I don't know how she did it.

I went to Tokyo last weekend to listen to this lady from Canada speak. I couldn't really tell from the title what she was really going to talk about, but I'd heard about her several times and was curious to hear what she had to say. Another reason I went was because I wanted to learn more on how my friend, Sachi, translates.

Let me tell you, Sachi is REAL good at translating. But this day's translating must've been more than challenging even for her. Of course, she pulled it off without hardly any glitches. (Although she has the funniest look of "what in the world are you talking about lady!" on her face in the pic above.)

Man OH man, the speaker was incredibly difficult to translate. I tried to take notes and practice translating in my head, but I gave up after the first 5 minutes. I don't know how Sachi did it. I think if it were me, I would have thrown my pen and said "sorry, no can do ma'am" and walked out. It wasn't the topic that made the whole thing difficult, but just the way the speaker's train of thought worked...anyways, what I learned was that you gotta basically be able to think like the speaker and kinda try to read the speaker's mind, on top of knowing the content well, if you wanna be a good translator. Just knowing the words doesn't help.