The Citizen, 1995-08-30, Page 5THE CITIZEN, WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 30, 1995. PAGE 5.
Where is it we're
trying to get to?
Back in the spring of 1807, an English
poet by the name of Bill Wordsworth took a
look around, decided that England was going
to Hell in a handcart, picked up his quill pen
and dashed off a few stanzas of patriotic
outrage that began:
The world is too much with us; late and
soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our
powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours.
Wordsworth was writing about his
country's loss of innocence nearly 200 years
ago. Can you imagine what he'd think if
somebody plopped him down in Piccadilly
Circus today?
Never mind Piccadilly Circus - I could
blow poor old Bill's mind just by setting him
down in my favourite armchair and letting
him leaf through a few magazines.
I have, for instance, a copy of last week's
Maclean's Magazine which contains a full
page advertisement that looks like a movie
poster. It shows four attache-case-toting
Business Types — three guys, one woman -
striding purposefully toward the camera and
away from a city skyline. They're smiling,
obviously finished for the day and looking
The art
of interpreting
I was rather interested during the hoopla
leading up to the all-star baseball game when
a segment showed an interview with the
Japanese born pitcher, Hideo Nomo, who
apparently speaks next to nothing in the way
of English. At the interview there was an
interpreter hovering over him and, when he
was asked a question about feeling pressure
before the game, he replied with a multi-
sentence comment. The interpreter got right
to the point; the answer, he said was "No."
This brought to memory a scene from
Moliere's The Bourgeois Gentilhomme,
which has been presented at Stratford on at
least one occasion. The protagonist of the
play, the social climbing M. Jourdain, is
having a conversation with a visitor whom
he believes to be a Turk. The latter makes a
statement of one word; the interpreter
proceeds to take a long, long sentence to
translate it and Jourdain, who is at times a
few croutons short of a salad, is astonished
that it takes so much to translate one word.
The interpreter assures him that the Turkish
language is like that, the Turks can say a lot
of things in very few words.
The language, by the way, has nothing to
do with Turkish; it is a make-believe
language used for the purpose of duping
Jourdain, which it most assuredly does.
I could well relate to the interpreter in the
Nomo incident since there have been any
number of times, when I was called upon to
forward to a little R and R.
Ah, but looming over them like an
immense, roiling thundercloud is the satanic
image of The Boss - a red-faced ogre
scowling angrily at the departing foursome,
fists clenched.
The advertising copy reads: •
"A tale about four of the best in business.
But the moment they leave the office they
become...
(and then in huge, Elliot Ness style-
letters...)
THE UNREACHABLES
"No one can get in touch with them and
they're not in touch with anyone else!"
It's an ad for Cantel, the cellular phone
folks. The moral, in case you missed it, is
that any business person who doesn't have a
cellular phone welded to the hip, just isn't
committed, businesswise.
"With Cantel you're always accessible"
warbles the ad copy. Well, no offense,
Cantel, but I don't want to be always
accessible. Like your Unreachables, I
actually have a life outside of my work. I
like it that way.
Getting harder to maintain, though. Our
own Bell Canada is forging ahead, finding
innovative ways to throw even more people
out of work. This summer in Quebec, Bell
customers won't be able to raise a human
operator. They'll be talking directly to a
computer which can recognize and respond
to human voices.
Bell expects to shave an average of two
Raymond Canon
interpret, that I decided it was better to leave
out some of what was said._ One vivid
incident comes to mind when I was
interpreting in a family court in Ottawa. The
husband was German, the wife Italian and
their differences of opinion were so violent
that they had been forced to appear before
the court. Both the wife and the husband
were prepared to answer questions posed by
the judge, but they could not resist the urge
to attempt to persuade me that their cause
was just; the other was bogus.
The judge began to wonder out loud why I
was giving what appeared to be far less than
full translations and I informed him that each
time there was some persuasion going on, I
was resisting.
His reply was laconic; "Keep on resisting,"
he advised me, which I did!
The most unsanitary bit of interpreting I
ever did was when I was assisting in one of
the International Pork Congresses held in
Stratford. There were three Spanish speaking
delegations, one of which decided to buy
some sows. The haggling took place in a
pigpen and I was standing up to my ankles in
pig manure as each pig was sold. The others
had boots on: I didn't and, as soon as I got
back to the motel, my shoes got a thorough
cleaning.
There was another problem. My Spanish
had been learned in Spain; the delegation
was from Venezuela. I could appreciate what
it must feel like for an American from
Louisiana to be translating the statements of
a Scotsman. Both vocabulary and
pronunciation were quite different and I
certainly had to listen very carefully.
One of the biggest problems in
seconds off the time it takes to respond to a
call.
Whoopee.
