I did the conference call interpreting gig this morning. What I had thought was going to be me being there as a backup was in actuality me intepreting the entire interview between the Japanese news journalist and the UNH professor. So, TV Asahi totally owes me for 40 minutes of telephone interpreting on a Saturday morning. That would've probably cost them a chunk of change to get an A class interpreter, but I'll chalk this one up to experience. No one paid me and no one signed me to any confidentiality agreement either, so I guess it's ok to write about it.
It was hard. I'm not a big follower of the details of the primary election delegate selection process or political topics in general. I studied some the night before by looking around on the web. I think I did ok. Not as polished as I would have liked to have been, but functionally fine.
It was weird to work with some of the questions because they were so leading sometimes. Like looking for hints that the party headquarters in Washington promotes or obstructs certain candidates in the primary stage and trying to characterize the Dean campaign as weak and ineffective. I'm not sure how any of this will be presented as news in Japan. Maybe none of it will be directly mentioned at all. Still, it was a weird feeling to think that my choice of words could influence the way news is presented on a major network in Japan.
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