Today, I had a meeting in three languages. The Korean education specialist who came to meet with my boss and our team (to suggest an international Early Childhood exchange between our schools and kindergartens in Korea - neat!) brought a translator who spoke Korean and Chinese, which was then translated into English for my boss's (and my) benefit. This was quite an interesting experience, since for the first time since arriving in China, I was watching my Chinese colleagues wait for a translation AND preferring to hear Chinese over the other language being spoken in the room, since I actually understood about 20% of what was going on when it was happening in Mandarin. As opposed to the...well, nothing in Korean. Though I'm pretty sure she laughed once, and I think that was pretty much the same in both languages.
This makes me wonder about the complexity (and probably unfortunate length) of other more important multi-national meetings. I now have an amusing and critically disturbing image in my head of a UN meeting taking place as a long game of telephone, with interpreters whispering between each representative and by the time the message goes down the line and up and around and zig zags back to the front of the room, the proposed treaty becomes some nonsense idea like requiring pants for all domesticated mammals, or the Euro.
At any rate, there seems a frightening amount of room for error, and it makes me wonder what percentage of (mis)communication accidentally resulted in conflict prior to the simulcast-concurrently interpreted-digi-babel-era in which we currently exist.
aye-aie-ayi (<--- at least three different meanings).
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