Pretend it had all worked backwards.
Pretend the president is routinely reading his routine briefing papers and everything looks routine – until he gets to one of the more minor details in his upcoming visit to the Nelson Mandela memorial earlier in December in South Africa. And there he reads:
"The sign-language interpreter the South African government has arranged, Thamsanqa Jantjie, is more widely known for his rendering of pure gibberish in sign-language. Fortunately, the audience served by such translation service is largely symbolic and driven more by political correctness than by a real need for translation.
"It should be noted, however, that the interpreter, Jantjie, will perform his translations only inches from President Obama and, although the Secret Service assures us they are always 'less than inches away' when it comes to security for the president, this interpreter is being treated for schizophrenia and faced a rape charge in 1994, theft charges in 1995, a burglary charge in 1997, malicious damage charges in 1998, as well as murder, attempted murder and kidnapping charges in 2003 (which involved 'necklacing' but for which he was determined mentally unfit to stand trial)."
Where, exactly, are those Secret Service agents poised? And could any of this possibly explain why the president's hair is standing on end?
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Those who deal with personnel or "human resources" know of the many workers who cheerfully bend the extra angle when asked to do the firm a favor outside their job description. They also know of those who snarl and complain, "That's not my job, Man!" It's always been a comfortable assumption that the Secret Service belongs 100 percent to Category "A." It was, therefore, at least slightly unsettling when a top official in the Secret Service issued a statement to the effect that the vetting of the interpreters for the president of the United States is the job of the host country! Gee, fellows! Do we really want to fight about that?
In a common-sensical real world – getting harder and harder to imagine! – that issue would never be discussed out loud, but we'd recognize that not all host nations are created equal. Canada? Most definitely trust the Canadians to vet. Likewise the U.K., Australia, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and a lot more. But for Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, South Africa and a lot more – "Excuse me, Mr. Prime Minister, I'm from the U. S. Secret Service and we have a few questions!"
I thought all "interpreter" jokes, yarns, anecdotes and stories ended when Woody Allen aced out all competition with his grand-slam comment back during the Cold War, namely, "What if Khrushchev wanted peace and his interpreter wanted war?" Thamsanqa has brought the "interpreter" jokes back big-time.
The major league of interpreting has to be the United Nations headquarters in New York. You can spot the visitors who know nothing about the interpreting business. They're more impressed with the simultaneous interpreters, who rattle off what's being said in a different language right away. They're much less impressed with consecutive interpreters who let the speaker go on for a while and then give forth the translation. Actually, the simultaneous interpreters have it much easier. They don't have to remember anything!
There are two "big days" the interpreting crowd likes to remember. One is when West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer spoke to the U.N. General Assembly for the first time, in German. That one requires this bit of knowledge of German grammar: German loves unending sentences, clause after clause, where the verb comes only at the very end. Chancellor Adenauer was speaking an awful lot of German and not a sound was coming out of the German interpreter's booth into the headsets of the delegates. The chief interpreter nervously punched the intercom button and yelled to the German interpreter, "We're not getting any sound from you!"
Came the reply, "I'm waiting for the verb!"
The second "big day" requires no knowledge of grammar of any kind. A delegate from a West African country said in his speech, "In my country, we have a proverb that tells us, 'Never stick your arm up a sleeping elephant's rear because he may stand up, and have you considered where that would leave you?'"
The English, Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese and Arabic interpreters simply gagged, resumed translating after the great "proverb" and then, reportedly, had to go take a pill and lie down.
The world's champion interpreter? I'd nominate the South Korean colonel interpreting what an American major told a group of cadets at South Korea's "West Point." The American had read somewhere that a good speech should start with a joke. He missed the part about the joke being relevant to the subject matter of his speech and at least fairly clean. My Korean interpreter-hero could tell that the joke the major was opening with was both irrelevant and indecent. The interpreter knew it should not be translated.
How did my favorite interpreter handle it? The colonel simply told his listeners, in Korean, "Our American visitor is telling a story which, alas, is meaningless in our culture. He expects a big laugh at the end of his story. At that point I will simply say, 'Laugh!' – whereupon all of you will please laugh uproariously." It worked wonderfully.
Unlike most people, I actually met my hero, the South Korean colonel. I asked him if he really got away with it completely.
"Not exactly," he explained. "As I was driving the American major back to his base he said, 'You know, Colonel, it didn't take you very long to translate my opening joke.'"
The colonel said he told the American, "Ah, but you see, Major, Korean is a very quick language!
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