Fringe benefits

My annual trip to the tax preparer has all the anxiety of a trip to the dentist,and the solemnity of the confessional.  I’m not worried about paying huge tax amounts.  Rather, I have to sit through a thorough examination of my performance for another year, from a purely financial point of view.

Working as a freelancer is a brave and bold endeavor.  As an independent, unless I provide it myself, I have  no health insurance, no retirement, no paid vacations.  One must be an IT expert, an accountant, a self-marketer, not to mention the self-discipline required. According to the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, the average mean income of a translator in the U.S. is $45,000 per year.  My tax guy compliments me on my bookkeeping, and talks about his trip to France, giving up on trying to copy my pronunciation of French towns and castles.  Yet I always come away with the feeling that he thinks my ability to work in a foreign language should make me wealthy.

So now that the returns are filed, I am going to take an uplifting moment to review some of the priceless moments that don’t have a line on the tax form, that don’t add to my bottom line, and that make me happy that I do what I do.  Without becoming a millionaire.

This year, I took an oath of office for court interpreters in Illinois.  This is a milestone, mostly because we never had an Illinois oath of office before.  There are now some ground rules.  Their purpose is to make legal proceedings accessible to Limited English Proficient persons, but an equally great benefit is a set of guidelines that the attorneys and courts can follow to help the beleaguered interpreters in their performance.  Progress.

I was invited to speak in a webinar for the Illinois State Bar Association.  The moderator emailed that the presentation went “very well… Particularly Deborah’s portion.  She has a very personable style.”

I have a flowery Email from a project manager who used the words “thoroughness”, “great sound bites”, and “tremendous value to the research.”  This one is going into my portfolio.  I keep a leather-bound linguist’s scrapbook, as proof (to myself? to others?) of what I can do.

I have a lovely Thank You note from a client who writes “je suppose d’après votre nom que vous êtes Américaine… ”   I translated a legal document into French for him and he was surprised to learn that I’m an American!

I had my usual annual calls from my retired French citizens in Chicago.  One woman whom I assist left her native country in her youth to work in the mines in France and now relies on receiving her pension wired into her American bank account.  She cannot read or write the forms sent to her from France, so I go and help her and she and her husband serve me wine and pastries in their suburban kitchen.  Another elderly gentleman who has to show up living and breathing at the French Consulate to obtain his certificat de vie proving he is still eligible to receive his pension, brings me a bouquet of flowers and a box of chocolates for making a few phone calls for him.

I helped a woman with the paperwork she needed to regain her French citizenship, a West African woman who needed a translation of her school transcripts quickly to apply for a job, an asylum candidate who just needed to talk to someone while nervously waiting out the interminable weeks and months for his hearing. I translated the documents required to transport someone's loved one back to France for burial in his hometown.

Language is a very human activity.  We have electrified it, mechanized it, computerized it.  But those artificial processes do not really enhance the miracle transmission of words from one human heart and mind to another.  I can’t seriously look my tax preparer in the eye and give him the George Bailey line that I’m “the richest man in town.”  But I’m warmed by a call this afternoon from Simone who tells me that her pension finally made its way into her checking account.  She will use the money to see her new grandson in Texas for the first time.  Life is good
.

Liberté - Egalité - Etre Français

Over the last few days of the terrorist attacks on Paris, I had many exchanges with friends in France, from all different parts of the country.  My dearest lifelong friend Denise lives not far from Montrouge, the Parisian suburb where a terrorist shot and killed a policewoman in the street. 

In fact, the site of that attack isn’t far from the famous spot where a native-born Frenchman attempted to assassinate Charles de Gaulle.  I was too young to remember that moment, but just old enough later to be profoundly affected by the assassination of Kennedy.

I grew up in a time when bullets were used against important figures, targeted as symbols of something greater than their personal, private selves.  In the United States, decades have gone by without any acknowledgment of the significance of Kennedy as a target.  We are told over and over that it was the work of a single fanatic, nothing more.

In reaction to the shootings in Paris this week, one of my friends in the South of France wrote to me that “all of the West has to go to war against these fanatics.”

My reaction to this remark was immediate.  “We Americans went down that path to war after 9/11 and it did not provide us with a very satisfactory resolution.  In fact, it was ruinous.”

I remember one cold spring day before the war, before Shock and Awe, when I had gone to a friend’s house to go horseback riding in the woods.  There were four of us in the barn:  three women tacking up our horses and the farrier who was fixing a shoe or trimming a hoof.  He had a Semper Fi patch on his jean jacket.  The conversation, usually very collegial in a barn, had turned to the looming prospect of war with Iraq.

