What the fuck am I doing here?

My head was spinning as I looked at the approximately two hundred audiences packed in front of me in the conference hall, most of them in uniforms. Oh man, I’m just an interpreter. I was just to come here and act as the interpreter on the stage. I’m not even a science or engineering major. Fuck. Actually, I’m not even at the high-school level of mathematics. Granted, this was not a super critical lecture. It was more of a PR event directed at the Airforce, as part of Biaz Group’s annual event where they bring in military technology experts from overseas to run one day conference for the Airforce officers. It’s not like my performance here will affect Biaz Group’s business. Otherwise, they would have had someone more important, or high profile from their own company to do this. The audiences were not VIPs either. Many of them were still in the Airforce Academy, as I said, this was just a PR event.

I received a call about two weeks before the event from an agency. I had been making living as a freelance interpreter/translator for the past two years or so. They told me there was a conference where a foreign engineer will come and give an hour lecture on the newest trend in military technology. I was like, erm, okay. I’ve never covered this field before, but I did do some translation and interpretation work in the medical field a few times - although I do not have any background in medical education. If you prepare enough in terms of learning the terminologies and the core logic of the text or speech to be delivered, then it is possible to perform in this job.

The pay offered was very generous, so I had to accept it. Then I received the PPT material on the same day and immediately regretted it. There were so many words I’ve never seen before, and the even more puzzling factor was that many words used here were common words, but it was clear that they had different meanings in this context. I took a deep breath and told myself ‘Come on Poos, you can do it. This is not rocket science or anything’

After two hours or so of struggling, I was sulking with my head in my hands. Jesus. This IS rocket science.

But I persevered. In retrospect, I could probably have made more money if I passed on this job and spent the two weeks on multiple smaller and easier jobs. But the fact that the pay for one hour interpretation time on this was many times more than the normal work I did, I felt it might be worth investing my time to break into this niche market. So I studied - not just the PPT that I was given, but spending countless hours and sleepless nights going down the Internet rabbit hole to understand at some basic level how things covered in this lecture actually worked.

After two weeks of hard work preparing for this, I was pretty confident I could do this. Language is almost never a problem in this work. It is assumed that you speak the languages you interpret at native levels, and to be fair there are countless people in this country who fall into that category. What matters is how you can digest the topic and have on stage (or site) presence and chemistry with the speaker to do a fluent translation. You cannot let the audience (or others in the meeting, if it were a meeting) hang in there for too long waiting for the next translation lines. At the same time, you could not interrupt the speaker against the flow of his speech to do your translation.

Sometimes immediate interpreters are sought after, but in the field of technical translation, such as seminars, lectures, or business meetings with foreign clients, immediate interpretation is not so desirable as people want more complete, coherent, precise, and polished sentences. Also, in many business meetings, people often deliberately use ambiguous or slightly misleading words that they can later say ‘sorry I think it was a misunderstanding’ later in the negotiation. So you want to convey the exact same level of clearness (or ambiguity) and subtlety as the original speaker’s choice of words.

What’s happening now though is not an interpretation work. I had to give a full lecture on, well, rocket science while I was a sociology major (who wasn’t even that good at it).

The renowned engineer that was to give a speech here just fell sick an hour before his scheduled lecture time. He must have eaten something wrong at the breakfast. He was puking nonstop and it was clear he needs to go to a hospital and get proper treatment. He simply could not stand for an hour and talk. This, by common sense, should lead to cancellation or delay of the event schedule, but no, this lady called Gika from the Biaz Group came into the preparation room and announced that this event shall not be canceled. Mr. Biaz is on his way to attend - wait, THE Mr. Biaz? Why the fuck would he come to this minor PR event? This lady Gika looked at me in the eyes and asked, “Do you know the topic? You’ve studied the PPT?” and obviously I answered yes, but didn’t expect her to then go on to say “Great. You shall go on the stage and do the presentation as a stand-in”. How. The. Fuck..

Engineers usually don’t work with a script or pre-written speech paper. They have PPT slides and talk as they go. That’s why you need an interpreter on stage, not someone who just read off the written script in time with the speaker’s pace of speech. So hell, I actually have to make up the speech based on the slides as we go. While this felt impossible at the time, I accepted the order and now I found myself standing in front of 200 Airforce people, all of whom must know about the topic more than I do. Shit. Let’s just do this.

“Good afternoon everyone. Thank you very much for taking the time to attend this presentation. It is an honour for me to be here on the stage with such a distinguished audience in front of me. But let me be honest with you from the start. I am not an engineer, let alone someone as well versed and respected as Dr. Altmann in this field. I was tasked with assisting Dr. Altmann in today’s presentation on stage, but unfortunately, he fell ill just about an hour ago and is unable to do this presentation himself. I assure you he will be fine and recover soon, but we cannot let your valuable time spent coming here go to waste. So please allow me to deliver this presentation as a stand-in for Dr. Altmann. I must tell you in advance though. I received this PPT about two weeks ago and studied it hard, very hard. Since I’m not a specialist in this field it was a big challenge from the start, but I kept on telling myself ‘You can do this, this is not rocket science’. And after some time, I realised it IS rocket science. But thankfully, not all of you are rocket scientists either. So perhaps my experience of understanding the material in layman’s terms can actually help the general audience to grasp the essence of the topic more easily. I apologise for the long introduction, so let us start with the presentation now”

There were a few chuckles around the room with my rocket science joke, more like a formal laugh as people on these occasions laugh for you at your attempt at a joke, not the joke itself. And it was probably for the best that I admitted this is not my field. Getting this out of my heart made me feel more at ease, and the audience seemed to relax a bit more too.

Then I gave a full one-hour presentation and left the stage with a polite bow as the audience gave surprisingly genuine applause. The material was not mine of course, but I felt that many of them appreciated my genuine effort to do as best as I can, so felt that I did share some of the credit on this successful event with poor Dr. Altmann.

When I left the stage and went back to the preparation room, the Gika lady was there and beamed me a smile.

“You have done surprisingly well. That was very impressive. Mr. Biaz asked me to express his appreciation of your effort on his behalf”

Shit. I was so engrossed in the situation I totally forgot about Mr. Biaz. He must have come and gone without me noticing during that one hour I was on stage.

“If you have time tomorrow, at 10:00, I would like you to come to our office for a little chat. I will let the reception know that you will be coming”

I don’t know what this was for, but maybe some extra pay? I was free the next day and had no reason to reject anyway.

“Sure thing. Thank you for your kind words ma’am”

“Gika is fine. Tell the reception you’ve come for an appointment with Gika”

“Right. Thank you Gika”