by Michael Finley
Copyright © 1997 by Michael Finley

This was my challenge in September as my partner Harvey and I were invited to address a group of business leaders in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on the topic of teams.

The conference would provide simultaneous translation, just like at the United Nations. Translators sitting in a booth translate the talk into Portuguese and relay it back to the audience via headphones. It sounded terrific.

Harvey took the language challenge in stride. But I, perhaps because I speak some Spanish, decided to pepper my remarks with Portuguese phrases. By doing so I would show the audience respect, and perhaps win them over to our point of view.

One month, two books, an audiotape, and an interactive CD-ROM later, I had given up on Portuguese. I planned to open my remarks with one weak joke ("A month ago I could speak no Portuguese. Today, I am incompetent.") but I couldn't master that in practice. Sad.

So we fly to Brazil, set up, and meet our translation team. One, Marcia, is young but pretty good. She is charming and bright, and you can tell she loves English. The other one, named Ismail, is borderline. A thin man with a knobby head, he begs us not to tell anecdotes or amusing stories, because he never gets them.

Ismail is more than a wee bit off. I am chatting with the lovely Marcia about how difficult simultaneous translation must be. You have to be quick enough to express the Portuguese in the same time as it takes the speaker to say the English, we agree. This is hard, because English words are clipped short and Portuguese phrases tend to go on and on. But you can't change the meaning, because it will come back to bite you.

Also, you have to be listening to the sentence being spoken now while translating aloud the sentence spoken ten seconds ago. This is very difficult mental work, requiring a flair for multitasking. I tell Marcia that women supposedly are better natural multitaskers. Picture

a mother with a baby in one arm, a fry pan in the other, a phone under one ear and a dog pulling coffee filters from the trash, and you know what I am saying.

Ismail, perhaps wanting to get on my good side, nods to me and said, in not the very best English, "The weemen having the very beeg brains. The weemen being clever."

I was a dead man. I just didn't known it until that moment.

The first hour of the full-day affair, Ismail stumbles wretchedly on the simplest phrases. Marcia has to take over while Ismail hides his head in his hands. But after a while she, too begins to

discombobulate, skipping the endings of sentences, finishing with "et cetera," or "blah blah blah."

Imagine our view from the front of the room. We are standing on tiptoe, speaking as slowly and as deliberately as we can -- and we're from Minnesota, so we can be pretty slow and deliberate without trying. The audience is staring up at us in utter miscomprehension. A joke about a bear falls flat because instead of saying that a man put on his running shoes, Marcia said he started to play tennis. At the back of the room, Marcia, realizing her error, is jumping up and down in the booth, rolling her eyes, horrified by the mistake but determined to try to catch at least half of the next sentence.

At lunch break, our hosts dispatch Ismail to some other line of work -- hopefully far from the beeg brains of weemen. Harvey and I stand at the end of a long line of Brazilian business people, who range from polite but pained to frustrated and mean. One man is just curious to know why a man being chased by a bear would start playing tennis.

This is killing me because I know it's a funny joke. But to them, I just have an odd sense of humor.

Marcia and Michelangelo A new partner is called in to assist Marcia. His name is Michelangelo and he has a steadying influence on the translation team. Marcia finds time for the temperature of her beeg brain to simmer down. By 2 PM, people are even laughing at our anecdotes.

One of the interesting side effects of the Internet has been the sudden incrrease of communication among the countries of the world. Generally speaking, this is a good thing, enhacing our prospects for trade, and mutual understanding.

Great things are happening. I send mail almost every day to people in places like Singapore, Iceland, South Africa and Argentina. if the other party speaks a language I can parse, we can have simple conversations. If the other party speaks English, all the better.

But what is not good is when other parties just think they can speak English. Or they have bought a $29 translation program that brutally converts words from one language to another, with no thought for idiom or multiple definitions.

Every now and then you get a communication that tells you that globalization has a way to go. I recveived one this summer that stood out for its excellent awfulness. It is so extraordinary that I have to share it with you:

From: "JULIO C. ANDALO" To: TO: GENERAL DIRECTOR / GENERAL ADMINISTRATION

The friend manager, possesses a product, it plans , equipment and he doesn't know where it can disclose in Brazil, it is not more problem, because the noble friend has just acquired not only a commercial contact, but yes a friend in Brazilian territory. For so much I need that sends me by mail letter (and or he/she saw Email: jca@goldnet.com.br) descriptive with clarity of all the products that the noble friend wants to export the one that price, samples, fiscal classification, photosensitive with technical and more record some other information that judges important.

And so on, for six exhilarating paragraphs.

Of course, Senhor Anadalo has no idea how he is coming across to people. I found myself wondering what sort of person would find this Pan Am Spam intriguing and respond. Do you suppose he and Ismail might mysteriously find one another, and their unique, shared spin on the English tongue, in this crazy rotating world of ours?

TRANSCOMPETITION

A Business Week Book

Transcompetition: Moving Beyond Competition and Collaboration
by Harvey Robbins, Michael Finley
List: $24.95
Our Price: $17.47
You Save: $7.48 (30%)

Hardcover, 240 pages
Published by McGraw-Hill
Publication date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0070530823

Michael Finley is co-author with Harvey Robbins of THE NEW WHY TEAMS DON'T WORK.Visit Michael Finley at his home page, or e-mail him at mfinley@mfinley.com