I spoke up and said “Invading Iraq will be our greatest mistake since Viet Nam.” 

I quickly learned that this was not the sort of thing one should say, smack in the middle of Republican DuPage County.  The response to my outburst was on the order of “Do you want our way of life threatened?  Do you want to see gas go up to $4.00 a gallon, threatening our economy?”

I felt very alone that day.  But I have never regretted voicing my opinion.

Fast forward to a more recent time.  I received a Facebook message from a woman with whom I had worked and remained friends for thirty years.  “Politically we are on opposite sides but that is okay because that is why we vote our personal choices but don't shove it down anyone's throat. It is almost like you are an activist.”

The message here was that I should NOT discuss religion or politics, particularly my left-leaning French ideas.  In order to keep everything “friendly”, those subjects are taboo, and Political Correctness is more than ever a requirement for social survival.  Me? An activist?  Posting something pro-Obama on Facebook is activism?  He is the President.

While we in the U.S. are conditioned not to rock the boat with our opinions, the French relish a good heated discussion.  It is a national sport, on a par with soccer, except that nearly everyone plays.  

One way of understanding the differences between French and American thinking is to look at how students in each country are evaluated.  In the U.S., the SAT and the ACT are multiple choice exams where only one answer is right!  Unthinkable in France.  The baccalaureate exam in French is in essay form.  The grading system in French schools is on a severe numeric scale, where no one ever achieves a perfect 20 out of 20 points.  Americans strive for that A+, but in France, there is always “room for improvement”, and nothing is ever perfect.  If you want to pay a Frenchman a compliment, “pas mal” or “not bad”, uttered with the appropriate uplifted tone of voice, would be more prized and more believable to him than an exuberant outburst of “wonderful job!”

In a country where the esprit critique is the cultural heritage of the Enlightenment , where nothing escapes doubt and examination, an attack on freedom of expression is particularly hostile.  And yet, the French terrorists this week, unlike those who hijacked the planes on 9/11, were not foreigners attacking a nation who had invaded their homeland.  They were French nationals attacking what they perceived to be an invasion of their beliefs, which were not to be questioned.  They attacked the satirical press precisely for being French, with the sometimes biting, saucy, challenging components of French humor. 

These guys were attacking the very culture in which they lived. 

Is France “at war” as my friend suggested?  What happens when a culture is attacked from within?  In all wars, boundaries are disputed and set.  The boundary in France’s conflict is not geographic.  It is a fragile line between Fraternité and Political Correctness, secularism and religious indoctrination, cultural assimilation and cultural resistance. 

Americans are usually much more obvious than the French with flag-waving patriotism, but this week, I have seen countless French flags on the news, and everyone singing La Marseillaise at the top of their lungs. So I have been flying my French tricolor flag on my front porch, against the attack on the culture that gave me the literature, the poetry, the music, the pleasures of the table, the style, and, most of all, the people that I love.  My heart is with them.

A review of Co-ïncidences, by Dr. Cynthia Hahn

Probably the best compliment one writer can pay another is to admit to the pangs of jealousy I experienced upon reading a line I wish I had written:

Daybreak Harvest

Poised to sing spring, this

in-between hour when

poems are time’s pockets.

Obviously, Cynthia Hahn is herself justifiably proud of her stunning metaphor of “time’s pockets”, since this verse is repeated under her photo on the back cover of her newest collection, entitled “Co-ïncidences” (Editions alfAbarre, 2014;  editons@alfabarre.com)

In this collection, Cynthia Hahn and artist-illustrator Monique Loubet brush onto paper the delicate landscapes of a woman’s soul.  Dr. Hahn is at her poetic best in the spare precise Haiku of her art, like the delicate brush strokes of Chinese characters that convey multiple meanings.  Ms. Loubet’s art is in perfect balance with the words on the page, full of subjective and sensory impressions that re-create objective reality.

My greatest enjoyment of this bilingual collection, however, was trying to decipher which poetic version came first:  the English or the French?  As someone who can call Cynthia Hahn a friend, and as poet and translator myself, it was a great game for me (and perhaps for her students) to read back and forth between the French and English to seek out the original poetic inspiration from the poetic translation.  In testimony to her craft, this was never very obvious and my guesses are certainly influenced by personal preferences for certain sounds and images.

