When I lived in Japan I was very fortunate in that my job was all in Japanese and that I rarely had to speak English. One of my wife’s friends worked as a professional translator and occasionally I would help her out with her translations or interpetation jobs. The first time that I helped her on a interpetation job was almost my last. My friend had a job as an interpeter at a television lighting show. It was a 3 day event and her job just consisted in helping customers with their questions. She found her self in some what of a jam as she suddenly had to take another job for her company and she asked me if I would do the job since I studied television production in college. The job paid 30,000 yen a day for 3 days and I immediately said yes when hearing about the pay.
On my first day I met the staff who all were very kind to me except the President of the company who gave me a gruff hello and that was it. I was so happy to be making such good money that I didn’t care. The show opened up at 8:00 in the morning and as soon as it started a very obese man came to our booth and gave me his name card. He was from France and from what I could tell from his name card, he was in charge of all the TV stations in France. He shook my hand and began asking a fairly long question. His English was extremely poor and he was breathing very heavily as he must have walked the entire floor area before coming to our booth. At this time the President came over and I introduced him to the customer. When I told the President that he was in charge of all the TV stations in France his eyes got very wide and all of a sudden I became his best friend. The next 20 minutes were agony! I couldn’t understand any of his english! I pretended to take notes and shook my head a few times and when he was done I made up my own question for the President of the company. Now the President was very excited and spoke much to fast for me to understand him! Now I had to make up another answer for the Frenchman! The next problem was that the Frenchman couldn’t understand me! This went on for about 20 minutes and after it was over I just wanted to go home and never work as a translator again!
The rest of the day was fairly uneventful except that the President of the company treated me like his long lost son and wouldn’t let me go out of the booth to eat and if I went to the bathroom I had to be very fast. The next day went by without any problems but on the last day the Frenchman came back and we went through the same process again!
About a week after the show I found out that the Frenchman had put in a huge order and that the company made so much money that the President of the company infited me to his house for a private party! I was also asked if I wanted to become his private translator but a little voice inside me said that this time I was lucky but next time I might not be so I declined the offer and that was the end of my professional translator career!