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Glad it's over...
Sep. 20th, 2007 10:59 pmWhen the group broke up this afternoon, it became evident that two interpreters would not be required for the last day of the job, and as the commute was becoming something of an ordeal for me (the trip home today took two and a half hours), I sort of volunteered to be the odd man out.
The presentations today were par for the course: dense PowerPoint slides that should have been translated before the meeting, and which would have required a significant amount of time to translate. Instead, it fell to the meeting interpreters to do a sight translation of the material, which is almost never going to be anywhere near as good as a well-written translation, expecially as a particular meeting interpreter (me) doesn't normally translate from English into Russian.
(One might ask why, if I'm working as an interpreter, orally translating from Russian into English and back, should it be a problem to orally translate written text? The answer lies in the fact that people do not speak the way they write, which would be enough of an answer, but the situation gets only worse when you start having to deal with telegraphic grammar in bullet points, the content of table cells, and labels in various other devices such as org charts, flow charts, and pie charts.)
The material was overwhelming linguistically as well: industry-specific terminology that came at you faster than you could absorb it (this tended to overwhelm the other interpreter as well), as well as management-speak that, for some reason, is assumed to represent concepts that are not intuitively obvious, at least not to this observer.
I came home and pretty much fell asleep until Natalie returned from work.
To make up for the lost assignment time tomorrow, the universe arranged for me to receive some translation assignments.
I am going to hit the sack again before I snap out of the semi-consciousness I'm in, the result of a call from Drew and a short consultation to get me on the list of his friends and family on Flickr. Glory, but the grandkids are getting big!
Cheers...
The presentations today were par for the course: dense PowerPoint slides that should have been translated before the meeting, and which would have required a significant amount of time to translate. Instead, it fell to the meeting interpreters to do a sight translation of the material, which is almost never going to be anywhere near as good as a well-written translation, expecially as a particular meeting interpreter (me) doesn't normally translate from English into Russian.
(One might ask why, if I'm working as an interpreter, orally translating from Russian into English and back, should it be a problem to orally translate written text? The answer lies in the fact that people do not speak the way they write, which would be enough of an answer, but the situation gets only worse when you start having to deal with telegraphic grammar in bullet points, the content of table cells, and labels in various other devices such as org charts, flow charts, and pie charts.)
The material was overwhelming linguistically as well: industry-specific terminology that came at you faster than you could absorb it (this tended to overwhelm the other interpreter as well), as well as management-speak that, for some reason, is assumed to represent concepts that are not intuitively obvious, at least not to this observer.
I came home and pretty much fell asleep until Natalie returned from work.
To make up for the lost assignment time tomorrow, the universe arranged for me to receive some translation assignments.
I am going to hit the sack again before I snap out of the semi-consciousness I'm in, the result of a call from Drew and a short consultation to get me on the list of his friends and family on Flickr. Glory, but the grandkids are getting big!
Cheers...
