The Gospel according to Smorltalk If you, like me, are afflicted by old fogeyism, you may also be a martyr to general grumpiness syndrome. It comes with age and is rarely more acute than at Christmas, when peace on earth and good will to men are the order of the day. “Bah! Humbug!” I say as I stomp around with the hangdog demeanour of a man...
Count Smorltalk raids the minibar – again! British waistlines are testament to the fact that we are a nation of foodies. If any further proof were required of quite how food obsessed we have become, the runaway success of the BBC television show The Great British Bake Off, now in its sixth series and emulated around the world, speaks volumes...
Count Smorltalk on another sticky wicket Just the other day on the radio they were talking about cricket, which, as you will know if you have ever lived in England, constitutes a very high proportion of total broadcast output of the BBC and is deemed a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to discuss at very considerable length on the radio. But...
Count Smorltalk gets acronymic Not so long ago, OMT popped up in the middle of a French speech. OMG I thought. What’s OMT? Hang on, hang on. This is French, so OMT is Organisation Mondiale du Tourisme. Great, here we go then. No wait a mo. My colleague is scribbling something on the desk. What’s that? Oh right, thanks. He’s written OMT. Great. I...
Count Smorltalk takes up rocket science As I was just saying, I’m going to give up interpreting and try something a little easier. You see, I just don’t know if I can do this much longer. It’s not the interpreting. No, that’s the easy bit. Bring on the interpreting! No, it’s all the other stuff. All the stuff that has to happen before I even get...
Count Smorltalk pulls his hair out It lies in wait in at the cheese counter – Cornish Yarg? Bath Blue? Double Gloucester?… Decisions, decisions! It ambushes you in the socks department – cotton Argyles? woollen cable-knits? thermal ribbed?…. Decisions, decisions! It has you by the short and curlies in the Ford dealership –Oxford White? Sterling...
I’m a freelance translator with quite a bit of experience under my belt, and I also work as a court interpreter. I’ve always wondered about conference interpreting, but I’m wondering if it’s the right choice for me. I’m also fascinated with law and am actually in the process of getting my law degree, and I’m...
On September 30 I had the pleasure to participate in a very special event organized by AIIC. An occasion even more special to me as I was lucky to take part in it without securing myself an official place on the guest list. Due to my poor health condition that evening I only decided to stay for the first part of the seminars, the one which...
Count Smorltalk ponders up and down ”Hello Smorltalk, I hope your well.” This was the opening line of an email I received this week. It made me wonder what had happened to the rest of the sentence. I hope your well is what? Deep, perhaps? Or wet? Deep is the well of my despair for certain when I contemplate my own inability to spot typos...
Dear Candidate, So you want to be an interpreter. Great, we need more good interpreters. That’s why we got up at an ungodly hour on the weekend, that’s why we’re spending the day in a classroom that we knew would be either overheated or Arctic, that’s why we’re imbibing inordinate amounts of tepid coffee from the machine downstairs...