This past Sunday despite being super-busy with other things in my life (known as 猫の手も借りたい, or so busy that I could even borrow the paw of a cat to help) (starting a computer science program!), have a job, getting ready for UDC (trampoline dodgeball championship in Chicago!) I volunteered with MJ at a conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center to be a translator for conference attendees. I was Mandarin, MJ was Korean. It was very different than I expected, being a translator at this event because it's not what I also envisioned a translator to be, like the N. Korean translator for Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. I expected to only casually use my abilities and greet some customers once in a while, give them directions to certain places in Chinese, engage in some small talk about where they were from, direct them to the restroom, help them ask a question to someone more senior them me.
The reality is shocking sometimes, and I naively thought for some reason there wouldn't be a lot of Mandarin-speaking people, maybe because in my daily life cycle I deal with only a few people, and definitely not that many Mandarin speakers. Turns out there a LOT of Mandarin speakers in the world, and thousands of them gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center on Sunday; I felt like I spoke to every single one. I probably met more people and had more conversations (albeit) brief than I do in a week or 2 weeks in my normal life. I was helping people get registered in a rather difficult registration process, which required me being a problem solver most of the time more than just a translator, as the process was not an intuitive one and people would often run into problems, and I became pretty much customer service, and multilingual customer service at that. Because of the nature of lining up waiting for the registration process, I was subjected to many people in line coming to talk to me because I wore a "I speak Mandarin" t-shirt (mandated by the company) which was like wearing a "I am a rotten banana" t-shirt in our home for fruit flies to descend upon. It was a literal verbal assault of questions specific to each person, and I had to deal with each one, and quickly because people were impatient. It reflected a cultural difference between Chinese people and Americans: Chinese people are impatient, don't wait for you to finish your conversation with other people before butting in, and feel free to tap/ touch you to get your attention at any time, like they're the most important person in the world. Many times I wanted to yell at them, "I'm not Prince Shotoku! (Prince Shotoku is a Japanese historical figure, a shrewd politician who was said to be able to listen to 10 people talk at the same time, and remember the contents of each conversation. In modern times Japanese people say they're not Prince Shotoku if too many people are trying to talk to them at once). Not necessarily blaming Chinese people because that's the culture they were brought up in, but it seems like common sense to me: wait your turn, I have to finish my conversation with the other person before I get to you, I can't finish that prior conversation if you're constantly butting in trying to get my attention about your own problem. It was very very annoying, and coupled with the fact I had to be translating conversations to relay them to English speakers, made it that much difficult and my head hurt that much more. I often was talking so much I'd forget which language I was speaking and start speaking the wrong language to the wrong type of speaker! They just gave me a blank look before I had to start over.
*Another cultural difference, maybe specific to Chinese people who attended this conference: they seemed to be pushy with no sense of asking nicely, no "lip service" or "cushioning" questions with a smile or anything to round off the edges a little.
Another thing about a translator is having to break bad news to other people, or show disagreement, or basically anything negative. That's not my forte, and probably not anyone's forte, having to give them the bad news and not have them kill the messenger. It's why doctors probably don't like telling patients about a disease, now I know how they feel. Many times the customer would be upset that the convention had sold out and they couldn't register anymore, even though they flew halfway around the world from China to come to L.A. for this specific event. I felt bad too, but the organizers of the event didn't offer any suggestions, so I had to be creative and try to pacify the angry customers. That was not easy, and I don't relish doing it again. Translators have to bear the brunt of the emotion, being at the surface level of the words and understand that some people are going to be upset. I just wish I didn't need to be customer service and relay back the customer's upset message, even though I knew it was a lost cause, I had to relay the message anyway with the responsibility of getting the customer's message across.
It wasn't easy being Prince Shotoku, and it's not being a translator. Listening to people and then talking for people was pretty exhausting, and I was really really tired by the end of the day.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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