Letter to Count Smorltalk Dear Count Smorltalk, This could be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Because I believe you need a friend. I believe you must be terribly lonely. In your Trolley Folly post, you painted this sad self-image of a suitcase-lugging, colleague-bugging conference interpreter who had to wrestle through the work day. What...
Count Smorltalk asks the question: is this the end of the road? When I was little, nobody had had the genius idea of adding wheels to suitcases. I reckon that the late dawning realisation that you could add wheels to bags is a prime example of linguistic determinism: we called it luggage because we lugged it. End of. I was lucky to...
The issue of interpreter visibility has been discussed many times, and it remains an ongoing discussion. I was reminded of it just recently when I read an interview with an interpreter who repeated the old mantra of the invisible interpreter. It was something along the lines of, “I know I’ve done a good job when no one knows I was there.”...
Anyone setting out to learn a pseudo-science like economics or pedagogy is soon inundated in scholarly books on the topic, purporting to sum up the distilled wisdom of that particular field by using a limited number of buzzwords to map out the essentials. Ideally, these should share a common initial, thus helping (presumably quite slow) acolytes...