Comparing the English verse:

Copper bell sounds a

lake of yellow lotus,

sun’s grounded glow.

to the French

Une cloche de cuivre sonne un

lac de lotus jauni,

chimères de soleil tombé en terre.

makes me think that this poem was born in English first, while the vocalic harmonies in the poem Elle en arbre

Les oiseaux me fortifient

de leurs nids

de leurs dons de trilles

lead me to believe that this French rendition, with its strident bird songs, was written before the English.

As for Night Undresses

Sun and Moon lie

in a crimson suitcase

filled with ragged clouds.

I’m convinced that the beautiful evocation of this image had to have been first seen with Cynthia’s English-speaking eyes.  My impression is that Cynthia Hahn is a bit more “liberated” in English and more rigorous in French, but if that is true, she would only be acting in faithfulness to the distinct natures of those two languages.

Her collection is a bird’s eye journey, from Ascent, to Flight, to Landing, in a final contemplation of mortality at a poet’s favorite place for that:  the sea. 

I came back to a new reading of these poems over the Christmas holidays, and was again pierced through with lines written for the finality of another year in the cold of winter:

Who will sing new year

leaves onto the trees?

Softly falling angels.

Congratulations, Dr. Hahn, on an elegant, moving work.  I say that with both jealousy and admiration.

365 Cheeses

“A country that produces 365 cheeses cannot lose the war!”

So said General DeGaulle.  Also:

“How can you govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese?”

These two quotations came to my mind a couple of months ago while on the road interpreting for a group of over thirty French visitors to the Midwest.  The exact number of cheese varieties in France, as well as in the quotation, was as jumbled in my memory as it was in DeGaulle’s, so I had to look it up.  I tried to find an exact figure of how many different types of cheese are produced in France, and those numbers were all in conflict with each other.  I think the reason for the ambiguity is that the French don’t want to discount the small producer out in the Aveyron with a hundred head of cattle on a hill and a really great homemade cheese sold in the local farmer’s market.

The huge variety of cheeses is the perfect expression of how French cling to their individuality, to their unique personal expression.  How horrible of me to make sweeping generalities about a culture!  This is the place where prejudice is born!  And yet, the more time a person spends straddling two cultures, the more those cultural definitions become enforced through observation.  I know for a solid fact that some jokes will make an American laugh, and will not even provoke a smile from a French listener.  Conversely, something a Frenchman finds screamingly funny can totally escape the American sense of humor.  Certain actions and reactions can be expected, dependent upon culture.

My group of French visitors to the U.S. approached me on the tour bus with a request.  Would I please speak to the driver in order to reserve her services and her vehicle for the evening? 

It would be simple enough to just go interpret the question to the bus driver, but my antennae went up, sensing a pending complication.  Interpretation always has the interpreter thinking ahead.

“Before I ask the driver, can you find out three things for me?  How many passengers will there be?  What is your destination?  And at what time do you want to leave?”

The groups’ transportation delegates left me, with a promise to come back in a few minutes with the answers.

I sat in the back of the bus and watched the conversation unfold in the aisle, starting with a simple question and escalating to a full blown debate, punctuated with both laughter and moments of forcefulness.

An hour later, their spokesperson came to me with the following itinerary:  “Six of us would like to go to the art museum.  Five want to go to the jazz club.  Three from the museum group want to join the others at the jazz club, and two from the jazz club don’t want to leave the hotel until later, but then the art museum would already be closed.”

I borrowed the piece of paper on which the person had scribbled the math and made my way down the aisle of the bus to the driver’s position, knowing full well what her response would be:  “Taxis.”

How did I foresee that there would not be an easy consensus?  Would an all-American group have come up with one destination and one departure time?  Perhaps not, but I dare to make the generalization that Americans are more “team players” than the French.

I often hear from French visitors that they are astounded by the number of American flags, flying from every building, from schools to gas stations.  You don’t see as many tricolor French flags in France.  In some way, the French don’t need a symbol to know they are French.  Their culture is so thick with traditions, with “dos and don’ts” that are subtle indicators in a person’s mannerisms and speech that immediately communicate to each other that “I am French.”  I can’t describe it, but when I go to the airport to meet a group of clients, I can spot a group of Frenchmen at a hundred yards in the crowd.  For that matter, it’s just as easy to pick out American tourists at Roissy.  Nobody is carrying a flag.  The American one is a confusing patchwork of stars and stripes, and serves as a symbol to unite the cultural mix that is an American.  The French flag takes the same three colors, bleu blanc rouge , but displays them in an understated couturier-acceptable array of equally measured vertical bands.  I think to the French mind, other than on July 14^th on the Champs Elysées, those colors merely indicate the location of a government office and the French have a love-hate relationship with government.  They rely heavily upon it and are always extremely unhappy with it.

