Losing one’s cool

This moment when an interpreter on CBC lost her cool because she couldn’t hear the feed is going to be all over the internet presently.

Except that it’s billed in the popular media as a “translator’s” goof. But it was an interpreter. A translator translates the written word, and an interpreter translates the spoken word.

Sometimes a translator might lose her cool. Sometimes she feels like asking the author-client, “Were you asleep in elementary school? Have you never heard of punctuation and capitalization rules, sentence structure and dictionaries?” But she doesn’t. Sometimes she comes close, skirts the thin line, asks the client, “did you perhaps mean ‘[trace metal] calibrations’ when you wrote ‘castrations’? Did you actually mean ‘units selected at random’ when you wrote ‘units selected at citrus blossom’?” Does it really matter that my translation of your novel is ‘not poetic enough’ when the original is misspelled, incoherent and boring? (OK, we bit our metaphorical lip on the last one, and agreed to up the poetic quotient.)

And that’s why I blog anonymously.