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About meChile trip
In November 2004 I went to Santiago to translate a press conference transcript. The APEC summit took place here that year. Chile is the farthest APEC member from Japan, so it doesn’t get any more distant than this. Flying there took about 12 hours to Dallas, a 6-hour layover, and another 9 hours to Santiago. I arrived on the morning of 11/21, translated the press conference held on the evening of 11/22, and flew out on the prime minister’s plane (an Air Self-Defense Force flight) on the morning of 11/23. I’ve uploaded some photos of the whole deal.
The work itself doesn’t take that long to do. I get a copy of the prepared comments beforehand; I usually translate this in advance, even though it’s likely to change considerably, just because it makes it easier when I don’t have to go digging for proper nouns during crunch time later. The advance document comes with seven or eight expected questions and proposed answers for them, and I translate them as well. It’s a way to kill a few hours when I wake up at four in the morning, if nothing else. (Note: In the language services industry people are strict about using “translation” for written work and “interpreting” for oral stuff. I do the former; I’ve been pressed into the latter a few times, but it doesn’t come naturally to me.)
In the end things are over quite quickly. The press conference takes 20 or 30 minutes and we have the complete Japanese and English transcripts within a couple hours after it’s done. These get mailed off to the Japanese Cabinet Office, which posts them on its website. If you’re interested you can see the English version right here. (The Japanese one is up as well, if you’re able to read it.) Thrilling stuff, to be sure.
Santiago was warm, quiet, and pretty. My screwy internal clock and the work schedule kept me from going out on the town at night, so I didn’t get to eat many local delicacies or drink the wine while I was there. I did get a couple bottles to bring back with me, though. My Spanish is nearly nonexistent but I got around all right with the little vocabulary I know. How much is a subway ticket, one sandwich please, that sort of thing. It worked all right.
I flew regular airlines to get there, but the flight back was on the Japanese government plane. There are two planes that fly in a pair, in case one breaks down somewhere. Big Boeings with a conference room up front and a bedroom upstairs. As you go back in the plane the people get less important, down from cabinet secretaries to ministry division heads and then all the way back to steerage, where the press and I hang out. (There are a few pictures of the interior online. I haven’t seen him do a press conference onboard, but I understand he did this on the way back from his trips to Pyongyang; the reporters sat in the plane on the tarmac while he went into town to talk with Kim. I sit at that desk and do work sometimes.) It’s a smoking flight, which is terrible. One of the guys on the security detail went through probably two packs of cigarettes during the 23 hours we were in the air. Ugh. The seats are fairly comfortable—they were business class seats about 20 years ago, which means they aren’t nearly as nice as the seats you see nowadays, but they recline nicely and offer good leg-room. The food is great. Flight crews are elite members of the Japanese ASDF in dress uniform. They smile as they bring you beer, wine, water, snacks, and these weird filters you can put over your nose to help you forget about that dude with the two-pack-a-day habit a couple seats ahead of you. Good times.
This was my second of these trips; I went to New York in late September for the UN General Assembly. Coworkers in my company did trips to Georgia (the US state) for the G8 summit, Hanoi for the ASEM meeting, and Vientiane for the ASEAN + 3 gathering. Sounds like a fun bunch of places to visit, and this job for a time was one way to do it, but what an exhausting way to go . . . It’s an interesting job, though.
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