16.00. I am not even sure if the waitress so much as poured water for me; this buffet was self-service, as are most of them. I do know she kept me waiting for my check. There went half my per diem, right there.

Heck with it. No use crying over spilled milk. Remember the good times.

My presentation rehearsal goes well. Attendance at the sessions thus far has been good to excellent, though not necessarily of super-high quality. I attended a session on web site translation where the first speaker defined "URL" as "University Resource Locator" and committed a couple other faux pas before I left. You can't win them all; you can only recite Shepard's Prayer, and hope that God is listening.

Cheers...