I spent a weekend in an intensive workshop for court
interpreters. My work flow has been such
lately that I have been looking forward to Brain Down Time on the
weekends: slouched in a chair flipping
channels between a great old Katherine Hepburn film, a quick look at the
Weather Channel to convince me that my three-mile power walk has to wait until
the threat of rain subsides, and back to CNN to see if they are still hashing
over the same terror threat.
So it took sincere Dedication to my profession to get
dressed and drive into the city to commune with fellow interpreters.
Happily, the weekend provided more than a couple of real
highlights, beyond the instruction (which was excellent).
I’ve been thinking that, as I am getting older, I am not as
polite and deferential as I used to be.
Impatience seems to be taking over some of my kinder impulses at
times. Maybe that is the result of being
better at foreseeing outcomes. Such
as: Taxes are due. My computer will have a major crash once
every two years. All materials in the
universe get dirty, need cleaning and eventually deteriorate. Seasons change and come back again. Those realizations have led me to planting
more perennials in the yard than annuals, buying better paint, and upgrading my
technical support options.
But where I really notice a change in me over the years is
in conversation. Even when engaged in
casual banter with a friend or a relative, I find I am possessed by some inner
demon who, while trying to listen to the person in front of me, is wildly
tapping his foot, arms crossed tightly in front of his chest, and who wants to
shout “get to the point already!”
In addition to that, if my gentle interlocutor has launched
into a topic that does not rivet my attention, I’m suddenly thinking of when I have
to do my bookkeeping… maybe I’ll make some saumon
en croute for dinner, but damn… I didn’t defrost any puff pastry… what time is the next train? … and (slipping
back into the conversation at hand) when did I hear this same conversation
before?
Something is obviously wrong with me. Despite my impulses to connect with the
person who is speaking to me, an inherent rudeness
is taking over.
My problem could very possibly be a cultural overlap issue. I’m thinking of the old Bible on
French-American cultural differences, written by Raymonde Carroll[1] that confirmed to me what I had learned about
French conversation styles.
“… it is the
‘continual interruptions’ in French conversation that baffle Americans… what an
American takes for an interruption is not really an interruption but plays a
completely different role in French conversation. Seen from the exterior, French people engaged
in conversation do indeed seem to spend their time interrupting one another.”
However, hanging out with other simultaneous interpreters, I
discovered that we all seem to share some similar habits. Finishing someone else’s sentences, for
instance. Talking over each other. Occupational hazards.
Something else I reproach in my conversations is a quality
that scarily reminds me of Attention Deficit.
While capable of concentration when it is called for, my brain, when
unleashed, can go off on various tangents, pulling my interest with it. One remedy is to remain comically active in
the act of conversation. Pulling a juicy
play on words out of the air. Throwing
in an infrequently used adjective. Making
a joke (if appropriate, of course). But
then, to do that, I almost invariably have to interrupt the speaker.
The one entertainer I admired above all other for his flow
of speech was Robin Williams. His brain
was a light-speed pinball machine, with genius ricocheting off of any available
word.
He might have made a really great simultaneous interpreter.
Maybe I’m going to be too kind to myself here, but I’m going
to congratulate myself that I have a talent for Divided Attention. It is the curious split in thinking that
allows a simultaneous interpreter to hear someone speaking and interpret that
person at the very same time. It is the
ability to process an audio message while producing another one in another
language. Not just “listening and
speaking” at the same time, but processing two messages simultaneously: one that is incoming and one that is being
created to be sent out in the next second.
I went home from the workshop on the train with another
interpreter. The only language we share
is English. Our conversation was not a
ping-pong match of “my turn, your turn”.
It was a spiral of speech, where the ideas floated between us and we
snatched half sentences out of the air to chart the course of our
conversation. Anyone listening to us
would have thought us the rudest women on the planet.
But then, we did have moments of complete harmony…. when we
laughed.
[1]
Cultural Misunderstandings: The
French-American experience; translated
by Carol Volk, 1988 University of Chicago Press.
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