Also being developed in the Bell Northern
Research labs is something they called
Premier dialling.
If this plans out you won't have to bother
yourself with hernia-threatening telephone
books or calling Information. You'll just
pick up the phone and holler "Tony's Pizza!"
or "Canadian Tire" — and you'll be connected
immediately.
Imagine. Pretty soon we won't need our
dialling fingers any more. We can have them
surgically removed at birth.
Oh, I realize that all this stuff represents
'progress' — but I have one small question:
What's the rush?
Where is it we're trying to get to, again?
I'm reminded of a poem called A Child
Speaks.
Will people never, never learn,
That meadows should be played in?
How long before they really know
That streams were made to wade in?
They should be shown, and made to see
That caves were made to talk in,
That trees were really made to climb,
And rain is meant to walk in.
Instead, they build their houses tight,
As though they're meant to stay in;
Will people never, never learn
The world was meant to play in?
We used to know that, back when we were
kids. How come we forgot?
interpreting comes when you are doing it for
someone who has some knowledge of the
language but not enough to express himself
accurately. They tend to jump in to correct
you and as often as not they are wrong. You
would like to tell them to keep quiet without
offending them, which is not the easiest
thing to do.
In this respect the most interesting incident
I had was when I was on a tour with some
visiting Russian farmers. The French
network of the CBC wanted to interview one
of them but discovered that all the
interpreters on the tour were fluent in
English and Russian only. I was pressed into
service and got along nicely until one of the
Russian journalists, who was actually a KGB
man, started not only correcting but also
telling the poor farmer what to say. The
latter was getting so flustered (you didn't
fool around with the KGB) and stopped
proceedings and asked the CBC to get the
spy, oops ... journalist out of the studio.
From the on things went well.
I cannot end before I tell you what I
consider to be the best story of all time
concerning a interpreter. It was actually the
dean of interpreters at the U.N. who was
being interrupted by one of the speakers and
corrected.
Finally the interpreter could take it no
longer: when the speaker broke in to
exclaim, "That's not what I said," the
interpreter replied, "I know, monsieur but
that is what you should have said."
From then on there were no further
interruptions.
The
Short
of it
By Bonnie Gropp
A lack of conscience
We're all supposed to have one.
When we were kids, it was depicted in
cartoons as an angel on a shoulder, one
which, with gentle words and a soothing
tone struggled to dissaude, while the devilish
caricature on the other side taunted and
teased its subject to do something wrong.
The conscience is our moral sense. It
keeps us on the straight and narrow,
reminding us of what's right or wrong.
Though we may not actually hear the voices
of good and evil, the behaviour of most
people will be affected by their conscience,
at best before the damage is done or at worst
driven by guilt after the deed is done.
The majority of people, thankfully have a
strong sense of moral conscience. Knowing
that something is wrong, keeps them from
doing it.
Then there are those among us who don't
seem to catch on quite as quickly, however,
who play with the devil then face the music
alone (the devil never seems to pay) as they
unload the burden of their guilt through
confession.
Conscience perhaps is why Susan Smith
finally stopped lying and admitted to police
that her two young sons had been tragically
murdered by her own hands. Conscience,
too, is what investigators from the Metro
Toronto police believe is eating the killer of
two teenager sisters, that the torment of
knowing what they had done must be too
formidible to bear alone. Police feel that
because the killer is human a gnawing
conscience will force them to admit
culpability in this cold-blooded act to lessen
the pain.
Conscience is the reason spouses confess
adulterous sins, the reason little ones admit
to telling fibs. Conscience is what keeps us
from being animals. Feeling remorse or guilt
is a human response. It makes us part of
society.
And it was very much not in evidence
during the testimony of Paul Bernardo or
Karla Homolka. It has been mentioned in
numerous columns and commentaries by
media people across the country, who are,
like myself, shocked not just by the
depravity of the acts, but by the fact that
neither Bernardo, nor Homolka showed any
sign that they felt sorry. In fact, while
people in the courtroom plug their ears to try
and block the disturbing words and sounds
from the tapes, Bemardo, they say, appears
to thrive on hearing it again.
Though Homolka never struck me as
having quite as much fun as her ex-husband
is said to appear to be, her narcissism was
nauseating. That she cared less for her role
in the torture of these girls than she did for
what it had cost her, was evident. That they
were tortured, humiliated and degraded was
secondary to the pain Bernardo had caused
her.
Like many people, my interest in this trial
was with the hope that I might gain some
understanding of how two people who
appear so normal could be so twisted. Yet,
as every day brought more knowledge into
the last few days of Mahaffey's and French's
lives, it brought us no closer to
comprehending the evil that rules their
killers, nor the lack of conscience that makes
them less than human.
Arthur Black
International Scene