Monday, May 28, 2012

The translator job

What a day, last Thursday! The headmistress of one of the schools where I'm teaching asked if I could do an extra day's work. The school would receive an important visit from Denmark and they needed someone to translate. Since my Danish is a bit rusty, English would do nicely as well. And so I jumped on my Vespa for what I thought would be a visit from Danish children. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it weren't as much children, but an important delegation of adults. Headmasters, inspectors and even people working for the Danish ministry of education! And there I was in my best... t-shirt. One person from the Danish delegation did in fact speak very good Italian so I began to seriously wonder what the heck I was doing there. But after the introduction the party was split in two and I was to accompany the second group. 

The Danes visited the nursery, the infant school, the primary and the (lower) secondary school. And all the time I had to translate. Easier said than done. Doing a live translation between two languages neither of which actually is your mothertongue is a bit of a challenge, even for a "normal" person. Imagine what it must be like for an autistic person like me, who doesn't understand words in the first place! 

At this point I'd like to explain that being autistic also means that I'm completely unable to follow a normal conversation because not all of the words get through to me. In my head I have to puzzle the words that I do pick up back together into something that makes sense, more or less. Can you imagine how I was falling apart? I had to hold on to every word with my fingernails, hoping that it would not vanish into the bottomless well in my head before the sentence would be finished. Fortunately, I intervened just in time and already started translating after only a few words, thus forcing the person talking to split the explanation into little bits which I could just about manage. It worked and in the end I got lots of compliments for my work, even from the Danes who said that my English translation went very fast and was easily understandable to them. It was the best compliment anyone could give me that day because I felt absolutely exhausted.

When I got home, I almost collapsed and didn't say much anymore for the rest of the evening. My head was spinning and felt like hundreds of needles were penetrating my skull. No, doing a live translation must be one of the worst jobs anyone could ask of me. Even though I did like doing it very much and it was a wonderful day as a whole. But once again I had to face the limits of what my condition allows me to do. I had to think back to the days when I was still working in Belgium and had to go to all of these important meetings. I have to admit that I was lucky enough to have the most amazing colleague you could ever imagine and he usually helped me through the ordeal. Not that he probably noticed how much I was using him. Although I don't like the word "use" very much in this case because it sounds so pejorative. I respect that person so much that I don't want to sound too rude - I was only trying to survive... Anyway, it's one of these tricks I learnt myself over the years in order to hide my autism to the rest of the world. I pretend that I've totally understood what was said, even though I didn't understand a peep of it. But then I take the initiative, before anyone can beat me to it, and ask some open questions about the meeting. Something like: "That was quite unbelievable what he said, wasn't it?" Inciting the other person to comment and then I obviously agree for the full 100%. Even more, from the person's response I can more or less guess what was being said during the meeting. Yes, you could almost consider that I was completely asleep during the meeting itself. But mind you, I was wide awake all the time and desperatly trying to make some sense of the discussion!

Of course, it didn't always go like this. When I'm very familiar with a subject and/or have a strong opinion about it, I'll be the most eloquent person in the meeting room and defend my point of view with the utmost vigour. It's so strange... Sometimes I wish I could just unscrew my head for a couple of days... or years... 

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