Working in the French language and culture is personally exhilarating for me, like joining an exclusive club with an elaborate secret handshake.  The French with whom I work are usually very warm hearted towards me, with my mixed American background but my obvious efforts to be one of them.  I think professional linguists have somewhat of a split personality, with a foot in two cultures.  We get to be someone else, role playing and toggling between idioms and the manners that go with them.

Today is the Feast of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators.  He was a Roman who traveled to Gaul and spent some time in the Middle Eastern desert with hermits.  He made the cultural transitions required to translate the Bible into Latin, an amazing piece of work. 

I wonder if he was easily recognizable as a foreigner when he was hanging out in Syria?  Or was he successfully able to blend in with the locals?

The real test would have been when he went to arrange for his “bus ride” back to Rome….

Putting words in their mouths

Language separates humans from animals, and yet there are so many experts out there that claim to “read” animal language.  I suppose that puts animal trainers and handlers in a certain class with translators and interpreters.  We decipher a “foreign” communication, and give a voice to those who cannot be understood.

I volunteered for many years in an equestrian center, drawn by the natural beauty of horses, and perhaps riding a horse was the fulfillment of a dream passed down from my Polish grandfather. His portrait in my home shows him brandishing a sabre as he sits astride a horse that I would guess to be an Arabian, with its small stature, dished face and dancing feet.  Someone once told me that it is particularly tiring to sit an Arabian horse, because they never stand still.  My grandfather’s horse looks as if it wants to fly off the wall.

Early on in my exposure to horses, I found it interesting that human handlers routinely “spoke” (in first person) for the horses in their care.  “Where’s my hay?”  “I don’t really want to go for a ride today.”   I suppose all humans put words in the mouths of their beloved four-legged companions.  My dog communicates fairly clearly to me:  licking his nose while standing next to the fridge where his bag of kibble sits means “hey, I’m hungry.”  Standing by the front door means “I need to go out.”  Putting his toy at my feet means “can we play fetch now?”

Horses, on the other hand, are infinitely more discreet than a dog, and almost entirely non vocal.  They don’t bark or wag their tail to let you know they are happy to see you.  Their communication is so subtle:  the direction their ears are pointing, the position of their head, the amount of white showing around their eyes.  Unlike the happy hind end message of a dog, a swish of the tail on a horse (if not to chase a fly) might be a warning signal that a hoof is going to come off the ground in your general direction pretty soon, especially if his ears are flattened against his head.

As an interpreter, I would listen in quiet amusement while humans in the barn would “interpret” for horses.  Horses do communicate, but their very nature makes the communication complex.  They are both powerful flight animals and submissive servants  and we humans have had to figure out which side of their nature is operational at any given moment, without too much of a sign from the horse.  Human history would have never progressed to where it has if there had not been generous equines to assist us.  What if all we had to work with were goats or kangaroos?  Horses, with all their muscle and size and speed, stand for us and let us climb aboard, allow us to attach all manner of leather and metal to their bodies and in their mouths.  I am always deeply touched by the generosity of this animal towards humans.  It is their very generosity that makes them inscrutable.  Saints are not complainers.

As an interpreter, I am limited to my experience and exposure to situations in my foreign language.  I have actually toured a nuclear power plant with French speakers.  While this allowed me to learn some specific technical vocabulary, that one encounter does not make me an expert in nuclear power.  Likewise, spending years and years with horses might give me some vocabulary, but would I actually “speak horse”?

There are horse “whisperers” and trainers who, through extensive exposure, interpret what the horse is thinking and feeling.  Unlike language interpreters, however, who are trained to remain neutral, and who are interpreting within their own species and maybe even under a common modern cultural “umbrella” of understanding, the horse whisperer or trainer is making a bigger leap of faith.  Seriously, no one really knows what a horse is thinking. 

I have watched the conflicts that have arisen between horse handlers, each interpreting equine messages differently and subsequently providing different responses and reactions.  There are those who will beat the horse and intimidate it (the caveman approach), shout, whisper, massage, clicker train and reward. 

The trainer I respected the most was the very first one I encountered in a barn.  He didn't speak so much to the horse as LISTEN.  And, as any interpreter knows, effective LISTENING is crucial.  Horse communication is full of tacit messages, and can go misinterpreted for a very long time until the horse has a “freak out” moment, or lies down in pain on the ground.   

