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Telecons comin' outa my ears...
Feb. 6th, 2007 10:39 pmToday's telecon nearly blew my mind.
I was interpreting for the one Russian participant among a group of technical types discussing the finer points of closing out work. Such discussions can assume such aspects of hair-splitting discourse as to make the most studious law student quake in his or her shoes.
That kind of stuff doesn't bother me, much. After all, my job is simply to parrot what is said.
And I can soak up quite a load of verbiage before having to unload, the way a capacitor can accumulate an electrical charge. The only problem is, both I and most capacitors have a limit.
In the end, after the conversation got completely away from me this morning, I paused and tried to gently remind the participants that I could only do my work if they limited their utterances to one or two sentences. (I should have said breaths of air, because this one guy was able to go on for about five minutes without leavening his spoken words with much punctuation to start with, least of all a period.)
In the end, I ended up deliberately "stepping on" people who started to respond without giving me a chance to do my thing. In retrospect, I don't really feel too good about having done so, but then again, I don't think I had too many alternatives (if I had merely shut up, I think the telecon would've gone on for a long time before anyone - except, perhaps, the Russian sitting in - would've noticed the absence of the interpreter).
(I probably ought to have gotten the hint yesterday, when the background documentation for the telecon turned out to be about 60 pages in length!)
* * * The floodgates have opened up again. After agreeing to do another 7 am telecon tomorrow morning (involving Linux, of all things!), I got the document I had expected to receive last Friday, and shortly after that, I got a call with a request to do a rush French-to-English translation of a contract.
Said contract has taken the better part of 9 hours, including all the research, but the result - just over 4000 target words - will go out the pipe here shortly. And so, too, I will go to bed, as it turns out that in order to get out of this place in good order for a 7 am telecon, I need to get up at no later than 5:30 am.
Cheers...
I was interpreting for the one Russian participant among a group of technical types discussing the finer points of closing out work. Such discussions can assume such aspects of hair-splitting discourse as to make the most studious law student quake in his or her shoes.
That kind of stuff doesn't bother me, much. After all, my job is simply to parrot what is said.
And I can soak up quite a load of verbiage before having to unload, the way a capacitor can accumulate an electrical charge. The only problem is, both I and most capacitors have a limit.
In the end, after the conversation got completely away from me this morning, I paused and tried to gently remind the participants that I could only do my work if they limited their utterances to one or two sentences. (I should have said breaths of air, because this one guy was able to go on for about five minutes without leavening his spoken words with much punctuation to start with, least of all a period.)
In the end, I ended up deliberately "stepping on" people who started to respond without giving me a chance to do my thing. In retrospect, I don't really feel too good about having done so, but then again, I don't think I had too many alternatives (if I had merely shut up, I think the telecon would've gone on for a long time before anyone - except, perhaps, the Russian sitting in - would've noticed the absence of the interpreter).
(I probably ought to have gotten the hint yesterday, when the background documentation for the telecon turned out to be about 60 pages in length!)
Said contract has taken the better part of 9 hours, including all the research, but the result - just over 4000 target words - will go out the pipe here shortly. And so, too, I will go to bed, as it turns out that in order to get out of this place in good order for a 7 am telecon, I need to get up at no later than 5:30 am.
Cheers...
