VERY grueling day

Today I had one of the toughest assignments, if not THE toughest, I've ever had. Didn't expect it to be soooo long. It was a deposition and none of the client's conference rooms were large enough, so the deposition took place in a very WARM GARAGE. Yes, a garage! Anyway there we were, and it took 3 videotapes to do it all. I can't divulge all the details but suffice it to say a it's a personal injury lawsuit, deciding whether it's the guy's own fault he fell and nearly died, or is the fault of the company who contracted workers, the contractor, or the company whose building the guy was working on...AHHHH. During the morning I hadn't had much to eat and although I started off well, by early afternoon my heart started pounding and I started sweating. I couldn't concentrate to interpret adequately. I kept missing things. Everyone must have though I absolutely sucked. Well I kept not feeling well and someone noticed and asked if I was OK, and I said I couldn't concentrate because I wasn't physically feeling so well and so we all took a break and each person went to lunch for half an hour. Well I got some chips and yogurt and crackers and juice in me and after that I felt much better and I thought I was able to recoup during the rest of the deposition- things went more smoothly.
The lawyer of the guy suing (the one who fell) had her OWN interpreter there, whose SOLE job it was to find fault with my interpretation to be sure he had adequate communication back and forth. Mostly he doodled but I noticed him writing some things and during lunch when I came back EARLY I sorta peeked at his notes and saw where he thought I screwed up. I had used the English word "wiped" for "barrer" instead of "swept" which is closer which didn't particularly bother the lawyer who hired me. That among a few comments he made of stuff where he thought I hadn't interpreted properly, which is to say verbatim. Well that guy was a more experienced interpreter than I am. He seemed to be a very, very nice guy, a pastor in a Spanish-speaking Baptist church, actually, and though he was a native English speaker he had gone to school in Mexico for a year to learn Spanish and then lived in Panama for many, like 20, years. Gaaaaa!!! How can I compete with that? Plus it is easy to sit back and watch someone else interpret and find where they made mistakes. So anyway early on when I was starting to crash and burn he and the guy's lawyer made the comment that they wanted to review the videos and make a whole bunch of amendments to the thing. Well I noticed that during the afternoon when things were going better for me he didn't make as many comments but a couple of times when the guy was describing successions of events, he did point out a couple of things I had ommitted. The thing is to ask the guy to speak slooowly and sentence by sentence so that I do not miss one single thing. If he says 10 sentences then I might forget some detail.

I am scheduled to do simultaneous interpretation later this month with Rose Baz at the company where Rafael is now, and I know Rafael is probably kind of worried because we really, really, really need more training. If THIS was tough on me, that will be tougher. Because no one is stopped to repeat anything and you still have to say every single thing they say and in this case the people won't even know we're there telling a bunch of people in English everything they discuss in Spanish. I realize now that I'm not made of such tough mettle, I can crumble easily. I made it through today. I thought today would be easy because I'd done similar things before- depositions, court testimonies, etc. Nothing nearly as tough as this one was. Then when I came back Azza said she did a similar one once (in Arabic, I think) and she thought she was going to pass out it was so arduous. She said Rafael's done these (like I did today) when he was here and he's very, very good, and they even grilled and nit-picked over him.

That Baptist pastor, he was a nice person, and I know it's his JOB to make sure everything is adequately translated and to poitn out my deficient work, but it always seemed like he was sort of smirking a little. Don't know if that was his intention but I myself prayed and prayed, and I'm glad God allowed me the strenght to recoup be that as it may. Well the lawyer who hired us said to me "relax, you did fine"...though I'm sure internally she had to have been saying...man, you suck!!!!!


Came back to work where Steve and I took our Arabic class with Azza- very relaxing after the circumstances- then I entered data and did office work I had planned for earlier in the day (thinking that this assignment would take only an hour or two and not the six plus that it took). WOOOOOOOW. I NEEDED that experience, as it put me WAY out of my comfort zone. I needed to learn, but I'm SURE glad that's over. If I'd have known beforehand about this, I may have deferred it to someone with more experience, though.