There are as many different styles of training and managing horses as there are barns across the countryside, and horse handlers are often immovable in defense of their preferred method.  They fervently cling to their method like a religion.

That is why I so appreciated my first instructor, Matt Trynoski.  His reflective approach to any horse problem would begin with:  “Hmm, that all depends….”  tempered with years of experience and a lot of listening.

Through my contact with horses, I have found them to be wonderful teachers.  They have much to teach human beings on the subjects of fear and confidence, dominance and submission, persuasion and force, strength and gentleness, generosity and collaboration.

If we only know how to listen…

Obsolescence

I’m just old enough to know a thing or two about obsolescence. 
 

 

My first computer had a DOS prompt and I’ve owned every version of Windows since 2.0.  My first job using a computer required that I learn to use WordPerfect, which has since disappeared  in favor of MS Word.  Fortunately for my career, I was able to move from a technical environment into a legal one, and attorneys held on to WordPerfect longer than other professions.
 

 

From my thirties on, changes in technology have zipped along, with kids leading the race, eager for each new gadget, and frugal adults reluctantly following, learning early on that any equipment bought was obsolete as soon as it came out of the sturdy cardboard box in which it was sold.

 
 

Perhaps a person’s age and experience paint our world’s planned obsolescence in a bad light.  I spoke up at a recent board meeting, where the discussion of replacing the company fleet of cars was on the table, to tell clients that the hybrids they were contemplating are equipped with a special battery that has an estimated service life of seven years and a replacement cost, after seven years, that would then exceed the resale price of the car.
 

 

I’ve often wondered what happened to the bits and pieces of my old cars, beloved machines that carried me where I wanted to go.  A lot of metal, plastic and rubber went into their construction.  Where is it all now?  And I am only one single car owner on this huge, automated planet.  Sometimes I imagine the earth beneath my feet suddenly bursting open with old car bumpers, milk gallons, and 8-track players oozing to the surface from long hidden garbage dumps.
 

 

I started writing this while seated in the double-deck car of my commuter train, having left my Buick in the train station parking lot.  Soon I will be getting on a plane to cross the Atlantic into France.  Hundreds of other aircraft will be in the sky simultaneously, and the international space station will float over all of us.  How many times in our lives do we entrust our physical bodies to the inside of a big metal machine, with the objective of moving quickly from Point A to Point B?  I’m sure few people know how many times they have ridden in a car or a bus, and I count myself fortunate to have lost track of how many flights I’ve taken over mountains and oceans.
 

 

The trains and cars and aircraft have all gone through lightning evolutions in a short period of time, but here is the constant in all of this Modern Metal Modification Madness:  People are not obsolete.  The machines get faster and more efficient (well, let’s take the Concorde out of this discussion), but their goal is to move human beings.  I can easily transmit my image and my words and thoughts over wireless connections to far reaches of the globe.  And yet people still need to meet up with other people, have face-to-face contact.  The basis of the whole internet and communications revolution is to carry human words and voices faster and further.
 

 

As a translator and interpreter, I am acutely aware of the individual, personal nature of a human being’s speech and use of his language.  Human rendering of language is as unique as a fingerprint, with accents and styles, ethnicity and education all shaping our speech and our words.  But just as we entrust our human bodies to a variety of machines so that our presence is not limited to the space in which we live, our words and our speech are more and more entrusted to mechanical devices that will carry them great distances.
 

 

We should never forget the human being behind the text message, the document or the Email.  Because behind the flood of electronic communications is thought:  the intangible products of the human brain.  And no two brains are alike.
 

 

I recently attended a professional meeting of translators, where a distinguished professor of translation lamented the rapid decline of the individual translator’s income.  While translation as an “industry” is outpacing many others in growth, individual translators are suffering from plummeting rates.  As in many fields, the mechanization that was developed to “make life easier” has made life harder for those humans whose functions it replaces.  Linguists seem to be going the way of travel agents.  Although we are the ones who know all the best places and how to get there, the general public prefers to take its chances with booking over the Internet.
 

 

Translation software was developed to enhance the translator’s memory by instantly coughing up a phrase that was translated previously.  As a tool for the translator, what a boon!  But these lovely tools have fallen into the wrong hands:  translation agencies and the clients themselves.  Now the client can say to the purveyor of translation services:  “I’m only going to pay you for NEW text, since my machine has already translated fifty percent of my document.”
 

If the subject of the translation is an owner’s manual for a machine that is in its FIFTH VERSION, it’s easy to see how automated translation would be fast and efficient.
 

