Our Dream Team on the Conversations conference on artificial intelligence, voice assistants and chatbots. To answer the questions that are on the tip of the tongue of all interpreters: no, nothing was said about the replacement of a human by AI (and interpreter, in particular) in the near future. Many presentations were focused on how to make people like to communicate with technical support bots🤔 Because people like to talk to people! (surprise-suprise!) To make an analogy with interpreters, I believe that it is much more pleasant to listen to a human translation and to be translated by a real human 🤗
My collegague and me have completed a week of workshops on McDonald IT systems for Sberbank-Service employees. Do not ask me how these are related to each other 🙈 Now we know the internal processes in McDonald really well 😀 The course was delivered by specialists from India. The indian accent + IT = explosive mixture 😂 When asked to speak slower they usually, on the contrary, sped up – a machine-gun burst of terms, file names, drives, hardware, software, features…It helped a lot that I know this slang due to my husband who also is involved in IT. Sometimes necessary words just came to me – to ping, UPS, etc. 😀 Had a whole sea of impressions. The main conclusion: IT guys are the best 👍
My colleagues and I have completed the Feldenkrais training course – the first one in Russia! Awareness through movement. It was my first experience of interpreting in a joga centre – an exciting experience! The trainers were from Germany and though they spoke English well sometimes the pronunciation was a little bit unusual. For example, we had a funny incident on my first day. The trainer said that the day before the interpreter (my colleague) made a mistake and translated his words as “rolling like a beer”. I interpreted that smoothly while wondering what on earth he is talking about? And actually I said, says the trainer, “rolling like a – and I am starting to look for the right variant -pair, pear? I explain – couple, fruit? No, it was an animal 😂 a bear! At the 4th attempt the translation was correct at last😁
One more incident: the trainer tells a story: imagine, you are walking in the forest and holding a piece of paper and a Bumblebee sits on it. I have 4 and 6 year old kids, so I have only one association with Bumblebee – that of transformers. So I am translating – Bumblebee sits on the paper. Without a trace of doubt. After that the story continues. The trainer says: now imagine that you have a heavy backpack on your shoulders and a Bublebee sits on it. This time the audience could not bear it any longer: Who is Bumblebee??? And I understand that something is really wrong here – why should Bumblebee sit on anything at all)) We had a good laugh🤣
In general, the work with a trainer is very specific. During the training he or she creates a special atmosphere – something like a tranсe – and it is very important not to disturb it by imitating the trainer’s intonations. If you are starting to stumble the concentration breaks. Moreover, you become an expert in all the body parts, joints, muscles, including coccyx, sacrum, etc. The advantages of such work: you can come to work in a T short and leggins instead of a business suit and can lie with your eyes closed on the floor during the breaks and nobody will judge you. However, it is quite emotionally exhausting.
