The week before last I delivered a speech to a bunch of Hanoi bankers. The subject of my presentation was assigned to me 2 weeks earlier by someone in Marketing: "New Ideas in Customer Relationship Management". Of course, I had no new ideas. And no time to find any. So I grabbed a lot of other people's old ideas, tied them together with string and chewing gum, arrived 5 minutes early to load my PowerPoint file onto the central computer.
I was told the speech would be translated, simultaneously. I was also told that while I had 45 mins to speak, I would only to use 35 mins of material because of the speed of the translation so please go through the other material quickly. An interesting stage direction to say the least: "You will need to go slower than normal, so will not get through everything, so please go quicker through some parts."
I asked to meet the translator. I opened up my PowerPoint and showed him the sections where I would not be sticking to the written words on the screen and what I would say; how I would introduce myself in the beginning; checked that he had good translations for obscure words such as advocacy, psycho-demographic and end-to-end multi-channel process architecture; asked how quickly he would like me to speak and whether there was anything else he needed to know or vice versa. Turns out he didn't want to know anything at all, except where I was from:
"Sydney."
-- "I studied in Adelaide at Adelaide University for 3 years."
"What did you study? English language?"
-- "No. Finance."
"Oh. Do you need me to go through my speech with you?"
-- "No. It's OK. Just speak a bit slower than you normally speak. But not too slow. Just a little bit. Like 10%."
"What about this pace, is this OK?"
-- "No that's too slow. Just a little quicker but not too much."
"Oh. OK."
There are about 10 rows of people in the audience. Having studied the invitation list I knew they had job titles like Vice General Director and Deputy Director, Payment Promoting Department. So I knew I was in for a good time.
Next thing I know I'm getting mic'ed, then announced, and walk up the aisle to the podium through gentle applause.
As I start to speak, the entire audience reached for the pair of headsets in front of them and puts them on. So now no one is listening to me. My wisdom (OK, other people's wisdom) is being filtered via a slack-jawed Adelaide Uni finance graduate. And I am looking out onto rows of bumble bees. I know how Jaws 3 felt.
Needless to say, I abandoned all attempts at light hearted repartee and ploughed on through the material. Halfway through, I noticed that I had abandoned the podium and my hands were gesturing a bit too hard and my arms were occasionally flapping. I think my message was looking for other ways to get out in its raw from. Quite tragic but beyond my control. About 3/4 of the way through I got bored, so I started speeding up my speech to annoy the translator. At one stage I was rabbiting on really quickly about key customer life event triggers and how to recognise them and how to operationalise them, while thinking to myself "Simultaneous that, yer cunt.".
That's not my only experience of simultaneous translation though. No, no, no.
Edwina provides simultaneous translation for me - in English - on a daily basis.
For some reason, she feels that by repeating things I say she is helping people understand it. Sometimes it's condescending to the locals when it's staccato. Sometimes confusing. But mostly it's just disruptive, superfluous filler. This from a document review last night with our contractors:
My echo: "You need to add a table in that section there. Just a breakdown of everything.
Me: "I don't understand this bit. I think I know what you're saying but the client may not understand. Could you please reword it?"
My echo: "This needs to be reworded so that the client understands it. Can you see the sentence there that begins with--"
Me: "Yes Edwina - they know which sentence. They're already marking it up on their page.
My echo: "So that sentence that you're marking up - yes that one. That needs to be reworded to make sure the client under--"
Me: "Let's have only one voice saying the same thing, OK?"
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