But how much of human language is so repetitive, so uniform, so black and white and lacking in nuance, that a machine can render its translation?  Machines are made that way, but not human beings.
 

I just translated a brochure for a client who wanted the product literature to be an elegant reflection of the high-end, unique objects whose commercial value resides in their place of origin and the human craftsmanship that went into them.  The brochure was classy, peppered with descriptive language and the occasional play on words that only someone French-speaking would grasp.  I had some great “Ah Ha” moments coming up with parallel expressions in English.
 

A machine could not do this. 
 

On my way to Union Station in Chicago this week, I passed in front of a record store that was selling good old vinyl records.  The store was full of customers at 10:00 o’clock in the morning.  I asked someone about the value of going backward technologically and purchasing vinyl.
 

“It just SOUNDS better.”
 

I guess until human ears and brains become obsolete, with all their capacity for detecting nuance, there is still hope for humans who translate and interpret the shades and tones and notes of human language.

The State of my Soul

Interpreting is an adrenaline sport.  The physical demands of the job cannot be ignored.  Most employers at least recognize the need for a glass of water within reach, but I doubt that they have any idea of the importance of preparation materials, time of day, comfortable positioning with visibility of the speaker, or the need for working in manageable amounts of time.  Some of these conditions can be controlled by the interpreter, but for the most part, we are at the mercy of the environment into which we are thrown. .  For the interpreter, our success is a transfer of meaning from one brain to another, a nebulous and intensely personal outcome.

 

I had a mentor who put me into my first simultaneous assignment.  Many years ago, at a formal dinner in his home, I was seated next to a prominent figure in the French community, who was singing the praises of our host.

 

“I knew William was a brilliant interpreter from the very first sentence I heard him translate in the booth.  It was:  je n’ai pas d’états d’âme… “

 

I froze.  Even though I grasped the meaning, I couldn’t, at that precise moment, come up with a solid English equivalent of that phrase, translated word for word as “state of the soul”.  As soon as I returned home, I ran to my Robert Collins dictionary.

 

État d’âme:  mood, frame of mind, to have scruples, to have qualms, to have doubts.

 

How wonderfully French!  The definition of the undefinable, the expression of turmoil in the soul. 

 

A week ago, I struggled through a tough assignment, and went home feeling totally defeated.  Among other difficulties I encountered while interpreting was the acronym “GPA”, which does not mean “grade point average” in French.  This morning, my best friend, a Frenchwoman who has lived her whole life near Paris, told me that she had never heard of GPA, which stands for  “grossesse pour autrui” or “surrogate motherhood”. 

 

Acronyms are one of those obstacles that can derail an interpreter’s performance.  They are linguistic shorthand, a sub-language, in a way, some being universally recognized and needing no translation:  CD-ROM, JPEG, even the word RADAR is an acronym.  Some require some scrambling of their letters:  NATO becomes OTAN, AIDS becomes SIDA in French.  BRIC can stand “as is”, but I’ve had Americans throw BYOB and GAAP into their speeches, both requiring expanded definition.  A programmer once informed me before his speech that IBM stands for “I Blame Microsoft”.

 

During an interpreting assignment, in the heat of battle, sometimes one saving moment of inspiration gives that essential injection of confidence into the bloodstream that makes everything work.  I have vivid memories of the precise words I was able to translate for a colleague interpreter who had the microphone and looked to me for help:  simple things like “checking account” for “compte courant” or “nacre” for “mother of pearl”.  Under less stressful conditions, my partners would have come up with those translations easily.  Being able to instantly fill a gap is like hitting the tennis ball to the complete opposite side of the court where the opponent isn’t.  Lucky shot.

 

On the second evening of my recent difficult assignment, I needed some inspiration.  On stage behind a microphone, in front of a good sized audience and cameras, I was hoping to redeem myself from the previous night’s performance. 

 

And then, suddenly, I heard my speaker use the phrase “états d’âme”! 

 

It was almost as if my mentor was sitting on my shoulder, whispering the translation into my ear.  I knew then that everything was going to be all right.  The expression itself is not so unusual, but like Proust’s madeleine, a whole realm of memories was attached to it, and I was now reliving my mentor’s moment of glory.

 

The word “inspiration” comes from the ecclesiastical “spiritus”, meaning both breath and spirit.

 

Thank you, my guardian angels, for your whispered inspiration when I’m interpreting.  Thank you for easing my doubts, my mood, my frame of mind, the qualms in my soul.