Conference call interpreting

Just got out of a meeting with the public affairs people in Ukraine. It was way crazy, but fun--I filled the role of interpreter, secretary, and also participated as a public affairs representative!

We have an American missionary couple in Ukraine who were in on the meeting, so I interpreted from Moscow what was being said in my office, as well as what was being said in the Kiev office, to a couple in the Kiev office. Interpreting a conference call to people not in the same room with me was definitely a first. I have done interpreting where I have a headset, and I'm watching a monitor and interpreting into a microphone, but this was totally different. Comments were flying from Kiev and Moscow participants, and I was trying to catch all of them while being heard through the same microphone that was relaying what they were saying. Often in these situations, I interpret by sitting right by the couple so that it can be done simultaneously, but as they were in Kiev, we made do. At one point we considered having me call and talk to the couple on a cell phone, but we got it all worked out and just continued as we started. I even got in a couple of Andrey's side comments, which he just laughed at.

I really love interpreting! It's so fun to take someone else's words and formulate them as we would say them. Many people think that interpreting from language to language is just a manner of substituting words (one tiny example--something as simple as saying I have or at me in Russian would not make very much sense if directly interpreted word for word. I have a headache would be at me is a head hurting. And actually, they don't use is or a so it would really be at me head hurt. Not the most elegant of examples, but you get the point), but it's really an art--different cultures say things in different ways, with different grammar, and an entirely different lexicon at times. You really need to have a command of your own language to be able to convey the right message. You are expected to not only listen to a foreign language and understand what they are saying, but be able to formulate the same idea and express it. It's a matter of speaking and listening in the exact same moment--all must be done simultaneously, and you can feel yourself fall into the rhythm of it. It's almost like your brain seperates speaking and listening and lets both programs run at the same time. So cool!

I do have to mention here one of the mistakes I made--Andrey was talking about the website and how they were two parts--one static and one...something I didn't hear. Because I didn't hear the second, I didn't really have a frame of reference for what he was saying, so what was supposed to be static came to me as statistic. They're almost as close in English as they are in Russian (statika vs. statistika), so you can imagine it is easy to mix the two up. Luckily, we caught it right after I said it and got right back on track. And I learned a new word :) All in a day's work